Re-imagining leisure studies 9781138898844, 9781315708317, 1138898848

Table of contents :
Part I: Some Considerations of Method Part II: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Twenty-First Century Leisure Part III: Towards an Understanding of Devotional Leisure

Citation preview

Re- Imagining Leisure Studies

In this provocative new book, Tony Blackshaw argues that leisure studies is in a quiet but deep state of crisis. The twenty-first century has brought profound change to all aspects of society, including a plurality of new leisure worlds, and traditional concepts of leisure studies fail to capture this richness. This book aims to re-invigorate the study of leisure by revealing and unpacking these leisure worlds, thereby changing the way we think about leisure and the way we do leisure studies. Both trivial and serious in its implications, it is precisely this paradox that makes leisure such a fascinating subject of study. Re-Imagining Leisure Studies presents a new and radical set of methodological rules for studying leisure trends and cultures in contemporary society. It discusses the critical issues that underpin recent developments in leisure theory and explores the key themes of social class, community, consumerism, politics, freedom and globalization. Marking a turning point in the reception and understanding of leisure studies, this book is vital reading for all students and scholars with a social scientific interest in leisure. Tony Blackshaw is a leisure scholar and researcher of international standing who teaches at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He has published works on a broad range of themes in leisure studies which include the following: Leisure Life: Myth, Masculinity and Modernity (2003), New Perspectives on Sport and ‘Deviance’: Consumption, Performativity and Social Control (with Tim Crabbe) (2004), The Sage Dictionary of Leisure Studies (with Garry Crawford) (2009), Leisure (2010) in Routledge’s Key Ideas series and The Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies (2013).

Routledge Critical Leisure Studies Series Editor Tony Blackshaw Sheffield Hallam University

The modern world is one that holds an intense fascination with the activities we place under the heading ‘leisure’. Rather than simply being the opposite of ‘work’, ‘leisure’ today can be seen as a form of social and cultural life in which ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ intersect and mutually inform one another. This series is a forum for agenda-setting research that examines our contemporary world of leisure. It places a strong emphasis not only on mapping current developments in individual and collective leisure activities, but also on challenging our understanding of these from different perspectives. Providing detailed empirical and theoretical accounts, this series explores the critical issues that underpin people’s leisure lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While this series is devoted to leisure, many of its books touch on other subject fields, contributing to interdisciplinary studies and appealing to readers from across the social sciences and the humanities. Available in this series: Re- Imagining Leisure Studies Tony Blackshaw

Re- Imagining Leisure Studies

Tony Blackshaw

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Tony Blackshaw The right of Tony Blackshaw to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Blackshaw, Tony, 1960– author. Title: Re-imagining leisure studies / Tony Blackshaw. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge critical leisure studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016014102| ISBN 9781138898844 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315708317 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Leisure–Study and teaching. | Recreation–Study and teaching. | Leisure–Sociological aspects. | Recreation– Sociological aspects. Classification: LCC GV14 .B534 2017 | DDC 306.4/812–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014102 ISBN: 978-1-138-89884-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-70831-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents

Preface

vi

Introduction – the issues at stake

1

PaRt I

Some considerations of method

13

1

The end of Leisure Studies

15

2

Some ‘new rules of method’ after Leisure Studies

36

PaRt II

Recovering the spiritual foundations of twenty- first-century leisure

63

3

65

Deconstructing the disenchantment thesis

PaRt III

towards an understanding of devotional leisure

95

4

Twenty-first-century devotional leisure practices: seeking self-realization and authenticity

101

5

Twenty-first-century devotional leisure life-worlds: authenticity and community in the spirit of our congregation

129

Conclusion

157

References Index

162 171

Preface

To borrow one of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s favourite analogies, being a leisure studies scholar in the twenty-first century is rather like walking on a tightrope – a careful balancing act, which demands a very particular sort of sociological imagination. If you look down on one side, everything does look comfortingly familiar: lots of research going on, most of it utilizing tried and tested theories and methods, while taking great care not to separate leisure from its wider social, political and economic context. On this side of the tightrope it is Leisure Studies as usual. On the other side, however, is a completely different territory. The tightrope artiste recognizes some of the strangeness, but much of it still awaits interpretation and description. As a critical response to this situation this book offers a totally new approach to leisure studies for the twenty-first century, with sociological hermeneutics and hermeneutic sociology at its heart, showing how everything distinctive about leisure and its study today is fundamentally shaped by the art of living. Seen as an aspect of social life through which individuals come together in an attempt to either render their personal and collective conditions of existence meaningful or simply make themselves an object of admiration, leisure appears in a completely different light. When leisure brings people together in these two ways it implies a partial, if not wholesale, democratizing of society. There are further implications as well. The transformation of leisure might be a subversive influence upon other institutions – such as Leisure Studies itself. For a social world in which self-realization involves dedicated artistic practices (which to bear their full fruit require certain moral principles, and not least commitment to collaboration rather than competition) the maximising of human potential would be very different from that which Leisure Studies knows at present. The changes now affecting leisure are indeed revolutionary, and in a profound way. This book completes my attempt to re-imagine leisure studies which I began with Leisure Life: Myth, Masculinity and Modernity, published in 2003. Like that book, the present one stands on its own. In it I am analysing the art of living less as a plan of action than a practice, which entails living your life in a certain way. Agnes Heller argues that individual artists of life are generally less

Preface

vii

bothered about adopting an introspective, theoretical attitude to themselves than most academics are prepared to admit. Most of us are creative individuals who fulfil ourselves through essential action. What this tells us is that we need to understand the art of living not so much as the issue of self-knowledge but as a ‘leap’ into a destiny – which is another word for authenticity. What this suggests is that the meaning of life is not some goal to be pursued but something which is articulated in the art of living itself. Nietzsche thought that the practice of philosophy is one of the primary sources of such an authentic existence. In my view so is leisure practice when it too becomes a source of devotion. In differentiating between two kinds of devotional leisure practice – ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ – in this book I have invited some new figures into the club of leisure studies – namely Zygmunt Bauman, Agnes Heller, Jacques Rancière and Peter Sloterdijk – and rejected all the usual suspects. This is a polemical book, and thus it does not cut Leisure Studies any slack. I am using it as a foil against which to develop my own interpretation of leisure. The biggest obstacle to change is precisely Leisure Studies suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting here. So I am not interested in presenting or appreciating Leisure Studies on its own terms. This study is only intended as a more embracing project which is to re-imagine leisure studies for the twenty-first century. I will consider it a success if it helps to spark a serious discussion of the issues it raises amongst Leisure Studies scholars. I am grateful to Simon Whitmore for prevailing on me the responsibility of editing the series of which the present study is the first instalment. My thanks extend to Jen Hinchcliffe, who copy edited the manuscript. I also want to thank Fiona for putting up with my latest obsession.

