Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters

Ben Anderson
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
Received 22 May 2003; received in revised form 3 February 2004

Abstract
This paper aims to fold the increased attention to issues of materiality in social and cultural geography into the more recent
attunement to questions of affect. The vehicle for this aim is a discussion of the complex ways in which boredom, and bodies bored,
compose time–space. Somewhat surprisingly, and in stark contrast to its experiential ubiquity, boredom has rarely been discussed
within the social sciences. The paper therefore performs a geography of how boredom matters by way of a series of examples of the
taking place of boredom drawn from research on music and everyday life. Rather than discuss boredom through the critical concepts
that underpin the thesis of disenchantment, such as alienation or anomie, I argue that boredom takes place as a suspension of a body’s
capacities to affect and be affected forged through an incapacity in habit. Through this discussion I argue that the ‘new materialisms’
that increasingly populate social and cultural geography struggle to discern the affectivity of profane social-life and, importantly,
cannot conceive of the risk of depletion that boredom, via its connection to meaninglessness and indifference, exemplifies. However,
attuning to the movement-from that always accompanies boredom discloses the immanent presence of intensities that on-go even as
boredom stills and slows time–space. Based on the ambiguity of boredom that results, the conclusion draws on the ‘not-yet’ mate-
rialism of Ernst Bloch [The Principle of Hope (vols. 1–3) (N. Plaice, S. Plaice, P. Knight, Trans.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1986] to disclose
an image of process-matter that draws on Bennett’s [The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings and Ethics, Princeton
University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2001] concept of an ‘enchanted materialism’ but retains a sense of process as incorporating
both plentitude and depletion. The basis to this form of affective materialism is the event of hope.
Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Boredom; Affect; Affective materialism; Hope; Music; Matter

Boredom itself represents the death of meaning, of
interest. It is an experience (however dimly under-
stood as such) of the emptiness that lurks at the
heart of human existence, an emptiness into which
each moment fades, into which all finite things
pass away.
(Raposa, 1999, p. 60)
Hope is a spring: it is the leaping of a gulf.
(Marcel, 1965, p. 86)
E-mail address: benjaminjanderson@yahoo.co.uk (B. Anderson).
0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.02.005
1. How does boredom matter?
Does boredom matter? To be bored, or perhaps
more importantly to potentially/probably be bored, has
become part of the common-place experiential fabric,
the affective texture, of Modern everyday life (see
Barbalet, 1999; Klapp, 1986; Spacks, 1995). Conse-
quently, there is no longer anything surprising, aston-
ishing or wonderful about the often unacknowledged,
and certainly unevenly distributed, experience of being
bored. Despite the word ‘boredom’ only coming into
use to describe a psychological state in the middle of
the nineteenth century, life is now conducted in the
shadow of an assumption of boredom as a social/cul-
tural given (Spacks, 1995). However, simultaneously,
boredom does not matter. Its banality has long ren-
dered it comparatively immaterial. In comparison to
740 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
the grandness of ennui, for example, boredom acts to
trivialize a disenchanted world in which, sadly and
consequently, nothing matters (see Kuhn, 1976). Given
this ambiguity, that runs throughout this paper, I aim
to attune to the slightly different, but not unrelated,
question of how ephemeralities such as boredom mat-
ter. Given in part the invigorating energies of a mul-
titude of ‘new materialisms’ (see this volume and Pels
et al., 2002), in a range of recent writings on the cul-
tural turn there is a growing feeling that it is time to
‘tack back’ from a focus on signification to a renewed
questioning of ‘the materiality of matter’ (see Jackson,
2000; Lees, 2002; Philo, 2000). In this literature ques-
tions of the affective colouring of social-spatial life
have, however, either been forgotten or discussed
erroneously in the terms of one side of a divide in
which ‘matter’ stands as the ‘real’, ‘grounded’ or
‘physical’ opposite. Philo (2000, p. 33), for example,
eludes ‘‘texts, signs, symbols, psyches, desires, fears,
and imaginings’’ in his category of the immaterial.
Matters such as boredom have, therefore, begun to
take on significance via a separate attunement to
questions of the ‘‘affective modalities of association’’
(Whatmore, 2002, p. 5). Recent work has begun to
extend, and deepen, engagement with different modal-
ities of the non-rational in order to disclose how
emotions, feelings and mood work to compose the
vagaries of social-spatial life (see Anderson and Smith,
2001; Davidson, 2003; Dewsbury, 2003; McCormack,
2003). The separation between matter and the non-ra-
tional is now, therefore, somewhat intuitive. It is as-
sumed that immaterialities do not matter. There are,
however, numerous problems with this separation: not
least that it repeats a categorical distinction between
matter and those capacities taken to form part of the
enlivening ‘ideal’ dimension of life and thought (see for
alternatives to this split Bennett, 2001; Massumi,
2002b).
This division has, however, begun to be re-drawn in
the development of a new ‘aesthetically disposed’ sense
of materiality in the body of work known as non-rep-
resentational theory (see Thrift, 2004a,b). Thrift (2004a,
p. 124) argues that this has three main components: first,
imagination is extended into matter, second, a ‘lyric’
sense of materiality is formed around the affect of
wonder and, third, the resulting picture of materiality is
based on the neo-baroque sense that ‘‘the world is
contingent and complex, a space for opportunities and
events’’. In this paper I aim to contribute to this new
sense of matter by folding the renewed concern with the
intensities of affect directly into the heart of a figuration
of the materiality of matter. The vehicle for this is a case
study of how boredom takes place based on in-depth
research into music and everyday life, conducted over
the course of eighteen months with seventeen lower
middle class households in Sheffield, UK. The paper
also weaves into its story of materiality a wider discus-
sion of the diverse energies of boredom. 1 The first
section focuses upon how the contemporary over-
abundant presence of boredom has, hitherto, been
explained as evidence of a lack of animation in con-
temporary social–cultural life. Boredom becomes one
particular manifestation of a set of materialized social
structures formed into the thesis of the disenchantment
of the world. Eschewing the determination that follows
this rendition of ‘the material’, the following section,
through the description of a number of events in one
household, describes in practical terms how bored
bodies are composed. Here, in time–space stilling and
slowing, we encounter a corporeal trace of one of the
etymological routes of boredom as reiterative action. 2
Drawing on a form of ‘relational materialism’, I argue
that boredom emerges from a breakdown, or incapacity,
in the framing action of habit. The limit to equating
matter with a realm of co-present artefacts is, however,
how boredom as a form of ill-being effects time–space.
In the following section I discuss the meaninglessness
and indifference that are often assumed to stem from
boredom. Here I argue that boredom discloses how life
can be at risk of lessening. I go on to argue in the fol-
lowing section that this places in question the assump-
tion of plentitude, or liveliness, in the aforementioned
emerging renditions of a ‘lyric’ or ‘enchanted’ materi-
alism in non-representational theory. The final section
discloses the presence of different movements-from
boredom, such as joy, hope and despair, in order to
begin to develop an empirically informed conception of
matter as ‘not-yet become’ (Bloch, 1986). Through the
movement of example, and in relation to the other ‘new
materialisms’, the paper discloses the beginnings of what
1
The empirical stories, and the broader sensing of boredom, are
developed from in-depth case study research into music and daily
domestic life with seventeen lower-middle class households. The
research involved a series of qualitative research methods including
group and individual interviews, research diaries, periods of observant
participation in each of the homes (Thrift, 2000a) and more experi-
mental ‘listening-with’ methods. The three empirical ‘events’ are all
from the same family. All names are anonymised at their request.
Given the myriad foci of the research on which this paper is based,
broadly on affect and music consumption, this is far from a
comprehensive or exhaustive treatment of the topic ‘boredom’. It
aims, instead, to fabricate a tentative narrative of boredom as a means
to think through how concepts of matter and materiality currently take
place. It does this by extending out from the aforementioned empirical
research into a wider, deliberately speculative, discussion of bore-
dom(s) diverse social-spatial energies. The paper is therefore meant to
be a starting point for a geography of boredom, that would
supplement recent work on emotions such as anxiety, fear and
confidence.
2
The word does not appear to have a clear etymology. It is linked to
both the French bourre, meaning padding and the reiterative action of
a drill, to bore. Spacks (1995) argues that the verb ‘to bore’ arose in
English after 1750. The first citation as noun, boredom, is not until
1864.
