Simmel on Acceleration

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour

37:40021–8308

© 2007 The Author

Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007. Published by Blackwell

Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKJTSBJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour0021-8308© 2007 The Author Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007XXXOriginal ArticlesSIMMEL ON ACCELERATION, BOREDOM, AND EXTREME AESTHESIAKEVIN AHO

Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and

Extreme Aesthesia

KEVIN AHO

ABSTRACTBy focusing on the unique velocity and over-stimulation of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel pioneered an interpretation of cultural boredom that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory by viewing it through the modern experience of time-pressure and social acceleration. This paper explores Simmel’s account of boredom by showing how—in the frenzy ofmodern life—it has become increasingly difficult to qualitatively distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to us. Furthermore, this emotional indifference invariably pushes us towards more excessive and risky behavior, towards, what I call, “extreme aeshesia.” Insofar as novel experiences quickly become routine in the technological age, it appears thatonly extreme sensations and experiences can break the spell of boredom, allowing us to momentarily feel strongly for something.Keywords: Simmel, acceleration, boredom, extreme aesthesia

In the wake of Reinhard Kuhn’s pioneering 1976 study

The Demon of Noontide:

Ennui in Western Literature

, there has been a recent upsurge of interest concerning

the contemporary experience of boredom. Patricia Spack’s (1995)

Boredom: The

Literary History of a State of Mind

, Lars Svendsen’s (2005)

A Philosophy of Boredom

, and

Elizabeth Goodstein’s (2005) comprehensive

Experience without Qualities: Boredom and

Modernity

have all tuned into the modern mood, a mood born in the urban

industrial centers of Western Europe and America and reaching a state of ubiquity

in the technological age. The mood can be recognized when there is a pervasive

cultural craving for immediate amusement, risk, and peak sensations, a momentary

aisthesis

that briefly pulls us out of the emptiness and indifference of our everyday

lives.

1

Anton Zijderveld (1979) explains how one can identify boredom.

It can be observed that speech becomes gross and hyperbolic, music loud and nervous, giddy

and fantastic, emotions limitless and shameless, actions bizarre and foolish, whenever boredom

reigns. A bored individual needs these irritants of body, psyche and mind because he is not

behaviorally stimulated in any other way (p. 77; cited in Spacks, 1995: 19).

However, to claim that modern culture is bored because it is not “behaviorally

stimulated” seems odd. We live in the age of hyper-stimulation, of global

travel, instant credit, and endless technological distraction. There are so many

obligations, choices, and products to pick from and consume, how can one possibly

be bored?

Twentieth-century social theorists and philosophers have pointed to a number of

overlapping causes that contribute to the modern malady. The Thomist philosopher

Josef Pieper (1963), for instance, has suggested that boredom emerges in modern

culture because—in our obsession with utility and productivity—we have forgotten

the value of genuine, purposeless leisure, confusing it with instrumental distractions

like shopping, dining, or going to the movies, activities that we are fundamentally

indifferent to. Neo-Marxists, drawing on the work of Thorstein Veblen (1994),

have argued that capitalism’s increasingly affluent middle-class has created a life

rooted in conspicuous consumption, spawning generations of bored citizens whose

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Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007

passions have been reduced to buying the latest clothes, cars, and electronics.

Martin Heidegger (1995) claimed that the fundamental mood of modernity is

boredom because nothing can stand out as unique or different anymore; all

beings—including humans—have been leveled to the status of a quantifiable

resource to be manipulated, used, and exchanged. And cultural critics influenced

by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have indicated that this emotional

flatness may emerge from the excessive repression of feeling and desire in a

technological culture that privileges rational control, discipline, and order.

While not dismissing any of these accounts, I want to suggest that the cultural

affect of boredom and the postmodern tendency towards, what I call, “extreme

aesthesia,” might also be attributed to the unique velocity or tempo of life in the

technological age. The work of sociologist Georg Simmel is important in this regard

because he is one of first to interpret boredom through the modern experience of

time-pressure and social acceleration, an interpretation that has had a significant

impact on contemporary social theory (Adam, 1990; Virilio, 2000; Rosa, 2003;

Scheuerman, 2004). According to Simmel, the rise of the rationalized, scientific

worldview and the emergence of the instrumental money economy have stripped

us of the enduring values and meanings that gave pre-modern life a sense of

cohesion and purpose. The result is a shared experience of emptiness where life

is reduced to the meaningless production and consumption of goods and services.

