Boredom

Članak je podijeljen na dvije cjeline: prva će se dotaknuti kontekstualnih i konceptualnih okvira te psihološko-iskustvene domene dosade; druga će se dotaknuti pitanja suvre-menih potrošačkih praksi koje se sagledavaju kao prakse koje nude moguće " rješenje " protiv dosade. Prvi korak bit će skiciranje konteksta unutar kojega dosada, kao koncept i specifi čno stanje čovjeka, postaje društveno relevantan fenomen. Drugi korak je postavljanje konceptualnih i teorijskih okvira, gdje se daje pregled nekolicine različitih pristupa dosadi. Pomnije će se ispitati dva tipa dosade – situacijska i egzistencijalna do-sada. Potom slijedi dio teksta koji se bavi pitanjem postoje li prakse koje nastoje ponuditi svojevrstan " lijek " protiv dosade. U tom će segmentu biti govora o konzumerizmu te kulturnoj i zabavnoj industriji, pri čemu će se pozornost obratiti na odnos svakodnevice, dosade i praksi " anti-dosade ". Umjesto zaključka, otvorit će se pitanje može li dosada poprimiti oblik društvene kritike.

The paper is divided into two parts. The fi rst part focuses on contextual, conceptual, psychological and experiential characteristics of boredom, while the second examines contemporary consumer practices which are viewed as practices that of er a possible “solution” for boredom. The fi rst step sketches the socio-cultural context in order to locate the manifestation and development of boredom as a concept and a socially relevant phenomenon. The second step gives an overview of different approaches to boredom in order to draw a broader conceptual and theoretical framework. Two types of boredom are closely examined: situational and existential boredom. The third step raises the question
– are there any practices that seek to of er a sort of a “cure” for boredom? Here, the focus is on consumerism, culture and the entertainment industry. Particular attention is given to the relation between everyday life, boredom and “anti-boredom” practices. The last part tackles the question – can boredom take the form of social critique?

Утверждение, что философы в своей трактовке различных философских категорий осознанно или неосознанно опираются на возможности, предоставляемые им языком, звучит как трюизм, но часто игнорируется в конкретных исследованиях. В статье наличие непосредственных связей между семантической структурой слова на базовом уровне и его философскими интерпретациями продемонстрировано на материале сопоставления интерпретаций категории скуки Б. Паскалем и М. Хайдеггером. Несмотря на то, что многие исследователи воспринимают ennui и Langeweile как строго соответствующие друг другу понятия, внимательный анализ показывает наличие существенных особенностей в их семантической структуре. Интерпретации Паскаля и Хайдеггера в значительной степени исходят из этих особенностей, доводя их до концептуального оформления.

“Sıkıntının temelde bir anlam krizine işaret ettiğinden yola çıkarak, sıkıntı mekânlarına ve zamanla ilişkisine, bir estetik kategori olarak kullanımına, siyasette uç verdiği anlara, edebiyat ve sinemadaki temsillerine ve ona karşı sunulan panzehirlere bakmak, bu coğrafyaya özgü anlam arayışlarına ve çatışmalarına dair kışkırtıcı sorular ortaya atabilir.” Aylin Kuryel, “Sunuş”tan

Son yıllarda Türkçenin en yaygın kullanılan sözcüklerinden biri, “sıkıntı”. En yaygın kullanım şekli de: “Sıkıntı yok”! Kalıbın bu kadar çok tüketilmesi, sıkıntının, sıkıntıların varlığına işaret ediyor olsa gerek. Zamanımızın kronik kriz hali, sıkıntıyı “toplumsal ortak duyu” haline getirmiyor mu? Elinizdeki derleme mekâna/zamana, siyasete, edebiyata ve sinemaya odaklanan dört bölümde, sıkıntının toplumsallığını ve potansiyelini inceliyor. Yani sıkıntının toplumsal nedenlerini, görünümlerini ve sıkıntı deneyiminin doğurabildiklerini… Zira sıkıntı, kimi kuramcılar veya ’68 hareketi “sıkıntı karşı devrimcidir” dese de, isyana da sevk edebilen bir insanlık durumu. Taşra sıkıntısından, “sıkıntı” diye hashtag açmaya uzanan gerçeklikleri var sıkıntının. Orhan Koçak’ın kitaptaki yazısında dikkat çektiği gibi, “hazza karışmış iç sıkıntısı”ndan, “bildiğimiz düpedüz can sıkıntısı”na, “herkesten ve her şeyden sıkılma”ya, “sıkıntıdan patlama”ya uzanan bir duygulanımsal yelpazesi var. Nelerin “sıkıcı” bulunduğu da, çok şey anlatır bize. Sıkıntı, ondan sıkılmazsanız, çok şey anlatır.

