Chaired Sabiha Huq
Christian Parreno: Boredom as Time, Space and Modern History
Boredom, unwanted and avoided, is usually described as the slow passing of time that derives when the environment and its events are meaningless. It is an experience of both time and space. Although similar conditions have existed in the past — including horror loci in Antiquity, acedia in Medieval times and melancholy in the Renaissance — boredom became prevalent with the consolidation of modernity, as an effect of the French and Industrial Revolutions. In English, the term emerged in the nineteenth century to denote moments of annoying pause amidst a way of living characterized by the desire for busyness, high velocity and constant change. To Martin Heidegger, in a series of lectures of 1929-1930, titled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the reciprocal relationship between boredom and excitement unveils the disposition of the modern individual and, with that, the reasons behind cultural and social decline. Portraying boredom as ‘a dense atmosphere’ and ‘a fog’, Heidegger observes that the condition is omnipresent in all dimensions of the everyday, with different levels of intensity — from superficial boringness to existential boredom. This has produced a temporal ‘lag’ that locates the modern individual in the ‘back of the present’ rather than ‘on the front’, awaiting directions from the norms of science instead of proactively seeking the truths of philosophy. By the same time, extending the qualities of personal boredom to a larger scale, Walter Benjamin, in the convolute ‘Boredom, Eternal Return’ of the unfinished Arcades Project, extends the condition as a historical meta-structure. Through the many fragments by many authors and his own aphorisms, Benjamin exposes a repetitious concern about the reliance of progress on the exhaustion with what has already been consumed. Boredom thus provides an environment of sameness so the new can emerge; it is ‘a grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks’.
Through the juxtaposition and interpretation of the temporal and spatial aspects of boredom in the writings by Heidegger and Benjamin, this paper explores how boredom not only entails the experiential and the historical but also embeds the negotiation of the future. This temporality is dependent on the qualities of the modern environment, defined by architecture and an urban realm that respond to capitalist economies.
Bio: Christian Parreno is assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. He holds a PhD from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, an MA in the Histories and Theories programme from the Architectural Association, and a BA from Universidad San Francisco de Quito. He was a Visiting Graduate Researcher at University of California, Los Angeles, and a student of the PhD programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His research explores conditions of boredom and exhaustion in the modern built environment, with an emphasis on experience. He is the author of Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience (Bloomsbury, 2021); and his writings have appeared in Architectural Histories; Architecture & Culture; Emotions: History, Culture, Society; Log; Revista de Occidente; The Journal of Architecture; The Journal of Architectural Education; The Journal of Boredom Studies; Textual Practice; and several edited volumes.
Clare Holdsworth: The Social Life of Busyness and relational temporalities
Busyness is a defining temporality of the 21st century. The rush of everyday life is matched by equal intensity to manage time efficiently and learn to slow down. This imperative to manage time is most commonly interpreted as an individual matter. In this paper I make the case for an alternative approach with starts from the principle that temporalities, and particularly the anxieties we experience about time, are essentially relational. Drawing on feminist writings about time and relationality, phenomenological interpretations of temporality that foreground the synthesis between past, present and future, and a bricolage of qualitative data; I consider how the study of time in everyday contexts can be considered anew through a relational lens. The bricolage of data includes one day diaries about time, texts on time management, interviews about family and working time, which were all collated from Anglo-American cultural and social contexts. Indeed, the design of this research project also challenges the temporal intensity of much academic research through seeking out available data in different formats to interrogate how busyness is experienced and managed. These data reveal how individual anxieties and experiences of time are inevitably shaped by intimate and professional relations. Moreover, the tactics that people are encouraged to adopt to make the most of time are implicitly framed by gendered, classed, heteronormative, able-bodied and racialized assumptions about who can and who cannot manage time.
Bio: Clare Holdsworth is Professor of Social Geography at Keele University, UK and author of The Social Life of Busyness (Emerald, 2021). This book concludes the findings from a three-year Major Research Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Clare’s research explores different expressions of busyness and how these are formed by and through social and intimate relationships.