 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
I have termed an affective materialism. This is a mate-
rialism that thinks through how a quasi-idealist/quasi-
corporeal dimension of affect is internal, rather than in
supplement or opposition, to materiality. Somewhat
counter-intuitively, it is based on attuning to the diverse
energies of boredom through the affective supplement of
hope. Hope expresses a relation-with the world that, in
contrast to boredom, embeds us directly in the ongoing
processual modalities of matter. The spark, or glimmer,
of hope works beyond what is actual as ‘‘a continuous
movement toward the superlative, the sublime’’ (Lu-
dema et al., 1997, p. 1037). But this is a movement that
must always incorporate the risk of disappointment for,
as Bloch (1986) is continually at pains to point out, hope
contains a hazard since it only ever discloses what ‘‘may
become possible in the future’’ (Hudson, 1983, p. 105
emphasis added).
2. Boredom and disenchanted matter
Explanations for the contemporary over-abundant
presence of boredom under modernity/post-modernity
typically begin from an intuitive association with a no-
tion of either alienation or anomie (see Barbalet, 1999;
Healey, 1984; Klapp, 1986). 3 Four main neo-weberian
explanations are commonly given that link the thesis of
disenchantment to the rise of boredom as a uniquely
modern phenomena combining, in Sean Healey’s (1984,
p. 89) words, ‘‘intense, desperate, agonized, undirected
irritation alternating with a sullen, morose, lowering
lethargy and an utterly exasperated violence’’. First, the
increase in boredom is assumed to stem from the process
of secularization: ‘‘the growing metaphysical void at the
heart of Western civilization’’ (Healey, 1984, p. 87).
Second, and related, the growth in boredom is argued to
stem from modern forms of individuation that have led
to the rise of a possessive, calculable, individualism (see
Spacks, 1995). Third, boredom is determined by the
changing conditions of leisure, and a concurrent right to
happiness, in late-modern societies (see Klapp, 1986).
Finally, boredom is argued to have emerged in response
to the rise of standardized, standardizing, organizations
of time–space (see Highmore, 2002). In each case a set of
familiar conceptual–empirical stories, respectively secu-
larization, individualism, leisure and bureaucratization,
are offered as explanations for the existence of boredom.
Boredom, once explained, has therefore become a
symptom of the ‘imprint of meaninglessness’ that char-
acterizes the disenchantment of the material world. It
insists in a rationalized, intellectualized, world in which
3
It is worth noting that the complex terms ‘alienation’ and ‘anomie’
both have contested histories. Boredom is generally assumed to be one
element of what are both wider structural–experiential categories (see
Barbalet, 1999).
741
the nature of matter is dulled. Fredric Jameson (1988),
commenting upon Weber, argues that boredom is the
psychological substrate of one particular historical mo-
ment in the world’s demagification. Emerging after rage,
but before anxiety, in boredom one ‘‘assumes, naturally
enough, that all life is thus empty’’ (Jameson, 1988, p.
187). In this sense boredom is assumed to be a ration-
alist, materialist, malady bound up with the elaboration
of the staple ‘villains’ of Modernity. The most striking
example of this process is in how boredom exists as an
index of a profound ‘subjective malaise’ in the writings
on modernity and city life by Simmel, Adorno and
Kracauer. Boredom is figured as a prophetic condition
that reveals a set of ‘facts’ about the psychic and emo-
tional toil the deficit of meaning extracts on individuals
(see Goodstein, 2004).
The thesis of disenchantment, despite holding an
intuitive hold over contemporary social and cultural
theory, has, however, recently been challenged on the
grounds that the story of Modernity it tells is predicated
on ‘‘a vast saga of historical rupture, fatal destiny,
irreversible good or bad fortune’’ (Latour, 1993, p. 48).
Put simply, contrary to the guiding assumption that
haunts each of the above explanations for boredom,
‘‘the magic has not gone away’’ (Thrift, 2000c, p. 236).
Rather than repeat the terms of the critique of this thesis
(see Bennett, 2001; Thrift, 2000c), here I want to focus
on how this story of the ‘context’ of boredom is tellable
only through a precise articulation of a type of materi-
alism. First, ‘the material’ in its positive definition be-
comes equivalent to a set of named social structures/
theoretical constructs that stand in an uneasy co-rela-
tion of determination to a defined ‘cultural’ realm. To
perform a ‘materialist analysis’ is therefore to postulate,
albeit in ways that vary, a ‘‘social structure that is sit-
uated beyond culture and that functions as the ultimate
foundation of human action’’ (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 197).
Each of the social–cultural processes named above
thereafter become the ‘real’, yet strangely transcendent,
determinate form of ‘the material’. This account of ‘the
material’ remembers a much longer tradition of struc-
turalist and historical materialist work, that articulate
‘the material’ as a founding pre-discursive space stand-
ing before, and determining, ‘in the last instance’, a
realm of culture. It is important to stress the effects this
has on the profane experiential dramatics of boredom.
Boredom, by necessity, becomes a secondary epiphe-
nomena that stands on the side of the explained as a
feeling, a matter of no consequence, to be explained as a
‘social construction’ of a set of named conditions.
Ironically, therefore, in offering a materialist analysis for
a phenomena such as boredom no space is given for
boredom to effect since ‘‘the materiality of matter, its
palpability and its physical insistence, is rendered
unspeakable and unthinkable’’ (Kirby, 1997, p. 108).
This is the second, hidden, understanding of materiality:
742 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
as a blank that has had ‘‘all life stolen from under it’’
(Bennett, 2001, p. 80). The matter of the world, the
bored body that sighs or yawns, must stand as an origin
point waiting to be ‘socially constructed’ (see Barad,
1998; Cheah, 1996; Fraser, 2002).
3. Becoming bored
The result is a world of dead matter reduced to ‘‘the
status of victims of grand theft who have been stripped
of their capacities and powers’’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 80).
Therefore attending to how boredom matters must in-
volve eschewing the alchemy of explanation, that makes
real but not fleshy a set of transcendent social structures.
Embedded within each of the above explanations for the
‘construction’ of boredom, under certain Modern social
and physiological conditions, is an assumption of the
experiential uniqueness of ‘modern’ boredom in com-
parison to other ways of being in the past considered
akin to boredom, for example sloth, melancholy, acedia,
or ennui. Boredom is experienced by a human subject
alone and occurs when something outside oneself holds
a series of attributes or properties that are in themselves
considered ‘boring’. For Spacks (1995, p. 8) modern
boredom therefore confirms a late-modern ‘‘participa-
tion in a culture of narcissism’’. She argues that the
recognition of a right not to be bored, and an obligation
not to bore, only came about in the nineteenth century
at the same time as a concern with the quality of inner
experience and a notion of individual rights. Due to its
deadening rendition of materiality the disenchantment
tale cannot tell us anything about the mechanism by
which boredom takes place i.e. how bodies, and time–
space, become bored. I want to, therefore, now draw
upon the ‘relational materialism’ associated with certain
articulations of actor-network theory in order to de-
scribe, at least initially, how bored time–space is com-
posed in and through ensembles of practices that
stabilize, momentarily, a ‘‘world of heterogeneous hy-
brids’’ (Bingham and Thrift, 2000, p. 287). 4 Perhaps
here, in questions of composition, we encounter the first
glimmer of hope by turning from the determinism that
infuses ‘structuralist’ accounts to the materially hetero-
geneous process of how boredom settles in a ‘‘full and
complicated (folded) world’’ (Bingham and Thrift, 2000,
p. 292).
4
This section draws on several of the main percepts of the body of
work that has been known as ‘actor-network theory’. Throughout this
section there is a hesitation over the danger of hypostatizing actor-
network theory as a ‘thing’ with a stable form. Rather than stable
object to be evaluated, it therefore provides the beginning of a different
tale of how boredom ‘takes place’.
We begin what could be a different tale of bore-
dom with a story of music and everyday domestic
life. Andy is in the kitchen of the house he shares
with his family. He cuts carrots in preparation
for an evening meal after returning home from
work. He writes in a diary entry:
Not a lot happened today. Only time listened was
when I was making dinner. Was quite. . . I guess
bored, a bit restless, as it wasn’t really exciting
cooking, just chopping. Decided to put on a CD.
I guess it was about half past five, everyone else
was busy doing homework. Put on, listened to that
a bit but it was mostly background to take my
mind off things a bit, didn’t take much notice of it.