Introduction The issues at stake

The central aim of the present study is to re-imagine leisure studies for the twentyfirst century. However, it is not a study that has any affinity whatsoever with leisure studies, that subject field which, as Rosemary Deem once explained, is ‘mostly atheoretical, sees and researches leisure as though it were a male or unisex phenomenon, which utilizes large scale surveys and often separates leisure from its wider context’ (1986: 8). It is not a study that has much affinity either with the more critical Leisure Studies (the focus of the critique developed in the first two chapters of this book), informally connected to most of the main scholarly journals that deal with leisure, of which Deem is an enthusiast, which despite lagging behind developments in people’s actual leisure experience continues to survive against all the odds into the twenty-first century by resurrecting ideas that are mostly theoretical, seeing and researching leisure sociologically with the awareness that it is not a male or unisex phenomenon, utilizing qualitative methods, as well as large-scale surveys, while taking great care not to separate leisure from its wider context. As is well known in Leisure Studies, in the 1970s the study of leisure was led away from its uncritical comfort zone by bright academics from disciplines as diverse as urban studies, geography, history, social work, and especially sociology, attracted to a new field of study whose subject burned brightly in their own free time, and who in due course not only produced a new subject field that reflected the diversity of their own interests, straddling theory, policy and practice, but also a paradigm shift by bringing attention to social inequality as the fundamental issue in the study of leisure. It is this observation that alerts us to the compelling influence that sociology was to have on this new interdisciplinary subject field. Indeed, not only did sociology make a recognizable aspect of human life appear strange by de-familiarizing the familiar, but it also provided the means to think differently about leisure and its intimate relation to the often unfair (and ideological) functioning, organization and development of society. In broad outline, then, in the last decades of the twentieth century a new, critical perspective of leisure was established with the emergence of Leisure Studies, whose beating heart was sociological in orientation. While I would concede that insights which have their roots in sociology are of obvious relevance to the overall theme of the present study I take a different

2

Introduction – the issues at stake

view to Leisure Studies about how and in what ways we should be exploring twenty-first-century leisure. But let me risk a perhaps recklessly broad generalization of what a Leisure Studies-style study might look like were it attempted here. It would probably begin by defining leisure as ‘a bounded category of practice and experience’ (Rojek, 1995), although with the caveat that it is not completely free from work and other obligations. It would possibly suggest that leisure is both trivial and serious in its implications and that it is available for either relaxation or to pursue our chosen personal challenges. It is precisely these paradoxical features that make leisure so fascinating, and the following one would certainly feature in such a study: the paradox that on the one hand leisure relates to freedom, and, on the other, it signifies, as its Latin root licēre suggests, permission or licence. In order to illustrate these paradoxes the study might well offer an across-the-board discussion of leisure activities, no doubt including sleeping, hobbies, holidays, shopping, sports and recreations, cultural and artistic activities – the list is endless. However, I expect such a study would be more concerned with developing a critical analysis of leisure in society than with putting together a comprehensive inventory of leisure activities. Those already familiar with this history of Leisure Studies would envisage such a study, were it attempted here, to acknowledge all of the following: patterns and configurations of leisure vary across time and from society to society and culture to culture (Dumazadier, 1974; de Grazia, 1964; Elias and Dunning, 1969; Kelly, 1978, 1983; Parker, 1971, 1983; Roberts, 1978, 1981), and that leisure is transformed fundamentally by modernity (Rojek, 1985, 1995) in general and the depredations of industrial capitalism (Clarke and Critcher, 1985), patriarchy (Deem, 1986) and racism in particular. Armed with these critical insights, such a study, I think would undoubtedly point out that leisure is not universally available to everyone, but is the product of modern social, economic, political, gender and cultural differences. However, it would not be content just to record and classify these differences. The study would argue that we must recognize that differentiation is an important ingredient in understanding leisure. With this in mind it would aim, I think, at advancing a range of tried and tested theories – from Marxism to Postmodernism, from Feminism to Poststructuralism – as to why variations in leisure take the form that they do. In this regard it would argue that this is because leisure reflects differences of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and (dis)ability. Were the study conducted by feminist Leisure Studies scholars I think it would claim that intersectionality – the idea that social inequality in leisure is relational and has multiple dimensions – offers us a way to move beyond static interpretations of compound social inequality by taking into account representations of shifting, multi-layered social inequalities which are constructed across classed, gendered and racialized social relations in particular leisure spaces (see, for example, Caudwell and Brown, 2011; Watson and Ratna, 2011; and Watson and Scraton, 2013). Alternatively, were the study conducted by one of the more ambitious Leisure Studies scholars writing today, it would also acknowledge that the meaning and