And with technological innovations, we can produce and consume more things

in smaller units of time, resulting in a life so accelerated that it is difficult to

qualitatively distinguish which things actually matter to us. We are so busy, so

over-stimulated and stretched thin, that we have become bored, blasé to the frenzy

of everyday experiences. Yet, as Simmel reminds us, it is precisely because of this

“blasé attitude” that we increasingly turn to more excessive, adventurous, and

risky behavior. In our indifference we search for something, anything that evokes

a strong

aisthesis

, momentarily breaking the spell of boredom.

I. THE RISE OF BOREDOM

Although the experience of boredom has ancient roots that can be found in the

Greek words for idleness (

scholé

,

álys

and

argós

) and an apathetic state of mind

(

kóros

), the word that best captures the feeling is the Greek word

akedía

derived

from

kedos

which signifies a spiritual lack of interest, an indifference that takes on

a moral character insofar as it represents a sinful condition of the soul. (Svendsen,

2005: 49–51; Kuhn, 1976: 40) From late antiquity through the Middle-Ages,

acedia was associated with a demonic tiredness or stupor of the soul that the

fourth century monk Evagrius of Pontus simply called the “midday demon”

(

daemon qui etiam meridianus vocatur

) who struck between the hours of ten and two

(Kuhn, 1973: 43). However, this pre-modern conception is, for our purposes, not

very helpful because it focuses largely on the immoral character of the soul or,

Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia

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later, on the idleness of the leisure class. In this essay, we are focusing on a

specifically modern manifestation of boredom to the extent that it is no longer

restricted to those rare sick souls or a few wealthy socialites. It is, rather, the

consequence of existing in the modern world itself.

In this regard, it is worth noting that the English word “boredom” was not

introduced until the nineteenth century and the psychological term “to bore” did

not emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century (Spacks, 1995: 13–14;

Goodstein, 2005: 107–08).

2

Similarly, the French word “

ennui

,” understood as

a personal sense of spiritual barrenness or indifference, and the German word

“

Langeweile

,” understood as an unpleasant feeling when one experiences an empty

stretch of time, both went through a modern process of democratization, whereby

the mood no longer belonged exclusively to the few but to the modern world

as

a whole

(Goodstein, 2005: 111–112).

3

For Simmel, the experience of modern boredom corresponds historically with

Nietzsche’s (1974) late nineteenth century pronouncement that “God is dead,”

referring to the breakdown of all absolute, universal truths and values in modern

Europe, truths that endowed pre-modern life with a sense of enduring meaning

and purpose (p. 181). In the ancient and medieval worlds, the value of things was,

in large part, understood in terms of an underlying natural order, a “great chain

of being” whereby people came to know their place in the world and came to

understand the divine purpose of their shared goals and projects. Simmel (1986)

confirms that the pre-modern worldview

gave life that absolute purpose . . . The salvation of the soul and the realm of God presented

itself to the masses as an unconditional value, as the definitive goal beyond everything particular,

fragmentary, senseless in life. And they lived for this final purpose until, in the last centuries,

Christianity lost its power over countless souls (Goodstein, 2005: 260).

4

With the urbanization of modern Europe and the growing influence of a secular

scientific perspective, nature came to be increasingly understood, not as an

enchanted place filled with divine purpose, but as a vast and, ultimately, meaningless

storehouse of brute objects in causal interaction, objects that can be instrumentally

observed, measured, and controlled. On this view, human beings show up as just

one more piece of information, one more object among countless others that can

be explained rationally on the basis of specific calculative procedures.

In his 1918 speech, “Science as a Vocation” (“

Wissenschaft als Beruf

”), Max Weber

(1958) warned of the danger of Europe’s growing commitment to a rationalized

society. According to Weber, this “increasing intellectualization and rationalization . . .

means that there are no more mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,

but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means

that the world is disenchanted.” (p. 159) Weber suggests scientific “progress” has

no meaning beyond the “purely practical and technical.” Such progress is endless

and ultimately meaningless in terms of the existential questions that are most

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important: “What shall we do and how shall we live?” and “What is the meaning

of our own death?” (p. 139) In the modern age, the human being comes to be

regarded either as an object to be manipulated and quantified or as a self-enclosed

subject, separate and distinct from a meaningful social background of enduring

beliefs and practices.

Simmel (1997b) sees the emergence of the money economy as the central

feature of this instrumental worldview. In the money economy, values are “leveled”

and “equalized” to the extent that they are detached from one’s emotional

relationship to a whole community. Money comes to be regarded as the rational

“equivalent for anything and everything.” On this view, the value of things is

interpreted exclusively through the quantifiable grid of money (p. 249). The

consequence of this is twofold: First, the money economy cements the modern

sense of individual freedom from restrictive social norms insofar as the subject no

longer interprets herself/himself in terms of a binding relationship to a communal

background of enduring practices and beliefs. Second, because social life in the

money economy depends on the mediation of instrumental reason, there is a loss

of emotional connectivity, what Simmel (1978) refers to as the “peculiar leveling

of emotional life” (p. 432).

