The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order by Bruce O’Neill (review)

In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order, Bruce O’Neill makes a significant contribution to the anthropological literature on neoliberalism and structural violence by exploring the affect of boredom among homeless individuals in Bucharest, Romania. This boredom is distinct from the “bombastic utterances of bourgeois ennui” (101, O’Neill quoting Bourdieu [1987]). Rather, it is an experience of “traumatic suffering” (101)—of being “cast aside” to the margins of a complex web of relationships that are increasingly dictated by the (in)ability to produce and consume in a capitalist system. The transition to capitalism after the fall of communist dictator Ceauşescu and the country’s eventual membership to the European Union (a membership with concomitant hopes and failures around work and consumption during “crisis”) increased prevalence of market values in Romania. These new sensibilities now dictate the value of human life as well, rendering or recoding low-skilled, aging, or black market laborers as “redundant and unnecessary” (83). Many of these individuals have become homeless in Romania, and experience boredom as a symptom of dispossession from local and global markets that leaves them unable to engage in meaningful work and social relationships.

Time and time again, homeless informants explain to O’Neill that they are plictisit (bored). Compared to the struggles they faced during communism, which involved dealing with limited resources and waiting in long lines for rations of bread and daily goods, the conditions of deprivation for the homeless today seem far worse. Prior to the country’s transition to capitalism, deprivation was a shared aspect of social life. People waited in long food lines together, O’Neill’s interlocutors recounted nostalgically, where they could gossip and drink. The shared experience of the communist-era food lines contrasted greatly for O’Neill’s informants with the way capitalism now fosters an isolated suffering—one that cuts individuals from previous communal and family ties. O’Neill’s informants recounted suffering in solidarity under communism where at least basic needs like a home and a job were provided by the government. Now, under capitalism, there is higher inequality and homeless individuals face deprivation isolated from material conditions and relationships that allow them to form and mediate meaningful social lives.

O’Neill outlines these arguments in six chapters, an introduction, and conclusion. He weaves rich ethnographic detail throughout the text, mainly from his interactions with Bucharest’s homeless at the Backwoods Shelter and Stefan’s Place. These “socially devalued spaces” (16) are located on the outskirts of Bucharest, and are places where homeless men and women can access a range of resources, from health professionals to showers. O’Neill’s analysis also includes his interactions with homeless living in squats in central Bucharest. Being situated within the city offers individuals different possibilities and limitations in regard to consumption and economic gain compared to their counterparts at the shelters. Still, engaging peripherally in consumer culture in the city center “did not build toward any recognizable meaningful life: not a career, a family, or a home, or even a sense of momentary distraction” (36). Instead, it became integral to the sense of boredom O’Neill explores as an analytical lens throughout the book.

Chapter 1, “Space–Time Expansion,” articulates how consumption grants individuals access to different spatial and temporal modes of experience. If the new speed of the global marketplace compresses both time and space for those who have access to work, private transit, and media, displacement from global competition has the opposite effect. Distractions like brandy, or țuică, may speed up time in the early mornings, and create moments of optimism while homeless, jobless men wait to be picked up for black market construction work. But as soon as the alcohol wears off and work does not come, the drudgery of time returns (21). This is boredom—a feeling of being stuck in place without hope for a meaningful future.

But boredom is...