Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (review)

Elizabeth Goodstein's remarkable new book operates at a number of levels, each of them fascinating in its own right. At its simplest, it tells the story of the historical transformations of the discourse of the subjective experience variously called "boredom," "ennui," "acedia," "melancholia," "mal du siècle" and "horror loci." The pre-modern history of these kinds of subjective malaise goes back at least to St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, emerging in new form in the writings of Pascal and La Rochefoucauld in the seventeenth century and of post-Enlightenment and Romantic authors (Goethe, Hegel, and others) in the decades that followed, to take on a specifically modern (urban) form in the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, Goodstein traces a dual social history—of the changing circumstances in which new forms of malaise were manifest, and of the reflective accounts by contemporary commentators attempting to describe and explain this subjective experience. This project represents a major part of this very substantial book, and involves the author in an impressively learned (and interdisciplinary) review of the work of a number of key authors of fiction, criticism, philosophy, and sociology. Prominent in her account are Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Musil, each discussed at considerable length and with great sensitivity to the specificities of their particular writing practices. Goodstein also gives serious, if briefer, consideration to the contributions of sociologists Wolf Lepenies (his 1969 book, Melancholy and Society) and Norbert Elias (specifically his classic 1939 study, The History of Manners).

All of this is compelling and persuasive, and highly original in its productive crossing of disciplines in pursuit of a single theme. Goodstein's real intent, however, is to go beyond such accounts, both literary-philosophical and sociological, to explore the rhetoric of boredom and to investigate the genealogy of the metaphorics of boredom. As she demonstrates, the competing accounts of the subjective experience of boredom, bifurcated as they have tended to be since the nineteenth century into philosophical and sociological analyses, share the weakness of taking the experience literally, rather than grasping its discursive construction (408). Although Simmel and Heidegger, in their different ways, developed more sophisticated accounts of subjective malaise than their predecessors, understanding it historically as a specifically modern condition (414), neither was able to perceive boredom as anything more than either an epiphenomenon of social-historical processes (Simmel) or ultimately a universal and eternal feature of the human condition (Heidegger). Goodstein argues for a "philosophically reflexive mode of rhetorical analysis that steps outside the modern rhetoric of experience . . . while attending to the historical specificity of the discursive and conceptual transformations associated with modernization" (407). In her account, Musil's literary-philosophical exploration of early twentieth-century European malaise in his great five-volume, incomplete novel, The Man Without Qualities, comes closest to offering such a "critical, reflective perspective on the dilemmas of modern subjectivity that neither abstracts experience from history nor neglects its philosophical dimension" (417).

This persistent bifurcation of accounts of boredom is central to Goodstein's review of her selected authors. At times, it becomes a little unclear just what the duality is. There is some slippage in the language, perhaps to some extent unavoidable as she moves from one historical period—and discourse—to another, but nevertheless confusing. The key divide is clearly between accounts premised on a conception of an ahistorical, or universal, human condition and those that insist on explaining subjective experience in its social-historical setting. The first category, in Goodstein's wide-ranging narrative, is variously identified as philosophical, spiritual, idealist, existential, subjective, and humanistic, especially in the introductory section of the book. This is opposed to accounts identified as empirical, social, social-scientific, materialist, and historical. In neither case are these all synonymous terms; nor are the oppositions proposed consistently. Still, the fundamental divide, crucial to Goodstein's analysis and critique, is between historical and ahistorical conceptions of subjective malaise. And here she produces a highly...