CHAPTER 6

The Atrophy of Experience: Walter Benjamin and Boredom

Carlo Salzani

The essay relates Walter Benjamin’s analysis of boredom, especially in convolute “D” of the Arcades Project (“Boredom, Eternal Return”), to his critique of experience and thus to a number of central concepts in his work, like ennui, spleen and melancholy. In the notes for the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire book, boredom can be related to Erlebnis: it is the “malady” that accompanies the disintegration of the traditional forms of experience, which Benjamin called the “atrophy of experience.” However, thanks to its connection to allegory, boredom also plays a fundamental role in Benjamin’s revolutionary project: the melancholy gaze of the allegorist reduces the historical event to ruin, showing its facies hippocratica, its “death mask,” thus exposing the naked truth of the demise of experience. This is the dialectical potential of allegory and thus of spleen.

Benjamin devoted a whole section of the Arcades Project – Convolute “D” – to the problem of Boredom. He thus recognized that boredom is a fundamental component of modern life and of its phantasmagoria and planned to include its analysis in his work on the prehistory of modernity. However, this chapter of his work was never written and a systematic and coherent approach to boredom is thus absent from his corpus. Rather, in his work the analysis and uses of boredom are extremely inconsistent. In his writings of the 1920s and 1930s Benjamin utilized a number of terms almost as synonyms – Langeweile, ennui, taedium vitae – often in connection to Baudelairean spleen and melancholy, often also contradictorily. He also used the term acedia, albeit very rarely and not in relation to boredom. As the recent literature on boredom explains, these terms are all connected, though took different connotations in the evolution of the concept: if the roots are in medieval acedia – almost equated with melancholia in the Renaissance – ennui, Langeweile and boredom took a very specific connotation after the industrial revolution and are therefore strictly connected to modernity.1 These terms have been used in different ways and with different connotations in different contexts, and cannot be said simply to coincide. They certainly present national, cultural, social and historical particularities that cannot be reduced to a unity. However, their relation can be taken as constitutive of a “discourse,” what Elizabeth Goodstein calls the “discourse on boredom.”2 128 Carlo Salzani

This discourse is related by Goodstein to the modern concept of experience: she thus defines modern boredom, with a Musilian wink, as “experience without qualities.” Though Benjamin never gave a clear definition of boredom, and did not explicitly relate it to his analysis of experience, in his work the connection is evident. This essay will attempt to construe an analysis of Benjamin’s boredom through his concept of experience. It will thus highlight the distinction between pre-modern and modern boredom, and then connect the few notes on boredom to be found in Benjamin’s writings to his analysis of modernity. The goal is not to find a monolithic and coherent definition of boredom, but rather to explore a discourse.

1. Erfahrung and Erlebnis

“Why is storytelling on the decline?,” Benjamin asks in a short piece published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in November 1932 and titled “The Handkerchief.” “This is a question I often asked myself when I sat with other guests around a table for an entire evening feeling bored.” The answer is, he argues, that “people who are not bored cannot tell stories. But there is no longer any place for boredom in our lives” [Die Langeweile aber hat in unserem Tun keine Stelle mehr]. Boredom is here associated with those pre- modern activities – “weave and spin, tinker and scrape” – which were “covertly and inwardly bound up with it” and are progressively disappearing from modern life. The decline of storytelling depends on the fact that the traditional rhythms of pre-modern life, with their relaxed and ancestral repetition, and which were accompanied by stories, are dying out. “If stories are to thrive,” he concludes, “there must be work, order, and subordination” (GS 4.2:741/SW 2:658, emphasis added).3 The same point is made in “The Storyteller” (1936): “storytelling,” Benjamin writes, “is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.” Stories are retained when they are integrated in the listener’s own experience, which will lead him or her to repeat them one day. The process of assimilation requires “a state of relaxation” [Entspannung]: “boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation,” he states; “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” [Erfahrung] and this state is becoming “rarer and rarer.” The activities intimately associated with this kind of boredom – “weaving and spinning”4 – are already extinct in the city and are progressively disappearing from the traditional community. This means that, without boredom, “the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.”5 “Wisdom,” the “intelligence coming from afar” transmitted through storytelling, is dying out in modern life: the new form of communication is “information,” which