(Diary Extract: Andy 11.12.01)
Barthes (1990, p. 25) stresses that boredom, rather
than being a spontaneous response to something exter-
nal, ‘‘supposes a whole indirect production’’. The
background bodily feeling that Andy names as boredom
is first and foremost a more or less precarious effect
formed in concert with the elaboration of a much wider
relational field. Being ‘‘I guess bored, a bit restless’’ exists
only from within an everyday life that includes, most
immediately, the habitual action of chopping carrots as
food preparation: ‘‘not really exciting cooking’’. It ex-
tends to the repetition of what he later terms a ‘‘quick
dinner’’ within his, and the families’, day to day domestic
life. It also touches upon the formation of a set of bodily
habits solidified over the course of being at home in the
same house for the past twenty eight years: a way of
orientating around the intimate space of the kitchen.
The settling of boredom over this domestic scene, in this
case, heralds the common link between re-occurrence, as
one form of repetition, and the boring of bodies. From
the research on music this was commonly expressed in
both the use of music within situations where actions
were repeated and the capacity that new music had to
quickly become ‘boring’ after being incorporated into
the routine of daily lives. Andy remarks later during our
conversation ‘‘I kind of do it every day, that’s why I need
the music on’’. 5 More specifically, the dulling case of
chopping carrots ‘‘every day’’, speaks to how it is
through the enframing actions of habit that forms of re-
occurrence are occasionally translated into ephemeral
feelings of boredom. The precise nature of this connec-
tion depends, however, on the approach taken to the
question of how habit structures action. One school of
thought has ‘suspected’ what Beckett (1931) named as
5
It is perhaps because it captures the paradox of re-occurrence,
everything changing and yet everything remaining the same, that the
deadening routine of the assembly line is a frequent analogy of the
experience of boredom (see Langbauer, 1993).
 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754 743

the ‘‘dull inviolability’’ of habit to be the cause for quently, although actor-network theory is able to speak
boredom (see Csikszentmihalyi, 1977). Alternatively, a of how boredom is produced ’in’ context, it is unable to
more ambivalent attitude that spreads back to Witt- witness how matters such as boredom enable the
genstein and Heidegger, views habits as enabling; ‘‘sets ongoing creation of new, barely sensed, orderings (see
of techniques for on-going coping of and within given Thrift, 2000a). It is therefore to the ongoing effects of
forms of life’’ (Harrison, 2000, p. 512). Drawing on this boredom, in addition to its composition, that this paper
latter literature, it is important to stress that the link is now diverts into.
far from invariant since everyday domestic practices, to
be able to be performed successfully, necessarily incor-
porate a habitual dimension without boredom settling
4. The lessening in boredom
(Barbalet, 1999). 6 Moreover, in the above example of
Andy preparing dinner, boredom comes about not when
Boredom is an example of a malady based on the
practices are habitual but, by contrast, when the ‘for-
elongation of the now-time of the present that ‘‘makes
getting’ intrinsic to habit has been momentarily inca-
everything more hidden, makes days not only grey but
pacitated. It is the unraveling of habit, a sudden
uniform’’ (Benjamin, 1999, D 1a, 9). The immediate
realization of the again of ‘‘just chopping’’, that is passed
bodily effect of boredom, that emerges in concert with
through to enable boredom to settle. The ‘hidden’ effects
the incapacity in habit, is one in which time–space does
of habit are momentarily disrupted so that repetition is
not move: it fails to pass (see Waugh, 1976). Time–space
thereafter felt as a ‘bare’ reiterative dulling presence in-
creates, and is created through, mechanisms of stilling
itself.
and slowing. Mechanisms of stilling and slowing occur
The exact nature of the incapacity, it should be noted,
primarily through an impeded sense of proprioception:
depends upon how the disruption of habit is produced
hearing music that bores is felt, before it is named, in a
with, and through, its entanglement in a more extensive
change in the sense of movement. 7 Boredom therefore
set of relations (see Raposa, 1999). The account of the
contradicts the pervasive ‘‘narrative of speed up’’ that
settling, or condensation, of boredom through a ‘rela-
insists ‘‘we live in a speeded-up world––a ‘faster’, ‘more
tional materialism’ discloses boredom, initially, as al-
mobile’ world’’ (Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 18). In
ways-already an effect of how a whole manner of
contrast to the pervasive re-valuation of background
heterogeneous ‘bits and pieces’ are held, and kept, to-
forms of slow-time that are currently ongoing life lessens
gether. The settling of boredom is therefore one effect of
in the stilling–slowing diminishments of boredom (see
a breakdown in the relatively durable network that en-
Thrift, 2000b). Two main effects are assumed to feed
ables home-space. The material of the world, a carrot or
forward from and spin back into the stilling–slowing
knife, is both ‘included’ and an ‘effect’ in this account of
grip of bored time–space. First, meaninglessness. Sec-
boredom. Matter becomes equivalent to a realm of co-
ond, indifference.
mingled artefacts (Latour, 1993). However, the limits of
such an account of matter, as a relational effect, is pre-
To sense the lessening of boredom we divert into a
cisely the affectivity of boredom. For, as is now well
second example of boredom taking place. Beth is
commented upon, in its account of matter as equivalent
16 and was just taking her GCSE’s at the time of
to a realm of ‘artefacts’ that are relationally constituted
talking. Here she describes in an interview listening
co-components of practice, work from within the La-
to music whilst doing work in her bedroom on the
tourian tradition of a ‘materialist semiotics’ has only
same evening as Andy was cutting carrots at about
rarely attuned to ‘‘the more corporeal configuration of
the same time. This was one of the main times
energies and elements particularized in the experiential
fabric of diverse living beings’’ (Whatmore, 2002, p. 36).
The technical inflection of actor-network theory’s infra-
language, and its focus on those competencies that have
formed the limits of Modern rationality (will, discretion,
7
force etc.), has meant that a focus on ‘‘the effectivity of For the benefit of this paper the term ‘proprioception’ is used to
(quasi)objects’’ has too often forgotten the ‘‘affectivity refer to the body’s sense of movement. Massumi (2002b, p. 58/59)
describes how it functions in the following terms: it registers ‘‘as
of (body) subjects’’ (Whatmore, 2002, p. 161). Conse- conditions of movement what the skin internalizes as qualities: the
hardness of the floor underfoot as one looks into a mirror becomes a
resistance enabling station and movement; the softness of a cat’s fur
becomes a lubricant for the motion of the hand. Proprioception
translates the exertions and ease of the body’s encounters with objects
6
Several ‘popular’ examples of the link between habit and boredom into a muscular memory of relationality. This is the cumulative
exist. For example, relationship guidance services report that one cause memory of skill, habit, posture’’. For more on the connection between
of long-term relationship breakdown is reported feelings of boredom styles of listening/hearing and the sense of movement see Anderson
(see Spacks, 1995). (2004b).
744 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
when she listened to music, and she had a clear
understanding of what sort of music was appropri-
ate for homework.
Beth: Yeah. . .I’d just got home from school. . .I
was like hurggh can’t be bothered to do any work,
but I had to cos I had loads on, so I had to. . .just it
was answering some tests, just ten questions or
something, so I started doing it but I just got SO
bored, they weren’t very hard and it was all things
I’d done before. I was just bored, but I just
couldn’t really concentrate on them, so I put on
some music while I was doing my work.
B: What was it, the music I mean?
Beth: It was S Club 7, quite happy. . .you can just
go along to it. . .I was just going along with it.
More happier than I was, it did just make me feel
more happy whilst I was doing the homework,
changed the way I felt about it. I sung along to
it sometimes and then got on with my work.
B: Were you still bored. . . whilst it was on?
Beth: No I sort of, sort of forgot that I was having
to do homework. . . I was doing. . .you can’t be
bored to that song anyway.
(Interview: Beth 12.12.01)
Boredom, as an interruption of the energetic of
interest, acts as a barrier against the formation of certain
relations with aspects of immediate experience as it
‘‘absorbs ever more material into the maw of meaning-
lessness’’ (Spacks, 1995, p. 56). Schoolwork becomes, in
Beth’s words, ‘‘just ten questions or something’’. 8
Meaninglessness feeds-back to lessen the affective qual-
ity of a stilled–slowed everyday life. Time–space takes
place with an absence of animation: the waning of
liveliness that is taken to be an index of disenchantment.