Aylin Kuryel’in derlemesi, Senem Aytaç, Barış Bıçakçı, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Ayşe Çavdar, Begüm Özden Fırat, Emre Tansu Keten, Orhan Koçak, Beno Kuryel, Efe Murad, Pınar Öğünç, Osman Özarslan, Necati Sönmez, Asuman Susam, Uğur Tanyeli, Mehmet Fatih Uslu, Sezen Ünlüönen, Nalan Yırtmaç ve Fırat Yücel’in katkılarıyla.

Soren Kierkegaard Lucinda-kritikájának elemzéséből kiindulva azt vizsgálom meg, hogy miben különbözött Schlegel és Kierkegaard iróniával kapcsolatos trópus-használata, milyen metaforák mentén határolódott el a dán filozófus német elődjétől. A hegeli bírálati pontok számbavételével igyekszem árnyalni a Paul de Man-féle interpretációt is. Kierkegaard és Schlegel összehasonlítása során külön hangsúlyt fektetek az éghajlat, a meztelenség, és a restség alakzataira, illetve azok revelációval és szubverzióval kapcsolatos szerepére.

O artigo discute os conceitos de narratividade e suspense (Baroni, 2007) próprios da experiência de leitura dos quadrinhos (Fresnault-Deruelle, 1976) a partir de um ponto de vista negativo: pretende-se contemplar a suspensão do suspense em histórias com fracos níveis de tensão, em trabalhos centrados no cotidiano de seus protagonistas - marcadamente presentes nos quadrinhos alternativos (Hatfield, 2005).

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Drawing from concepts from post classical narrative theory (Baroni, 2007), the following paper seeks to explore the dynamics of suspense proper to the experience of reading comics (Fresnault-Deruelle, 1976), especially in contemporary everyday sto- ries that involve a low narrative tension, like many alternative comics (Hatfield, 2005).

In this paper, the issue of boredom in slow film - a recent trend in art-cinema that increasingly has gotten critical and scholarly attention – is conceptualised as a paradoxical form of negative affect that can be a possible source of gratification for the viewer. In it, the leading question is thus what are the possible gratifications derived from elicited affects for viewers of the slow film genre? It adds to the debate on the topic by providing an emphasis on the spectatorial, affective engagement of the viewer, a research area that is previously overlooked in the debate that has so far mostly comprised of issues of aesthetics, culture criticism and film history. The paper proposes that boredom can be a source of gratification for some viewers, when it can give rise to contemplation and self-reflexivity and/or meta-emotions such as aesthetic pleasure (A-emotion), moral self-appraisal and identity building. The paper advances towards these conclusions by taking implications from (neo)formalist film studies and genre theory as well as the adjacent fields of psychology and phenomenology – more specifically synthesizing Matthew Flanagan’s aesthetic investigation of Slow Film, Anne Bartsch’ model of emotional gratification and Heidegger’s phenomenology of boredom. By providing a delineation of possible pleasures of the seemingly paradoxical pleasure in the negative affect of boredom, this paper has relevant implications for the philosophical and psychological debate on what is known as the ‘paradox of negative emotions’. Moreover, by adding a phenomenological account of contemplation, it enriches the debate on the Slow Film genre with a distinct audience-orientated approach.

This project explored students' perceptions of academic boredom in under-and over-challenging situations with the hypothesis that boredom is a multidimensional and situation-dependent construct. In Study 1, college students were asked to think of an under-and ...

Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In our estimation, the complicated reality is that, in using slightly different but related concepts, Kierkegaard is providing a unique look at acedia as it manifests differently at different stages on life’s way. Thus, on this “perspectival account”, acedia will manifest differently according to whether an individual inhabits the aesthetic, ethical, or religious sphere. We propose two axes for this perspectival account. Such descriptions of how acedia manifests make up the first, phenomenal axi...

