Andrew's Wiki
Decentering Leisure

Opening Salvos

• Most definitions of leisure revolve around freedom, choice, escape, and satisfaction, but this doesn’t reflect real experience
  • our freedom is always “contingent upon time, place, and…others”
  • and it’s hard to tell when we’re satisfied
    • it’s like utopia, where you always want to be but never get to
• Leisure is socially conditioned
  • ie freedom, choice, self-determination not really there, but actually reflects what societies make of them discursively: “in relation to determinate social formations”
  • “one cannot separate leisure from the rest of life and claim that it has unique ‘laws’, ‘propensities’ and rhythms’”
• Two un-definitions of leisure (definitions he wants to demolish)
  • “a personal or collective state of being to be maintained or accomplished” via managed behavior
  • “casting off the character armour of ordinary social life and surrendering oneself to ‘self-expression’”
• Leisure is “more messy” than most people admit
  • By decentring he means taking leisure off the Freedom, Choice, and Self-Actualization highway…
  • he means not assuming you know what leisure is but instead of looking at its CONTEXT (cultulre)
  • each culture has its own meaning of leisure 2
    • for example under modernity ”’real experience’, release, escape, and freedom.” Truly, “the modernist identification of escape, pleasure and relaxation with leisure was simply another kind of moral regulation, with the result that, under modernity, we were never sure if we were free enough for far enough” from what we were escaping from
    • during modernism, an “ambiguity about leisure experience” that has to do with “conflict between agency and structure” esp b/c freedom is always defined first by society
• “I want to oppose the proposition that leisure is in any meaningful sense ‘free’ time and ‘free’ space.” 2
• “leisure is often described as the realm of the authentic – the area in life where we can really be ourselves” 9 (in Parker, Leisure and Work; Kelly, Freedom to Be: A New Sociology of Leisure; Olszweska and Roberts, Leisure and Life-style)
  • Yet look at the aping of Young Werther in 18th c: authenticity? nah; English 18th c full of simulated spaces too which were like “private theme parks” 10 (talking about neo-classical designs)
• leisure in modernity also must take note of the real/fantasy interpenetration like in Marx talking about commodity fetishism where the “productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life” and Benjamin on modernist leisure forms as phantasmagoria “into which people entered in order to be distracted” qtd 11

Capitalism

• Marxists v Weberians “disagree sharply about the engine of capitalist development” 3
  • M: “expropriation of the laborers” (destruction of their traditional forms and turned over to capitalism); conflict
    • end of capitalism: “the productive physical and technical forces developed by capitalist enterprise will eventually be obstructed by the social barrier of the class system which prevents the optimal use of natural resources, labor, and technology”
  • W: the engine is in “religion and the rationalization process” in “professional administration, rational law, and the ethos of Protestantism”
    • we won’t ever get away from capitalism b/c is superior
• He will use this contrast to talk about leisure
• He notes that leisure under capitalism is seen through lens of “commodification and homogenization of experience” 4, ie professionalization of sports and paying spectatorship, ie Thomas Cook’s prepackaged trips mechanical
  • Urry is one of his citations here
  • B/c of capitalism’s homogeneity, diff to find way to escape: Cohen and Taylor’s Escape Attempts show that your escape attempts will always be “reabsorbed by the system” 4
    • In leisure studies, “the study of leisure under capitalism has been especially interested in the ways in which people resist commodification and homogenization” and they look at utopian possibilities and cite unevenness of subordination under capitalism

Modernity

• He “qualifies” the identification of Marx and Engels as prophets of modernity (eg Berman, Sayers) by saying that Marx and Engels believe that eventually you will face the “real conditions of life and his relations with his kinds” and that you can scientifically rewrite society to be just
  • While this is modern, he says that modernity is increasingly characterized by pessimism: this is the second “side of modernity” he says: where “flux, motion and ceaseless movement are not seen as the pathologies of class domination which will be eliminated…but as immutable features of modern life” 5
  • his ex. of this second modernity is Baudelaire “the fugitive” who Rojek says is all about “mass circulation processes” and things circulating, which is “delirium” b/c it’s spinning faster and faster which you see sometimes as exciting and other times as collapsing everything
• These two modernities have two diff leisures
  • order and control leisure: leisure is planned and orderly and enriching
  • “disorder and fragmentation” (here he quotes Simmel on metropolis) so that leisure is “a series of fleeting relationships which can produce boredom, frustration and nervousness as well as excitement, stimulation and pleasure” 6 “the cult of distraction” (it’s thus cynical, ‘leisure isn’t about self improvement’ but about filling time up)

Postmodernity

• Harvey: where it “swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary….as if that is all there is” qtd 7
  • so that the subject has disappeared: Baudrillard, Virilio
• leisure in postmodernity: “stress the decomposition of hierarchical distinctions between high and low culture,” pastiche, eclecticism, playfulness, distrust of utopia, “depthlessness….seduction as an end in itself; and the collapse of the distinction between author and consumer”
• again, postmodern leisure: “existence without commitment…plenitude but not discretion”

• More About Capitalism
  • leisure as part of capitalism’s “universal market”
    • three stages of market (Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism): 1) commodity production replaces barter system; 2) local/trust relations of services go commodified; 3) “product cycle,” a dependency-inducing parade of goods
• While Taylor left the worker alone for his leisure time, Ford wanted to incorporate work and leisure under one management regime (would surveil workers to make sure their leisure was done appropriately)
  • Ford was continuing the tendency for mid-Victorians onward to police workers: make sure they’re clean, looking at high art pictures, exercising, etc): “rational recreation” 14
    • So, bourgeois types of leisure pushed on the working class have been interpreted as just more rationalized scientific management of workers (Andrew, Closing the Iron Cage; Rigauer, Sport and Work): alienation, standardization, etc
• Yet workers often resisted these imposed leisure forms and created their own: Ewan, The Captains of Consciousness; G Stedman-Jones “Class Expression versus Social Control?”; The Aristocracy of Labor in Nineteenth Century Brain, Gray
  • “as a badge of class identity”
• Rojek explains how you can apply alienation to labor even tho’ Marx was talkin about work
  • “the experience of labor as external or self-denying finds its parallel in the experience of the consumption of leisure experience as external, coerced, and manipulated” replacing the spontaneous w/the forced 16 so that we are like animals in a state of “passive consumption”
    • Marx: “his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts)
    • So Rojek says here we could see where leisure could be “mere animal activity” of Marx’s vision of labor
    • He says this is basically the argument of Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (standardized work and leisure is about “amusement, with fee-paying activity, distraction and social control) and of A and H’s Culture Industry
• His summary of the culture industry
  • “It organized subjects at the very moment when subjects are led to believe that they are truly free: in their ‘non-work’ time.” 17 with a conservative, patriotic tone of culture (good triumphs over evil, we don’t need to change a thing about society)
  • “breeds complacency…things are not so bad after all…isolates social critics as misfits or dissidents”
• Siegfried Kracauer, their contemporary, also says: work and leisure involve same body rhythms: It is conceived according to rational principles which the Taylor system only takes to its final conclusion. The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls” qtd 17
  • b/c all activities incl sex and leisure, have a specific time and place to occur in
  • conformity secured in representation of synchronized bodily movements
  • culture “bewitches” people, forces them to “comply with the system that brutalizes and enslaves them. The body at work is regimented to crave the same rhythms and synchrony in leisure” 17
• Who doesn’t believe the Frankfurt School?
  • Dick Hebdidge: people “neutralize, subvert, and oppose codes of manipulation” 17
  • you are too pessimistic and underestimate everyday resistance
• Capitalist State: quotes Marx saying that government is really just the “executive committee of the ruling class” (the bourgeois getting their way)
  • Althusser’s ISAs ideological state apparatus that convinces you to submit
  • Durkheim: the state as “above all, supremely, the organ of moral discipline” 19, Professional Ethics and Civil Morals
    • making this particular system normal, natural, obvious (Corrigan and Sayer)
  • where does leisure come in? deciding to support certain leisure forms and not others (some are deviant); deciding what kinds of activities are “decent” and “normal”
• Abercrombie et al, The Dominant Class Thesis
  • They say that instead of ideology securing the consent and ruling the behavior of the dominated class, actually it secures the dominant class. Meanwhile, dominated class culture v. subversive
  • Rojek says this idea means that leisure time maybe hasn’t been effectively policed
  • maybe things aren’t as homogeneous and standardized as you think; maybe our societies are differentiated…ie now that we’re in the period of flexible accumulation a la Harvey

Some History of Leisure Studies

• Traditional approach: sociology of leisure
  • where leisure’s all about “freedom, choice, creativity, and self-determination” 22
  • where leisure has “humanizing potential”
  • Young and Wilmott 1973 The Symmetrical Family
  • Roberts 1978, 81; Leisure; Contemporary Society and the Growth of Leisure
  • Parker 1983 Leisure and Work
• Then, in the eighties, the cultural studies approach was the dominant approach: Hall (Culture, Media and Language 1980), Hall and Jefferson (1975 Resistance through Rituals), Bennett and Mercer (1986 Popular Culture and Social Relations), Mc Robbie? (1978 “Working-Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity), Fiske (1987 Television Culture), Tomlinson (1989 “Whose Side Are They On?” in Leisure Studies)
  • Against sociology of leisure:
    • this stuff reminds you that “leisure choices are made in a context of structured inequality.” 22
    • says that tradish analyses only look at work-leisure dynamic, outside of rest of culture
    • tradish approach “overestimat[es] voluntarism” and assumes we’re free 22
    • “tended to rely on survey methods and quantitative data” which can’t ever be accurate and skews answers of respondents (surveys limit)
    • and it doesn’t want to change society but only describe it as it already is: “facts” don’t show you how it came to be or how it relates to power and inequality 23
• Cultural studies in leisure: at greatest energy late 70s and through 80s
• Cultural studies gets critiqued
  • You’re not the only one to recognize inequality (ie feminist readings)
  • Doesn’t work out culture/class relation (if you’re not talking about Marxist class how can you pretend to represent a social totality? And yet if you do, then what about your diversity? There’s a tension between Marxism and cultural studies not worked out!)
  • It all leads to same thesis about class inequality: “mechanically repeated to suit every eventuality” 23 and is blinkered b/c always sees class as the hidden answer; not impartial
  • Sometimes indiscriminately applies “hegemony” ie class manipulation to culture, leading to silly conclusions instead of good ones: he notes that Willis concludes that consumerism is now active, that Critcher and Clarke conclude, “leisure is never wholly free nor totally determined activity,” and Rojek’s like, duh.
  • And it doesn’t even mention play or fun 24, instead it’s only about contestation, conflict (and he notes the political valence found in interpretations of leisure are “asserted rather than demonstrated” and I agree)
  • Example critics against cultural studies apparoches: Chaney 1994 The Cultural Turn, Tester The Flaneur 1994
• What has cultural studies done well?
  • a kind of structuralism which doesn’t let you just say “Freedom!” and have a coherent argument
  • talking about actual experiences
  • opens up question of “emancipatory potential of leisure” 24
• Hall and Jacques New York Times argument, 1989, along the vein that state control is not the best interpretant for leisure
• Cultural studies: “frontiers of resistance” rather than the Adorno and Horkheimer monolith
  • best example of this in leisure studies is Clarke and Critcher 1985
• Clarke and Critcher, The Devil Makes Work
  • Marxist
  • Leisure is at once “part of the universal market…subject to the processes of commodification and homogenization” and yet also (and this is THEIR words, not Rojek’s) “an arena for cultural contestation between dominant and subordinate groups”
    • how? by looking at “variety and diversity of popular culture;” in beyond its common resistance against ruling groups, differences in leisure forms in diff age, locality/region, ethnicity, gender
      • tho’ they still are Marxist in that they see all laborers together in their antagonism w/capital; they are not “the end of class” people
  • capitalism truly oppresses b/c you only think about what you choose (we get to choose, whoopy) instead of actually having the power to DETERMINE what you can choose from)
  • leisure is run via hegemony (Gramsci’s term, which Williams in The Country and the City helped to popularize as an alternative to Marx’s outdated “ideology” b/c “hegemony” is more complex)
    • hegemony also recognizes that workers not under false consciousness (“well area of class manipulation” 22), but instead “continuing interplay and negotiation” between classes
  • So, let’s get to leisure: hegemony as explanation for leisure relations: in their words, “Innovations in leisure may test the limits of the dominant ideas about what are acceptable leisure meanings and experiences…there is ‘cultural work’ to be done, legitimising and incorporating new forms, while marginalising and suppressing others” qtd 22