This leveling results in a feeling of emptiness and restlessness, what Simmel

calls the “blasé attitude.” If value is understood only in quantifiable terms,

specifically in terms of the question “how much is it worth?” then our deepest

social, personal, and emotional commitments must also be quantified. Absorbed

in the money economy, the modern individual becomes increasingly indifferent

to things because they exist “within a uniform and dull coloration, no longer

distinguished by variation” (1997b: 249). Money becomes an “absolute value,” an

unquestioned “end-in-itself,” and the forms of life are controlled with “merciless

objectivity” through rational calculation, quantification, punctuality, and the

ceaseless exchange of goods and services (1978: 431). And, as the money economy

accelerates and expands with technological advances in communication, trans-

portation, and production, the individual finds it increasingly difficult to keep up

with the things that they are frantically consuming and producing. The result, as

Simmel (1978) writes, is an “extreme acceleration in the pace of life, a feverish

commotion and compression of its fluctuations, in which the specific influence

of money upon the course of psychological life becomes most clearly discernible”

(p. 506).

II. ACCELERATION AND BOREDOM

At the end of the nineteenth century, the physician George M. Beard (1880)

introduced the word “neurasthenia” to refer to the nervous frenzy of the industrious

American caught up in the money economy, a frenzy embodied in twitchiness,

punctuality and busyness and which led to any number of emotional and physical


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ailments including “dyspepsia, headaches, paralysis, insomnia, and anesthesia”

(p. vi; cited in Shorter, 1997: 130). Physicians and psychiatrists came to see

neurasthenia as a ubiquitous symptom of an accelerated urban life, a symptom

with no explicit physiological basis but one that appears to derive from uniquely

modern social conditions.

5

“Neurasthenia,” as Michael O’ Malley (2005) writes,

“served as a catch-all, general purpose diagnosis, much as Attention Deficit/

Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) does today” (p. 384).

In his groundbreaking 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (“

Die

Grossstädte und das Geistesleben

”), Simmel (1997a) follows Beard’s lead by suggesting

that the increasingly intense stimulation of the nervous system in modern cities

invariably leads to a temperament that is fundamentally “blasé.”

Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement

is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In

this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation in the last possibility

of accommodating to the contents and forms of metropolitan life (p. 179).

According to Simmel, the nervous system of the metropolitan subject—bombarded

by increasingly diverse stimuli—invariably reaches a peak of over-stimulation and

the body responds, out of sheer “self-preservation,” by relying on the intellect,

“a protective organ” that is rooted in emotional detachment.

The metropolitan type of man . . . develops an organ protecting him against the threatening

currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with

his head instead of his heart (p. 176).

This intellectual detachment has both a positive and negative function. Positively,

because it is the “least sensitive” part of the psyche, the intellect provides a self-

preserving emotional barrier, anesthetizing the subject from the sensory “shocks

and inner upheavals” that are symptomatic of metropolitan life (p. 176). Negatively,

it results in a life that is based not on personal and emotional connections to the

social world but on instrumental “logical operations.” The consequence of this

type of calculative individualization is, for Simmel, boredom, a disengaged

indifference to our everyday choices and commitments.

Simmel suggests the indifference characteristic of the metropolitan subject is

unavoidable. It is, in large part, a natural response that stems from the velocity

and ceaseless nervous stimulation in the modern city (p. 175). There are many social

forms that contributed to the increased pace of life at the turn of the century:

the emergence of new communication technologies with the press, telegraph

and telephone; advances in transportation with the steam engine, railroad, and

automobile; and mechanized forms of mass production (Urry, 2000; Rosa, 2003).

The combined impact of these technological developments rapidly changed the

tempo of metropolitan life and contributed to a growing sense of nervousness.

Indeed, some have argued these inventions burst onto the social fabric so quickly

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that the nervous system was simply unable to adapt. Max Nordau offers a portrait

of this turn of the century urban nervousness when he writes:

Every line we read or write, every human face we see, every conversation we carry on, every

scene we perceive through the window of the flying express, sets in activity our sensory nerves

and our brain centers. Even the little shocks of railway traveling, not perceived by consciousness,

the perpetual noises and the various sights in the streets of a large town, our suspense pending

the sequel of progressing events, the constant expectation of the newspaper, the postman, or

visitors, cost our brains wear and tear (Kern, 1983: 125).