Introduction – the issues at stake

3

purposes of leisure have changed over time and that in some people’s leisure there has been a gradual rejection of some of these restraints. The study almost certainly would end by suggesting two contradictory conclusions. The first is that the key issues relating to leisure today are much the same as in the second half of the twentieth century. The second is that they are different. For on the one hand it seems that our leisure has remained constant. Yet on the other hand it is clear that it has changed or at least is beginning to change. There is no shortage of books written that have produced and go on producing this same ambivalent effect. And this should come as no surprise. For what I have drafted in here is the typical scene in Leisure Studies today. Such issues as the ones described above do appear in the present study from time to time, but solely as the backcloth rather than as direct objects of analysis in their own right. This is a very different kind of book to one that you would find in Leisure Studies. In the final part of Leisure (2010) – the book to which the present study might be considered a sequel – I argued that in the liquid modern world (Bauman, 2000a) we today inhabit, which is founded first and foremost on freedom and – let me add here using a term I have borrowed from Pierre Rosanvallon (2013), the uniquely insightful interpreter of the convoluted trajectory of historical social inequality – the ‘individualism of singularity’ (as opposed to the ‘individualism of universality’), leisure moves steadily into its position as the principal driving force underpinning the human desire to render life meaningful or – at the very least – to give it a sense of passion, pleasure and purpose, which are two different ways of saying something about the value of what it means to have lived before we reach that final destination to ‘which all life tends and to which it eventually arrives on its own and in its own time’ (Bauman, 1992a: 19). I also argued in Leisure that hermeneutics is the basis of truth in liquid modernity since freedom itself is entirely unfit to serve this type of function, because it is based on a foundation that cannot found (Heller, 2005). In this regard liquid modernity ushered in a new phase for leisure, which saw it ingeniously empowered by the human imagination. To paraphrase what Agnes Heller (1999: 125) said about culture more generally, with the onset of liquid modernity, the subsidiary, compensatory function of leisure was transformed to an interpretive function. That is, leisure ceased to be defined through the distinction between its good and bad aspects – work against leisure, consumerist leisure against authentic leisure, and so on; it instead became more and more meaningful. In liquid modernity, I argued in this book, it is hermeneutics that deepens the meaning of leisure, rather than good and bad taste or judgement. It is meaning, the appeal to the unknown known, that places my leisure interest at the top of the modern hierarchy of culture. It is placed high by me because it has the potential to serve for infinite interpretability – as well as giving me passion, pleasure and purpose – again and again. It is here when leisure is the subject of our devotion where lie intimations of freedom. It is in pursuing this freedom – singularly and together – that we pursue our private passions, pleasures and purposes, our unspeakable

4

Introduction – the issues at stake

thoughts, artfully converted into undisguised epiphany, into a performative space in which the democratic spirit comes out to play, thereafter transforming what was hitherto ineffable into the shared language we create to put a name on it, subtle and precise – this is a process that accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century, with the coining of a whole raft of new leisure innovations and experiences. Whatever our choice of leisure devotion they speak to us as individuals because we inescapably feel them to be the special centre of our private worlds. Yet the very same source of our devotion is always capable of undermining this natural solipsism because it nearly always takes place in a social context. This means that, when we embark on our chosen leisure devotion, we encounter a self-sufficient world of secrecy that spoke to us as individuals when we were first enticed by it; in our leisure ordinary things in the world often become extraordinary, because we sense in them a secret of which we don’t know enough. But then when we begin to encounter something about what this secret is it dawns on us that it doesn’t just centre around us as an individual. This boundedness, this simultaneous sense of individual wonder and community, is what gives our chosen devotion its air of magic, of being at once fantastic and real, a mix of marvel and belonging. In other words, if there is meaning to existence, we come closest to it in our leisure experiences. This is the job leisure was always cut out for, since it is that distinct realm of human activity, which perhaps more than any other, provides us with the thrill of the search for life’s ‘unknown known’ and the exhilaration of the potential discovery of its secret, its essential unfathomability. What this suggests is that there is much more to leisure than mere leisure activities or pursuits; it is to live your life in a certain way. Building on this thesis the emotional centre of the present study is its radical exploration of leisure (and leisure studies) as the art of living. The view developed in this book is that, since there is no one single mode of life that exists that is best for all people, then it follows that there is no satisfactory conception of the art of living. But, in common with Alexander Nehamas (1998), I do believe that we need to recognize that such a conception exists. In this study it is argued that the practice of devotional leisure is one of the primary sources of such an existence. Insofar as the art of living is concerned, it has to be emphasized that what leisure will entail for all individuals is the opportunity to find in it something like a source of meaning and a reason for living, on the one hand, and the opportunity to make themselves feel ‘truly alive’ in a way that challenges them to imagine another kind of life that feels like an escape, not only from their everyday one, but from reason itself, on the other. It is my view that all devotional leisure practices derive their impetus from this double pulse. This last observation notwithstanding, when the art of living is the focus of attention it matters a great deal that we recognize individuals as human agents in life rather than victims of social structure. With this in mind the starting point of this study is that in the twenty-first-century Leisure Studies assumptions about

Introduction – the issues at stake

5

universal human experience have run up against their limits. As a critical response to this state of affairs, the study aims to transform our perception by proposing a new parallax around which we might understand leisure. What I propose in the following pages is reformulating the study of leisure in response to some key cognitive and social changes in human experience. The assumption of this book is that there is a paradox at the heart of Leisure Studies: although it is extremely critical of social inequality in leisure, it commits the cardinal sin of representing the ‘subjects’ of social inequality – the ‘poor’ generally but the ‘working class’ specifically – as having no social role in their leisure other than to perform this social inequality as they endure it as their life (Rancière, 2004). It is too often the case that Leisure Studies treats individuals like hapless automatons who don’t have any agency. The capacity of humans to amount to more than the sum of a set of circumstances is ignored; the ability to make a choice is glossed over. What is forgotten here – like all other essential questions in the functionalist epistemic that underpins Leisure Studies – is the enigma of leisure itself. My use of the term ‘epistemic’ (or cognitive frame) here is derived from Foucault’s conception of an ‘episteme’ which he develops in The Order of Things (1970). It is my view that Leisure Studies is organized around a functionalist epistemic, a theoretical and empirical system of classification, in which words intersect with representations to provide a prevailing order of knowledge (or discourse) for how things are connected in the overall subject field; this discourse describes the conditions under which what is taken to be ‘true’ knowledge about leisure is possible. Put simply, this epistemic is a model of functional equilibrium that has difficulty in analysing social change. This functionalist epistemic is in this sense characterized by the watchwords ‘predetermined’ and ‘over-determined’ which, to paraphrase Foucault, are ‘conceived as both the guarantee of that knowledge and the limit of its expansion’ (1970: 35). What would happen if we reversed this tacit assumption? What if we observed the ‘poor’ like everyone else in the twenty-first century as individuals of singularity in their endeavours to become artists of life in the first place? What if we assumed that it is in our leisure that we are able to dissolve old social forms and replace them with new ones: all kinds of habitats, social networks, social spacings and social arrangements where we find new equilibriums? We could then see every phenomenon in people’s leisure worlds from a parallax view and, contrary to Leisure Studies as the fait accompli study of completed works, we could develop an understanding of leisure as a powerful force of self-realization and democratization, a veritable ‘theatre for the equality of opportunity’ (Rosanvallon, 2013) that makes it possible to engage in the kinds of practices that shape individuals as artists of life. With an analogous manoeuvre, we could likewise unpack the art of living when it is no longer only a pursuit but has also become an arrival, a new kind of ‘home’ in our leisure for all of us people from elsewhere. Whether we call this the ‘art of living’, the ‘individualism of singularity’ (Rosanvallon, 2013), ‘self-transformation’, ‘the care of the self ’ (Foucault,

