Introduction

Grey is often used as a sign for the inability to recognise differences; hence the well-known proverb that in the dark all cats are grey. Thus understood, grey is not so much considered a colour in itself, but rather as the fading of colour, or the blurring of all colours into each other. Based on what Walter Benjamin says in the quote above, one might say that what the colour grey is for our vision, boredom is for our experience of time. The experience of boredom as described here, in this case caused by a grey and rainy day, is characterised by the inability to distinguish between different moments in time. Each second, minute or hour of the day blends into the next, and appears to us exactly like the previous one, while we feel as if we are stuck in an endless loop.

Boredom takes in a central place in Walter Benjamin's work, especially in his unfinished Arcades Project, an analysis of modernity that was to contain a section on boredom. His attitude towards it, however, is deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, he considers boredom as part of what he calls the ‘hellish time’ of modernity. On the other hand, he also describes boredom as the ‘dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’, and ‘the threshold to great deeds’. How to explain this ambiguity?

As I will argue in this chapter, Benjamin understands boredom not as part of the human condition per se (as is the case with for instance Schopenhauer), instead he believes that nineteenth-century industrial capitalism generates a specific kind of boredom, differing from earlier forms. I will start out by investigating what causes this boredom. A particular place where this becomes clear is Benjamin's analysis of fashion, which will be discussed in the second section. Fashion, he argues, is exemplary for the modern experience of time: the eternal recurrence of the same disguised as constant progress.