Indeed, as O’ Malley (2005) and others have argued, acceleration and the over-

stimulation of the senses stemming from late nineteenth century technological

innovations may represent

the

most dramatic social change in human history. To

this end, the most important machine that altered the tempo of modern life may

not have been the railway, automobile, or telegraph, but the introduction of the

mechanical clock itself. (Levine, 1997) Indeed, Simmel (1997a) goes so far as to

suggest that without the clock, the whole rational social structure of the money

economy “would break down into an inextricable chaos.”

If all of the clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only

by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long

time. (p. 177)

In his essay on the Metropolis, Simmel explores the psychic costs of a life

increasingly governed and regulated by the clock, when “punctuality, calculability,

[and] exactness are forced upon life by . . . metropolitan existence,” and experiences

are increasingly compressed by the universal accuracy of a “stable and impersonal

time schedule” (p. 177). Accordingly, the clock, as an instrument of rational

calculation, becomes a symbol of the money economy, leading to the “universal

diffusion of pocket watches.” The watch allows people to precisely calculate,

measure, and quantify the various moments of their lives, thereby “transforming

the world into an arithmatic problem” (p. 177).

In chorus with Simmel’s findings, the classical sociology of Marx, Weber, and

Durkheim had begun to engage the phenomenon of clock-time and its adverse

effects on modern social life. Marx (1978), for instance, revealed how the manipula-

tion and exploitation of time as a measurable commodity is fundamental to the

machinery of capitalism, forcing the working class into longer, more intense, and

competitive workdays that tore at the fabric of social life and strained physical

reserves (p. 469–500). Weber (1998) showed how the emergence of clock-time and

the rise of capitalism resonated to an increasingly disciplined Protestant work

ethic in Europe and America, where the wasting of time became the most serious

of sins.

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is

infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability,


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idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary to health . . . is worthy of absolute moral

condemnation (p. 157–158).

And Durkheim (1979) addressed the more extreme consequences of a life

increasingly regulated by the impersonal structures of clock-time which resulted

in the fragmentation of stabilizing social norms. In his 1897 essay, “Le Suicide,”

he suggested that it was on the basis of accelerated socio-economic changes in

the Industrial Age that an earlier sense of communal belongingness and social

integration was being destroyed, creating an underlying sense of anomie and

loneliness that increasingly ends in suicide.

For Simmel, clock-time—with its preoccupation on speed, precision, and the

fads and fashions of the moment—destroys a more original sense of time that is

rooted in the organic, value-laden memories of our past, memories that create a

sense of being anchored and oriented in the world. The result of this destruction

is a culture that fosters increasingly bizarre behavior and nihilistic attitudes.

Lawrence Scaff (2005) explains Simmel’s position in the following way:

In the absence of a temporal anchor and orientation, the “anything goes” of style and

acquisition takes over. But since style and acquisition are insubstantial and meaningless, the

modern response is to “invent” meanings, no matter how bizarre, tendentious, or self-destructive

(p. 20).

Benjamin Whorf ’s (1956) ethnography of the Hopi Indians and Pierre Bourdieu’s

(1963) classic study of the Kabyle peasants of Algeria, support Simmel’s claim

that the pre-modern experience of time conflicts dramatically with the modern

understanding. The Kabyle, for instance, understood time not as a measurable

commodity to be effectively manipulated and controlled by available technologies

but as a shared social context of lived experiences that orients a people and gives

meaning and significance to their lives. Bourdieu explains that for the Kabyle

Time . . . is not . . . measured time . . . [Instead] the parts of the day are lived as different

appearances of the perceived world, nuances of which are apprehended impressionistically:

“when the sky is a little light in the East,” then “when the sky is a little red,” “the time of the

first prayer,” then “when the sun touches the earth,” “when the goats come out,” “when the

goats hide,” and so on. (p. 57)

The Kabyle viewed the introduction of the European clock with suspicion

because it pulled them away from the fragile, organic unfolding of life, turning

life—with all of its tragedies and joys—into something to be mastered rather than

accepted. Consequently, the clock was seen as a symptom of “diabolical ambition”

and often referred to as the “the devils’ mill” (p. 59).

For Simmel (1997a), the ubiquity of time pieces—and other turn of the century

inventions as mundane as artificial lighting—meant that the natural rhythms and

instincts of life were being increasingly controlled and regulated by machines,

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resulting in “an exclusion of [humanity’s] irrational, instinctive, [and] sovereign

traits” (p. 178). In the metropolis, we are forever being pulled away from the

natural movement of life that tells us, among other things, when to sleep, when

to eat, and when to wake up. Today, the clock artificially determines these organic

needs, and we are invariably compelled towards speed, punctuality, and being “on

time”.

