Boredom, Redux: A Reflection on Higher Education

Arthur Schopenhauer's 1818 magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, confronts us with an intractable human nature we'd rather avoid. Like Freud after him, Schopenhauer's account of the discontents of civilization centers on our inability to surrender our pretenses of hope, happiness, and success, thus proving that enlightenment's liberating self-consciousness is often a fool's bargain. Our "will-to-live" is also a drive toward death, the space between merely perpetrating illusions that "sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative painlessness." Yet Schopenhauer quickly adds that "boredom is at once on the lookout for this; then the propagation of this race and of its activities"((Schopenhauer, Will and Representation, 2:357.)) So, to ward off boredom we fuck or otherwise divert ourselves — including by trying to understand why the world exists as it does and how we exist in it, what Schopenhauer calls the desire of Vorstellung to make sense of the Wille or "essential nature." Unable and unequipped to find the cure of enlightenment, however, life becomes a "game" of "[e]ternal becoming" and "endless flux" that ends up "showing [existence] as a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a lifeless longing without a definite object, a deadening languor."((Schopenhauer, Will and Representation, 1:164.)) For Eugene Thacker, Schopenhauer's pessimism signals "the smallest interval" that lies "[b]etween resignation and tranquility," the "night-side of thought" that "introduces humility into thought. It undermines the innumerable, self-aggrandizing postures that constitutes the human being."((Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 10, 3, 4-5.)) As a necessary approach to a "world [that] is increasingly unthinkable," "the logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: saying no to the world as it is (or, Schopenhauer's tears); saying yes to the world as it is (or, Nietzsche's laughter); and refusing to say either 'yes' or 'no' (or, Cioran's sleep)."((Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet: Horror Philosophy Vol. 1 (Arlesford: Zero Books, 2011), 1, 10. See also Thacker's commentary on Schopenhauer's later writings, On the Suffering of the World, edited by Eugene Thacker (London: Repeater Books, 2020).)) I read this third refusal as a rebuttal to the corporatization of higher education, its simulation of deeper thought, a black mirror of the work of the intellectual and intellectualism. We've warned about this possibility for some time, I realize, but the threat now seems acute.

Teaching undergraduate and graduate students since 2000, I have come to see how societal pressures to be successful, to which the university has become the all-too-willing handmaiden, have promised a gratification that compromises the mental and emotional health necessary to run the gauntlet of academic achievement determined by GPAs rather than the rewards of learning for learning's sake. Certainly the logistics of scale, of an ever-expanding infrastructure to accommodate the burgeoning number of students matriculating out of high school, make this corporatization, especially when funded from the public purse (at least in my country, Canada), a necessary devil's bargain. We might say that it was always thus in academe: isn't the point of higher education to educate students for future success? Yet besides a buzzword for the economy of keeping higher education afloat, corporatization assumes learning is something that can be accomplished by surveys or course objectives that quantify and evaluate the labour of deeper thought. Add to this a pandemic and anxieties about jobs and one wonders if the university's job is any longer to cultivate informed minds and citizens, to maintain a vigilance against the dangers of collective ignorance. Instead, are we too focused on cultivating illusions of happiness that make us docile participants in the larger game of existence, short handing any self-consciousness that might attend enlightenment?

As I say, the game isn't new. In "Was ist Aufklärung?" Kant warned against the lethargy that comes from surrendering the desire to free ourselves from our "self-incurred tutelage," "man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another."((Immanuel Kant, "Was ist Aufklärung?", in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by Lewis White Beck (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 29.)) For Kant, laziness and cowardice explain our blind acceptance of this tutelage. I'd add boredom or ennui to the list, the inevitable "deadening languor" that for Schopenhauer characterizes an inevitable existential crisis.((We might say this crisis extends to Generation Z and now Generation Alpha, the majority of my students born under the sign of Google and its relentless distractions that bring the world to us in one click at the same time that they deaden our response to it.)) The corporatization of higher education is one telling symptom of this crisis, a homogenization (ironically also at a time of the increasing atomization of disciplinary structures) or branding that recycles mottoes and platitudes about the assessment of strengths and metrics for success, as opposed to a confrontation with the inevitable gaps and failures of our knowledge.  But I imagine boredom, like pessimism, as a productive response to such a crisis, a kind of necessary withdrawal that is at the same time the adoption of a productively skeptical attitude toward pressures to conform to hope, progress, and that most banal of designations, happiness.