To hear this quality sense the legion of terms that de-
scribe the quasi-corporeal configuring effects of bodies
bored: lifeless, lethargic, monotonous, mundane, stale,
tedious, tiresome. The opposite of boredom are those
8
However, experience can be meaningless without it necessarily also
being bound up with the elaboration of boredom. Philip Fisher writes,
for example, of how the class of experience we name as wonder
involves a comparable component of ‘meaninglessness’: ‘‘the moment
of pure presence within wonder lies in the object’s difference and
uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of
anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in
which the mind does not move on by association to something else’’
(Fisher, 1998, p. 131).
terms that indicate the immanence of a certain vitality:
interesting, exciting, amusing, captivating, enthralling,
entrancing, fascinating (Winter, 2002). Both effects
provide a witness to the intracorporeal ethics of
becoming bored. Care, and generosity, in particular
lessen as the waning of affect leads directly into an
indifference that ‘‘envelops beings as a whole’’ (He-
idegger, 1995, p. 138). Heidegger (1995, p. 67) aptly
describes boredom as ‘‘that which makes all things and
other human beings and myself fuse into a colourless
indifference’’.
Boredom’s greyness indicates a certain, usually
indeterminate, quality that is time–space (Caygill, 1998).
The term ‘affect’, as developed through Deleuze’s (1988)
reading of Spinoza, best enables us to sense the imma-
nent, banal, quality of time–space that boredom lessens.
Affect is equivalent to a ‘background’, lived, (in)corpo-
real, faith: ‘‘the feeling of life itself, the sense of being’’
(Damasio, 1994, p. 150). Boredom, since it is a malady
of and in intensity, therefore:
belongs to neither the subject nor the object of any
encounter but to the movements and variations of
intensity (as potential to affect and be affected)
that constitutes a ceaselessly oscillating fore-
ground/background, or, better, an immanent
‘plane’ (i.e. this is an in-between with a consistency
all of its own).
(Seigworth, 2000, p. 232)
Since boredom discloses a malady in the circulation
of intensity it is not self-identical with an experiencing
subject. Before the utterance ‘I’m bored’ can occur,
boredom already exists as an indistinct hue that envel-
ops the ‘bits and pieces’ that compose time–space and
thereafter, through the sense of proprioception, lessens
the immanent vitality of our ‘‘background bodily feel-
ing’’ (Damasio, 1994, p. 150). Here it is worth coupling
the above discussion of the lessening of an immanent
vitality, the sense of almost-not-quite life that is carried
out in grey, with talk of the failure of this ‘more’ to take
place. Boring music, for example, was described using
various terms: ‘‘it lacks soul’’, ‘‘it’s got no passion’’,
‘‘there’s just something not there’’. 9 Each approximates
talk of an extra, a surplus, that insists in different cate-
gories of music, for example music felt to be a favourite,
music that is laced with memory or even music that is
intensely disliked (Anderson, 2004a). Even though the
object may be considered to be functionally perfect a
certain indeterminate quality is thereafter considered to
be missing that enables boredom to be felt as a malady
9
Comments taken from a discussion the family described in this
paper had about ‘boring music’ during a joint interview.
 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
that ‘‘hangs above and gradually settles over the present
moment’’ (Benjamin, 1999, D 12, 8). 10
5. The plentitude of matter?
Describing the effects of bodies bored, and the sense
of bored time–space, enables us to begin to attune to the
circulations and distributions of affect. It therefore also
potentially opens up the Spinozian problematic of how
an incorporeal dimension is comported into matter. This
moves us into a tradition of ‘‘immanent naturalism’’
(Connolly, 1999) that assumes an animation, a becom-
ing otherwise, in ‘‘matter per se rather than the matter of
humanity alone’’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 166). Stretching
back to Epicurean discussions of primordia, this work
attempts to side step the problem of equating matter
with either a transcendent structure or a realm of arte-
facts. Neither figure of matter can conceive of the dyna-
mism of passionate bodied time–space outside of ‘‘the
negativity associated with the vicissitudes of (human)
signification and iteration’’ (Cheah, 1996, p. 119). The
most sustained drawing together of these literatures
has been Jane Bennett’s (2001, p. 1) joyful elaboration of
an ‘enchanted materialism’ that aims to disclose ‘‘a
contemporary world sprinkled with natural and cultural
sites that have the power to ‘enchant’’’. Her enchant-
ment tale is premised on a series of encounters staged
between the bio-philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari
and pre-modern Epicurean philosophies of a baroque
material substance. The combination enables Bennett
(2001, p. 104) to disclose a constant iterative generation
as ‘internal’ to a matter that therefore ‘‘surprises, dis-
turbs, charms and swerves’’. The result is a materialism
that remembers the liveliness of matter rather than re-
duce the capacity for liveliness back down into a set of
human faculties (the imagination, will etc.). Thus ‘‘all
material things, natural and artifactual, already engage
in a fascinating array of lively and motile morphings’’
(Bennett, 2001, p. 87). The image of matter assumed is
one of an almost unlimited plentitude that stems from
the unsettled, unsettling, ‘richness’ of matter in this
world (see Thrift, 2004a). Bennett’s ‘‘enchanted materi-
10
Benjamin (1999, D2a, 1) likens boredom to a ‘‘warm grey fabric’’.
His discussion of boredom occurs mostly in the convolute entitled
‘‘Boredom, Eternal Return’’ from the Arcades Project. In this
assemblage boredom is discussed in meteorological terms as an effect
of ‘‘this world of mist, this cloud world’’ (D1, 1). It subsequently
becomes equivalent to dust, rain showers, and fog and is interlinked
with the relation between the bourgeois and ‘‘cosmic forces’’. In a wry
comment he states ‘‘nothing bores the ordinary man more than the
cosmos. Hence, for him, the deepest connection between weather and
boredom’’ (D1, 3). Benjamin here equates boredom with different
modes of uncertainty (see Fioretos, 1999). Scattered remarks on
boredom can also be found in his essays on Baudelaire and Leskov (see
Benjamin, 1969).
745
alism’’ is therefore based on an onto-story in which,
following Deleuze, ‘‘the process of becoming goes on
and on and on. It is not finite’’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 165):
It is this broad account of matter, and the ‘non-rep-
resentational’ sources it draws upon, that has been ex-
tended implicitly and explicitly into recent work that has
sketched the beginnings of a geography of embodied
practice based around ideas, and ideals, of performance
(see for example Dewsbury et al., 2002; McCormack,
2002; Thrift, 1996, 2000a, 2004a,b; Wylie, 2002). 11 The
starting point has been a renewed appreciation that the
world consists of an infinite, motile, capacity for all
manner of becomings. In comparison to the non-dy-
namic focus of what Thrift and Dewsbury (2000) name
as ‘dead geographies’, this new materialism has been
crouched in a quasi-vitalist re-affirmation of the figure
of ‘life’ as ‘‘a mutant, undisciplined creativity that is
worked out through the properties of existence’’ (Amin
and Thrift, 2002, p. 95). The emerging disclosure of a
world that is rich is therefore based on the Epicurean
faith that the matter of the world is necessarily and
inevitably generative via accidents, swerves and leaps.
Dewsbury et al. (2002, p. 437) themetize this under-
standing in their assumption that the world is excessive:
‘‘the world does not resolve or come to rest’’. 12 Recent
work has focused the assumption of generation into two
main interconnected directions. First, that the minutiae
of embodied practices, as the generic social thing com-
posed out of affects and precepts, are productive of sense
(see Harrison, 2000; Wylie, 2002). The attention to the
emergence of bodies bored in section two, and the
content of the following section, exemplify the com-
monalties this paper has with this aspect of this litera-
ture. Second, and following on, attention is thereafter
focused in particular on the conditions for the produc-
tion of the new (see Dewsbury, 2000; Harrison, 2000).
The new is always coming-to-be since, as Dewsbury
et al. (2002, p. 428) stress, there is ‘‘always something
exceptional, somebody else; an accursed share, a dan-
gerous supplement, a restless spirit, another example to
be given’’. The force of the worlds becoming otherwise
has therefore recently been formalized by Thrift (2000a)
as ‘the push’ and by Massumi (2002a), in a different but
related context, as ‘the flash’. From this literature a
language of emergence is emergent that remembers to
11
There is a danger here of assuming a singular, fixed, entity named
‘non-representational theory’ (see (Thrift, 1996, 2000a, 2004a,b). For
this reason I have mixed it together with Connolly’s (1999) discussion
of an ‘immanent naturalism’ and Bennett’s (2001) discussion of an
‘enchanted materialism’. All three seem to share the same roots and
routes in developing animated concepts of matter and materiality.
Routes that I hope this paper is also immersed in.
12
See the use of the borrowed operators ‘overdetermination’ in
Rose (2002), ‘event’ in Dewsbury (2000), ‘flesh’ in Wylie (2002) that all
gesture in different ways towards this principle of generation. The
operator the ‘not-yet’ also, in part, shares this same function.