6

Moreover, with the ceaseless innovation of new time saving devices, more

and more things can be compressed into a particular moment, resulting in a

“contraction of the present,” where the sheer consumption of experiences and

things

increases

while the span of a given unit of time

decreases

. (Rosa, 2003)

The contraction of the present can be experienced on any given day. For

instance, as I drive to the office, I occupy a present span of time. This span

“contracts” as I make appointments and check messages on my cell phone, pick

up my dry cleaning, grab lunch at a drive-thru restaurant and eat it behind the

wheel, check my notes and calendar as I wait in traffic, all without leaving my car,

all while moving toward my office. The present “contracts” to the extent that a

measurable span of time has been efficiently filled with activities. The consequence

is a heightened state of nervous arousal, of pressure and over-stimulation rooted

in a need to do more things in less time. Hartmut Rosa (2003) points out that the

social experience of time pressure—emerging in tandem with increasing rates of

production and consumption—results in a self-perpetuating “feedback loop.” If

the world around you is busily engaged in producing and consuming things,

then the idea of slowing down or taking time out from acceleration starts to look

“old-fashioned, out-dated, and anachronistic.”

Thus, people feel pressed to keep up with the speed of change they experience in their social

and technological world in order to avoid the loss of potentially valuable options and

connections (p. 11).

Social forms of acceleration, therefore, not only force me to fill my calendar with

an endless series of activities and obligations, I am also sucked further into the

“acceleration cycle,” turning to newer, faster technological gadgets which hold out

the “false promise” of freeing up more time which will, in turn, make it possible

for me to catch up with everyone else (p. 11).

Social psychologists (O’ Connor, 2005; Gergen, 1991; Cushman, 1995; Levine,

1997) have increasingly pointed to time-pressure, overstimulation, and social

fragmentation as core contributors to a growing number of serious psychiatric

conditions including: depression, anxiety disorders, impulse disorders, and the

increasingly ubiquitous personality disorder, ADHD. And cardiologists have

begun to identify how the social construction of the competitive, driven “Type A”

personality has increased the proliferation of heart disease, high blood pressure,

obesity, emotional fatigue, insomnia, and tendencies towards hostility and rage

(Freidman and Rosenman, 1959; Ulmer and Schwartzburd, 1996). What makes

Simmel’s observations so compelling, however, is that the consequence of


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acceleration need not be as dramatic as a diagnosable psychiatric or physiological

disease. The blasé attitude is much more pervasive and, consequently, more subtle.

For Simmel (1997a), boredom emerges insidiously as we are busily occupied

with our workaday routines. It is on the basis of our harried busy-ness that we

have difficulty responding qualitatively to the various tasks and projects we are

engaged in. In short, it is modern life itself that “makes [us bored] because it

agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they

finally cease to react at all” (p. 178). The result is an inability to distinguish which

activity actually matters to us, creating a “devaluation of the whole objective

world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality

down into a feeling of the same worthlessness” (p. 179). If family obligations,

work, exercise, shopping, and dining must all be efficiently performed within an

increasingly compressed schedule, then it becomes difficult to identify which of

these activities is more meaningful or significant than others. In our heightened

state of nervous indifference all of our choices take on an equal significance; we

do not have a strong emotional reaction to any of them. Things, says Simmel,

begin to appear in “an evenly flat and gray tone, [where] no one object deserves

preference over any other” (p. 178). Accelerated existence, therefore, begins to

exercise a tacit but elemental control over us, carrying us along with little or no

conscious awareness of what is going on, “as if in a stream, and one needs hardly

to swim for oneself ” (p. 184).

For Simmel, it is because the modern subject no longer has the capacity to

react emotionally to everyday sensations and experiences that extreme measures

need to be taken to break out of boredom. The consumer and the producer must

find new ways to differentiate mundane stimulation from specialized experiences

that are unique and exceptional. Thus,

the seller must always seek to call forth new and differentiated needs of the lured customer. In

order to find a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a function which cannot

readily be displaced, it is necessary to specialize one’s services (p. 183).

Simmel refers to this as a need to “exaggerate,” “stand out” or “be different” from

the blasé stimulation that bombards the individual in everyday life (p. 183–84).

The inability to feel anything, therefore, pushes us towards more intense, risky,

and excessive experiences that will spark, albeit briefly, some sort of strong

emotional reaction.