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Introduction – the issues at stake

1986), ‘self-constitution’ and ‘self-assembly’ (Bauman, 1992b), ‘self-design’ and ‘virtuoso asceticism’ (Sloterdijk, 2013a), ‘freedom’ or simply ‘empowerment’ is purely a matter of personal judgement. The assumption of this study is that its significance rests precisely on the opportunity it offers critical minded leisure scholars to pursue the above kind of inquiry to a greater effect than has ever been done in twenty-first-century leisure. To date, Leisure Studies has operated with the uncanny capacity for putting paid to such ambitions; it has overlooked the extent to which the ‘individualism of distinction’ in leisure, understood by sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, became unexceptional and lost its elitist connotations in the final decades of the twentieth century, ushering in ‘a new phase in human emancipation, defined by the desire to achieve a fully personalized existence’ (Rosanvallon, 2013: 226). In so doing, Leisure Studies has continued to wrap leisure within a social inequality discourse and the veil of illusions associated with the concepts of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability and so on without which it cannot function properly. The kind of leisure study to which the present one aspires means, first and foremost, tearing off the mask of these illusions. It is interested above all else in unpacking the art of living pursued by all individuals in the twenty-first century – men and women, black and white, gay and straight, (often jumbles of these markers of identity), individuals de facto, every last one of them, poor as well as affluent – who reject – to borrow an aphorism from Herbert Marcuse (1968) – the one-dimensional life which Leisure Studies appears to suggest always squeezes out other aspects. Any reader familiar with the study of leisure will notice immediately that the interpretation I have briefly mapped out here is contentious, and by no means the only one possible. It has to be said, however, that until about 20 years ago most scholars were mainly interested in understanding leisure in a way that was deeply engrained in Leisure Studies’ doxa – the knowledge it thinks with but not about. But especially in the 1990s they also began to consider the wider setting in which leisure took place, associating changes in the meanings and purposes of leisure with wider social, economic, political and especially cultural developments. Leisure, it was claimed, reflected the zeitgeist – which of course it was bound to do, since the zeitgeist was usually defined in and by people’s leisure pursuits. It was against this background that Chris Rojek wrote his seminal study Decentring Leisure (1995), stressing the importance of the societal shift from modernity to postmodernity, the cultural condition, which he argued, had ‘radically changed the idea of leisure’. In one book, Rojek had seemingly rehabilitated Leisure Studies’ position within the social sciences, advancing an original reading of leisure and constructing a new conception. He had transformed the theoretical discourse and changed the boundaries of Leisure Studies in profound ways. We would never talk about leisure the same way we used to – or so it seemed to me at the time. We might ask, then, as Rojek was inclined to do in this important study, what if the Leisure Studies notion of leisure as a universal idea is suspect? A little

Introduction – the issues at stake

7

reflection, Rojek proposed to his readers, suggests that it is not always clear what leisure means anymore. What if it turns out that the concept of leisure presupposed by Leisure Studies, far from being some universal feature of humanity, is in fact a product of social and historical conditions that needs to be called into question? What if, today, leisure is a mere side effect of culture? Clearly such a postmodern decentring approach leaves no room for the notion of leisure as conceived by Leisure Studies. Yet, for all that Decentring Leisure was a work of principled pragmatism, it was subsequently criticized for being too theoretically clever at the expense of embodying its analyses in real leisure lives (see for example, Roberts, 1999). But a larger problem was that few in Leisure Studies seemed interested in (or capable of?) putting Rojek’s ideas to work empirically. Consequently, Leisure Studies quickly reverted to type, reducing its ambitions to either re-applying tried and tested theories and methods or hoping to ‘discover’ some new theoretical ideas from empirical data, which today it churns out in the ever-shrinking comfort-zone of coterie approval that is its key associations, conferences and journals. There is a sentence of Nietzsche that seems to hang over Leisure Studies: ‘I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar’. What I mean by belief in grammar is the widespread conviction in Leisure Studies that its tried and tested concepts, theories and methods somehow presuppose an order of things that mirrors its conviction to a ready-made way of conceptualizing social ‘reality’, which it perceives is more adequate than any other. Though many in Leisure Studies continue to both sing the praises of and pursue such concepts, theories and methods, they are meeting with increasing challenge for at least three reasons. First, there has been a decline in confidence in objectivity across all academic disciplines. Second, within Leisure Studies itself, while confidence appears the norm, this has declined as apparently self-assured assertions about the value of Leisure Studies often come under attack. The most obvious upshot of this trend would have to be the decline of leisure studies degrees in universities. Third, and most relevant to our concerns here, Leisure Studies has done little to advance the study of leisure conceptually in light of the challenges posed by the new century. Indeed, the epistemological framework Leisure Studies works with is hardly ever seriously questioned, even though it is one that was designed to handle the past century’s leisure experiences. The upshot of this is that Leisure Studies today is in a quiet but deep state of crisis, which has in no uncertain terms precipitated the decline in the study of leisure in universities across the globe. But what do I mean by a crisis? To squeeze together two definitions, the crisis of Leisure Studies can be understood as a result of a ‘legitimation crisis’ (Habermas, 1975), reflected in the erosion of the explanatory basis of previously important theoretical perspectives, which has led to an ‘organic crisis’ of authority that ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of