Feminists on Leisure

• “Both Marxism and orthodox feminism play down the ambiguities of commodification in favor of a utopian model of society in which these ambiguities are eliminated” 28
• Tradish sociology of leisure critiqued for its male-centred analysis: leaving women in the dark
  • Deem 1986 All Work and No Play?, Bella 1989 “Women and Leisure,” Hargreaves in the 1980s and 1990s, incl Sporting Women
  • Leisure analysis has posited “classless, deracialized, degendered ‘individual’ 28
  • What about gendered nature of free time? that cuts across class identity?
• Leisure has been “exclusionary” to women, limiting the type and number of leisure activities they access
  • Women kept at home, their work seen as non-work
    • Thus, they call child-care, shopping, chores, bodily maintenance “leisure” (Wearing and Wearing, “All in a day’s leisure”)
  • Women’s leisure has to be “caring” whereas men’s does not
  • Mc Robbie? and Griffin: young girls’ leisure tied up with house work, but not boys
  • leisure spaces “dominated by men” 29 “subject to the more powerful male gaze”
    • confined to home or bedroom
  • mothers more affected in their leisure time than fathers
• “Male-dominated research is criticized for making a fetish of scientific method and hierarchical relationships in research” 30 “treats people as objects” (Stanley and Wise 1992 Breaking Out)
  • also is seen to be complicity w/inequality b/c such methods don’t commit to changing conditions
    • they say that feminism makes “emancipation the object of research” Henderson and Bialschki “Leisure Research and the Social Structure of Feminism”
• Critiques of such feminist tactics have said that other methods will be emancipatory, theirs are biased, or you’re forgetting race, etc
• Do women have a “common world” of leisure?
  • Well you’re forgetting class, status, type of household, etc
  • too hopeful about your capacity to change things, feminists, b/c then you are only in womes-only groups and don’t let men in who have the same goals as you; and some other divisions will still exist
• Ultimately looking at leisure just from a male-rule perspective is too limited and simplistic 33
  • However, you can’t forget to look at sexism, he says
• Feminism did become important element in leisure and made gender integral in leisure studies: since the mid-80s, he says, any work that doesn’t involve gender on some level has been attacked
• Feminism has been a part of Rojek’s fight in stopping the illusion that leisure is about freedom b/c they’ve said, for example, “in practice norms about femininity, respectability and motherhood operate as powerful constraints on women’s licence to engage in leisure activities” Woodward et al “The Sociology of Leisure and Women’s Sport”
• More recently, women are questioning whether leisure always makes women the loser, and he clearly doesn’t want to limit the discussion to gender

Modernity 1: The Roots of Order

• Modernity 1: order and control
  • “a general transformation of personality, economy, and society which has its roots in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment but which crystallized with the industrial revolution.” 36
  • often called “positivism” (“that science can only deal with observable processes and conscious experience…record objects and processes and to build general laws from this material…ultimate weight on quantitative data”) “functionalism” (where everyone must play his/her proper role for health of society, incl. rhythms of labor and leisure to keep it all going) and “pluralism” (political economy: interests group jockey for power democratically)
    • Leisure under Modernity 1 as functionalism is a “function to be fulfilled” 37 to keep society in “good order” while any disorderly leisure needs to be fixed or eliminated
    • Leisure under Modernity 1 as positivism: quantitative data: surveys, charts, graphs
• But values get in the way of facts (fact is actually whatever’s the dominant ideology); too formalistic and not about real experience (too much about the “established and observable” 38; so they don’t look for example at illegal leisure like animal baiting, illegal sexual behaviors, trespassing, drugs); laws ignore the developmental and the comparative (universalizes)
  • Why have people done it then in studying leisure? B/c gives you clout, it’s rather easy and adaptable, it’s good for policy
• “Modernity 1 defines leisure as occupying an observable space and time in society and having an observable function” 38: they see leisure as necessary for keeping social order
  • ie, Dumazedier, The Sociology of Leisure 1974 “word leisure for the time whose content is oriented towards self-fulfilment as an ultimate end. This time is granted to the individual by society, when he has complied with his occupational, family, socio-spiritual and sociopolitical organization” qtd 38
    • individualist standpoint
  • ie, Olszweska and Roberts 1989: Leisure and Life-style: “Societies create leisure only in so far as their economies produce in excess of more ‘basic’ requirements. And the growth of leisure in the modern world continues to rest on the relentless application of science and technology” and they say you get more leisure if you’re a successful worker (see, leisure a part of progress narrative)
    • and that leisure can’t replace work or its values “Without undermining its own vitality” 39 (that does seem about right to me…)
    • society standpoint: leisure “subsystem” of society and thus helps stabilize the society as a whole: “relaxation, exercise, innovation, education and preservation” 39
  • ie, Kaplan 1984 in Leisure “the primary value of mankind in industrial societies is leisure” qtd 39
• Such understandings of leisure ignore deviant leisure, so it’s incomplete and inaccurate
• Modernity 1’s leisure theory sees leisure as moral, stabilizing influence; only pays attention to “legitimate” types, times, and spaces for leisure (theatres, sports fields and arenas, public parks; and “holidays, weekends, and evenings” only)
  • notice how they are being policed, the time and space of leisure, Rojek points out
• Modernity 1 also sees “certain forms of identity, association and practice are appropriate for leisure” and others not so much, sometimes by laws but usually by social mores (“civilized behavior”); so leisure is “legitimate and progressive” 39