III. THE RISE OF EXTREME AESTHESIA

In his 1911 essay, “The Adventure” (“

Das Abenteuer

”), Simmel (1997c) refers to the

character of Casanova as an “adventurer,” a person who activity seeks to live in

the “present” by embarking on a series of erotic encounters (p. 223). These

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adventures are important to the modern subject insofar as they create momentary

experiences of intense feeling, of differentiation within the blasé entanglements of

everyday life. Lost in the immediacy of the moment, the adventurer, like “the

gambler,” is thrust into a unique relation to time. He is not looking forward,

anxiously fretting about the obligations of the future, and he is not looking

backward, brooding over the mistakes and choices he made in the past. The

“atmosphere,” says Simmel, “is absolute presentness—the sudden rearing of

the life process to a point where both past and future are irrelevant” (p. 230). The

adventure represents a momentary

aisthesis

, an intense feeling or sensation that is

“torn off ” from the mundane stream of life experiences (p. 228).

Kierkegaard’s (1973) Johannes the Seducer provides us with a model of such a

character, a wealthy aesthete who embodies the modern need to stave off boredom.

For Johannes, the spell of boredom is broken only by means of gratifying particular

short-term pleasures. Johannes deliberately plans his entire life around turning

a brief moment of pleasure—in his case the seduction of a beautiful women—into

a “little eternity.” These experiences pull Johannes out of the dull busyness of his

everyday existence. However, as soon as the excitement and passion of the “little

eternity” ends, and the seduction is complete, Johannes becomes indifferent again

and the rush of pleasure dissipates. In describing the waxing and waning of his

seduction of Cordelia, Johannes laments,

How Cordelia engrosses me! And yet the time [it] is soon over; always my soul requires

rejuvenescence. I can already hear, as it were, the far distant crowing of the cock . . . Why

is a young girl so pretty, and why does it last so short a time? I could become quite melancholy

over this thought and yet it is no concern of mine. Enjoy, do not talk. The people who make

a business of such deliberations generally do not enjoy . . . (p. 76)

Johannes cannot rest. After the thrill of the seduction he must, with no guilt, move

on to the next moment, the next adventure.

Kierkegaard sees such a life as one that ultimately leads to despair because it

is fundamentally fragmented and disjointed. It is an existence with no overarching

coherence or purpose. Life becomes an endless series of increasingly intense

moments with nothing eternal that binds these disparate moments together.

Kierkegaard describes the fundamental futility of the aesthetic life in the

following way:

One tires of living in the country, and moves to the city; one tires of one’s native land, and

travels abroad; one is

europamüde

, and goes to America, and so on; finally one indulges in a

sentimental hope of endless journeyings from star to star. Or the movement is different but still

extensive. One tires of porcelain dishes and eats on silver; one tires of silver and turns to gold;

one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the burning of Troy. This method defeats itself; it is

plain endlessness (p. 25).

Like Kierkegaard’s seducer, Simmel (1997c) sees the professional adventurer as

someone who seeks a life with no continuity, one that is based solely on satisfying


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individualistic and selfish desires (p. 221). Such an individual longs for the

exhilarations of risk and chance, attempting to turn these momentary “accidents”

into “necessities” (p. 224).

What makes Simmel’s critique so fundamental to contemporary ways of living

is his understanding that an existence based on experiencing intense pleasure

quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. In today’s hyper-accelerated world,

what is novel and exciting today no longer excites the nervous system tomorrow;

yesterday’s pleasures become boring and uninteresting. Thus, “a life in boundless

pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé” because any risky or intense experience all-

too-quickly becomes routine (1997a: 178). Leslie Paul Thiele (1997) refers to this

postmodern phenomenon as the “routinization of novelty,” whereby novelty

becomes institutionalized into technological modes of production requiring

“increasingly intense stimuli . . . to achieve the same level of pleasure” (p. 24). In this

regard, the ordinary pleasures of shopping for the latest fashions and traveling to

the trendiest resorts are no longer interesting enough to break the spell of boredom.

The consequence is that each adventurer must become more extreme, more

“adventurous” because experiences that were previously regarded as exceptional

and euphoric have now become banal (Simmel, 1997c: 222).

In his 1895 essay, “The Alpine Journey” (“

Alpenreisen

”), Simmel (1997d) offers

a case of how technological progress has made the turn towards extremism

inevitable. For previous generations, the Alps provided a few healthy individuals

an escape from the routine novelty of the metropolis because access to these peaks

was difficult. However, technology has made venturing into the Alps mundane,

bringing boredom to the mountains. Simmel writes:

Destinations that were previously only accessible by remote walks can now be reached by

railways, which are appearing at an ever-increasing rate. Railways have been built where the

gradients are too steep for roads to be constructed . . . Like all social averages this depresses those

disposed to the higher and finer values without elevating those at the base to the same degree

(p. 219).

It is possible that the mortal danger and intensity of mountain climbing may bring

the question of one’s existence sharply into focus, perhaps forcing a personal

reevaluation of one’s everyday choices and commitments. However, this existential

confrontation becomes less significant when the peak is crowded with tourists,

when the climber next to you is being pulled up the mountain by a guide.

