[csaa-forum] Panel Proposal - Everyday Transformations

[Laurence Simmons (FOA FTV)]

I am seeking people who may be interested in offering a paper in a session
on Boredom at the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of
Australasia, Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-First Quotidian in Perth
9-11 December 2004. This usually involves four speakers and papers can
either be refereed or non-refereed. Refereed papers will be published in
electronic conference proceedings.

Boredom

The dynamic of this session will depend in part upon boredom as a displaced,
unmentioned, perhaps unmentionable, possibility, but one that is a defining
feature of contemporary everyday life. We offer the promise to interest you
and the need to defeat your boredom impels our project. But can we be
bothered? Can you? What does 'being bothered' mean or entail? How do we
speak not only to avert boredom but to deny it, to represent it, to
investigate it, to embrace it, to deplore it? How to speak then of boredom
from its very condition? This articulation of the idea of boredom condenses
a spectrum of crucial meanings and attitudes from late medieval notions of
acedia (sloth) to Heidegger's lengthy (boring?) analysis of boredom in The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics which ends up making the question of
boredom the 'fundamental attunement' of modern times. If the boredom induced
mirrors the boredom described, how to speak then of boredom from its very
condition? Such exertions of expression contradict the state they describe
and you may well wonder how anyone so absorbed with boredom has even the
energy to mention it. Nevertheless, we can see that if there are problems
with the theoretical recuperation of the ordinariness of boredom, it still
has to be asked - but asked in what sense? - what boredom 'does'.

Expressions of interest to l.simmons at auckland.ac.nz




Associate Professor Laurence Simmons
Department of Film, Television and Media Studies
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
Aotearoa/New Zealand
Tel 64 9 373 7599 x 87130
Fax 64 9 373 8764
email l.simmons at auckland.ac.nz