8

Introduction – the issues at stake

morbid symptoms appear’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). Erving Goffman, a sociologist and uniquely insightful analyst of how we build the mental apparatus to understand everyday situations, is also obliging in answering this question. What is significant from Goffman for understanding this crisis is his idea that what we think of as ‘common sense’ often tends to resonate with the established cognitive frame (Goffman, 1981). In my view, this crisis can be located in the fact that having established a functionalist epistemic to understand leisure, Leisure Studies no longer deliberately thinks it is necessary to revisit its meaning. This is unconscious; what Leisure Studies thinks of as ‘common sense’ about the ostensible meanings and purposes of leisure is merely a notion that resonates with its own limited cognitive frame. This has presaged a ‘business as usual’ attitude in Leisure Studies and the deepening of the old trend identified by Rojek where leisure scholars appear mainly interested in examining everyday leisure ‘as a bounded category of practice and experience’. The upshot is that people’s actual leisure lives and experience remain hidden within the discourse into which Leisure Studies co-opts them. For all their ostensible usefulness, re-applying tried and tested theories and methods or hoping to ‘discover’ grounded leisure theories have important limitations, not least their incapacity to grasp the complexity of twenty-first-century leisure and the dialectics and dynamics of the social processes underpinning the increasingly ‘as yet under-defined and most certainly under-determined’ (Bauman, in Bauman et al., 2015: 17) life-worlds that accompany it. What limits the cognitive frame underpinning Leisure Studies particularly is its tendency to miss the point entirely that the twenty-first century has brought profound changes to all aspects of human life and social processes which call for the re-thinking of the concepts (and the functionalist epistemic) used to narrate how and in what ways we experience leisure. The starting point of this book is the concepts Leisure Studies ordinarily employs to make sense of leisure, in fact provide us with a very limited form of understanding, one that not only fails to capture the inexhaustible richness of leisure experience but also limits our potential receptiveness to that experience as well as the meanings people find in it. Whereas Leisure Studies sees a singular world made up of complex intersections of social class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability and so on which impact on our leisure, there is another approach to thinking which attempts to understand the place of leisure in our lives in a different way, in Husserlian terms, through the concept of Lebenswelt. As Zygmunt Bauman describes it, the Lebenswelt (or Life-world) is that realm of lived life and experience that we live daily and experience ‘prior to any theoretical experience’, which we understand and recognize Erlebnis as both a ‘real’ and a meaningful reality. As he explains: Whatever is part of the ‘Lebenswelt’, is given as a mode of ‘Empfindnis’ – ‘being at the tips of my fingers’; lying open, here and now; accessible without the mediation of theoretical constructs which are produced by

Introduction – the issues at stake

9

science struggling to let itself loose from ‘Lebenswelt’, and therefore shyly concealing its origin, and drawing the curtains of abstract concepts between man and the world in which he already lives. (Bauman, 1976: 45) In other words, the Life-world is of a ‘natural’ order perhaps best exemplified in what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the il y a, the unconditional ‘there is’ of life lived just then, at that moment, before theoretical interpretations get in the way. In attempting to overcome this epistemological gap between the Life-world and theory, in Leisure Life (Blackshaw, 2003) I attempted to make knowable the leisure life-world of a group of working-class ‘lads’ with whom I had grown up. The aim of the study was to enable its readers to experience the way ‘the lads’ actually experience their leisure lives. This meant that it was about their leisure life-world, my leisure life-world, but also our leisure life-world. Consequently, as a researcher, I occupied a strange dual position in this life-world – Tony Blackshaw as an insider and Tony Blackshaw the researcher as an outsider on the inside. I used this special position to not only make sense of how ‘the lads’ live their leisure lives, but also to allow the reader to know how they and we feel that collective experience, individually together. Leisure Life offers not just, or even primarily, an advance in ethnography in Leisure Studies. It involves two specific elements that are important to the present study. One is its appeal to the sociological imagination – that empathetic way of interpreting social life that is not only attentive to human complexity but is also capable of presenting us with new understandings since it re-imagines the Life-world in a different way, shifting our ethical sense of things in the process. The second element is its recognition that, when applied to leisure, the Lifeworld is in fact a concept that defies the convention of thinking in totalities. What this second element suggests is that not only do we insert ourselves into the Life-world rather than find ourselves ‘born out of it or sited inside it from the beginning’ (Bauman, 1997: 169), but also that the Life-world is in fact best understood in the plural. Implicit to this understanding is the idea that modernity can no longer be represented as a coherent whole; second, that we can no longer assume that it has a definite or manageable order; and third, that the world has become diversified and multiple as never before (Nancy and Barrau, 2015). This is a view that is also critical of the assumption that the theoretical world is the only horizon from which really existing realities take their meaning, and which argues that when we understand the world in the plural, then we recognize that there are different existential possibilities. In other words, the twenty-first century is one of all kinds of leisure life-worlds. Some in Leisure Studies will no doubt argue that I am not offering anything new in making this last argument. Attention to pluralism has a long history in the study of leisure. Two figures stand out in this regard. In almost all his publications, which first appear in 1970, Ken Roberts has consistently argued that the