Five Types of Modernity 1 Social Order Theories

• 1) Conservative Theory
  • invisible hand of society keeps people in order through their own self-interest
  • society as “an open race in which the best finally win through”
  • its leisure: Kaplan’s Leisure: Theory and Practice 1975: “Leisure…is a relatively self-determined activity experience that falls into one’s economically free-time roles; that is seen as leisure by participants; that is psychologically pleasant in anticipation and recollection; that potentially covers the whole range of commitment and intensity; that contains characteristic norms and constrains; and that provides opportunities for recreatio, personal growth, and service to others.”
  • Rojek: such theories of leisure see it as “antithesis of work,” about “personal growth and social harmony,” progressive, has rules
  • Progressive stuff: Kraus 1987 Recreation and Leisure in Modern Society: lists six ways leisure helps society
    • social cohesion/adjustment (promotes tolerance, satisfies needs, grows skills, makes you happy); self-realization (to make up for work); community renewal; citizenship (responsibility; “wholesomeness”); personal health; personal commitment (you care about your social group more)
  • Godbey 1989 leisure is what is its own end, isn’t necessary, has few constraints, little anxiety or time-consciousness, has lots of personal autonomy, self-actualiziation
  • What’s missing? Difference, otherness, problems with seeing leisure as socially good (he notes Nazi’s Kraft durch Freude movement of cheap leisure like musical events, theatre, walks, vacations used as a chance for propaganda
  • this is much of the earliest leisure theory
• 2) Moral Regulation Theory
  • late 70s, early 80s developed
    • developed in sociology of culture from Gramsci’s “Americanism and Fordism”
    • when production changes a change in consumption must result in response: that is, there’s a new “regime of accumulation” (a set of prod and con together)
    • mode of regulation: the non-economic institutions that help to keep the regime together: “schools, universities, hospital, the welfare system and mass advertising” 42, usually coordinated by state intervention
    • so what’s going on is that human behavior is brought down to size, that is, the size of the production so that people are made to match the production model to secure profit not help them
    • ex: Corrigan and Sayer’s work that moral regulation makes a particular system’s norms look natural and inevitable
  • State does it through physical force (Think Weber’s idea that state has monopoly on violence; think enclosure and the closing of hunting lands to workers), taxation and licensing (David Harvey showed how street singers in Paris had to get their songs approved by gov in advance to prevent socialist entertainment, and not allowing sale of alcohol on Sunday), and moral example (holidays for soldiers and heroes, marches, festivals, family values movements; choosing to fund certain types of leisure, which then look normal)
  • Modern order = self-discipline (a la Foucault)
  • Leisure time determined by social structures
  • What’s wrong w/this model? People aren’t lumps of clay but rather negotiate their behaviors and identities: Cunningham 1980 Leisure in the Industrial Revolution and Gray 1981 The Aristocracy of Labor in the Nineteenth Century say this, showing that people rebelled from such control from above, and rather make popular culture themselves: “elastic” says Rojek 45
    • E P Thompson did say the disciplinarians won, so he’s on the other side of this argument
  • Other problem: the state’s importance is overestimated here!
• 3) The Protestant Ethic Thesis
  • Weber showing how work went from a quiet, uncompetitive, not overdetermining factor in your life: as Rojek says for Weber “Leisure was woven in the the fabric of everyday life. It was not space and time to be challenged or struggled for, rather it was seen as an immemorial feature of life”
    • Weber’s words: “this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed” b/c of Puritan tradition of thrift, hard work, modesty where you serve God
    • B/c Calvinism means you don’t know if you’re saved, the person is in a “wretched state of inner turmoil” and for “bearing this burden” you develop this way of working, to show that you are chosen: you spend life in work not in enjoyment; and you above all cannot waste time
    • Weber’s words: “impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism” qtd 46
  • These habits = wealth accumulated; so everyone begins to copy, and now it dominates the world as “an irresistible force”
  • Weber shows life being rigidly divided, work v leisure
    • Also shows why leisure is routinized and why you feel guilty and anxious about it
  • Fights against Weber: lots o religions have this quality not just Protestantism; and you forget the hedonistic types of leisure
• 4) Conspicuous Consumption Theory
  • “Display and show are central in understanding order in Modernity 1.”
    • emulation
  • Veblen: leisure: “non-productive consumption of time”
    • summary: the leisure class, the owners of capital, show they are such via c c, which shows that they have time and money to waste and don’t have to engage in productive labor
  • He’s critiqued for saying that the higher class sets the stage for the lower class culture and for giving too much emphasis on pecuniary value in culture, but Rojek say’s he’s great for semiotics of wealth
  • Also, Erving Goffman, not just Veblen: “modern society has evolved specialized spaces where conspicuous role display and reversal, preening and symbolically exciting situations are concentrated. He defines action spaces quite formally as spaces in which ‘activities and are consequential [and] problematic [are] undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake’” Interaction Ritual 187
    • such as “pool halls, casinos, discos, amusement parks, sports arenas and game arcades” 48
    • they have “fancy milling:” “open social contact with others in a setting dedicated to conspicuous consumption or the mere acquisition of pleasure”
      • you feel the effects of social mobility via spectacle and c c; it opens up opportunities; you don’t know what will happen next; you could flirt or see someone famous or get “real action”
      • you can consume some valuables, go to a fancy place, watch some fancy entertainment and then there’s possibility esp when there’s a big crowd 49
      • fancy milling says Rojek “involves symbolically relaxed participation with others and opening oneself up to acceptable risks and uncertainties”
      • it’s in a sense “vicarious experience” b/c you “project” yourself “into the role display pattern and apparent life situation of others” (it’s vicarious experience)
      • it lets you get away from your “serious” life and its limitations, what it prevents you from getting: “conspicuous acts of projection and release”
    • the sad part: it’s also “atomized…does not require participation with others.” why? b/c the usual vicarious experience occurs via mass media (films, fiction, theatre); it’s temporary (you must go back to the other world, they end up supporting that other world); and it’s thus only a “dreamworld” in Rojek’s words
    • Goffman: you have two kinds of spaces and action appropriate for them, the quiet and safe ones (home, work) and the ones that require [removed]”Lay himself on the line and place himself in jeopardy during a passing moment” 49) and from this contrast “we fashion nearly all of our commercial fantasies.”
  • What does Goffman do? “signs and symbols regulate conduct” “sociology of action places” “semiotics of social life” 50
    • Limits: doesn’t care about underlying structures or power; it’s only from the position of the “consumer” person, not anything more
• 5) The Theory of the Civilizing Process
  • Comes from Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process late seventies, early eighties, two volumes
  • “social order as a structured but unplanned process” 50 b/c people are intertwined by long chains
  • some people have more “chance” than others, but largely this is a theory of interdependence and mutuality, not about one single person challenging something else or forcing people to do something, not assuming that some people have all the power and others have none (this error Rojek calls “zero sum models”)
    • instead we’re seeing “the web of naked and tacit assumptions and connections which enmeshes them and frequently pushes and pulls them in directions which are against their will” 50
  • order comes from the connex that keep people together
    • and it notes that we don’t usually get our own way “irrespective of others” 51 (you usually discipline yourself)
  • leisure helps you get out your aggression and negative feelings
    • in Elias’ words, “many leisure pursuits provide an imaginary setting which is meant to elicit excitement of some kind imitating that procured by real life situations, yet without its dangers and risks. Films, dances, paintings, card-games, horse-races, operas and detective-stories and football matches…”
      • Rojek notes that this view sees leisure as “mimetic” b/c “enables us to abandon the restraints on our emotions in relatively controlled and enjoyable ways” 51 “project our passionate feelings” safely
    • in this way Elias’ idea goes against the tradish association of leisure w/relaxation
  • they are also going against the tradish dichotomy of routine/escape, necessity/freedom
    • such ideas say that work is where you are subject to deprivation whereas leisure is all about fulfilment; or that women’s work is dominated by men but their leisure allows them to be free
    • Elias and Dunning say no, actually, some work is pleasurable and some leisure boring or empty 51
      • and even though ‘culture industry’ would make you think all leisure is routine actually some of it isn’t: “they can also be de-routinized from time to time…they can provide heightened enjoyment provided one is able to cater for them in a non-routine manner” qtd 52
  • Elias and Dunning: “social life as a process” instead of thinking that west is at some kind of end-point: civilization is not “finished business” and so leisure can have diff meanings at diff times
    • society not “rigid, unchangeable”
  • Why are they cool? “healthy distaste for positivist and functionalist thought” b/c they “do not automatically associate leisure with ‘the good life’” or think it’s about “freedom, choice, spontaneity, and self-determination” and they care about leisure’s relation to whole society not just work
    • Why not cool? don’t get outside of the “civilizing” thesis; doesn’t take emancipation seriously or alternative/otherness seriously (so it seems like it supports status quo); and it minimizes aggression by seeing it as neutralizing, as safety-valve, which looks like “no way out, ever!”
      • and they actually say we live in “unexciting societies!” whoa, says Rojek, but the metropolis is exciting
      • and it’s too scientific, testability too important: social sciences not really about facts, and they’re forgetting how significant impressions and experiences are; they think they’re objective and denigrate “passionate” academics like feminists
• In general, Rojek notes, “Leisure itself is too narrowly associated with consumption. There is not enough in this perspective about production, innovation, or challenge in leisure conduct. Order is assumed too readily”
• “Modernity 1 values work as the central life interest and regards leisure to be a necessary but secondary part of life” 45
• “Modernity 1 never achieved the finished, unchallenged order of things to which it so ardently aspired. Modernity 2 was always waiting in the wings behind every legislative movement and every moral edict to bluntly reveal the fundamental disorder of things” 45
• “In the name of ‘progress’, Modernity 1 sought to control both nature and society. This involved prioritizing certain personality types and spaces in the social and geographical landscape and annexing others…the self was organized as a machine to accumulate value from leisure as well as work, and to consume commodities and ‘civilized experience. The corollary of this process of self-making was an empiricist, rationalist, atomistic, calculating egoistic outlook.” 56
  • Counter views: Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumption, say that Romanticism’s “dynamic organicism” (growth) was important, not just the machine, and people appreciated individualism, change etc
    • rebuttal: Rojek, yeah well that was secondary
• Modernity: “Leisure, with its time-worn associations with pleasure and freedom, was welcomed as the reward for work. But an excess of leisure was feared as undermining society. Leisure was always treated as secondary.” 57
  • Leisure as enriching ourselves is Romantic and “was treated as a threat to society precisely because it encouraged a disrespect for the inflexible, time-tabled existence favored by the ruling order”
  • Modernity came at leisure “with the same sober spirit of rationalism that it applied to every other part of life. Leisure time and space was materially and symbolically divided from work time and space. The seaside resort, the spa, the music hall and other leisure spaces offered ‘an escape from formality’ (Walvin 1992:217)” 57 (From A Child’s World)
• Kasson 1978, Amusing the Millions about Coney Island: turn of century, production economy turns into consumption and leisure economy (packaged holiday tours, luxury shopping)
  • indeed turn of century is “when leisure and consumption assumed greater prominence in the organization of everyday life” so that you have a switch from old values of industry, security, respectability gotten from duty and hard work, into the immediate gratifications of popular entertainment and temporary release
  • Kasson concludes that momentary release still helps to regulate, keep order, protect status quo, where fantasy turns into acceptance: “paradoxically, the spirit of egalitarianism fostered in the new leisure spaces ultimately functioned to reconcile leisure-users to the inequalities of society at large” 58
    • that’s a heavy complaint; Rojek say’s its “very familiar”, esp in feminist and Marxist analyses
• Pemble 1987 “greater accessibility to these leisure space [by non-leisure class] promoted outbursts of rage from the leisure class who despaired that their havens of retreat were about to be over-run with pleasure tourists from the middle and artisan orders” 57 The Mediterranean Passion
• Modernity 1 knows that its ways involve some sacrifices and loss of human experience but say it’s worth it for security: you don’t have liberty but you have stability

Modernity 1’s “Mechanisms of Regulation”

