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Why Modernism (from leisure space’s point of view)

• Timeline
  • 18th century: leisure becomes commodified
    • infancy (this is Habermas and cafes)
  • 19th century: building of dedicated, specialized leisure spaces ramps up considerably
    • much more the golden age
  • Modernism: a moment of self-reflexivity, a decadence of leisure spaces
    • where people really investigate the promises of leisure spaces
    • Forster’s career: Edwardian leisure space moves to modernist leisure space
      • When Passage to India ceases to care about tourism, it becomes more a modernist leisure space.
• Adorno, “Free Time”
  • Capitalism makes leisure in the form of work
  • The disappearance of real leisure occurs during modernism
• The architecture of these spaces is particularly interesting at this time (futuristic)
  • Like Lyons Teashops

Why Leisure Space (from modernism’s point of view)

• People think shopping is the coolest leisure activity, but what is really significant are the spaces that are being made and the social forms that are made possible by these new spaces.
  • Yes, department stores are cool. But they’re only the tip of the iceberg as far as leisure spaces are concerned.
• So many modernists inhabited these leisure spaces more than they inhabited other types of space
  • Antipathy towards family spaces and work spaces
  • Health reasons
  • Exile: when you are in exile, you go to leisure spaces. They are the natural spaces for exiles (D H Lawrence, The Captain’s Doll)
• Leisure Spaces and Modernity
  • Cosmopolitan, w/mobility and anonymity
  • Pace: exciting transfer of people, money, activities
  • Planned communities are very modern (Corbusier)
• L S make some plots easier to swallow. Mechanically, they are an excuse to make events happen (Ford) and especially to make confrontations occur (b/c you’ll leave).
• Complete
  • “Funny laws” that Sydney sees in The Hotel and the graveyards for visitors = whole community
  • Microcosm
• License
  • Your odd living/romantic arrangements are more tolerated there.

Rules of Leisure Spaces

• Not an escape from life or from the social, but instead the place where you reorient and re-determine your relationship to “normal spaces”
  • You take a break from normal routine in order to evaluate that routine. You need the distance in order to figure out what you’re going to do once back inside.
• You can get back to nature, even if only in a mediated form.
• Complex relation of spaces within spaces, spaces next to spaces, defined relationally against one another
  • Like a canal with multiple locks, going from one “level” to another (of formality, of license, of place)
• Temporary Autonomous Zones, Hakim Bey, which survive b/c they’re invisible to the state, b/c the elude History; temporary b/c once “named” they must disappear
  • Quotes one of Neitzsche’s last, crazy letters: ”...this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the world into a holiday…Not that I have much time…”
  • TAZ: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelTAZ
  • “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.”
  • “The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas…the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.”
  • as critique of revolution: b/c you can’t get that without silly martyrdom, so we adjust our expectations to what we can actually achieve
  • Why can I use it? “The second generating force behind the TAZ springs from the historical development I call ‘the closure of the map.’ The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita…Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed…in theory.”
    • So modernism is what deals with this fact of closure, esp w/in traveling!
  • about the map at this moment in history: the map is total, “yet because the map is an abstraction it cannot cover Earth with 1:1 accuracy.”
    • you no longer have revolution, he says, at this time; now you have insurgency instead of revolution (that is, it’s not about PERMANENCE but about moments of power difference)
• L S catalyze social change and social intercourse.
  • Routine, structure, public spaces, surveillance, flows
  • An excuse to trot out belief systems and opinions b/c of constant influx of new people and people who are diff from you
• Public and private space always shifting, so that in the end it’s always public space
• Sick Days / Stormy Days
  • Always the game-changer, where people are immobilized
  • And then Things Happen (Waugh; Voyage Out)

Themes

• L S and Death
  • A world tour…of sickness (Mann)
  • Luxury ship disasters: Titanic, Lusitania
• Leisure and Subjecthood
  • Usually about ego-death (Freud, yes)
  • Lose yourself in something else
• Leisure and Work
• Leisure Spaces and Modernity
  • Usually seen as backwards or forwards, slow or fast, not often contiguous w/normal time
• Class
• As sites of artistic production (hence self-reflexive when artists use them in their books)

Ultimate Theses

• Relationships happen in space, not through time.
  • Mary Butts: you see that people’s relationships vary by space rather than from their own innate properties
    • In sacred spaces like the little wooded cove by the shore, with a tiny creek, people can connect
• Leisure is a problem to be solved.
  • Time is seen purely, and is seen as something to be filled up (Elizabeth Bowen)
  • You figure out your real goals of life at a leisure space, rather than just bathe in idleness.
• Historical change: leisure spaces from socially sanctioned carnival to TAZ

Types of Leisure Spaces

• Moving
  • Train stations, coaches
  • Ships, cruise ships
• Eating/Drinking
  • Cafes, teashops, bars
  • Restaurants
• Living
  • Seaside resorts
  • Resort towns
  • Country homes
  • Hotels
• Entertaining
  • Music halls
  • Cabarets

Space Theory

• Production of Space, Lefebvre
• Space as constructed and constructing
  • Space as constitutive of social relations and vice versa
• Heterotopia

To Avoid

• Talking about these spaces as “spaces of experimentation” or “laboratory for modernity”
  • Rosner said it about private spaces
  • Casarino said it about ships in modernist sea narratives

Approach

• Ratio of history to theory
  • You have to begin w/history, accumulate facts, and let the theory come out of it. I have to know the cultural meanings of these spaces before analyzing their place in modernism.
  • Obviously, I’m not a historian; a theory of social relations and social being contextualized within various spaces, and its relation to representation, is what I’m after.