Über Langeweile, Nichtarbeit und raumzeitliche Konflikte in der Peripherie französischer Städte

Abstract

While boredom surely is an individual feeling closely associated with slowness or idle-ness, we can identify historical contexts in which boredom was evoked as a collective experience or used to mark specific groups and routines as problematic. In late 20th-century Western European cities, historical actors thus repeatedly labelled certain spaces or groups as different by pointing to their boringness. Whereas in the 18th and 19th centuries, a certain ennui still seemed characteristic of an upper class not forced to work, in late capitalist cities a bored person was considered potentially dangerous (or endangered). While the socio-economic order at that time was strongly oriented towards economic productivity, boredom, much like slowness, seemed suspicious. Between the late 1950s and the late 1990s, French newspapers thus repeatedly presen-ted boredom as a key problem of the banlieues. Analysing these representations of the urban periphery, I argue that the evocation of boredom repeatedly served as mechan-ism of social distinction that urban observers used to distinguish “the productive many” (white, male employees) from “the idle few” (housewives or, later, migrant youth).