746 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
keep hold of the indeterminate openness of the world;
‘‘its potential and its performative being (becoming)’’
(Harrison, 2000, p. 514). Rather than reduce the matter
of the world to a network effect the aim is to take seri-
ously the injunction to let ‘‘matter be matter. . . in irre-
ducible specificity and infinite connection’’ (Massumi,
2002b, p. 39).
How, though, to understand the lessening that
accompanies boredom if the world is cast as an ‘‘emer-
gent eventuality’’? (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 439).
Boredom takes place, settles, precisely when an imper-
ceptible extra, the ‘more’, does not occur under a con-
dition of reiterative ‘bare’ repetition. Instead, as
discussed above, in boredom a stalling is felt that weighs
down time–space: ‘‘the bored person has plenty of
nothing’’ (Raposa, 1999, p. 42 emphasis added). If it is
assumed that an ‘‘abundance is painted into the material
world’’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 87), it is difficult to undertake
an account of the diminishment, or lessening, of life.
Boredom has involved less meaning, less interest, less
difference. The liveliness of life can never fundamentally
be at risk, as it is in a certain way in boredom and other
forms of ill-being such as fear, anxiety or despair (see
Bachelard, 2000). 13 In the implicit and explicit focus on
matter as ever-more within this literature, a sort of over-
personal power that keeps on exceeding beyond in new
becomings, life can never by negated or destroyed. We
cannot adequately witness the lesson of boredom: that
the world might lessen through ‘‘loss, depletion, mor-
tality, omission’’ (Connor, 1999, p. 12). The stilling and
slowing of boredom is therefore intensely problematic to
a materialism based on an assumption that, although
the world is forged through temporary alliances, a
generative animation is nevertheless ‘internal’ to the
matter of a ‘rich’ neo-baroque world.
To subsequently attend to the undoubted lessening of
boredom we have to invoke some form of mechanism,
or technique, to account-for how we do not feel
enchantment, or gratitude, in our encounters with the
world i.e. how, and why, boredom insists and exists as a
failure to sense the plentitude of a predicated material
substance. The onset of boredom can be considered to
be authentic socially since it supplies an affective rec-
ognition of the futility of being in this world. 14 Or the
13
My point here is not to criticize enjoyment, or celebration, as a
mode of engaging the world. With Bennett (2001, p. 131), I am
convinced each can ‘‘aid in the project of cultivating a stance of
presumptive generosity’’. Rather it is to think through one problem
that stems from assuming that the world necessarily takes place in a
state of plentitude. This is not, however, the same as saying that it
never takes place in plentitude (hence the section ‘to joy’). On the role
of plentitude in non-representational theory see Thrift (2004b).
14
This was the option taken up by those artistic subcultures, such as
the Dandies, that made a virtue of ‘being bored’ as a mark of a disdain
for the present. For a discussion of different places boredom holds in
the artistic practices of the Dandies see Spacks (1995).
individual or group who proclaims boredom may be
considered to have failed to adequately comprehend the
world. This is how boredom has been interpreted in
relation to the threat of ‘acedia’ diminishing devotional
spiritual practice, for example (Raposa, 1999). 15 How-
ever, to view boredom as a forced or willful failure of
interpretation, ultimately recreates a distinction between
matter and a transfiguring symbolic realm. Conse-
quently, in a reversal of the assumption of plentitude,
the drabness of being-in-relation when bored has been
assumed to reveal the presence of an infinite nothing-
ness, mortality, at the heart of the matter of the world:
‘‘boredom waits for death’’ (Johann Hebel in Benjamin,
1999, D: 101). Kierkegaard (1963, p. 232), most notably,
writes that boredom ‘‘rests upon the nothingness that
winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that
which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is
infinite’’. Boredom, along with anxiety, is articulated as
an authentic index of finitude. He wails, in the same
essay, that ‘‘boredom is demonic pantheism’’ since in-
stead of fullness it is ‘‘based on emptiness’’ (1963: 231/
232). Heidegger (1949, p. 364), in a similar vein, writes
of how ‘profound’ boredom drifts ‘‘hither and thither in
the abysses of existence like a mute fog’’. Boredom
thereafter becomes a sign of the ‘‘emptiness into which
each moment fades, into which all finite things pass
away’’ (Raposa, 1999, p. 60).
6. Excess and finitude
Equating boredom with a being-towards nothingness
translates the lessening of boredom into an ontology of
despair that elevates the finitude of human being-as-
consciousness to the status of an ontological postulate.
It is therefore more productive, hopeful even, to begin
from the contrasting neo-Epicurean principle of the
richness of the material world that I have argued ani-
mates non-representational theory (see Thrift, 2004a).
How, though, to include an understanding that life can
potentially be, in Bloch’s (1986) words, ‘in hazard’
without centering a quasi-humanist notion of the fini-
tude of existence? The movement into the materiality of
affect suggests the beginnings of a materialism whereby
one would describe the relational composition of bored
time–space but also, and simultaneously, follow the a-
signifying intensities that swerve and spiral around
boredom. If we attend-to the materiality of the move-
15
In Christian theology, and in contrast to Bennett’s (2001)
‘enchanted materialism’, it is vital to state that matter is enchanted
primarily as a trace of a transcendent being. The result is an
assumption of a teleology to matter. This assumption has, arguably,
been extended to post-enlightenment scientific concepts of material
substance. Consequently, that a form of transcendence, or some sense
of teleology, is needed to speak of matter as animated is still implicitly
assumed.
 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754 747

ments before and after boredom, rather than only the manifold finite beings’’ (Brown and Stenner, 2001, p.
movement to boredom, boredom is disclosed as pro- 89).
foundly enabling of a will-to-connect differently. Evi-
dence for this movement is internal to both of the
6.1. . . .to joy
examples this paper has diverted into. It is also exists
more broadly in the way that boredom is often hypos-
Bodies bored, and bored time–space, are not static
tatized as a cause for a heterogeneous range of social/
or fixed. There has, for example, long been a somewhat
cultural practices. 16 The literature on urban crime, for
obscured, and perhaps unsettling, connection between
example, frequently names boredom as a ‘causal factor’
boredom and a movement to joy that opens up stilled–
for drug use, graffiti, and low level neighbourhood dis-
slowed time–space to ‘‘the so little thought-out, fore-
order. These are assumed to be alleviative, quasi-com-
most segment. . . of animated, utopianly open matter’’
pensatory, points of rupture in the taken-for-granted
(Bloch, 1986, p. 200). One example here is that disin-
order of social-spatial life (see Barbalet, 1999). Kier-
terest, and detachment, although intimate with bodies
kegaard (1963, p. 227), despite his equation between
bored as discussed above, have also long been pro-
boredom and finitude, muses that it is:
moted as somoaesthetic practices that enable a height-
ened aesthetic discernment of the beautiful, sublime or
strange that boredom, so still and static, should
even wondrous (see Brodsky, 1995). This is particularly
have such a power to set things in motion. The ef-
so in certain practices of contemplative music listening.
fect that boredom exercises is altogether magical,
Something akin to boredom has also long acted as both
except that it is not one of attraction but of repul-
a threat and, importantly, a catalyser of spiritual re-
sion.
birth in various forms of Christian and Eastern reli-
gious practices (Raposa, 1999). In the mystic practice
This section glances at three movements whereby the
of the ‘dark night of the soul’, for example, boredom
intensities that occur alongside boredom cross over
has acted as the prelude to a renewed spiritual joy (see
thresholds of indeterminacy to momentarily re-config-
James (1982) on the ‘sick soul’ and ‘conversion’). Bar-
ure time–space i.e. effect the affective quality of ‘‘life in
thes (1990, p. 25) hints at the tendencies that are inti-
all its sticky and slack human/nonhuman, inorganic,
mate to matters such as boredom when he stresses that,
incorporeal, phenomenal/epiphenomenal, and banal/in-
since it always more excessive than itself, ‘‘boredom is
tense everydayness’’ (Seigworth, 2000, p. 256). I focus
not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of
here on joy, hope and despair. Despite the constraints of
pleasure’’.
presenting them in linear form the three movements are
The joy that touches bodies bored is not a state
not cumulative, teleological or comprehensive. The one
possessed but stems from a body becoming active (see
assumption is that the movement that is internal to
Brown and Stenner, 2001). 17 It does not, therefore,
boredom can not-yet be known because it is always
function on conventional axes of either happy/sad or
entangled within the risk of a return-to the lessening of
pleasant/unpleasant (Massumi, 2002c). Joy, as a re-
life. Once considered in processual terms ‘‘the uncer-
newed inhabitation of the body’s potential capacities
tainty of the outcome remains’’ (Bloch, 1986, p. 112).
