[-empyre-] Welcome to May: Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

[B. Bogart]

Hello John,

I agree that boredom is imbued with cultural meaning. You write:

> As it is currently known, boredom is commonly thought to be a 
> condition of modernity (a Marxist critique could point to our 
> alienation from labor and the creation of leisure time to account for
> boredom’s emergence).

Does this imply that before modernity all moments of time were filled
with task-oriented behaviours? Or that there was no conceptualization of
the difference between task and non-task? Does modernity mark the
construction of the notion of tasks (as units of activity)?

What is the relation between boredom and rest? Does boredom always
involve a task that is momentarily paused, or a lack of task?

In terms of pornography, you write:

> The "pornification" of culture that many scholars write of and
> ability to locate a kind of pornography for every taste, fetish, and
> preference suggests, too, that pornography has in many ways become
> boring (and, slightly normalized) and is constantly attempting to
> reinvent and reestablish itself as not that.

What is the role of desensitization here? Does not all pornography
eventually become boring once experienced sufficient times?

Then there is also the notion of ritual in the context of repeated
behaviour...

Ben