Boredom presents its own dangers. In Tony Kushner's epic play on AIDS and homosexuality in Reagan's United States, Angels in America (1991-92), Prior Walter and Harper Pitt meet in what Kushner calls a "mutual dream scene."((Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, revised edition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013), 30. Hereafter cited as Angels followed by page number.)) Prior is suffering from AIDS and about to be abandoned by his boyfriend, Louis, who can't deal with Prior's illness; Prior takes up with Joe, Harper's hot but closeted Mormon husband. Harper both knows and doesn't know the truth about her husband, the way one does when one doesn't want to confront a life-altering reality, and so takes Valium, "Lots of Valium," in what Prior calls "wee fistfuls": "And you're dancing as fast as you can" (Angels 32). In Kushner's "Gay Fantasia on National Themes" (the play's subtitle), such occurrences are at once fantastic and all-too-common: regularly extraordinary insofar as the extraordinary intercedes on the everyday all-too-frequently as various characters struggle to cross what Harper calls "the very threshold of revelation" (33), anticipated by "A sort of blue streak of recognition" (34) that visits us especially when we don't want or expect it to.

Harper tells Prior:

What happens when imagination fails us as we confront our finitude? The scene is part Heideggerian, part Juvenalian, telling of imagination as a difference engine that fails to make a difference. The futile labours of imagination both queer and render melancholic how the possible tragedy of life ends up repeating itself as farce. Gaiety's attempt to transfigure the all-too-real dread of discrimination and marginalization — the homophobic fundamentalism of the Mormon church and Reaganite politics — becomes intensified by a confrontation with mortality visited upon the gay community. Kushner confronts the limits of tolerance when nurse Norman Arriaga, known by his drag name Belize, finds it possible to "forgive her vanquished foe" (265), Roy Cohn, "the polestar of human evil" (229), whom he/she has nursed through his battle with AIDS. As Harper says in her final speech in the play, "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead" (285).

The nothing lost that gets carried forward is, once again, the possibility of transformation, in this case a profoundly political sense of the capacity for forgiveness. But it also registers the detritus of history that Benjamin's angel is forced to witness relentlessly as it moves forward with its back toward the future. Kushner's play encrypts futility as our constitutive possibility, the sense of a life built upon disaster. As Maurice Blanchot writes, "[t]he disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing."((Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Anne Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 7.)) Against such futility we measure going forward in terms of our desire for a hope perpetually thwarted, that which produces in its stead a kind of existential boredom: a boredom of existence. Freud understands this dilemma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which speaks of the death drive as a "matter of expediency" always returning the subject to a primal inertia, for "an unlimited duration of individual life would become a quite pointless luxury."((Sigmund Freud, the Pleasure Principle (1920), volume 18, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23 volumes, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974; London: Vintage, 2001), 46.)) We hope for transformation, but its possibility is evermore about to be. Sara Ahmed calls this the "hap of happiness" that "then gets translated into something good," making happiness an "anticipatory causality" that "something good" will happen.((Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 30, 40.)) Anticipation materializes what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism," which "exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing."((Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. )) In Berlant's terms, "All attachment is optimistic" in that optimism is "the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene."((Berlant, Optimism, 1-2.)) The obstacle to happiness is our desire for it, our dependence on an external source to fulfill our desire that redounds on desire itself as the catalyst for a kind of cannibalistic feedback loop that stalls existence in a deadlock that is at the same time destined to go on forever.  

But what about "dreaming ahead"? Schopenhauer would have no truck with such transfiguring potential. In Like Andy Warhol (2017) Jonathan Flatley argues for the serial repetitiveness of Warhol's art as "allegories of boredom," figures for the social, political, and aesthetic technologies that interpellate us as normalized, homogenized subjects. Yet the boredom that exemplifies such modes of mechanical reproduction generates the possibility of other affects that play with and resist such modes.((Jonathan Flatley, Like Andy Warhol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).)) I wonder, then, if the modes of corporatization and normalization that increasingly characterize the labours of higher education might still produce similar affective responses as modes of a necessary critique. In 2015 I participated in the Walrus Talks, a national event series about Canada and its place in the world, organized and hosted by The Walrus.((Joel Faflak, "Creativity is a Waste of Time," The Walrus Talks: Creativity, YouTube, April 16, 2015.)) The event was held at my home institution, the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and this time the topic was creativity. At the time I was in the midst of my administrative role as founder and Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities, a four-year undergraduate program that combined scholarly research with experiential learning. I was also teaching courses on madness, creativity, and leadership, the latter of which I approached in terms of failure. I care deeply about students' success, but I want them to be armed for the times when success might fail them. What value can we derive from such inevitable "gaps" in our lives? From such lapses comes greater understanding, resilience, compassion, empathy, tolerance. Put another way, while I value the knowledge students bring to the classroom, I care more about investigating our collective ignorance, because that, more than ever, is where I see the value of a higher education that asks us to navigate outside of the institutional parameters and markers of what universities deem to be success. For me, that's where the experience of learning, as what Deborah Britzman calls "difficult education," transpires.((Deborah Britzman, After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). "Difficult education" is Britzman's general term for the fact that education takes place in a complex, often anxiety-ridden transferential space between teacher, student, classroom, and world. That is to say, we implicitly encounter the acquisition of knowledge as a kind of assault on our very ego structures.  )) It means risking getting bored with learning, not because of the rote quality the corporatization of higher education can produce, but because only by exploring the possible uselessness of ideas can we possibly unleash a potentiality otherwise hidden from view.