• “a grid which is imposed upon life…rigid discipline of order. Special times for work, special times for play; segmented space for serious activity, segmented space for the less series life – the life of leisure” 59
  • seen as a voluntary contract, like Foucault’s “carceral networks” which create the idea of the individual (the individual is “written before he or she is born” 59) where discourse and power networks are “parasitic” and surround the individual; determining the status of the person, his context, his qualities etc
  • three types of power: institutional (ethnic, social, religious forms), economic (class), and subjective power (power about the “self”), history tending to replace the first two with the third (getting into identity politics; from external domination to self-discipline)
• Leisure and power: well traditional and Marxist views on leisure talk in terms of “freedom,” whether you can get it or not via leisure; but Foucault shows us that leisure is a part of the carceral system, full of prohibitions and regulations, so it cannot be free
  • of course, “carceral networks as simultaneously a source of regulation and empowerment” 60 so micro-politics (the level of everyday life) (not about large structures or institutions)
• Micro-politics of Leisure
  • some concepts that within leisure help to produce and regulate the individual
  • the body: Turner’s work says “you’ve ignored the body” in 80s, 90s
    • cf the “leisure look” of the woman in a tracksuit and full makeup, w/out any sweat
    • lots of our leisure time spent adorning and maintaining the body and displaying it, about making yourself attractive…but people haven’t really addressed that issue
    • Modernity 1 “created the atomized individual ruled by the dictates of the life-cycle”
      • each type of leisure corresponds to a moment in the life cycle: in maturity, leisure is supposed to revolve around family; as late adolescent, is supposed to concretize your independence
      • advertising pitches the vacation to that time period: retirees find vacations that are soothing, comforting, that is less hedonistic than it is communal (Chaney’s work), thus giving you a “utopian alternative” to the loss of autonomy you experience as you age: so none of these leisure activities are individual choices about leisure
    • Ann Game on Bondi Beach in Sydney: the “Gaze” of the tourist industry on the tourists, controlling how they behave
    • Findlay on theme parks and world’s fairs looks at landscaping and design that tries to control behavior through a few key features:
      • essentialism: they boil down the metropolis to a few key images to control your “mental map” of the culture
      • pride: evoke respect and pride and reverence for national culture
      • promise: “of a better life” 62 to “harmonize and edify leisure behavior” that are the corollaries of American expansionism
  • the family, “the ideological centre under Modernity 1”
    • Samuel Smiles saying that the home prepares you for social life
    • divided by gender: father motivates, mother manages
    • but of course the truth is that the “nuclear family” often doesn’t exist or at least isn’t truly the natural organizing factor but an historical or ideological development
  • religion
    • in modernity 1, organized religion decreases
      • Durkheim: b/c of mobility, pluralization, scientific knowledge, etc, so the new industrialized societies make up new ways to make them cohere, instead of religious belief: the “cult of the individual” (rights and capacities, duties, etc)
    • people have argued that leisure has replaced religion’s functions: Durkheim said the state could have full calendar of holidays to replace the religious calendar that would bring community together
    • for example, leisure seen as uplifting people, just like religion would have: it’s a kind of conversion, I guess
    • for example, sports seen as new religion: purpose, authenticity, identity etc; to find new types of ritual (Burns, “Leisure in Industrial Society” by the early 70s people were saying this)
    • for example, Mac Cannell? in mid seventies about tourism as the search for authenticity “the rhetoric of tourism” says you find the real things as against the artificiality of your regular society: this is “typical… actual… real… original… authentic… true”
    • and of course they’ve recognized that this search for authenticity has very little truth value: it’s all staged, distorted, calculated 67
  • habitus (Bourdieu’s term)
    • Habitus: an imprinted, distinctive pattern of social conduct that motivates or propels your behavior; socialization is the process of imprinting this “onto the individual” esp through rewards and punishment and therefore “thoroughly organize the individual” via speech, customs, dress, ideology of local community/family/etc; a “habitual way of doing things” 68
      • diff families have diff positions in larger society, so habitus is “differentiated” among them, based on affluence and cultural capital
      • allows you to classify people
      • allows you to evaluate yourself in comparison with others
    • how does it connect with leisure? each one of his three classes: legitimate, middle-brow, and popular: competes for access to leisure as well as to put the cultural badge of approval on their distinctive styles of leisure and hence get power (b/c you therefore have more cultural capital)
      • leisure is symbolic, part of a power struggle
    • evaluations of leisure always under construction, always changing (ie decline of fox hunting in Britain as barbaric): inflating, deflating like currency
    • what’s wrong w/Bourdieu? too deterministic b/c you merely reflect your class situation
      • but Bourdieu says, no, my idea is flexible (social behavior is always being modified, changed; kind of like Karl Popper’s “open society” with its “Free discussion” of values)
      • but then Habermas replies, what about the unconscious factors shaping your behavior? ideology is v powerful and makes compliance look like rebellion and openness
    • Beyond Bourdieu: Rojek says to look at subculture analysis, which shows that “leisure activity is an important testing-ground for opposing the values of ‘straight society’” 69
      • cf Cohen 1955 Delinquent Boys, Cloward and Ohlin 1960 Delinquency and Opportunity, Suttles 1968 The Social Order of the Slum
  • bureaucracy
    • Weber: “bureaucratic organization involves precision, speed, impersonality, unambiguity, methodical training, specialization and agreed rules of conduct…to produce coordinated, calculable action” and thus efficiency
    • bureaucracy instead of charismatic rule (obedience to person w/special powers) or traditional rule (time-honored); although to a certain extent they’re all always there
    • “bureaucratization of society increases calculation, measurement and control…at the level of both the body and society” 70
    • bureaucracy in leisure: in grooming, exercise, dieting, separation between work time and leisure time, work spaces and leisure spaces
      • (hence “the creation of purpose-built leisure spaces in which leisure can be invested was a product of Modernity 1. In the second half of the nineteenth century a variety of new leisure spaces emerged: seaside resorts, parks, boarding houses, winter gardens, promenades, pavilions, pubs, music halls, country cottages and holiday homes” King 1980, essay on the vacation home in Buildings and Society)
      • “produced in part through working-class agitation”
      • and in part b/c of surplus provided by capitalism
      • in part b/c state gets committed to improving the health, education, recreation of its citizens
    • bureaucracy also “Standardizes” free time: “decline in spontaneity, contrast, and passion”
      • Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason said that now people just want to accomplish something in their leisure and that’s awful, it just looks like work: “doing amateur repairs, driving an auto, sitting at machines; even the idea of an old age free of toil no longer awakens any great yearning” so we’re just succumbing to bureaucratic rationality
    • Merton “Bureaucratic Structures and Personality” says that b. wants excessive reduction of personality in favor of rigid rules and rituals; so that you care about the rules and not the thing itself; and you are too rigid about where and when it can happen
  • nationalism
    • leisure “traditionally” assoc w/nationalism b/c they train the character and imbue it w/national qualities, make you a gentleman
    • 16th and 17th c pastimes: “horsemanship, hunting, coursing, hawking, fowling, fishing, archery, fencing, travel, dancing, music, bowling, tennis, the playhouse and the cockpit” 71
    • games taught you discipline in 19th c England to learn imperial values like self-control and perseverance
      • Veblen of course sees it as archaic survival of the old predatory class
    • sports give you discipline
    • royal processions, festivals, etc: for “national unity”
    • Summerfield: “between 1870 and 1914 the music halls transformed the popular song from an instrument of social criticism into a vehicle of jingoism and conformity…eschewed political controversy” 71 “Patriotism and Empire”
    • Nazi German’s Strength through Joy program was leisure in the service of nationalism: you trained your body (drill), and “pleasure” was stigmatized as weakness, illness
      • Theweleit: for fascism, “Pleasure, with its hybridizing qualities, has the dissolving effect of a chemical enzyme on the armoured body. Attitudes of asceticism, renunciation, and self control are effective defenses” Male Fantasies
    • so, sport helps maintain the order… but can it challenge the order?
      • Mc Rone? on women’s sports “exposing” male power
      • black athletics help to raise consciousness
      • overall, however, after 1870 leisure is more often used to “extend the rule of nationalism, to organize obedient subjects” 72 creating “the fictive community of ‘the Nation’” to create and reproduce a “discrete political and moral economy” 72
  • citizenship
    • types of citizenship include civil, political, and social, and capitalism will formally declare civil rights to people but deny them the other two
    • in leisure this has happened: “the disjuncture is very evident in the contrast between the commodities on offer in the ‘free’ leisure market and the stratified inequality of access to the market associated with gender, race, and class…embraces some as active participants but condemns the majority to the status of non-participants” 72
    • for example we all see the advertisements, but who of us actually go out and do it?
    • state tries to control heritage sites, but this can be contested: Britain controls Stonehenge, but hippies claim they have access to it as a site of worship for the summer solstice. Conflict ensues.
      • so what happens is that the state claims to represent the whole nation and its leisure needs but in practice it marginalizes some people
  • escape
    • “intimations and ideologies of escape, the promise of life beyond duty and routine, nostalgia for simpler times/truer feelings” 74 Modernity 1 is full of it
    • before was pushed to the afterlife, but now looked for in life itself: “secular embodiment of these sentiments become more urgent, more gross”
      • why? b/c of surplus generated by capitalism of commodities and time
    • just as people were looking in wonder at the new metropolises, “the grid-like structure through which life was meant to be led was imposed upon populations” esp with “wise and industrious use of time” 75
    • one 1834 guidebook for young middle class ladies says “By being constantly and usefully employed, the destroyer of mortal happiness will have but few opportunities of making his baneful attack, and by regularly filling up your precious moments, you will be less exposed to dangers..in which idleness would perpetually involve you”
      • hence needlework, family conversation, reading, flower arranging were recommended
      • an example of the work ethic
    • in this work heavy atmosphere no doubt dreams of escape came
      • movies and advertising used this esp automobiles: cars give you freedom
      • Le Corbusier agreed: cars are fantastic and we need huge highways, which involves demolishing ancient structures and roads, sure, no problem
    • urban planning and leisure
      • Le Corbusier “assumed that daily life could be segmented into eight hours or work, eight hours of leisure and eight hours of sleep”
      • Walter Gropius: wants “wide spaces with light and air and areas for children’s play where nature can enter” and rooftop gardens 76
    • this was at its height in 50s and 60s (esp b/c Reisman 1964 coined post-industrial society we only work 40 hrs a week not 70 like in 1920s): so leisure is beocming visible, a “focus of lifestyle and consumption…banish drudgery in the workplace” so that more leisure is the result of industrial progress
      • But Rojek notes the “underclass” that is underemployed and has time but no money for enjoying leisure; while the richer ones have no more time to do so
• Overall, leisure in Modernity 1: pleasure can only be abstract or momentary, and even trying to find happiness “is ultimately unfulfilling” b/c of the wide and changing array of commodities and the unhappiness of possession
  • you have to repress so much to get the stuff
  • Marcuse: Modernity 1 is full of “mutilation, antagonism and surplus repression” 77 “On Hedonism”
    • you are separated from your real needs b/c you must be acquisitive
    • “Acts intending enjoyment do not achieve the fulfillment of their own intention…false pleasures because the drives and needs to fulfil themselves in them make men less free, blinder, and more wretched”
    • caught between “a particular interest and a hypostasized general interest that suppresses the individuals” 77
      • Solution? Marcuse says we need to let people decide for themselves what their needs and desires are; replacing the current institutions of control with “Association of free producers” 77
• Problems w/Marcuse
  • You’re assuming we all have some universal need underneath the facade of fake needs
  • Foucault’s carceral networks mean that Marcuse couldn’t actually destroy the institutions of power
  • you can’t get away from some people representing the interests of others in this “association” of producers and there’s always danger in representation
  • if you want to fix society, fixing production won’t be enough b/c there are other aspects of life
• “Modernity 1 treats leisure as a segmented part of the social structure. That is, leisure forms are theorized as distinct from the rest of life and they are invested with determinate functions”
• Poor Modernity 1’s central problem: “a fatal contortion…a knot which strangles the elegant rational uniformity of the grid-like structure of order. The modernist ambition to construct a universe of segmented order is opposed on the grounds that, in practice, it produces a nest of irrationality and disorder” 78
  • Foucault and Nietzsche pointed this pout
  • for leisure, you have it “celebrated as a playground of escape” yet created chains that make such an escape impossible
  • and what’s wrong w/it? it narrows, limits life experience. So you have a reaction to modernity 1: modernity 2