that counters the lessening of boredom, may be pri-
Rather than consider boredom to be a forced, or willful,
marily felt as an intense disruption, or discontinuity, in
failure to interpret the world in line with a material
time–space. For example, joy moves into rupture in
presence we can instead consider how matters such as
those circumstances where a point of suspension, bore-
boredom are always ‘not-yet become’ (Bloch, 1986).
dom, dissipates suddenly into new connections that
For, as with the composition of bored time–space, the
transgress, or even destroy, the durable repeated social-
movement-from that always accompanies boredom, and
spatial orderings that form boredom. This imperative
is thus internal to it, is itself dependent upon the inde-
was translated into genres of music, specifically punk,
terminacy of how boredom, or more precisely bore-
that worked with the explosiveness that follows the dead
doms, are formed as processual ‘‘orderings of the
time of boredom (see Marcuse, 2001). It has also passed
relational field made up in the encounter between
into forms of action as a rationale for the explosion of

16
Just a customary review of the literature on boredom in
physiology demonstrates how the condition is hypothesized, often in
problematic terms, as the cause for a heterogeneous range of actions:
low levels of educational attainment, educational drop out, army
mistakes, driver errors, heavy machinery, and fatal accidents (see
Winter, 2002).
17
It is worth stressing that joy has been considered to be a virtue in
the tradition that Connolly (1999) refers to as an ‘‘immanent
naturalism’’. Taking their cue from Spinoza’s devaluation of the sad
passions in favour of the wisdom of becoming-active, writers such as
Nietzsche hold onto joy as the source for an alternative ethics not
based around any form of ‘transcendent morality’.
748 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
utopian political change that aim to transfigure the
‘now’ of time/space. The Situationaliste Internationale,
for example, translated the Marxist concern with alien-
ation into a series of creative urban practices based on
one injunction: ‘not to be bored’ (see Vaneigem, 1983).
In each case paying attention to boredom, rather than
dwelling in a disinterested exemption as above, acts as
the pre-cursor to a point of captivating utopian rupture:
the move towards a ‘‘better way of being’’ (Levitas,
1990, p. 8). The issue of a rupture, or explosion, attunes
therefore to how, even in boredom, ‘‘discontinuities or
disjunctions (are) integral to the movement of lived
experience’’ (Game, 1997, p. 121).
6.2. . . .to hope
Bored time–space can be enlivened by the force of a
new connection that quickens the move towards the
new, thus disclosing ‘‘the spark that reaches out be-
yond the surrounding emptiness’’ (Bloch, 1986, p. 160).
Developing a figure of matter based on the disturbance
of joy would therefore aim to ‘‘reinstate exaltation,
enchantment and derangement back into materialism’’
(Thrift, 2004a, p. 123). But is joy too excessive when
juxtaposed with the dulling diminishments of boredom?
The movement to the not-yet that takes place as part
of bored time–space often involves a much more subtle
re-alignment of the ephemeral insignificancies of daily
life via acts of diversion, distraction or discernment.
For example, boredom may be countered by a simple
act of turning on or off a song, switching channels on
the television or finding that attention has suddenly
wandered. Examples of this can be read from both of
the ‘empirical’ examples above. From the talk of
boredom at home it appeared to be relatively rare that
the dullness of boredom passed through the sensory
registers of shock, explosiveness or wonder. This indi-
cates that boredom is now felt as much as potentiality,
or possibility, as actuality and is therefore associ-
ated with a whole series of non-cognitive ‘coping
mechanisms’. It is, moreover, simultaneously a theo-
retical point. For otherwise we would need to postu-
late a mechanism to explain why boredom was
not always accompanied by a movement through the
excess of joy i.e. by invoking some notion of repres-
sion.
To sense this form of movement we touch a third
example from the research on music and everyday
life. Marie, Andy’s partner and Beth’s mother,
complained of a striking absence of time as she
struggled with the demands of her family and full
time career. The one time she actually talked about
boredom was whilst driving. She writes of a trip
back from taking her other daughter, Ruth, to
sports practice.
Marie: It was just. . .one of those boring, boring
journeys that I’ve done what feels like a million
times before, dropping off Ruth to athletics and
then driving back the same way. Sorry sounds like
I’m complaining. . .I guess I was slightly irri-
tated. . .I can’t really describe it.
B: Don’t worry about it
Marie: Yeah. . .I, I decided to put on a brilliant
album by Eric Clapton, and that took my mind
of things, I just. . .it was weird I felt like I almost
had to, the silence was weird. I don’t normally
mind it but I found it uncomfortable, I guess doing
nothing after a really hard day at work and having
to sit there driving again.
(Interview: Marie 12.12.01)
Each of the acts Marie hints at, ranging from an
initial act of attention, through choice and into listening
to a ‘‘brilliant album by Eric Clapton’’, enable a change
in the ‘‘uncomfortable’’ ambience of ‘‘doing nothing’’.
Listening-to-get-through, in this manner, folds into a
whole series of corporeal techniques that accompany the
dulling embrace of boredom. Think of how often a
fidget, sigh or yawn accompanies boredom. Or the
prevalence of daydreaming in bored time–space (see
Petro, 1995). Seemingly inconsequential, each performs
a restlessness of pre-cognitive attention that manifests
the tension of boredom. In each case they indicate how a
diffuse wandering, not only as a point of excess, is
integral to a movement-from boredom.
Highmore (2002) notes how it is possible to under-
stand such ‘invisible’ actions as tactical in form. The
example Highmore (2002) uses is Robert Linhart’s
auto-biographical account of working on a factory
assembly line. Linhart writes of how his body refused
to ‘‘get used to making the same movements in the
same way in the same period of time’’ (Linhart, 1981:
17 cited in Highmore, 2002, p. 160). In a similar
manner to how forms of restlessness accompany the
lessening of boredom:
‘‘. . .life kicks in and resists. The organism resists.
The muscles resist. The nerves resist. Something
in the body and the head, braces itself against rep-
etition and nothingness. Life shows itself in more
rapid movements, an arm lowered at the wrong
time, a slower step, a second’s irregularity, an awk-
ward gesture, getting ahead, slipping back, tactics
at the station’’.
(Linhart, 1981: 17 cited in Highmore, 2002, p.
160)
Through its use as a counterpoint to boredom, music-
as-listened functions on two different planes that exem-
 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
plify, in a heightened fashion perhaps, the mechanism by
which ‘life kicks in’ alongside boredom. First, and most
importantly given my arguments regarding the plane on
which boredom effects, music listened-to functions as a
means of re-animating a felt sense of background
vitality via a re-inhabitation of more potential (see
Anderson, 2004b). Marie listens to an album that is
‘‘brilliant’’ that she is then ‘‘enthralled in’’. Music when
attended to only secondarily provides an alternative set
of parameters for the conduct of conduct (see DeNora,
2000). It therefore induces an actualization in the form
of a qualitatively different set of affections. Bodies relax
as particular music affords a different rhythm, for
example.
The use of music in this way, as an interruption or
cut that works to re-transmit an intensified potential to
affect and be affected, links ‘background listening’
practices to both other media practices and a host of
image-expression events (see Anderson, 2004a; Mass-
umi, 2002b). Other classic examples include the break
as a technique of affective alleviation in the context of
routine, purposeless, factory work (see Klapp, 1986). It
can therefore be seen as an intensification of the
wanders of attention, fidget or daydream that come-
about with boredom and fold into a qualitative change
in bored time–space. Each may be categorized, with a
trace of hyperbole, as ethical pre-cognitive ‘corporeal
techniques’ that register a concern for the body in ac-
tion and consequently act to make the present moment,
the ‘now’ of lived experience, habitual once-again. The
corporeal terrain on which this occurs is again pro-
prioception: attention moves, fingers tap on a table,
eyes roll, our breathing quickens as we sigh or stretches
as we yawn. The implication is that the aforementioned
use of music, as a means of coping with the potential
existence of boredom, resonates with and even ampli-
fies the intensities that on-go beneath boredom, whilst
at the same time countering the diminishment of the
body’s capacities that characterize actual bodies bored.
Perhaps one irony of this use of music to smooth is
therefore that boredom, as it is forestalled or remedied,
is moved-from before it drifts into disruptive outbursts
of joy or rupture. People can once more dwell without
the visceral sensing of tension that I argued charac-
terizes the restlessness of boredom. Boredom comes to
exist as an index of mild dissatisfaction that provides,
first and foremost, the impetus to enter into different
relations i.e. it takes place as a form of affectively
based imperative to something-else where that move-
ment is possible. There is therefore a weak hope for a
not-yet elsewhere or elsewhen internal to boredom.