Given this mindset, I took the occasion to think about education as a waste of time in the face of what I called society's continual advisory alert against the terrors of contemplation that characterize intellectuals and intellectualism. I left my MA to start a business, feeling I wasn't useful enough. All that wandering about in the mazes of thought, what Coleridge calls the "unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths," left me without purpose.((Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 volumes, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1, 17.))  I then left business to return to academe because I had lost my soul in facts, figures, and the push to be endlessly productive and profitable. My mother cried when I left university: "I had such hopes for you as a teacher!" She cried again when I returned: "How could you say no to all that money?!" Either way, she often said to me, "You think too much." I now wonder what terrors she was protecting me from. Such dangers have something to do with poetry's ability to reimagine our world. Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821, responds to society's mistrust of the imaginative writer that goes back to Plato, who exiled poets from his ideal Republic. In 1859 Matthew Arnold said there was something premature about the Romantics.((See Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 237-58.)) Like Hamlet, they thought and felt too much but didn't know and didn't act enough. We wouldn't call Arnold utilitarian, but by advocating putting thought and creativity into proper critical action, he has ended up, ironically, speaking to our current world of metrics, of tireless innovation for innovation's sake. Now as then, there seems no denying a backlash against deep, often disruptive thought. Yet while I find myself depressed by Arnold's judgment of the Romantics, I'm comforted that he misses how the Romantics were not concerned always to make something of themselves.

Which leads me to ask: are we pushing ourselves too hard? "Creative failure" or "failing fast" are the catchphrases of our Zeitgeist, and certainly we hope we can pivot (to borrow another buzzword) on failure as quickly as possible. But I'm also mindful of Samuel Beckett's formulation from Worstward Ho, which Tony Kushner may have had in mind: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."((Samuel Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, edited by Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 81.)) Not the kind of thing to put on a recruitment poster,((Many years ago, in the early days of the branding of higher education, my university came up with the slogan, "Lead. Think," the irony of the inverted chronology having apparently escaped everyone's attention.)) but still: what would it mean to waste our time, squander our creativity, to claim the arts and humanities as productive wastes of time? But we know all too well what other failures of imagination have already and long wasted public money. What would it mean, then, if poetry and reverie, for instance, were necessary forms of education? Here's W. H. Auden in 1939, writing "In Memory of W. B. Yeats": 

Auden's poem describes the passing of Yeats amidst Schopenhauer's world of "deadening languor," of a boredom that barely registers an awareness of its creative potential. Auden's point, as I take it, is to risk, as Andy Warhol does, giving into the boredom, for only then might we make ourselves still enough to leave the possibility for other stirrings. 

As I said to my students, they are as capable of tackling the future as I can possibly imagine. Yet often educational and professional systems will ask them to work as hard as possible to advance as quickly as possible across the horizon of their futures. We are expecting them to map out that horizon on our behalf — indeed, we need them to do so. But I also know, as another Romantic William Blake writes, that the future can unfold a perilous path, the shifting sands of which may sometimes leave us bewildered. So, to them I finally said: don't be afraid to waste your time, to lose your way, to risk failing. If we all stopped being useful for just a moment, we might deter some undeterred historical trajectories: climate change; the unrestrained development of limited natural resources; poverty; growing socioeconomic disparity; racial intolerance; pandemics. To these material challenges requiring material responses one can add: religious, political, sexual, and cultural intolerance; physical but also ideological violence against things we imagine we don't, or can't, or won't understand. And to these I would add: the neglect of the everyday affective lives of our spirits and the spirits of others, the stories of how we feel, told about the apparently mundane and boring everyday-ness of our lives. Thought and imagination have their own equally palpable materiality in all fields. They produce a lot of waste, wasted time, wasted energy — which waste can be toxic. But I wonder if pressing for a form of disengagement from the world — to take time to figure out your story and thus to tell the stories of others — whilst remaining alert to those who would exploit this inattention, might push us toward our futures with a greater sense of hope. I hope our students make enough productive waste along the way to find out. I hope they risk being bored.

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Joel Faflak is Professor in the Department of English and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. He has published widely on literature and thought of the Romantic Century (1750-1850), the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, nineteenth-century philosophy, and film musicals. 

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