Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood

Chapter 6: The Burdens of Time in the Bourgeois Playroom

B U R D E N S O F T I M E I N T H E B O U R G E O I S P L AY R O O M 127 Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland opens by telling us: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do” (1). Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji, written almost eight decades later, describes the game Jumanji as “a young people’s jungle-adventure especially designed for the bored and the restless.” Many a modern children’s tale begins as a way to alleviate the heaviness of frozen time as it hangs over the isolated child in the bourgeois playroom. Boredom—the dread of having absolutely nothing to do, which is experienced both as a failure and disability—is a specific response to the commodification of experience under capitalism, an outcome of the absurd expectation generated by consumer culture that life should be an endless procession of opportunities to expand the self through the acquisition of things. A longing for content, it is a search for the sensuous nonalienated life, both for the philosopher lost in the abstract history of the idea and the consumer amidst the continuous parade of spectacles and events.1 For Marx, nonalienated life begins when human development becomes a need and an end in itself; like children’s play, the work of an artist or of revolution-making nonalienated labor begins The Burdens of Time in the Bourgeois Playroom The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom—the longing for a content. —Karl Marx 6 128 C O I N I N G F O R C A P I TA L with a sensuous engagement with the material world in an effort to change it. The English word “boredom” has a history of not more than two centuries. First appearing in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was used as both a noun and a verb to connote a dismissive attitude toward a thing which bores.2 Hyunsuk Seo, reading Siegfried Kracauer, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin, suggests that these astute observers of early twentieth-century consumer culture saw boredom as a profoundly contradictory experience: It was experienced as a state of both malign distress and liberating estrangement.3 To be bored and not to be agonized by it is at its best, Seo suggests, a political act or at the very least, as noted by Adam Phillips in On Kissing, a sign of psychological maturity. After all, as Phillips points out, it is a voluntary disengagement from the glittering world of commodities. Profound boredom, Kracauer suggests in this light, is the only “proper occupation , an event in which one is with oneself and in control of one’s existence.”4 However, boredom is designated a malady in capitalism because it amounts to wasting time. Capital transforms time into a commodity , that is, it has exchange value that can be measured in money. Time is the basic unit against which profits are calculated, and therefore the capitalist work ethic is a struggle against time, to make every minute yield ever more profits. Wasting time is also perceived as a personal failure because the bourgeois imagines that the individual precedes society, which is comprised of individuals who enter into contracts with others. Capitalist expansion in the late twentieth century has consistently eroded the boundaries, including domestic space, that stand in the way of maximizing the use of time to generate profits through both production and consumption. Thanks to new technologies such as computers , faxes, and cell phones, even travel spaces—airports, train stations, and hotels—that had previously enforced a waiting period are now colonized as spaces of work and entertainment or consumption . Reinhard Kuhn, elaborating in The Demon of Noontide on the degrees of boredom, contrasts the inactivity of the mind enforced by external circumstances such as travel, which he calls the simpler boredoms , with anomie, the total loss of the will to live. Clearly, boredom as a political withdrawal from consumer culture is a class privilege. It assumes the ability to buy and is therefore quite different from the boredom of a repetitive job that must be done to B U R D E N S O F T I M E I N T H E B O...