Each of these acts function to push the body into
different relations that smooth, instead of confront, the
felt reality of antagonistic, diminishing, relations of
sadness. In stark contrast to the ruptures of joy, as felt
749
through spiritual rebirth or political change for exam-
ple, boredom is not left or even transgressed. Hopeful
acts, in contrast, enable one to get-through routines or
practices that have to be repeated. The key here, in a
return to the third section, is that these techniques
accompany situations of repetition that can be re-
turned-to but without the incapacity in habit. To re-
turn to Marie, she speaks of the primary effect of her
use of music: ‘‘. . . so I can do it again next week without
tearing my hair out’’.
6.3. . . .to despair
Disclosing the movement to hope suggests a figure
of matter as hope-full: ‘‘more, or other, than what was
expected, even if what had been expected was. . . dis-
satisfaction itself’’ (Jameson, 1971, p. 151). The swerves
of hope and the ruptures of joy are paradoxically
present as tendencies within bodies bored. Forms of
despair are, however, also intimate with boredom.
Prolonged boredom is frequently narrated in main-
stream medical discourse as either a pre-cursor to or
secondary symptom-of depression (see Phillips, 1993).
Often a distinction is drawn between ‘simple boredom’
and ‘deep boredom’. Heidegger (1995, p. 92) writes of
how in this latter intensified form of boredom ‘‘we
ourselves’’ are bored. Boredom itself ‘‘radiates out’’ in
a manner that produces a disconnection from life. In
comparison to being bored with something or some-
body specific, ‘deep’ boredom refers, ironically, to an
intensified boredom that, as it lingers as a vague mood,
deforms bodies into the doom of depression. Terms
interlinked with boredom have long held a connection
to depression. Raposa (1999) argues that this occurs in
medieval thinking about tristtia, French thought on
ennui and renaissance debates around melancholy.
Each malady holds a family resemblance to boredom.
All speak to the different ways in which despair cuts
the move toward the ‘not-yet’. Frequently, boredom is
no longer a fleeting diminishment but instead trans-
forms into a deepened, elongated, quashing of effective
action. The passing from boredom to despair is one
that involves an intensification of the stall of boredom
into the cut of absolute, asocial, distance (Barbalet,
1999).
6.4. . . .boredom as suspension
Forms of non-being do, therefore, come to underpin
space-time so that occasionally ‘life’ is dead, dulled or
depleted (cf. Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). The move-
ment to despair, for example, is integral to the risk of
becoming bored. But, as I argued in the section ‘to
750 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
joy’, boredom is also intimate with traces of that which
is paradoxically ‘not-yet’. A materialism cannot only
be based on despair because even ‘‘in the negative there
are also constructs of the unconstructable,. . .there are
unbearable moments of wonder’’ (Ernst Bloch in
Bronner, 1997, p. 14/15). The three sections, and the
disjunctures between them, have exemplified how
bodies bored matter in-between the pure white of
matter as plentitude and the absent black of matter as
blank. How boredom connects to what is ‘not-yet’, the
smudging of hope and despair for example, cannot be
rendered so easily in such stark terms. Figuring matter
as not-yet begins, therefore, from attuning to how
tendencies and latencies are internal to the matter of
both bodies bored and bored time/space as ‘‘futureness:
pure futurity’’ (Massumi, 2002b, p. 15). Boredom is
‘‘only explicable in terms of the fact that something is
‘not-yet’. It is not-yet what it needs to be and not-yet
what it can be’’ (Hudson, 1983, p. 89). To think of
lessening and plentitude as occurring in process to-
gether, rather than separately, perhaps we need to
think with the uncertainty of grey as the basis to a
figure of matter. Grey itself embodies the same para-
dox as boredom. It mixes nothing (white) and the sum
of everything (black) (Fioretos, 1999). Focusing upon
joy, hope and despair as generic movements (and there
are as many others as forms of connection) demon-
strates the multitude of ways in which nothing, the
abyss of boredom that existentialists write of, acts as
presence and absence within the materiality of the
world. Instead of seeing nothing as a point of lack, or
an indication of the finitude of being, Game and
Metcalfe (2002) endow nothing with the generative
force of the ‘in-between’ that precedes and exceeds
divisions of subject and object. Speaking to the afore-
mentioned manner in which ‘fugitive energies’ (Con-
nolly, 2002) are ongoing even as boredom stills and
slows they stress that:
Nothing, then, is a hinge in our everyday lives. It
flips us, as an optical illusion does, between differ-
ent worlds and states of being, and in doing so it
teaches us how to hold paradox: to know nothing
as mystery, without seeking solution; to hold its
infinite meanings, without trying to squeeze them
into a oneness. If I can hold paradox, I learn that
everything rests on nothing.
(Game and Metcalfe, 2002, p. 50)
Nothing is here described as both empty and full:
‘‘emptiful’’ (Game and Metcalfe, 2002, p. 47). Uncer-
tainty is therefore of an experimental world ‘‘kept open
by the presence of futuristic properties within it’’
(Hudson, 1983, p. 92). Take, for example, how bore-
dom matters. Boredom emerges once a materially
heterogeneous collection of bits and pieces are held
together under a type of relation that embodies the
paradox that ‘‘something expected does not occur’’
(Fenichel, 1953). 18 It takes place ‘‘when our power of
acting is diminished or blocked’’ through incapacities
in habit (Deleuze, 1988). 19 Boredom can be defined as
a corporeal witness, felt through both the restlessness
of a visceral sensibility and a stilling of our proprio-
ceptive sense of movement, to a momentary suspension
of, and in, the transitive autonomies of a banal,
immanent, plane of intensity. Only secondarily is it
cleaved into an individual ‘emotion’ (I’m bored) and/or
a property of something-else (It’s boring). Instead
boredom is a malady of the manner in which, in
intensity, we sense relations bodily ‘‘in themselves’’.
Beginning from ‘the relation’ offers a different form of
definition to those that argue boredom is ‘really’ a
different emotional state i.e. ‘‘psychic anorexia’’ (Hea-
ley, 1984, p. 60), ‘‘the emotional feeling of anxiety that
an activity or situation holds no significance for them’’
(Barbalet, 1999, p. 632/633), ‘‘repressed anger’’ (Phil-
lips, 1993). The term suspension carries two resonances.
First, suspension heralds the idea of a break with a pre/
post state that is ‘‘an exemption from ordinary condi-
tions’’ (Crary, 1999, p. 10). Second, at the same time,
the idea of suspension resonates with a tension that
stems from the aforementioned break i.e. suspension as
‘‘a cancellation or an interruption’’ (Crary, 1999, p.
10). This tension is felt in the restless, visceral, frus-
tration that accompanies the event-hood of bore-
dom and leads into a series of disjunctive movements
(into joy, hope or despair). Boredom, as suspension,
perhaps exemplifies how life must be thought of as
at risk, or in hazard, even as one attunes to ‘‘the
coming-to-be, the badly formed, the seemingly incon-
sequential, the ephemerally felt’’ (Dewsbury et al.,
2002, p. 439).
18
This quote comes from Fenichel’s (1953) classic essay The
Psychology of Boredom. In this paper I have used the idea of
suspension in a manner that extracts it from the physcoanalytic frame
within which Fenichel originally classified it and instead equates the
tension of boredom with a suspension of affect/intensity i.e. in very
crude terms what I hope to have stressed is that boredom is of the
material world from the beginning of its formation. Later in the same
essay Fenichel goes on to elaborate on this definition of boredom:
‘‘Boredom must be a state of instinctual tension in which the
instinctual aims are repressed but in which the tension as such is felt;
and therefore one turns to the external world for help in the struggle in
repression. The person who is bored can be compared to someone who
has forgotten a name and inquires about it from others’’ (292).
19
Deleuze (1988, p. 97) explains the use of the term ‘power’ in a
manner that connects it back to questions of affective capacity: ‘‘all
power is inseparable from a capacity for being affected, and this
capacity for being affected is constantly and necessarily filled by
affections that realize it’’.
 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
7. Conclusion: hope and an affective materialism
. . .boredom is the threshold.
(Benjamin, 1999, D2, 7)
Hope is understood and championed as a pulsat-
ing latency of possibility contained in the unity
of the immanent and transcendent.