Modernity 2

• Takes off from Berman’s other side of modernity: “a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity” b/c of the destruction/creation process
  • you can’t create a stable rational order b/c modern life is all about constant change
  • all of the comfortable tidy divisions people make (man woman, base superstructure, time space) are not cohesive! we experience CHANGE instead
  • Berman: the “melting” tradition of modernity has been marginalized Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky
• “flux, change, de-differentiation and metamorphosis” 79
  • so laws of society? you can’t find em
  • Nietzsche, Simmel, Baudelaire all about “contradictory aspects of daily existence” 80
• Apollonian, Dionysian
  • Apollo, god of poetry and music; structure, order
    • its culture? “material abundance and superficial order” and yet huge human cost; you are your legal character only
  • Dionysus, god of wine, sensuality, intoxication
    • wants affirmation and contact, to love life b/c of the oncoming of death
    • must be open to all experiences, not “surrender” to respectability
    • what Nietzsche called the “will to life” “true life as a collective continuation of life” via sex
  • Greeks had both reconciled, and modern life tries to do it – and within everyday life
  • Apollonian tourists: “They climb the hill like animals…stupid and perspiring, no one has told them there are beautiful views on the way” they are only pleasure tourists without passion or beauty, and hence will get no health or creativity
    • too much about self-denial and what civil society needs from us
  • This is Nietzsche affirming, saying our lives deaden our bodies and our minds and souls, so we need to “embrace…the forbidden, the buried, the repressed” 81 to get more and more experiences
    • no more guilt, repression, hesitance
    • ubermensch: you overcome your own humanness (to embrace a higher humanity, you have to create yourself and make up your own laws and then follow them)
• Nietzsche and Modernity 2
  • “the rational order of modernity 1 is an illusion” (it’s not natural or the best way to go, and in fact it is “a form of organized mortification” 82)
  • “change is inevitable and must be positively embraced” (Nietzsche knows modern life is ephemeral and “convulsive” but you must embrace it rather than become anxious)
  • “modernity 2 relishes the spirit of affirmation” (be curious, don’t feel guilty, get to know yourself)
  • “modernity 2 celebrates the unavoidability of division and fragmentation” (for Nietzsche totality is a decadence, and innovation and change is healthy)
• Nietzsche: largely ignored in leisure studies, but he shouldn’t be
  • He can show us that present forms of leisure are too timid; they deny the passions and pleasure even while saying it’s the highest goal, making it impossible
  • In modernity 1, “the deviant is either imprisoned or driven underground – but never listened to or understood”
    • and Rojek said that we treat deviance in leisure studies the same way
  • Process rather than totality: “The whole no longer lives…it is compounded, calculated, artificial, an artefact”
    • and what you get out of your social whole, freedom and equal rights, leads to the lowest common denominator defining humanity, reducing us to “drudgery” and “torpor”
    • so fragmentation and division are against some “general subject” warning us that you can’t study some universal subject
• Modernity 1 was trying to gain profit, so was “trying to construct the entire world in its own images. Advertising, marketing, packaging and design were all used to make the commodity stand out” and glamorize consumption
  • It represents commodity culture as democratic but Marx and Benjamin say no
• Carnival
  • Bakhtin: “folk humor and ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” with the festivals “the central leisure event in society”
  • carnivalesque: “sharply distinct from the serious….forms of protocol which dominated life during the rest of the year”
  • Bakhtin’s words: “carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” 85
    • everything is comical, caricature: power, death, order; and the body reappears as well as Mother Earth
    • “both a utopian reaction against the norms of individualism associated with the growth of the market and a licensed release from the hierarchical order of ‘high’ culture” 85
• As modernity rationalizes, carnivalesque is marginalized, suppressed; and control over pastimes and traditions gets more and more invasive
  • Resistance: 1964 arrests were made “at the Oldham wakes” showing resistance from state control over forms of celebration by both locals and the press
  • 1833 Factory Act gives Christmas Day, Good Friday, and then a few half-holidays. And that’s it. Those are the only ones of mandated non-working days
  • Also state “repackaged traditional leisure events:” says Golby and Purdue, The Crowd in Civilization: commercialized (paying and watching instead of being a part of it yourself); liquor consumption controlled by state
  • new public events parading the royals and national heritage
• Where does the carnival go? To the edges, to the margins: Addison on the fairs going to suburbs, Walvin on the creation of seaside resorts on coasts (which were justified by health reasons); cf Coney Island (estb 1897-1905; by 20s declined seen as disorderly, decline, ungenteel) literally on edge of USA, and first theme parks on West Coast (Kasson: has sex and jollity but they’ve been “sanitized” first 86)
  • the freak show esp in America 870s-1930s: abnormal human bodies
  • The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White: modernity 1 “defined and re-defined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as ‘low’ – as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity…Disgust always bears the imprint of desire…nostalgia, longing” 87
    • so the devalued: “lewdness, lust, greed, and vulgarity:” really just get glamorized, you’re so curious you have to see; fascinated w/unrespectable (cf obsession with prostitutes during Victorian age, Rojek notes, exactly when respectable women are supposed to disappear from public view)
      • Theweleit 1987: these women are “undisciplined, sexually experienced and above all available…a fantasy-type at once both thrilling and threatening” 87 no stifling morality but then again there’s disease
• Shields: tension and release, Places on the Margin and Lifestyle Shopping in early 90s
  • leisure spaces feature a rocking back and forth between tension and release
  • they are therefore liminal zones, in Shields’ words “thresholds of controlled and legitimated breaks from the routines of everyday, proper behavior,” like deserts, the sea, forest, where you can be yourself b/c they are “beyond the control of civilized order” 88
  • limitations: “can never be areas of either genuine freedom of genuine control” b/c in Shields’ words “rather than the complete suspension of morality one finds the lifting on the curtain of morals followed by embarrassed or guilty returns to moral codes” 88
    • you must return, it’s part of the process, the code

Debord

• Today the commodity is about selling access to a dreamworld, a “symbolic universe of goods” 88
  • the first step was department stores, smalls, etc
  • identity fashioned around goods: Baudrillard
  • consumerism a religion: Jhally
• Cohen and Taylor, Escape Attempts, commodity culture gives you “the dream-stuff for exercises in imagined otherness” where you can escape from daily life
  • so, leisure gives you “symbols and images which we use to negotiate daily life” b/c its “escape routes” make normal life posible
  • for them, there’s a contradiction where yes it’s regulated by commodity production but then again some people truly find meaning in it: so it is regulated and yet can give escape; that’s just how the process works, contradictorily
• Debord, the Situationist leader in 50s and 60s
  • 1967 Society of the Spectacle
  • in modern life organized spectacles “replace real life…individuals float about in a semi-submerged state of consciousness…impotent spectators…beyond the control of any individual or group” (a parade, a film, a crash, etc, all of which are so spectacular they make daily life look really dull)
    • for leisure? it makes our leisure experiences pale, “which ordinary leisure experience cannot match”
    • Debord’s words: “Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption…is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself a guarantee of their equivalence”
  • What do you do about it? “highlight and celebrate the fundamental disorder of things” against the meaning-making coherence of the spectacle. Instead of accepting the spectacle, you “sabotages, steals, plays in the supermarkets and sleeps on the production line” qtd 90; via poetry, lifestyle, humor, irony and violence
  • detournement, meaning “diversion” and “subversion:” you take found materials and symbols “to challenge and reverse the spectacular order” b/c you want to play, amuse, reinvent
    • leisure here is about having fun, but serious fun (ie political); you must recognize the dehumanization in ordinary leisure and then transcend it 90
    • and you will uncover the fact that the spectacle is not self-sufficient and can’t keep itself up

Flanerie

• Modernity 1’s leisure: “purposeful activity harnessed to a rational goal” (improve health, education)
  • blasted idleness as a waste, a lack of will-power
  • Samuel Smiles: “Sloth never made its mark in the world, and never will” “burden” “incumberance” “nuisance”
  • Yet modernity 1 actually INCREASED the number of activities where people are passive! and idle (watching, waiting)
    • for example, “One drinks an unnecessary cup of coffee in a sidewalk cafe and watches the world go by while waiting for an appointment. One sits in a traffic jam killing time…” 91
• Baudelaire’s “new psychological character” created by the metropolis, the flaneur w/his “idle curiosity” in the social life around him, opening yourself up to the “sensations” around you
  • why? b/c modern city is “impersonal and episodic” and so “a source of boundless fascination”
• Benjamin hooks it up with leisure: “His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. It is also his protest against their industriousness” which Rojek explains “makes a virtue out of idleness” and puts senses above reason

The non-nation state: the Global and the Local

• Touraine, Robertson both say globalization makes studying from point of view of nation silly and meaningless
• Many assume that w/industrialization, everyone is getting more leisure
• However, some people are skeptical: A and H and Marcuse show how capitalism uses leisure as a manipulative tool: conformity, the “one dimensional man” and Riesman Abundance For What says the more leisure will merely mean more “empty and meaningless experience” 93
• Hebdige: people pick and choose from global cultures to make their own; it won’t homogenize b/c they are “mixing”

Leisure Space

• It’s a Modernity 1 cliche that leisure spaces are “free space, areas of choice, vistas of self-determination” where you are promised “release, self-knowledge, temporary uncluttered fun, liberation, maturity” 96 where you can have “personality, originality and continuity” rather than “impersonal, anonymous, episodic commodity relations”
  • maybe I can fight against Rojek here by saying that leisure didn’t always buy into individualist rhetoric even if it pretended to
• After 1840s these spaces are designed: public parks; game rooms in middle class homes, which gave a “sense of freedom” but it’s “constructed upon a regime of control” b/c separated from exterior world
  • thus they only help keep up the illusions that Modernity 1 has of leisure, he says
    • me: but what about public spaces? I think it can be diff there
• Benjamin on middle class household: “stripping things of their commodity character by means of his possession of them” on Baudelaire
• Public Parks: to incorporate nature inside industrial areas
  • part of the “rational recreation” movement of mid Victorian era: Robert Glendenning, one of the founders, is careful to say it’s more than just the fun of promenade and play, but actually “to feed the mind and exercise the body”
    • what rationalization
  • carefully divided from rest of city
  • Central Park designers saw themselves as offering a moral retreat
    • side note: they wanted it to be efficient, as efficient as a factory, so wanted roads but that would be ugly, so design shows the roads sunk under the ground level so they’re hidden
  • part of the rhetoric that industrialists give back to the public, that industry is compatible w/nature (even while it visibly TAMES and controls nature), to boast that industrialism gives you leisure and the places to enjoy it in 97
• “The architects of leisure under Modernity 1 can therefore be said to treat leisure spaces as the antithesis of work and living spaces.” public parks, seaside resorts, hotels, boarding houses, amusement centers (cf Kasson, Walton): to separate it from daily life “isolate it from the mundane, industrial world of routine and constraint”
• But can they truly create a counter-space?
  • No: Lefebvre: in the Production of Space: “Leisure spaces are arranged at once functionally and hierarchically. They serve the reproduction of production relations. Space thus controlled and managed constrains in specific ways, imposing its own rituals and gestures (such as tanning), discursive forms (what should and should not be said), and even models and modulations in space (hotels, chalets – the emphasis being on private life, on the genital order of the family). Hence this space too is made up of ‘boxes for living in’, of identical ‘plans’ piled one on top of another.” (P of Space 384)
    • you can’t have a ludic space in a society organized around accumulation of wealth b/c “always an object for individual capital investment” so the roads, hotels, shops, beer gardens, restaurants, arcades “Annihilate the sense of freedom, choice and self-determination which this space is supposed to radiate” 98
    • Lefebvre’s words again: “The truth is that all this seemingly non-productive expense is planned with the greatest care: centralized, organized, hierarchized, symbolized, and programmed to the nth degree, it serves the interests of tour-operators, bankers and entrepreneurs…representations of space facilitate the manipulation of representational spaces (sun, sea, festival, waste, expense)” P of Space 59
    • hence leisure space about ideology, which creates “illusory sphere of freedom” while actually creating “conformist and uncomplaining attitude” so that leisure spaces are all about control and capitalism and order, which is the exact reverse of what Modernity 1 says about itself

Deviant Leisure

• Modernity 1 allows it “only to chastise and reject it” 99 (ie sadism, drugs, stealing; as well as cross-dressing, transsexuality)
• Such activities are seen to transcend banality of everyday life
• Increase in legal action against “hooligan” practices at turn of the century for “street gangs, social crime, larking about and civil disobedience” which only worked to increase hooliganism b/c it was a response against the rationalization of the realm of work and discipline and against inequalities working class suffered (Humphries 1981
• 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act (banning opiates) did NOT “eliminate drug use” but actually spurred the creation of a subculture designed around drug-taking
• Deviant leisure isn’t spontaneous or mindless but rather “challenges…the law itself”
• Enclosure (see Malcolmson Popular Recreations in English Society 1700-1850 and Cunningham Leisure in the Industrial Revolution) destroyed popular leisure activities 100
• Game laws in 18th c restricted access to countryside; upholding the landowners
  • 1820s, creation of societies like “Ancient Footpaths Societies” and “Rights of Way Societies” that agitate for rights of pedestrians, so here we see arguments about leisure space rights intersection with property rights and state management of leisure