10

Introduction – the issues at stake

pluralism we find in people’s actual leisure interests and activities presents a strong challenge to the monological implications of grand theory originating, for example, in Marxist accounts (see Roberts, 1978, 1981; and Clarke and Critcher’s (1985) critical response). The second scholar who has consistently attempted to liberate our understandings of leisure from grand theory is Chris Rojek. Nowhere is this more explicit that in the implication of his decentring thesis, which is of course that we are living in a postmodern era of radical pluralism – that anything goes. This last observation notwithstanding, it is a third approach, diverging both from Leisure Studies and Rojek’s postmodernist decentring thesis response to it that I shall be exploring in this book. Neither Leisure Studies nor the postmodern approach, in my view, gives an adequate account of the pluralism found in twenty-first-century leisure. Moreover, their shortcomings have a common root, or at least are, in fact, connected. Leisure Studies is debilitated by a kind of blinkeredness that deprives some social groups of their entitlements. The obvious criticism of the postmodern way of decentring is that it treats leisure as nothing more than a pawn in the ‘language games’ that are being played out at the level of culture (for a fuller discussion of postmodern understandings of leisure see chapter 5 in Blackshaw, 2010). Both approaches show a marked reluctance to address fundamental questions of leisure: not just what it is or means but what it does, how it works for individuals as a form of artistic life practice, as a wellspring for different kinds of belonging. To borrow one of the great American philosopher Richard Rorty’s favourite aphorisms: the difference between what I am attempting to achieve in this book and Leisure Studies is the difference between someone who can remember and use a range of different vocabularies at the same time and a subject field that can use only one. What I am offering here is an orientation rather than a perspective; I am a sociologist as poet who is keen to use words in ways they have never been used. My mission is to shape the old language of Leisure Studies into new ways that I envisage will extend the possibilities of the sociology of leisure. To reiterate, my cognitive framework is metaphorical, its objective being to sweep you into a world you think you already know and make you see it all with a startled second sight. It is in this sense that its ethos is hermeneutical: metaphor trips a switch and a connection is made. With this thumbnail sketch of my alternative cognitive frame in place, I am now in a position to give a chapter-by-chapter run down of the book’s central arguments and its thesis. The first two chapters deal with the crisis in Leisure Studies and what to do about it. I am acutely aware that the criticisms of Leisure Studies I have outlined so far call for proof rather than simply assent. With this in mind it is argued in Chapter 1 that ‘Leisure’ as it is understood in Leisure Studies is dead and some good (pluralistic) reasons are offered as to why this is so. It is subsequently argued that there is a crisis in Leisure Studies, which has its roots in the deep structure of sociology – the academic discipline that provides its critical perspective – which has led to the end of Leisure Studies.

Introduction – the issues at stake

11

Taking its starting point from Jacques Rancière’s (2004) classic study The Philosopher and His Poor, this chapter develops the argument that if social inequality was once upon a time the fundamental issue in Leisure Studies, today it urgently needs an alternative cognitive framework for thinking outside this paradigm. In order to substantiate this assessment, the discussion offers a substantial critique of two leading theoretical perspectives in Leisure Studies: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and feminist sociology, and in particular the emphasis currently placed on the idea of intersectionality. It is argued in Chapter 2 that sociologists of leisure, and others who carry out research in Leisure Studies, generally have a particular activity in view: methodological uniformity of both the employment of research methods and the philosophical study of how, in practice, researchers go about their business. However, there are some different ‘rules of method’ when we engage in thinking sociologically about leisure after the end of Leisure Studies. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, analysis of this second kind of activity does not rely on the tools, epistemological frameworks and ontological assumptions generally used to make sense of leisure. Instead it develops its own new ‘rules of method’, which turn out to be radical, because they are not ‘rules of method’ at all. In this regard, Chapter 2 lays down the critical framework for the thesis that follows in the second part of the book. In this book I am explicitly developing a new way of re-imagining leisure fit for twenty-first-century purposes. For this reason Chapter 3 directly engages with the assumption that runs as a thread through virtually all theoretical interpretations of modernity – from Weber to Ritzer, from Adorno to Bauman – that it was from the offset marked by a certain ‘disenchantment of the world’. This has served to do more than simply promote the view that since the beginning of modernity we have never been anything but disenchanted, it has also led to the assumption that leisure in modernity is merely a product of an inescapable process that leads to the substitution of new technically rational means of social control for the old religious ones, which in the twenty-first century culminate in ubiquitous consumerism and the loss of freedom. What this suggests is that there is much more at stake here than the conclusion that processes of rationalization ultimately lead to disenchantment. It is important as a critical response to develop a critical analysis of the authentic leisure-consumerist leisure dichotomy. In so doing, we must make good the limitations of ‘the disenchantment of the world’ thesis, limitations that prevent us from recognizing that twenty-firstcentury modernity has not so much made enchantment obsolete as shifted it firmly into the orbit of leisure. Sometimes an intellectual work surprises and enlightens simply by naming what we had not thought required a name. In his important book You Must Change Your Life (2013a), the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk identifies the metaphor of anthropotechnics, which as I demonstrate in Chapter 4, acts as a pioneering template for understanding the duality associated with devotional leisure practice, especially with respect to the ideas of self-realization and

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Introduction – the issues at stake

authenticity. These two contrasting ways of understanding, developed by historical agents and what I call ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’, have been designed to establish two modes of existence fit for twenty-first- century artists of life. After unpacking the key ideas associated with anthropotechnics and the implications of what these mean for the individuals who follow the two different paths of devotional leisure, I look at ‘performative leisure’ especially in some depth. This invites a rather long discussion of ‘performativity’, which I hold to be pivotal to the thesis developed in the final part of the book. The chapter concludes that we need to recognize that there are different existential possibilities available for self-realization and authenticity because the twentyfirst century is one of all kinds of devotional leisure life-worlds, the sheer multiplication of which continually vies for our attention. If in the twenty-first century we have to constantly make ourselves up (‘You must change your life’), we also as a result have to constantly make ourselves at ‘home’, in some kind of community, because, as Sloterdijk (2011) argues, our becoming-in-the-world is never being alone; it is always becoming-with-others. It is demonstrated in Chapter 5 that this leads to the transmogrification of community, which is the continuance of self-realization and authenticity, and it connects in an immediate way with issues of sincerity and authenticity in devotional leisure. As this chapter demonstrates, community is not a concept that has any precision, but it is a very useful one for all that. In fact, it is the most important concept for understanding twenty-first-century leisure life-worlds. As we will see, community can be put to use in unexpected ways that expand our sense of what it means to twenty-first-century individuals. In this regard this chapter discusses two kinds of communities found in devotional leisure: value-spheres and heterotopias. This assessment of leisure communities involves the analysis of some complex ontological issues, which, in the event, spill over into methodology. This leads to a paradoxical twist through which hermeneutics finds a new stimulus, and not only that, but also reveals the secret to re-imagining leisure studies in the twenty-first century.

