Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will To Boredom by Haladyn Julian Jason

Author:Haladyn, Julian Jason [Haladyn, Julian Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-999-3
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2015-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

The distinction between no boredom and yes boredom is intended to draw attention to the function of the will in the experience of being bored, which serves as a self-conscious registration of one’s interest in affirming oneself by overcoming oneself – boredom setting the stage for an ontological questioning of the passions of subjective will. Of particular interest is the manner in which, to draw upon Nietzsche’s famous formulation, this no or yes answer speaks to the experience of boredom as a will that would rather not will than will nothingness (no boredom) or a will that “would rather will nothingness than not will” (yes boredom) (On the Genealogy of Morality, 67).

With no boredom we witness the subject’s refusal to will when a final goal is not present or is non-existent. No boredom signals the disavowal of the potential creative powers of subjective will and the acceptance of will as will-lessness, common in capitalist culture, in which the subject’s creative drive is used as a means of fuelling the need for a goal even without the possibility of achieving it – except temporarily, through the superficial engagements provided by ready-made commodified object-events that stage creativity as acts of choice. Such choices represent limitations that make us both the same and different, with our repeated experiences being marked by fascinations that are also boredoms.

Very rarely, for example, do we encounter museum arrangements that do not conform to a chronological, historical (as Hegel preferred it) or some other tried-and-true methodology that pre-orders potential experience, and by extension possible meanings, allowing for creative engagements that conform to and depend upon an established aesthetics of display. History, as staged most powerfully in the space of the museum, presents the past as an end in-itself that is beyond the subject yet functions vicariously as a spectatorial goal for the subject, which is called upon to create humanity by choosing to conform with common-sense notions of the human. This process enacts what Carol Duncan terms civilizing rituals, in which the subject experiences an object-event strictly within the parameters of the historicizing narrative imposed by the institution through its ordering of missed experience as experience. This institutionalization of display allows spectators to experience the world as a representation that is at the same time a similitude reflected back in the perceived object-events that, it must be remembered, are in fact used to subjectively order and measure the world they are called upon to represent; to go beyond these limitations is therefore to abandon the potentiality of participating in this common sense or ready-made meaning. It is by accepting the existing limits of the will that the subject says no to the possibility of creating a vision beyond pre-established parameters.

With yes boredom the will represents the defining condition of one’s engagement with a world deprived of a final goal, since it is strictly in and on subjective will that the possibility of meaning is conceived. In Nietzschean terms, yes boredom is a willingness to will nothingness, an active

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