Lauren Erdreich: The time of intimacy – parenting, class and family life
In his seminal work Minding the Time (2001, 2), Daly argued for the “central importance of time for understanding the way that families are organized and live their lives”. Setting out from this premise, this paper forms part of a broad conceptual project (together with Kari Stefansen and Ingrid Smette) exploring how time is implicated in everyday classed parenting practices and social reproduction. In this paper, we focus on one such practice - the creation of intimacy between parents and children. We ask, what concepts of time emerge from the literature related to intimacy? The value attached to the family as a seat of affection is a major aspect of the shift in the late 17th century towards what Charles Taylor called the “affirmation of ordinary life”. This shift saw a "growing idealization of marriage based on affection, true companionship between husband and wife, and devoted concern for the children" (1989, 289). The nurturing of these relationships requires dedicated time. The importance attached to this time continues to resonate in contemporary discourse about proper family life, particularly among middle-class families. Parents view time spent with their children as associated with warmth; as the basis for psychological well-being; as crucial for undivided attention to children's uniqueness, and to the success of their educational trajectory. Hence, parents invest resources into creating different modes of intimate time. These practices of intimacy create a relationship of ''co-presence'' in the here and now, at the same time as they are oriented towards an unknown future.
Bio: Lauren Erdreich (Ph.D.) is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her major areas of research and teaching are anthropology of education, parenting and education, mothering in cross-cultural perspective, the relationship of marginal groups with dominant educational institutions, nonformal education, and ethnography. In her research, she brings both educational and anthropological theories together into the analysis of the cultural experience of learning and being. She is co-author of Mothering, education and culture: Russian, Palestinian and Jewish middle-class mothers in Israeli Society, together with Deborah Golden and Sveta Roberman and co-editor of a special issue of British Journal of Sociology of Education, 'Education and parenting: Cross-cultural perspectives' with Deborah Golden, Kari Stefansen, and Ingrid Smette.
Rachel Loewen Walker: Covid Time: The Blursday Effect and the Stories we tell about Coming Back from a Global Pandemic
Few would disagree that “Covid time” has become a very significant part of the cultural imaginary in the months and years following the various lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our subjective experiences of time reveal a great deal to us about ourselves, as well as about the content of what is happening in the world around us. For example, during instances of extreme crisis and fear, time can slow down, a factor which is linked to psychological distress. Likewise, studies have demonstrated that time seems to speed up as we get older thanks to the blurring together of repeat experiences. When we think about our sensations of time in relation to Covid lockdowns, it is not surprising that the various health and socio-economic impacts, periods of heightened anxiety, social isolation, and a forced sedentary lifestyle, all impacted our subjective experiences of time, including both slowing down the timeline and ever distancing us from a future that could change at a moment’s notice.
In a study about the impact of the pandemic on experiences of time, researchers developed what they call the “Blursday” database: a repository of data from 2,840 participants across nine countries who completed various behavioural tasks during the pandemic (Chaumon et al., 2022). Their goal was to explore the impact of the pandemic on people’s sense of time and their findings demonstrate that during periods of covid lockdown, participants experienced time very slowly and had difficulty determining the days of the week (hence coining the term “blursday”). As someone with a background in philosophy and gender studies, I have largely relied on theoretical explorations of time, though I am increasingly curious about the interplay between scientific and philosophical perspectives. Consequently, this paper explores “Covid Time” at the interstices of the Blursday dataset (its expanding collection of resulting research) and my own explorations of the living present (2022). Deeply influenced by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Claire Colebrook, the living present refers to a non-linear concept of time where the present always stretches to the future and the past through anticipation and memory. My work explores the ways that we “make time” through various methods of storytelling, memorialization, anticipation, and documentation. Thus, I am particularly curious about the non-linear making of time that occurred during and after experiences of lockdown, as well as the ongoing “covid-time” that characterizes the present day. Is “blursday” to blame for the HR difficulties that plague many organizations whose staff won’t return to the office? Are heightened levels of social anxiety connected to time speeding up again? Has the loss of many “milestone” moments (birthdays, holidays, coming out experiences) forever changed our storylines? I explore these and other questions alongside COVID-19’s continued living present.
Bio: Rachel Loewen Walker is Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Political Studies, and Law at the University of Saskatchewan. Prior to this, Loewen Walker was the Ariel F Sallows Chair in Human Rights with the College of Law (2020-2022) and the Executive Director of OUTSaskatoon (2013-2020). She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Alberta and works primarily on gender, sexuality, philosophies of temporality, and human rights through community-engaged scholarship. Loewen Walker’s recent book Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities: Toward a Living Present, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.