Conclusion of Modernity Stuff

• Berman’s “paradoxical unity” of unity and disunity, standardization and diversity, etc
  • Leisure is as well: “ascetic and hedonistic, integrating and disintegrating, active and passive. All of this leads to confusion, lack of certainty, and violent disagreement among commentators” 101
  • He calls leisure studies a “gladiatorial paradigm” where people defend their own arguments to the total destruction of everyone else’s; showing where they differ from other people and not their similarities or overlaps: people don’t want to find common ground here!
• 1) Modernity 1 = differentiation while Modernity 2 – de-differentiation
  • Leisure spaces do both of these as well: shows Lefebvre in P of Spaces: “The space of leisure bridges the gap between traditional spaces with their monumentality and their localizations based on work and its demands, and potential spaces of enjoyment and joy; in consequence the space is the very epitome of contradictory space. This is where the existing mode of production produces both its worst and its best – parasitic outgrowths on the one hand and exuberant new branches on the other – as prodigal of monstrosities as of promises (that it cannot keep)” page 385
  • summary: for L, leisure space is “prodigal monstrosity” where freedom of choice is actually created in and by capitalism
  • leisure spaces are liminal spaces (remember this is Shields: “which suggests their arbitrary, cultural nature” 8)
• 2) “Leisure is a combination of continuous and discontinuous processes” 102
  • So don’t think that leisure represents social progress (this is what he calls the evolutionary thesis)
  • Discontinuous = leisure that “oppose the dominant values in society”
• 3) Must place “experience at the center of analysis” which is “many-sided” and can’t be “read off” from assumptions based on someone’s gender, class, income, locale, etc
  • It’s usually Modernity 2: messy! process! disorder! irrationality! 103 (I love this)
  • they usually feel satisfaction yet meaninglessness, anti-climax
  • People usually DON’T experience leisure as “free” “self-determining” “flexible” HOWEVER that doesn’t mean all leisure is “false consciousness” and “manipulation”
    • You see, Rojek pleads, “inherent ambiguity of leisure” liminality where you are at the “THRESHOLD of freedom and control rather than the idea of absolutes” so leisure is “shifting” and “conditional” which he says fits the fugitive experience model of modernity. 103

Side notes

• 1995: says that leisure studies is trying to be recognized by academia as special field of study
• Freud: “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery” b/c it’s all about repression, Civilization and Its Discontents

Phenomenology of Leisure

• Phenomenology: “everyday experience and ordinary life…construct meaning and negotiate social interaction” 104 and “approaches the world from the standpoint of the naive or native subject” rather than being so-called critical or positivist (which assume all waitresses or car repairmen or whatever will think in the same way)
  • Some people say phenomenologists are merely describing or interpreting, not trying to change the world, but phen. say at least we know the texture of everyday life and not importing our own artificial categories and order
    • they do not import categories but try to see what is going on for itself
• Goffman: “I start with the fact that from an individual’s point of view, while one thing may momentarily appear to be what is really going on, in fact what is actually happening is a joke, or a dream, or an accient, or a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or a deception, or a theatrical performance….” 105
  • So phenomenologists are trying to understand what is really going on and see the interesting things that happen if you misunderstand
  • You need a standard to judge what reality means, and this is called “life-world:” “the overall structure of meaning within which…particular patterns and symbols are located and from which they derive their collectively shared significance” and is a “backdrop to our personal sense of everyday life”
    • the business of life works by “typifications” (expectations about a particular social setting, what happens there etc)
    • Lefebvre: such typifications and patterns are “residual” b/c it is “what is left over after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out” Critique of Everyday Life so often what is left out is the institutions: health system, police, judiciary, education anything that creates order: so this means human relationships and everyday experiences are MORE than just a reflection of institutions
      • “friendship, love, humor, play, eating, drinking, walking, communicating, and browsing” 105-6 like a generalized flanerie that’s part of your life without really choosing it
• Rojek: “everyday life is a powerful metaphor” for “the messiness and untidiness of human relations” found in Modernity 2
  • and this is beyond positivism, beyond critical sociology
  • cites de Certeau “everyday life has a critical edge” 106; ”’foreground practices and institutions’ which provide ordinary human experience with gravity and stability” whereas everyday is “innumerable other” “relatively minor” “organizing discourses” that have a tension w/the foreground stuff
    • why can they exist? they are not “homologous” to the institutional activities
• Fiske, Reading the Popular, consumers are creative when they make their “consumer and leisure choices” so we should look at leisure in terms of micro-politics instead of macro: instead of class gender etc just look at interpersonal: “specific interactions between people” and the way they “resist and defy” the white male capitalist structures
• Problems with Fiske and de Certeau
  • You say the consumer is constantly a hero, “endlessly unmasking…while remaining mobile, flexible, and free”
    • However as Mc Guigan?’s Cultural Populism points out, that looks a lot like classical defenses of capitalism as opening up a free market; sounds like you’re just echoing capitalist ideology about finding your identity in products
  • You can’t actually separate micro and macro b/c the micro happens without macro
    • I agree! micro practices have to happen only b/c the macro is lame
    • Rojek: “class, gender and race…are rather more than empty abstractions” 106
  • You are often being ahistorical, asocial in your account, yet actions always occur within a set of larger motivations and constraints
• Rojek prefers Cohen and Taylor 1992 Escape Attempts
  • “They see everyday life as a mixture of ‘chained activities’ which render collective life predictable, and ‘escape attempts’ which aim to utilize these activities as a precondition of freedom. Everyday life, they argue, consists of ‘multiple life-worlds’. Escape attempts in modern society reflect this variety of forms.”
  • Escape attempts: in their words “where he suspends self-consciousness because the activity in itself provides an adequate opportunity for self-expression” qtd 107
    • I’d agree they end up erasing self-consciousness but I’d say for a diff reason, b/c self expression has become meaningless or undesirable
  • “hobbies, games, sex, sport, holidays, gambling, fantasies, drugs, therapy, anarchist politics, communes and criminal activity”
    • and of course these can sometimes end up being used by capitalism, just deceptions (me: this is what Chesterton seems to be about)
    • “The fantasies of popular culture may support and enhance paramount reality. The advertisements for rum, cigars, or perfume are set on a white Jamaican beach might indeed provide the source material for fantasies but they hardly send people rushing to Jamaican beaches, for they provide no script for such a journey.” qtd 107
  • Cohen and Taylor care a lot about leisure: “in leisure that the chained activities of everyday life threaten to engulf consciousness with their denial of choice and freedom. Precisely because leisure promises to free us it can give us a demoralizing sense of anti-climax and even despair when, instead, it leaves us feeling trapped. But leisure is also the axis in society for the richest forms of fantasy-work and identity development.” that was Rojek’s summary 107
  • Their three types of leisure activities, tunnels “used to launch escape attempts” out of everyday reality; all can potentially “deliver genuine escape experience” but are often neutralized or weakened (or may “cave in”)
    • “Activity enclaves” within daily life: “hobbies, sex, sport and games;” lots of opportunities for it
    • “Landscaping” to change your “immediate or habitual environment in order to realize escape fantasies” 108 (holidays, adventures, interior design) for “variety and difference” (like customizing your house)
      • this is when your decoration “signifies the distant in space and in time” to “break the links of the chained reality”
    • “Mindscaping” where you change your state of mind (drugs, therapy) for the “inner voyage”
  • Why care? they show how everyday life is full of “imagined otherness” 108
  • Weakness of this argument: Rojek says it tries to have it both ways, that it’s genuine and yet not always successful…and you can only interpret leisure after it’s happened, so that makes it diff to analyze or recreate

Nostalgia

• “All the commentators on modernity refer to the depth and pace of change during modern life” 108
  • Simmel says modern consciousness has “secret restlessness” and “helpless urgency” (Philosophy of Money), while we are engaged in “search for ever-new stimulations, sensations, and external activities. Thus it is that we become entangled in the instability and helplessness that manifests itself as the tumult of the metropolis, as the mania for travelling, as the wild pursuit of competition and as the typically modern disloyalty with regard to taste, style, opinions, and personal relationships” qtd 109
  • Modern life “fractured and subject to impersonal, implacable pforces of change” “episodic and incomplete”
  • Marx: civil society is “excess” and “intemperate” were people get into “contriving and ever-calculating subservience, to inhuman, unnatural and imaginary appetites” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) w/”fantasy” “caprice” “whim”
• Restlessness happens as a result of dialectical interplay between Modernity 1 and Modernity 2
• As Leisure
  • turns into “the endless pursuit of novelty…the latest commodity or commodified experience but forget them”
  • anti-climax
  • excitement, but it all fades
• Simmel
  • two reactions to this “Bombardment of the senses: neurasthenia and blase attitude”
  • neurasethenia “a tightening of the nerves” when you respond to assault of sensations: accelerated emotions
    • Leisure becomes “a state of tension and expectancy…in search of genuine escape and satisfaction”
  • blase attitude: where you move from one sensation to the next to the next, without “committing” to any of them and going for the next opportunity for escape
    • Leisure activities “simply become ways of killing time” but still “helplessly search for excitement, release, and escape” 109
  • Simmel on the Berlin trade exhibition: “The way in which the most heterogeneous industrial products are crowded together in close proximity paralyses the senses – a veritable hypnosis where only one message gets through to one’s consciousness: the idea that one is here to amuse oneself. Through frequency of repetition this impression overwhelms countless not less worthy impression, which because of their fragmentation fail to register” qtd 110
    • Rojek sees in this the cycle of differentiation and de-differentiation
    • Leisure becomes where you look for completeness, but nonetheless it never fulfills this and is always incomplete. Why? B/c “these experiences are themselves momentary” even though you might feel excited or feel that you’ve escaped
      • Simmel: “this excitement and euphoria…subside remarkably quickly. The uplift which a view of the high Alps gives is followed very quickly by the return to the mood of the mundane”
      • music does the same thing: “leaves the state of one’s soul exactly at the point where it was before” so they only look like diversions

Homelessness

• Tradish society rooted, modern society rootless: “identity, place, practice, hierarchy” 110 (Berger’s The Homeless Mind)
  • you won’t die where you grew up, basically
• Sennett The Fall of the Public Man: now we have no hospitality or trust or help: no fraternity b/c have no collective perspective; where what you really have is “fratricide” b/c your collectivity becomes smaller and smaller, less sociable b/c it’s all about who to exclude and reject, getting smaller and smaller
  • What would leisure be here? “sectarian. It signifies distance and difference quite as much as closeness and belonging”
  • And b/c it seems so temporary, always changing, you never feel satisfied
  • Social interaction is denigrated: “withdraw from social interaction in order to know and feel more as a person”
    • and then leisure is a part of this, where you separate yourself from “strangers” 111
    • problem? alienation results, you don’t feel grounded in just yourself
• Sennett The Conscience of the Eye 1992 now says the b/c “modern culture is uneven, serrated, jagged…mutating in unforeseen ways” but you can’t regulate it from above, so you have possibility, so “play and leisure forms here can be read as open links enabling connection and identification” where people “cross boundaries and look over walls” and “spin the static order…into a vortex where no division…finally holds together” neat 111
  • homelessness “in terms of mobility. Modern transport and communications systems are depicted as freeing consciousness from the bars of sectarianism. Through travel, play, and leisure individuals extend their narrative space” 112
    • that is, he agrees w/Berger et al’s modernity’s “inevitable pluralizations of life-worlds” so that homelessness shouldn’t make you feel “despair or anguish”
    • instead, modernity is “a combination of privatization and the opening up of new public spaces, of amalgamating high and low culture and of mixing narratives instead of marginalizing them” 112