The mountaineer must, therefore, take more extreme measures to break out of

boredom.

Writer and mountain climber Jon Krakauer (1990) offers an example of this

search for extremes in Chamonix, the self-proclaimed “

Capitale Mondiale du Ski et

Alpinisme

.” After climbing an extremely difficult spire called the Grand Capucin

in the Alps, Krakauer sparks up a conversation at a downtown bar with “Patrick,”

a locally renowned French mountaineer. He soon realizes that what he thought

was a dramatic climb with his partner was quite ordinary for the circle of expert

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Kevin Aho

© 2007 The Author


climbers in Chamonix. For a truly extreme experience, one must now climb

the peak solo, without ropes, and then parachute (or

parapente

) off the summit.

“You did not

solo

and you did not

parapente

the Capucin?” asked Patrick. “Did

you not find the experience a little—how you say in English—

banal

?” (p. 86)

And today, even the Alps are not enough. An ordinary but physically fit tourist

can now pay upwards of $70,000 to experience what only a few seasoned

high-altitude climbers could twenty years ago. Staying in a nylon tent city with

hundreds of other tourists, drinking Starbucks coffee at 18,000 feet, and sucking

on oxygen tanks, they have the opportunity for the extreme rush of being

guided to the top of one of the most remote summits on earth, Mount Everest

(Krakauer, 1997).

A recent article in

Travel and Leisure

magazine captures this contemporary

shift towards extremes by identifying a new breed of retired travelers, “perpetual

wanderers” who ceaselessly fly from one destination to another with only

brief stops in between. In earlier times, an annual vacation cruise to an exotic

location may have been enough to momentarily pull one out the emotional

flatness of everyday life. Today, however, the cruise ship itself must be filled

with novel sensations, endless buffets, rock-climbing walls, and all-night casinos.

But the recent emergence of the “perpetual wanderer” reminds us that this

is not enough because, as Simmel (1997d) says, the sensory “excitement

and euphoria . . . subsides remarkably quickly” (p. 220). In order to avoid the

inevitable emotional let-down of an adventure, there is only one thing to do,

never stop.

This new breed of extreme traveler resonates to Simmel’s theory of boredom.

If one is forever globe-trotting, consuming an endless number of experiences and

things, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the uniqueness of one experience

from another. “Perpetual wanderers see so much, so fast,” says the author Jeff

Wise (2003), “it’s hard to figure how they can process much of anything” (p. 156).

Indeed, the goal of the perpetual adventurer is not—at the deepest level—to learn

about the world or expand cultural horizons based on these exciting experiences.

Indeed the goal is not even to relax. Rather it is to keep the boredom of everyday

life at bay by “seeking out new experiences, as many as possible . . . as a way of

adding intensity to their lives” (p. 156). To this end, it is not the distinctive aspects

of each adventure that is important; it is to fill an underlying emptiness in life by

continually feeling the rush of the adventure itself.

Of course, the nihilistic culture of the rush is not limited to those economically

privileged enough to be world-travelers or mountain climbers. Although it is a

reference to technological culture in general, the desire for peak sensations

transcends class distinctions. Sociologist George Ritzer (2002) has pointed out

that, in a “McDonaldised” society, sensations are provided by means of massive

clock-driven enterprises that use technology in the most rational, efficient, and

cost-effective ways to create a myriad of affordable, consumable experiences, vast

“cathedrals of consumption” embodied in the biggest Vegas casinos and shopping


459

© 2007 The Author


malls, in mega-churches and amusement parks (p. 13). Indeed, in the age of

globalization, one does not even have to leave home to have these experiences.

The cheap manufacturing of personal computers and Internet access, for instance,

has made it possible for any American to fill the emptiness of their own lives with

instant pleasures by playing video games, maxing out credit cards on gambling

websites, endless shopping on eBay, or looking at extreme forms of pornography.

As Cornell West (1996) says, “this pattern of hedonism and cheap thrills,” made

possible by globalization, technological innovation, and easy credit, has made any

talk of race, class, or gender difference, as it pertains to boredom, “irrelevant”

(p. 109–111).

