The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995) – Siegfried Kracauer
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The Mass Ornament is a collection of essays by Siegfried Kracauer first anthologized in 1995. It features a 1924 essay entitled Boredom. Kracauer is most famous for his film criticism book From Caligari to Hitler.

“People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored.”

“Boredom becomes the the only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one’s existence… [O]ne flirts with ideas that even become quite respectable in the process, and one considers various projects that, for no reason, pretend to be serious. Eventually one becomes content to do nothing more than be with oneself, without knowing what one actually should be doing… And in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked: the great passion.”

Purse lip square jaw writes:

Kracauer writes about boredom as a way of resisting constant distraction or, in other words, defying Debord’s spectacle and Lefebvre’s colonisation of everyday life by the commodity. But [Ben] Highmore suggests that Kracauer also shares an affinity with 1970s punk: “to declare yourself bored is not a mark of failure but the necessary precondition for the possibility of generating the authentically new (rather than the old dressed up as the new).” —http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2005/02/in-favour-of-boredom.php [Oct 2006]

See also: Siegfried Kracauer – 1924