Narcissism and Hedonism

• Narcissism: takes Lasch’s definition: “a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires” qtd 112
  • subject becomes self-absorbed, has no more roots, no authority, etc b/c of their “profound lack of faith” that anyone can understand them
  • “Their leisure is a defiant statement of their inner self”
  • hopeless, “withdrawal from public life” and all you do is self-improvement: feeling better, eating better, taking lessons, learning new forms of wisdom, hobbies: while you are “avoiding challenge and development” and won’t mature, all about instant gratification
  • their lives? a search for themselves
• Modernity 1 “celebrated the rugged individual who utilizes the world as a resource to be shaped to his or her own design; it distinguishes between the private realm and the public realm” (whereas narcissist does not, thinking that world is beyond control and worries about their own death)
• Narcissism and Modernity: b/c modernity is “high-risk society” “prone to sudden dislocation caused…by economic depression, ecological disaster, terrorism and social protest” which seems to support a “siege mentality which always expects the worst” w/indifference and numbness
  • So, the narcissist just accepts this. What happens is that narcissism isn’t a decision really but a “perfectly mature and rational strategy to achieve personal success in consumer society” through “the management of the self in everyday life” 114: that’s the only choice people have to make in our society
• Narcissistic Leisure: “cannot provide an escape from the listlessness of daily life” b/c you can’t ever really find you or the perfect expression of you
• says Rojek now even the useful classes have leisure, so they are becoming narcissistic: infantile instant gratification and self-absorption (ie camera film your own life)
• Giddens says Lasch is silly and doesn’t see the “vitality” and “ceaseless innovation” of everyday life and how much social life still exists
• Hedonism: “the belief that the accumulation of pleasure is the prime goal in life” w/Dionysian drives at the top
  • Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, says that we add narcissism and hedonism, were you cultivate personal pleasure, not worry about the social; and commodities are used to be satisfied
    • requires “fantasy work” of daydreams of the perfect this or that: so you are always dissatisfied, always longing
  • hedonism as social critique (perofrmance art does this): resistance to puritanical Modernity 1; by people like Wilde, Dada, Situationists, punk
    • Daniel Bell, the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: hedonism leads to social paralysis b/c it’s “a world of make-believe” that only wants “immediate gratification”
      • and it actually depends on the system it says it rejects (merely critical not constructive)
      • and it actually supports capitalism b/c it’s all about accumulation and the self, not giving or the collective

The Infinity of Wanting

• “Market society seems to offer us an infinite universe of commodities and commodified experience” 116
  • Marxism has always said this: creates phantasmic desires and projects impossible satisfaction
  • NOW however, consumption is already about “wanting rather than having:” instead of the actual thing, you want the image or symbol of the commodity, so daydreaming seems good enough
    • Lasch: “The consumer lives surrounded not so much by things as by fantasies” The Minimal Self
      • me: maybe this is an historical development not eternal capitalist thing
• Ferguson, “Watching the World Go Round” on malls: “the market produces a haunting sense of absence in consumers even though it seems to offer them everything…it is impossible to conceive of owning examples of every item…wishing can never be translated into having” 117, so these four things happen:
  • Incompleteness (you can’t possibly be seeing ALL that is out there)
  • Arbitrariness (the thing you picked out circumstantially instead of by choice; and you feel that they don’t matter)
  • Fragmentation (you only meet a part of the commodity world; and this feeling is echoed in other areas of life)
  • Indifference (“Experienced as identical” so who cares what you choose)
• Leisure experience succumbs to this, says Rojek: these four things happen there too: “We always want more” 118

The Poetics of Leisure

• Part of leisure’s appeal is “the scent of poetry which is neutralized by the mechanical density of work and bureaucratic routine” 122
• Baudelaire saw poetry in the “constant upheaval, excitement and energy” of the steel and iron of the I R; he sees poetry in modern crowds
• Bachelard, however, is is main poetics guy, of course: “modernity is a universe of corners, private spaces, exterior spaces, nests, miniatures and shells”
  • And yet we are fascinated by transgression: “the poetic return ot hte elemental”
• Kasson (Amusing the Millions; on Coney Island); Rearick (Pleasures of the Belle Epoque; in France)
  • turn of century leisure and they connex it w/poetics: the “spell” that they put under folks b/c of all that speed and all those lights (for example they loved watching people do tricks in cars)
• Rojek against Baudelaire and Bachelard: they assume that “the alchemy of modernity works a universal spell…a yearning for the poetic crystallization of the eternal and the elemental from the flux of passing stimuli and impressions” 123
  • Seriously, he says, when do you ever get a chance to reflect on things? in an unmediated fashion? Esp when that’s what modernity does, “fracture consciousness”
    • and besides all that eternal stuff is a construct anyway
    • and of course such types of amusements didn’t last long (replaced b/c of cheap fast travel, radio, gramophone, film and television)
    • Me: what’s neat is that Rojek notes that there’s cleavage between reality and the rhetoric that we generally have trusted
• Does Leisure Have Poetics? “cannot be answered in the affirmative”
  • “What leisure offers is the charm of fulfilment which the density of everyday life negates.” and it’s only symbolized, hinted at, never given to you
  • However for Rojek it does. not. matter. that you won’t actually get it: “Rather it is part of the dream-world of escape and fulfilment with which modernity illuminates daily life. This dreamworld has a tangible poetic quality.” 124
    • esp b/c under modernity everything looks like a dream b/c of the huge gap between dream and reality

Regions and Staged Authenticity

• Goffman, Asylums 1959: “front and back regions in social organizations” the front is the face, the public interface w/staff; the back is the work or relaxation space for workers
  • Mac Cannell?, The Tourist 1976: tourism now includes back regions: the spheres are now de-differentiated and there’s a huge circulation of people everywhere
  • so we want to see the ”’real life’ of others” 124
    • “authenticity” “solidity” “behind appearances”
    • we want it b/c we realize our lives are artificial
• And yet such authentic moments are staged! Mac Cannell? calls it “staged authenticity” where naturalness is constructed, simulated
  • ex: “the pirate’s retreat” or “simulated moon-walks” and shopping mall decoration and fake “European” villages in US; and tableaux; Society for Creative Anachronism, Dickens Festival, Civil War reenactments
• They are “a simulacrum of spatial flexibility” 126 bringing the distant here (1889 Paris Exhibition crunching the world into a small neighborhood)
• Says that “today history can be chosen. We select how to relate to the past and remote places.” 126
• Reflects our feeling that that history and geography are flexible not “ineluctable gravity”
• People don’t care that it’s not “really” true

Satisfaction

• “Leisure as mass deception, leisure as myth, leisure as empty time-filling activity, leisure as control – these are some of the most prominent themes in the critical sociology of leisure.”
  • But “for many, real life only occurs outside the workplace. It is here where their emotions and interests are genuinely engaged….These people live for leisure” 127
  • So who are we to say False Consciousness? silly you you think you’re free?
• What’s wrong with modern life and leisure?
  • Mortality: “Leisure, it might be argued, concentrates our awareness of time passing.”
  • Inequality: it is “the essential context for studying choice and self-determination in leisure practice”
  • Change: modernity is “nothing seems to last”
  • Myth: “the familiar ideas in leisure studies that self-discipline is tantamount to freedom or that choice is equivalent to the options offered by consumer society are the mythologies of daily life.”
• Hence “there are good reasons, then, for arguing that satisfaction in modern societies has a delusional quality.”
  • Simmel on that exhibition: “One’s curiosity is constantly aroused by each new display, and the enjoyment desrived from each particular display is made to seem greater and more significant. The majority of things which must be passed creates the impression that many surprises an amusements are in store…Every fine and delicate feeling, however, is violated and seems deranged by the mass effect of the merchandise offered” 128

Conclusion

• Leisure in capitalist modernity: “to be given as a reward to the individual and society or withheld as a punishment or as a way of controlling social behavior” 175
• Is it a need? It always seems to be there, but pushed to margins
  • Habermas says that humans have two needs, work (production; material needs satisfied) and communication (institutions like community, media, leisure); and that capitalism distorts both of them
  • For Shields, leisure is a part of the human need for communication (which will “make orderly life possible”): play and leisure “through which individuals are formally and informally socialized into the rules and mores of collective life” 177
  • For Shields, leisure is part of basic individual needs, esp insofar as it is a social dispensation that will help the individual (ie part of balancing social needs w/individual needs): a society without leisure will not successfully produce and reproduce
• “leisure is posited as one institutional means which enables individuals to satisfy their basic individual needs for survival, health, autonomy, and learning. The point may appear to be somewhat pedantic. Actually it is a matter of real substance.”
  • Why? B/c he says that data show that leisure resources are treated as flexible, variable, esp in comparison to resources devoted to production, reproduction, politics, but we actually need them
  • Needs have been understood too much in the tradition of instrumental rationality (here’s looking at you Habermas) 177: not privileging leisure is seeing life “in Cartesian terms as the struggle of mind over the body and nature” where you forget allegorical, emotional, irrational
    • Descartes can’t talk to use about day-dreaming or flanerie
  • Needs have been understood too categorically, without understanding socially constructed nature: how are needs produced and mediated? 178 we need to know that
    • it’s been understood too essentially: can’t we change out needs? negotiate them?
    • for Rojek it can end up in a repressive view of leisure (ie you need to produce, dangit) 179
• The Need for Work (which everyone around him seems to be proving, to his dismay)
  • Sayers, “The Need to Work” says work fulfills activity (need to be active), production (we need to “mould our environment and ourselves”), sociality (“sense of identity and status and it increases our contacts”) 179
    • He’s trying to counter leisure theorists who identify leisure w/freedom, not freedom and work
      • if you’re trying to liberate man by freeing him from work, you’ve got the wrong idea, says Sayers; work not compelled by others; people will always have a need to work
    • but of course Sayers still says we need leisure, but not as much as need work, b/c work makes us “active, creative, and disciplined” 180
      • people w/too much free time are unhappy, frustrated (esp unemployment which is demoralizing; even women who only engage in housework and retirees feel this, he says; they end up not having structured time or active leisure)
    • Sayers: “The extensive, active, free and creative use of non-work time by working peole is a development of modern industrial society.” Whereas pre-industrial free time was “desultory” and “vacant”
    • Sayers says therefore we need “extension of work opportunities and the enlargement of work experience” 180
      • geez! I’d say we need to stop the rigid boundary between work and leisure
      • he wants socialist system where people can freely cooperatively develop their capacities via work, therefore ending alienation of capitalism
      • rather than increasing leisure, which will lead to unhappiness
    • Sayers know productivism is “unfashionable” right now, but he “identifies work as the seat of personal creativity, satisfaction and growth.” A moral society needs full employment.
  • Rojeks’ responses
    • 1) development of automation and computers is cutting work time
      • my rebuttal: no, we’ll just find a diff way to produce a show of productivity. notice how the workday did not permanently shorten when machines were introduced: a temporary blockage (underemployment) then led to a redirection of productive energies to places that would support full employment. deskilling in one realm is always supported by reskilling in another.
  • Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, 1980, his rebuttal
    • work is dehumanizing, so more leisure equals more individual development; when we won’t need work anymore that’s when everyone can grow freely
    • me: this is Wilde’s argument
    • Sayers’ rebuttal to Gorz: “phoney libertarianism” and why don’t you sympathize with unemployment problems; you must be realistic and understand necessity of work
  • Rojek’s responses again
    • Sayers says that pre-industrial leisure was vaucous (this is what will say that we need lots of work to be creative) but that’s not true
      • my response: I don’t think that Shields’ destruction of this particular point destroys the whole argument
    • You’re assuming work is creative, active, productive, but so can other activities be, and work often doesn’t even supply them. As Gorz says most people associate these good things w/leisure
      • my response: you don’t understand the right KIND of work is of course assumed here. He’s not trying to say that all work is all good; you have to find out what kind of work is good.
    • Why don’t you appreciate the active, productive, creative sides of leisure?
      • my rebuttal: well you’ve got me there b/c I do realize that my own belief about work and human life is essentialist. It’s just the assumption that leisure won’t be meaningful if it isn’t posited against work. Or, in my own ideal of work and leisure, what we really want is to meld the two realms together: not to change the binary but to dissolve it.
  • Shields: “As paid work becomes more routinized and mechanical, leisure becomes the axis for the development of creativity and personal enrichment” 182
    • um, Shields, weren’t you saying the opposite in your introduction?
  • Shields gives examples of situations where people’s work was diminished and they found other places to invest their emotion and identities; but I say that again this is b/c we are having a lovely blurring of leisure and work, not a dismissal of work
  • Socialist productivism, says Shields, needs to reevaluate its heroics of work in the light of shorter work days and government aid programs. They “wrongly prioritize production over culture” 182
    • me: since when was work somehow OUTSIDE of culture, Shields?
      • my own problem w/leisure studies: so busy thinking that they have a demarcated field to work on they don’t recognize the similarities of work and leisure
  • Willis, Common Culture 1990, “leisure is now the vital area of self-expression and real and symbolic personal growth” 182
  • Sure, Shields, I’ll agree that basically you don’t want to say that work is fulfilling and leisure is not, but I’m against this rigid kind of wall between leisure and work
• Keynes: put the unemployed back to work