Part I

Some considerations of method

Chapter 1

The end of Leisure Studies

A striking emblem of Leisure Studies is the functionalist epistemic, which as I suggested at the beginning of the introduction, understands leisure above all else in relation to social inequality and in terms of class, gender or ethnic struggle, and in more recent accounts, through the idea that these categories are relational and have multiple dimensions. This chapter argues that there is a need to revise this understanding in light of contemporary social and cultural transformations. Drawing the essence of its critique from Rancière’s (2004) classic study The Philosopher and His Poor, it is argued that what this functionalist epistemic represents is less a compelling understanding of social inequality in leisure than a scene of distribution (partage du sensible) – persistently restaged by scholars since Plato – in which marginalized groups (the working class, women, black people, the disabled and so on) are designated, delegitimized, assigned their place, and have their leisure classified and tied down to a function, which inscribes them and their worlds into the dominant order of things. This is the typical scene in Leisure Studies. In other words, this chapter makes the somewhat scandalous assertion that in order to open up a critical space for their own intellectual claims, Leisure Studies scholars ultimately distort the leisure lives of certain social groups. Under the auspices of Leisure Studies, the leisure practices of marginalized social groups are circumscribed by two distinguishing factors: taste, on the one hand, and legislating power, on the other. The upshot is that the judgement of taste is determined by the authority of Leisure Studies. As Zygmunt Bauman explains at the beginning of his highly influential assessment of modern intellectual work: the legislators are those keepers of secrets who make authoritative ideological statements about the world and who have the power to make the ‘procedural rules which assure the attainment of truth, the arrival of moral judgement, and the selection of proper artistic taste. Such procedural rules have a universal validity, as to the products of their application’ (1987: 4–5). Drawing on Bauman’s ideas, it is my view that in the twenty-first century, the authority of the legislators’ (read: Leisure Studies scholars’) understanding of leisure is downgraded in importance, and so is the power of their legislating message, their way of communicating the truth about ‘leisure’. This immediately entails the end of a certain form of analysis of

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Some considerations of method

leisure, namely, that legislating form found in Leisure Studies which claims to offer the ‘truth’ about leisure. The upshot is that Leisure Studies is increasingly undermined by an alternative interpretive mindset, whose authority is more democratic, and located in the different ways in which ‘ordinary’ people have always interpreted and constructed their own leisure worlds. What this tells us is that in order to develop new interpretations of leisure we must embrace leisure’s pluralism – the fact that what ‘leisure’ is is not constrained by having to look a certain way or to be of a certain style. The critique offered in this chapter anticipates my own thesis which argues that there is actually another sequence of scenes, corresponding to twenty-firstcentury life, where there exists a diversity of individuals with ever more equipment for self-enhancement, which demand that we update our conceptual, empirical and normative understandings by embracing leisure in the making and challenging functionalist distributions. To this end, the present chapter argues, drawing on the notion of the ‘end of leisure’, that understanding leisure as Leisure Studies does is no longer useful, has come to an end. It was the great American art critic and philosopher Arthur Coleman Danto, in his compelling interpretation of the seismic shift in modern art in the final decades of the twentieth-century, who first alerted us to the fact of the ‘end of ’ thesis: We live at a moment when it is clear that art can be made of anything, and where there is no mark through which works of art can be perceptually different from the most ordinary of objects. This is what the example of [Andy Warhol’s] Brillo Box is meant to show. The class of artworks is simply unlimited, as media can be adjoined to media, and art unconstrained by anything save the laws of nature in one direction, and moral laws on the other. When I say that this condition is the end of art, I mean essentially that it is the end of the possibility of any particular internal direction for art to take. It is the end of the possibility of progressive development. (1998: 139–140) In other words, what Danto is saying here is that the ‘end of art’ is not so much that we have witnessed art’s end, but the end of all legislating philosophies of art. To draw on this key insight, the idea that leisure has ended does not mean that it has died or that people no longer have any leisure. On the contrary, leisure continues to flourish. It too, just like art, is constrained only by the laws of nature on the one hand, and moral laws, on the other. Nor does it mean something like leisure has come to the ‘end of history’. ‘End’ as I am using it here means something more like a finishing point. The ‘end of leisure’ means that leisure in the functionalist sense of the idea has come to a conclusion. The ‘end leisure’ means that leisure no longer has a grand narrative, a compelling story. After the ‘end of leisure’, there is no such thing as ‘Leisure’ or ‘Leisure Studies’ – there is only leisure.

The end of Leisure Studies

17

There was once a time when the term ‘leisure’ meant something definite. If it is to continue to mean anything definite, then another term must be invented for that large class of social practices associated with free time activity, which are ‘leisurely’ without holding to the functionalist epistemic. Scholarly study is certainly essential to understanding what people do in their free time, but the most important things relating to what people do in their free time are not derivative from functionalist definitions. To borrow an insight from Peter Sloterdijk (2013b), leisure is not an instrument for serving the ‘moral reassurance’ of Leisure Studies; it is more a mode of human freedom that does not reduce very well to functionalist assumptions. What is most important about leisure today, and to my knowledge very few in Leisure Studies seem to realize, is that it is the practices associated with the ‘art of living’, the ‘individualism of singularity’, ‘self-transformation’, ‘the care of the self ’, ‘self-constitution’, ‘self-assembly’, ‘self-design’, ‘virtuoso asceticism’ and so on, which are the closest expression of the category of the leisure attitude. Twenty-first-century men and women are in no sense fixed. They might occupy very different places in the hierarchy of social institutions, but each and every one of them is born free – that is, contingent, and, indeed, endowed with boundless possibilities – and in this sense also equal. This means that they are individuals who can yet apprehend authenticity in their leisure. One conclusion that can be drawn from this observation is that the reason that leisure is no longer special anymore is for the simple reason that it can be anything. At the risk of being tautologous, maybe it is simply the case there is no longer anything that might simply be understood as leisure. When leisure becomes the art of living it no longer has any basis in reality since it is the meaning of life. My own understanding of what happened at ‘the end of leisure’ is that it signalled a cause for celebration because leisure had at last been liberated from the tyranny of Leisure Studies, both for individuals and for itself. The day when leisure crossed that line was the day when leisure became itself and freedom through leisure a real possibility. The fact that ‘Leisure’ had ended means that anything can be leisure. In other words, from now on leisure is the right of everyone, since it is no longer socially, culturally or intellectually mandated. Interpretations of leisure must be compatible with every possibility. They must guard against authorizing any special imperatives; they must rule out nothing. What marks the ‘end of leisure’ is that from now on leisure and Leisure Studies go in different directions. In other words, leisure is free from the need to understand itself from the perspective of Leisure Studies, and when that moment was reached, the social inequality agenda of sociology, through which Leisure Studies achieved its own critical perspective, was also over. To the extent that Leisure Studies continues is only as a ‘zombie category’, which no longer has a compelling grip on reality. The way I am using this term here refers to the idea of the ‘living dead’. It was developed by Ulrich Beck (2002) as a response to the major epochal changes that have transformed the relationship between