This paper focuses on the concept of boredom, which is often described as the product of modern times. However, the writings of Lucretius and Seneca warn of taedium vitae and horror loci, early Christian monks suffered under the demon of acedia, while the malady of melancholy plagued 17th and 18th century Europe. The first part of the paper explores some of the characteristics of boredom, while the second part focuses on an analysis of existential disturbances that can be provoked by boredom. The conclusion deals with the question of whether boredom represents a threat that must be fought against using all means possible, or whether it can be seen as a motivating power to induce far-reaching change.

Introducing the notion of boredom into the academic context, Boredom and Academic Work proposes a fresh sociological perspective on boredom and academic work alike.

It invites a reader to reflect on the essence of boredom and the nature of academic work from the sociological perspective. It constitutes methodological and conceptual guidance for all those interested in their own emotions both at work and outside. It also provides an original, interactional and essential definition of boredom and a novel standpoint for observing academic work, both in its systemic and practical level, and shows how the academic system influences its subjects' well-being, motivation, emotions, and practices.

Covering various approaches from the qualitative methodology, linguistics, sociology of work, emotions, and higher education, and telling a story of research and teaching university staff, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas and the general academic public as well.

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from
being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human
existence.”
                        Thomas Wolfe

A psychoanalytic look at aspects of Loneliness, with an emphasis on internal factors, further to those described by Melanie Klein, is presented. In particular, importance is given to Paternal Reverie as compared with Bion's concept of Maternal Reverie. Examples from literature and the TV series The West Wing are given, along with a brief clinical example.

Objective: Boredom has been defined as " the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable to engage in satisfying activity ". It is associated with a number of psychosocial and psychopathological problems. The aim of this paper is to test the validity of the Italian version of the Multidimendional State Boredom Scale (MSBS). The results of this investigation indicate that the Italian MSBS has factor structure that is similar to the original MSBS. Furthermore, there is evidence that the Italian MSBS has strong reliability. Method: In total, 690 undergraduate students participated in this research. Participants were 51.3% male, and 48.7% female, with a mean age of 24 years (SD = 4.92, range: 18-50 years). Two studies were conducted. In the first study, a confirmatory factor analysis was performed to determine whether data from the Italian MSBS fit the original MSBS factor structure. In the second study, the association between the Italian version of the MSBS and several related measures was examined. These related measures are: The Boredom Proneness Scale; The Dissociative Experiences Scale-II; Beck Depression Inventory-II; Beck Anxiety Inventory; The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Short Version; The Behavioural Inhibition System and Behavioural Activation System. Results: Study 1 found that the Italian translation of the MSBS, administered in an Italian-speaking sample, yielded the same factor structure as the original MSBS. Study 2 found that the Italian MSBS demonstrated construct validity in an Italian sample. Conclusions: The results of the present paper demonstrate that the Italian version of the MSBS is both valid and reliable. Study 1 found that the Italian MSBS has a similar factor structure to the original English MSBS, that the Italian MSBS's factors are significantly associated with one another, and that the Italian MSBS has good reliability. Study 2 demonstrated that the MSBS is valid, as it was related to a number of theoretically important constructs.

While bearing all the formal stamps of the realist avant-garde, Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) is animated not by the powerful, oppositional emotions of ‘shock’ or ‘anger’, but by a morally and politically devalued ‘boredom' – a vacuous, trivial affect long associated with the consumer culture that the avant-garde traditionally pits itself against. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gummo was widely greeted as an avant-garde failure. Contending, however, that recent radical shifts in the status and dominion of emotion convert boredom from consumer culture's signature affect to consumer culture's emotional trash, this article re-reads Gummo’s tedium as a function not of the film's avant-garde failure but of its effort to repurpose the avant-garde for changed economic and social co-ordinates. Exploring the convergence of emotional and literal trash through a semiotic analysis of the film's junk-filled, over-stuffed frames, I will suggest that precisely as a trivial, vacuous and a-political feeling – as our emotional trash or affective waste – boredom possesses an unexpected utility to a newly configured avant-garde project.

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.