This sweeping turn towards extreme aesthesia in consumerist society is indicative

of a cultural crisis. Today, West (1985) says, the “shock effect” of Nietzsche’s

announcement of God’s death has worn off. Nihilism itself has become “boring

and uninteresting” (p. 259; cited in Thiele, 1997: 24). When my life is so accelerated

that I am unable to identify which obligations and commitments are important

to me, then nothing stands out anymore, nothing is important. When what counts

as valuable is now mediated by the impersonal structures of time and money that

organize my actions and decisions in quantifiable terms of “how big,” “how

much,” and “how many,” then everything is equalized and devalued. When the

exposure to a barrage of sensory stimulations, choices, and distractions ultimately

deadens the nervous system, my everyday engagement in the world begins to feel

empty and flat. And I am, out of sheer boredom, pulled toward more extreme

experiences and moments—excesses of violence, sex, travel, drugs, religion—that

elicit any qualitatively different feeling whatsoever, anything but indifference.

Indeed, as the writer J.G. Ballard says, the transgressions of extremism may be

the only escape from boredom today.

People believe in nothing. There is nothing to believe in now . . . There’s this vacuum . . . what

people have most longed for, which is the consumer society, has come to pass. Like all dreams

that come to pass, there is a nagging sense of emptiness. So they look for anything, they

believe in any extreme. Any extremist nonsense is better than nothing . . . I can sum up the future

in one word, and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring. (Cited in Svendsen,

2005: 83)

7

However, the fact that we are engaging in more extreme forms of pleasure-

seeking in order to escape the busy indifference of our daily lives is not, in itself,

the most serious problem. Underlying the public need for peak experiences is an

unwillingness to face or acknowledge our flight from boredom itself. When the

world

as a whole

no longer shows up as enchanted place but merely as a storehouse

of things to be consumed and manipulated in order to break the spell of the

boredom, then there is reason for concern. Insofar as we are absorbed in this

instrumental worldview—a worldview that mediates both work and leisure—

it becomes increasingly difficult to ask about the meaning of our own busy

existence. We are unable to confront the urgent historical question of

why

we are

460

Kevin Aho

© 2007 The Author


bored in the first place, and, to this end, we remain largely unaware of our own

emptiness.

8

Kevin Aho

Florida Gulf Coast University

10501 FGCU Boulevard South

Fort Myers, FL 33965-6565

[email protected]

NOTES

1

The Greek

aisthesis

is a reference to sensation or feeling and is related to the word“aesthetic.”

2

According to Spacks (1995), the first occurrence of the word “boredom” appeared ina private letter in 1768 from Earl Carlisle announcing his pity for “Newmarket friends,who are to be bored by these Frenchmen” (p. 13).

3

Martin Heidegger’s (1995) interpretation of “mood” (

Stimmung) is helpful in comingto grips with this democratization of boredom. In his 1929/30 Freiburg lecture course,The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger refers to boredom as a “ground-mood”(Grundstimmung) that captures the “atmosphere” of European existence in the twentiethcentury (p. 67). Understood as an atmosphere or inconspicuous “silent fog,” the mood ofboredom is not interpreted as a subjective state of mind contained in me, in the innerrecesses of my consciousness or soul. Rather, moods are public; they are already “outthere” in the world I am “thrown” (geworfen) into (p. 77). Moods, therefore, determine inadvance the way things will count or “matter” to me. To be human, for Heidegger, is tobe already actively situated and engaged in a shared world, with shared moods that shapethe way things show up or come into being for me. And today, in the flurry of our turbo-capitalist existence, it is the mood of indifference that increasingly attunes me to the thingsand experiences I am involved with. Boredom is that “in which we first immerse ourselvesin each case and which then attunes us through and through” (p. 67).

4 This translation from Simmel’s 1906 essay Schopenhauer und Nietzsche: Ein Vortragszyklusis taken from Edith Goodstein (2005).

5 In American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History, Tom Lutz (1991) cites importantworks of turn of the century American literature that capture the neurasthenic experience,particularly for women. “The narrator’s growing insanity in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s(1892) story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, Edna Pontellier’s suicide in Kate Chopin’s (1899) TheAwakening, Curtis Jadwin’s breakdown in Frank Norris’s (1903) The Pit, Lily Barth’s deathat the end of Edith Wharton’s (1905) House of Mirth, Martin Eden’s suicide in Jack London’s(1909) autobiographical novel of the same name, Eugene Witla’s breakdown in TheodoreDreiser’s (1915) ‘Genuis’ ” (p. 6).

6 Robert Levine (1997) points out that it was not until the introduction of themechanical clock that the English word “speed” took on its distinctively moderncharacteristic, referring not to good fortune as in the phrase “God’s speed” but to someonewho is “punctual” and arrives at precisely the appointed time. (p. 57)

7 Lukas Baar, “Don’t Crash: The J.G. Ballard Interview,” KGD, 7(1995). As cited inSvendsen (2005: 83).

8 This may be, as Martin Heidegger says, the most fundamental “distress” (Bedrängnis),namely, “the absence of distress” itself. (1999: 163)

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Simmel on Acceleration