Homo Faber: The labor metaphysics

• Wright Mills: socialism has “labor metaphysics” 183 w/”horror of free time”
  • even laborers themselves always fight for the right to work, note sociologists
    • me: um, don’t you realize they think they’ll be paid less?
• Applebaum, The Concept of Work, v important, talks about pre-industrial concepts of work” “closely interwoven with nature and culture…no clock-watching or separation of the working day from the rest of life…work and leisure were intertwined” and the balance of work and leisure more satisfactory
  • so says Pirenne 1936 The Economic and Social History of Medieval England; Bloch 1962 Feudal Society; Thompson 1967 “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”
  • of course some people call this a false idyll: Sayers 1987 “The Need to Work,” Stedman-Jones 1977 “Class Expression versus Social Control”
  • Rojek wants to support the spirit of the former works even though they might be idealizing b/c Rojek cares about not fetishizing work time as THE reason to live
• Rojek: it was Locke, Smith, and Mill who “invented” the idea that only labor creates value, and classical P E exaggerates significance of the human need for work and b/c it devalues the self and communities makes people feel anomie and restlessness 184
  • I’d say that Rojek is not being historicist enough to understand why those authors needed to recognize labor at the time
• Rojek: under capitalism and classical P E, leisure seen as “oasis” but “more as an ideal than a reality. Industrialization polluted leisure with a constant time-consciousness and guilt about activity which was not directly productive. It required that individuals did not merely enjoy free time but extracted value from it by adding to personal growth.” 184 leisure was just the reward for work, hence just another aspect of “general market activity”
  • Sounds like Adorno here
• With homo faber, leisure is “extending personal market capacity” w/”rational recreation” movements the belief that leisure was “a form of rational purposive activity which complemented work”
  • B/c now meaning revolves around work, which is atomizing, life itself feels atomizing. (Whereas a better understanding of leisure, he suggests, would save that.)
  • Because of this market definition of leisure “leisure became an artificial realm of freedom in which the pursuit of escape routinely ended in anti-climax and where fantasy and illusion flourished”
    • and “dominated by the dreamworld of advertising” b/c you’re only allowed to be free via images
  • This is some heavy stuff. I need to consider it carefully.
• While people could experience “satisfaction…excitement and release” through leisure, it was only “in a momentary, fragmented form which only emphasized the illusory character of authentic escape under modernity” 184

Homo Ludens

• I guess he means to replace homo faber with homo ludens
• Play is a human need, outside of the rational goals of work and communication, as in Habermas
• Johan Huizinga (Dutch historian) has the work on play, Homo Ludens 1947: “play precedes culture” 184
  • “the first true premise of human existence.” from play comes “ritual, poetry, music, dancing, battle knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy”
  • play often irrational
  • play has four characteristics
    • Freedom: “Whereas much leisure performs a cultural function by fulfilling ritual obligations or duties, play follows the dictate of voluntary enjoyment….conducted for its own sake” 185
    • Imagination: “thrives on projection, allusion, and fantasy” and we experience “otherness” as well as find our “identity”
    • Disinterestedness: the activities as ends in themselves, not what will happen as a result of your action
    • Tension: “testing, chance and contest” and therefore “lives out emotions which are either repressed or diverted” by everyday life
  • lots of things come from play
    • law (b/c so much of it is role playing and contest)
    • philosophy (as a riddle-game initially, and always contesting)
    • war: as a “noble game” and as requiring “playing pretend” for practice
  • Whereas Habermas, Weber (Prot Ethic) and Doyal and Gough look at homo faber which marginalize all types of play, Huizinga looks at homo ludens where “play is the origin of culture and the foundation of human association and practice” 186
• Also like Huizinga is Baumann, Postmodern Ethics 1993, where flaneur is the homo ludens of modernity with his “aesthetic playgrounds” and his “disjoined, episodic contact with others” and his immersion in a “fantasy life”
  • Baumann says the postmodernity homo ludens wants to have play inside, inside a safe place (unlike the flaneur who left the home): “telemediated” play bringing world into home in two dimensions
  • Note: Baumann says “mass democratization of leisure” only happens in postmodernity
• “Play, for homo faber, is the reward for discipline and effort…a surplus pleasure” 187
  • And leisure spaces were defined to keep play in its proper sphere “at the margins of society”
  • Capitalist modernity sees leisure as donatory, where it is “Given” to you by will of an authority figure
• Postmodern “Telecity” (this is Baumann’s term being used by Rojek) is where leisure and work are “inextricably mingled” and leisureliness isn’t just for leisure spaces any more 188
  • me: but Baumann’s picture of the world under telecity is one of atomization and causal human relations where other people are merely an image on a screen so surely that’s not the way to go

Conclusion

• HE is against the nineteenth and twentieth century habit of “centring of creativity and self-development on the homo faber model” which began in 19th century where “work was universally and deliberately constructed as the fundamental human need” 188
  • but can he really just conflate the P E brainwashing with Marxist and other critiques? It’s an interesting coupling but perhaps doesn’t exhaust the situation
  • says homo faber was the atomistic society, trying each to get personal gain
  • leisure is here just trying to “recharge” to get back to work
• Modernity 1: leisure is at periphery
  • Bentham and Mill and Taylor: work is central to human and social health
  • he says we are still influenced by such models of work: which is “purposive rational action” of Habermas or devoted towards producing necessities
• Reaction against it: Romanticism: Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake (creativity, spirit, emotions, imagination; against restricted circumference of industrial life)
  • Free time = development and self-expression
• Another reaction against it: Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen between the two: “work is a creative and liberating force” yet still “existing institutions in society deformed work experience for the mass of workers” and while they get the need for leisure they don’t emphasize it
  • And then Marx followed this idea
• Ideas that spearheaded this reaction were influenced by Enlightenment concepts about labor: isn’t just about economic value; he says these views are “truncated” during the 19th century 189
  • Kant
    • labor = “any activity which contributes to the realization of reason”
    • play and leisure thus can count, such as writing, observing, playing, debating
      • me: ahem you can’t conflate these activities with mass-absorption entertainments! so don’t pull the old switcheroo on me
    • Rojek does admit the problem of overemphasizing reason, esp b/c for Kant reason is developed as reaction of the “resistance” that other people give to your own plans about shaping the world to your own designs
    • from “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”
  • Hegel
    • labor = “the main pathway to self-creation” 190
      • “confrontation with the natural, external world” b/c through labor he “objectifies his immanent powers by expressing them in an external product or effect”
      • “self-objectification” is social that is must happen through relations w/others…but only succeeds when labor is “unfettered”
    • with fettered work like industrialization, your experience of work is fragmented and alienated b/c of division of labor
      • the human need for self-expression is therefore blocked
    • industrial worker for Hegel “is a slave to a world of abstract needs and inner strife” but farmer’s work is concrete and rewarding
    • what does Hegel want? “an integrated model of society”
      • Rojek extrapolates Hegel to say that “from a Hegelian standpoint, the division of leisure from the rest of life is a symptom of the alienation which tarnishes industrial society. The segregation of leisure from the rest of life is paralleled by the artificial divisions within the human psyche.” 190-1
    • I have no idea where he gets this because he DOESN’T CITE HEGEL which makes me pissed off
      • also he seems to have some agenda against Marx and that’s no good either
• So he’s saying that Enlightenment works don’t try to divide labor and leisure. But this came too late in the game, and he’s note citing enough to prove it.
  • He says we can add emotions and the body back in, and then understand “reason” in a better way
• Modernity 1 leisure: “The limitations on self-making which the world of work necessarily imposed upon the individual were rewarded with the gift of ‘free time’” but became commercialized gradually, and there’s more and more fantasy content. Leisure associated with “excitement, choice, and self-determination”
  • Play and spectacle become commercialized, taken from communal background
  • Modernity 1’s beliefs about leisure were a mix of the “aristocratic ideals of a labor-free existence” and “modernist ideals of self-expression”
• Leisure, “sheer paradox” 191
  • “luminous goal” “yet it is prosaically constructed through social means and its meaning various historically”
  • It is elusive: we can experience the freedom and self-determination etc but “revealed in memory” or during the experience “as illusory or artificially induced” 192
    • we feel “our leisure never really belongs to us”
  • and seems “beyond our grasp:” contingencies, hazards, more problems, disappointment
    • he says modernism wants to solve this problem
  • “Western culture presents leisure as a realizable utopia.”
• The Final Thesis
  • “By committing ourselves to decentring leisure we emancipate leisure from the modernist burden of necessarily connoting freedom, choice, life-satisfaction and escape with leisure. We recover what the illusions of modernism have concealed.”
  • weird. 1) look how you used the word emancipate even tho’ you say we can’t trust freedom; 2) if leisure is not about those things then what do we get so excited about; 3) to call social constructions “illusions” is somewhat to miss the point, eh?