This paper discusses the temporal experience of film viewing by analysing the peculiar case of watching slow cinema, a strand of films that foreground temporality through its radical attenuation of narrativity as well as its austere, minimalist visual style. The article asks why the genre's distinct structuring of temporality divides its audience into diametrically opposing evaluations – i.e. evoking both strong appreciation from a dedicated audience and depreciation from an adverse audience-and poses the question how stylistic and formal aspects of stillness of film as well as viewing attitudes of the audience can correlate to an experiential effect of heightened temporal awareness, or what is dubbed slowness. This is understood as a pensive or contemplative viewing mode that is to be distinguished from boredom. Previous work on the topic has failed to adequately address the issue of slowness, because it has favoured a predominantly formalistic study of slow cinema over the explication of its experiential effects. This paper adds to the debate by adopting the framework of a 'poetics of cinema' (as put forward by David Bordwell); a form of inquiry that assumes a relation between functions and desired effects. This paper thus integrates the study of formal facets of a film, or its constructional principles, with a phenomenological description of the viewing experience, that is, analysing the spectatorial effects of a film. The paper proceeds to answer the stated question by first designing a theoretical framework comprising of three interrelated types of stillness of slow cinema's Deleuzian time-images that afford the typical experience of slowness. Consequently the paper elaborates further on the facets of this temporal experience; the said contemplative mode or form of lingering attention entails a heightened awareness of time or a Husserlian now-consciousness that affords a heterochronic temporal experience. The implications of this understanding of temporal experience in watching slow cinema could benefit the study of time experience in film in general. Moreover, understanding slowness might shed light on the relation between normative or evaluative acts and the audience's biases based on unquestioned, habitual engagement with film.

The authors examined the relationships among students’ levels of boredom, boredom coping strategies, epistemic curiosity, and graded performance regarding mathematics lessons, with the intention to explore
the mediating roles of boredom coping strategies and epistemic curiosity in the relationship between the level of boredom and graded performance. A total of 557 students from a small city located in the Western Black Sea region of Turkey voluntarily participated in the study. Of them, 211 enrolled in an Anatolian high school and 346 enrolled in a science high school. Results showed that the level of boredom, boredom coping strategies, epistemic curiosity, and graded performance were significantly
related to each other. Results also showed that deprivation-type epistemic curiosity and interest-type epistemic curiosity played significant mediating roles in the relationship between the level of boredom and graded performance. Notably, the mediating roles of interest-type epistemic curiosity and deprivation-type epistemic curiosity differed across gender groups.

Kierkegaard diagnoses modern boredom as both a social phenomenon and as an individual malaise. He focuses on a distinctive second-order form of boredom, “demonic boredom,” in which the reflective aesthete affects boredom in order to overcome it through irony. Modern boredom is construed as an aesthetic and psychological problem, which consists in a lack of resources to make life “interesting.” Its antidotes are taken to be distraction or the subjective injection of “the interesting.” Kierkegaard argues that the modern conceptions of boredom and its antidotes are flawed, since they ignore the spiritual dimensions of acedia. Demonic boredom is a mood, rather than an emotion, and fails to seek its only real antidote in the passion of faith, which can be ignited through spiritual exercises, heartfelt concern for others, temporal reorientation of the self towards eternity, and through finding the “fullness of time” in the life of Christ.

In reading E.M. Cioran’s œuvre, one is faced with an immediate and unremitting abrasiveness that has its roots with our being born into time. Indeed, the author of The Fall into Time and The Trouble with Being Born thought that it is precisely this accidental and unredeemable temporality, an original sin that results in a life forever situated in cycles of striving and becoming, which is to be exhuastingly apprehended in the experience of boredom: ‘Life is more and less than boredom, though it is in boredom and by boredom that we discern what life is worth.’ Cioran’s pessimism never relents; even his lugubrious friend Samuel Beckett had to keep his distance after finding him ‘too pessimistic’—who else but Cioran could write that ‘leukemia is the garden where God blooms’? Despite this, in Cioran’s often autobiographical, aphoristic and essayistic writings, we find a richly-timbred boredom (ironically so) which gives us incisive observations into a multitude of related concepts and realities. Nothingness, God, silence, mysticism, suffering, and quietism (among others) all feature in Cioran’s writings on boredom, as well as in this paper’s attempt to better situate Cioran’s work with respect to his more famous pessimistic and existentialist relations’s take on the subject, namely Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger. In exploring his work on boredom vis-à-vis specific writings on mysticism, Taoism, nothingness, time and insomnia, this paper aims to show how the failure to attain what Cioran called ‘a grain of ataraxy’, necessarily presupposes a limited set of ‘possibilities’ and ‘prospects’ when faced with the experience of ‘the sensation of the emptiness of existence’ that is boredom (Schopenhauer).