(Giroux and McLaren, 1997, p. 157)
There is a paradox at the heart of a paper that has
written on boredom as a complex co-present feature of
everyday life. To write claims interest. To read demands,
at least initially, that one is interested by what has been
written. But to claim interest, or to demand to be
interested, on behalf of the topic of boredom entails two
risks. Either interest stalls or, perhaps worse, absorbed
in the energetics of interest we lose hold of the
tediousness, banality, and frustration with which bore-
dom dulls time–space. Too easily we may forget that
boredom is a form of sadness, in Spinoza’s terms, that
diminishes the intensive quality of life. By glancing at a
number of empirical examples I aim to have at least kept
hold of this paradox for a moment or two whilst
remembering that, as Barthes (1990, p. 25) is at pains to
stress, ‘‘we do not escape boredom. . . with a gesture of
impatience or rejection’’. Through these glances I have
constructed a provisional narrative of the composition
of boredom i.e. the beginnings of a material geography
of the verb boring. Boredom takes place when a whole
series of bits and pieces are ‘held together’ under a type
of relation that discloses a situation of reiterative ‘bare’
repetition. By thereafter attuning to the colour of
boredom, its greyness, it becomes a malady of a body’s
capacity to affect and be affected. It therefore takes place
on the in-between dimension of a background feeling,
affect, that is ‘‘a kind of faith in the world that is simply
the hope that it continue. . . it is not a hope that has a
particular content or end point––it’s a desire for more
life, or for more to life’’ (Massumi, 2002c, p. 242
emphasis added). The exact nature of this malady is one
of a felt suspension of this hope i.e. a stalling in ‘‘our
sense of being’’ (Damasio, 1994, p. 150). It is vital to
stress that boredom is not a ‘thing’, despite my habit of
hypostatizing it, but instead one of the ‘‘names given to
differently assembled euphoric or dysphoric relations’’
(Brown and Stenner, 2001, p. 95). In each of the three
movements glanced at, despair, hope and joy, I disclosed
a paradoxical connection between the restless tension
of time–space stilled and slowed and the motion of a
will-to-connect differently that exist as tendencies and
latencies within bored time–space and bored bodies.
Disclosing the ‘strange magic’ of boredom, to use
Kierkegaard’s (1963, p. 227) wonderful phrase, therefore
interferes with the one-to-one correspondence between
boredom and self-consciously ‘critical’ concepts such as
751
alienation or anomie. Boredom hurries on an as-yet
indeterminate newness, albeit in different ways as it is
forged out of encounters, in a world disclosed as taking
place in neither black nor white, that is neither absence
nor plentitude, but only in shades of grey. Conse-
quently, even in boredom, ‘‘what appears to be stilled
life is still life: teaming, swarming and bursting with
becomings of every persuasion’’ (Doel, 2003, p. 162).
This process includes, however, the risk of a lessening
of life embodied, sadly, in the movement to despair that
on a somewhat despondent note I ended section six
with.
By refusing to materialize ‘critical’ concepts, or epo-
chal accounts of the disenchantment of Modernity, to
instead follow the self-disjunctive movement of those
intensities beneath actual boredom, this paper has aimed
to write boredom through a secular principle of hope: ‘‘a
memory of the future’’ (Marcel, 1951, p. 53). Hope is an
affective supplement that begins from an embedded trust
in/for the world. Bloch (1986) argues that hope is the
virtue of the not-yet because it acts as ‘‘the functionary
of what has never been, of the possible New’’ (Bloch,
1986, p. 6). Hope also embodies a risk that is absent
from an optimistic stance. Emergence may not emerge
because hope, and the act of hoping, incorporate a
break with the past that means hope is inevitably
uncertain. Hope fades. It can be disappointed. To use
hope as a supplement is not, therefore, simply a case of
being optimistic rather than pessimistic about the un-
doubted over-abundant presence of boredom in con-
temporary time–space. Instead the figure of hope
presupposes both an image of matter based on the
movement of affect and a specific materialism that at-
tunes to ‘‘the where we might be able to go and what
we might be able to do in every present situation’’
(Massumi, 2002c, p. 212). This affective materialism has
emerged through the detour I have staged into four in-
terlinked images of ‘matter’: as equivalent to a delin-
eated social structure, a constitutive blank, a realm of
co-present objects and an emerging joyful image of
plentitude. I have argued that none of these figurations
alone, and the materialisms each emerge from, can at-
tend-to the affectivity of matter. Thus far I have argued
that to attend-to how boredom matters involves retain-
ing the assumption of relationality in forms of relational
materialism, and thereafter working, experimentally,
with the aforementioned assumption of the affectivity of
matter and materiality that populates ‘non-representa-
tional theory’. In section five I argued, however, that a
materialism based on wonder, or enchantment, whilst
doubtless ethically enlivening finds it difficult to attune
to forms of sadness i.e. diminishments in the bright-
ness of time–space. My argument was that if life is
figured as teeming plentitude it can never be funda-
mentally at risk as it is in relations of dysphoria, such as
boredom.
752 B. Anderson / Geoforum 35 (2004) 739–754
In order to herald a materialism that can draw out
those co-present matters that lessen life such as bore-
dom, we must set in motion one of the drifts that I ar-
gued can be internal to bored time–space. This goes
through the aforementioned event of hope and finds
consistency in the emerging shape of an ‘affective
materialism’. In this form of materialism it is the
materiality of matter itself that is necessarily ‘‘full of
propensity towards something, tendency towards
something, latency of something’’ (Bloch, 1986, p. 18).
Rather than being enlivened to act and afford by
something-else, matter itself is ‘not-yet become’ (Bloch,
1986). Matter is therefore doubly processual. Both al-
ways-ever ‘in’ process and defined by the ‘processuality’
of this movement. This is a deliberately hope-full figure
of matter as interrogative based on the syncretic opera-
tor the ‘not-yet’. It is based on a theoretical–empirical
practice that conceives of intensities as internal, rather
than in supplement or opposition, to a matter that is
always ‘not-yet’. For matter is ‘‘at once intuitive and
abstract, mundane and phantasmagorical, real and un-
real’’ (Tiffany, 2000, p. 293 emphasis added). 20 This is
based on the assumption, implicit in the discussion of
boredom in section six, that ‘‘life is always lurking in the
interstices, in what usually escapes description. . .’’
(Stengers, 2002, p. 245). Throughout the presentation of
boredoms diverse energies the paper has attuned not
only to what has been actualized, the normal site of
most materialism, but also to the diverse ‘not-yet’
presence of ’’an indefinite ever ‘more’ that ‘fringes’ every
determinate context with a timeless margin of chance
and newness’’ (Massumi, 2002b, p. 214). However, the
conception of matter as both ‘in process’ and defined by
the ‘processuality of its moments’ does not mean that
matter is also inevitably ‘in excess’, ‘abundance’, ‘sur-
plus’ or ‘plentitude’. This is a hope without the guarantee
of a ‘‘more to come’’ (Massumi, 2002a, p. xxxiv). One
meaning of matter as ‘not-yet become’ is, importantly,
that it is ‘still-not become’, indicating that failed arrival,
deferral, loss and/or waiting could be built into the new
‘aesthetically disposed’ senses of materiality that popu-
late non-representational styles of work. Importantly, it
is therefore a materialism that discloses, through the
discussion of the movement of boredom to despair or
perhaps our reflection on how hope always ends, that
matter, not only human existence, holds a ‘not-yet’
tendency to both joy and despair: plentitude and deple-
20
Tiffany’s (2000) sense of a ‘lyric substance’, or ‘lyric materiality’,
articulates a similar problematic. However his account is predicated on
an understanding that the immaterial dimension that is internal to
matter is of a representational form. His focus is therefore upon ‘‘the
intrinsic role of pictures and elaborate analogies in shaping our
knowledge of material substance, starting with the classical notion of
the atom’’ (3). This seems to be a limiting conception that even as it
endows matter with active representational capacities forgets the
intensities of matter.
tion. Indirectly, through a series of backward and for-
ward glances, the contours of this materialism are
elaborated in the movement-from boredom that sets this
paper in motion. Here we return, in a roundabout way,
to the paradox that I themetised in the introduction to
this conclusion: the risk of losing hold of boredom by
being interested.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Andy, Beth, Marie (all pseudonyms) and
the other research participants for talking to me about
boredom and to Peter Jackson and Gill Valentine for
supervising the thesis from which some of this material
is drawn. Thanks also to three anonymous referees for a
mixture of generous and critical comments and Rachel
Colls for helping me clarify the arguments in this paper.
Special thanks to Jo and Spencer for having incredibly
low boredom thresholds and being lots of fun because
of it. All remaining errors/omissions are of course my
own.
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