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Some considerations of method

sociology, individuals and existing social formations and institutions. For Beck, zombie categories are essentially stock sociological concepts that, if they seem self-apparent, have in fact lost their conceptual and explanatory power. Drawing on Beck’s thesis it is possible to argue that after the ‘end of leisure’, Leisure Studies has become a kind of zombie subject field that continues to stalk living leisure worlds, even though it has come to feel like a ghost from a different time. How should we interpret such a contentious claim? That question prompted me to write this and the following chapter. It seems to me unlikely that any important interpretations of leisure will ever be written again. Leisure Studies is dead. This is not to say that it won’t continue as a zombie category. Indeed, as I intimated at the beginning of this book, I can imagine a future in which there will be no shortage of books written in Leisure Studies. But these will invariably represent flights into the past, package tours to much-loved Arcadias where Leisure Studies used to have some especially firm footholds: social class and leisure, gender and leisure, family leisure, leisure and the life-course, and so on. As is usually the case at properly consoling funerals, those writing these books won’t dream of dwelling on the deceased’s bad points, because they’ll no doubt be carried away by the eulogies that got them thinking about the resurrection in the first place – a bit of nostalgia; those were the days. But nobody should be fooled by what people will be saying at these wakes. Make no mistake about it, Leisure Studies is dead. Personally, I see no reason to lament the passing of Leisure Studies – the talent wasted on trying to rejuvenate this zombie category of study should be used for the more urgent task of interpreting leisure anew. It is, however, worthwhile enquiring why Leisure Studies has become redundant; it may help us to both understand more closely Leisure Studies’ historical situation and begin to map out for the study of leisure an alternative future which offers ‘ordinary people’ counterfactual release from the tyranny of fixity and destiny foretold. It is to these two tasks that the rest of present chapter and the following one are devoted.

The end of Leisure Studies If I were asked to mark the moment when the decline of Leisure Studies became inevitable, by identifying the work of one leisure theorist, I would choose Chris Rojek. Of the key interpreters of leisure, Rojek is an important standard bearer. In books such as Capitalism and Leisure Theory (1985), Decentring Leisure (1995), Leisure and Culture (2000), Leisure Theory (2005) and The Labour of Leisure (2010), we are presented with a sociology that registers no allegiances to ‘isms’ or any other signature gestures. His work offers us not a Leisure Studies interpretation of leisure but one in whose evidence we can believe. As all of these books demonstrate, increasingly from the last two or three decades of the twentieth century, in pursuing their leisure interests, fewer and fewer individuals have been able to believe in the value of the social roles assigned to them at

The end of Leisure Studies

19

birth. If, in Rojek’s mid-1990s mind, the postmodern imagination emerged as a new way to think and understand how we engage with leisure in modernity, by the end of the noughties he was just as persuasively arguing that what we call ‘leisure’ today is actually a form of social and cultural life in which ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ often intersect and mutually inform one another. What Rojek’s work demonstrates more than anybody else’s is that the study of leisure continues to prosper when it challenges the intellectual attitude that defines Leisure Studies. This is one good answer to our original question about the end of Leisure Studies. Yet, for all the innovative studies Rojek has produced over the years, his ideas have had little influence in Leisure Studies. To understand why, let us return to Foucault’s conception of ‘episteme’ once again. As David Macey (2004: 73) explains, as Foucault saw it, the body of knowledge produced within any episteme is organized around its ‘unconscious’ or doxa – the knowledge it thinks with but not about. This tacit knowledge is what underpins its ‘order of things’. In Foucault’s view then, every episteme operates within a set of rules of which its adherents are not consciously aware. The episteme under which Leisure Studies is organized foregrounds social inequality on the one hand, and a system of classification, which assumes that rigorous theorization and empirical study into the social presuppose one another, on the other. It is my argument that, without really knowing it, Leisure Studies uses these same rules to produce, in a circumscribed way, the very diverse objects of leisure of which it speaks. Hitherto I have suggested that the knowledge produced in Leisure Studies is governed by what Foucault calls a ‘historical a priori’ which foregrounds certain tacit assumptions about how and in what ways people experience leisure. Let me put it another way. Fundamental to Leisure Studies is the conviction that, however diverse the objects of leisure, these are destined to remain of a fundamentally certain order. So, in trying to conceptualize leisure, Leisure Studies must necessarily resort to certain modes of thought for ‘describing’, ‘representing’ and ‘speaking’ about how people experience leisure that in the nature of the case draw certain connections between different aspects of ‘reality’, and indeed derive their power precisely from the fact that they are expected. Whether ‘described’, ‘represented’ or ‘spoken’, the discursive formation known as Leisure Studies must continue to produce certain effects that provide us with an integrated account of the ‘reality’ about leisure. The further that process of integration continues, the more it can be taken to suggest everything inhering in a single common underlying ‘reality’, a functionalist equilibrium that is the source of all that is. This is the intuition that is common to Leisure Studies. In order to understand a world such as our present one that is fluid and shapeshifting we either need some different metaphors or we must use existing ones in different kinds of ways. In the following chapters, I will demonstrate that, in trying to understand twenty-first-century leisure, using the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ is extremely fruitful. As is well known, this metaphor is employed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his attempt to move the debates about

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Some considerations of method

modernity and postmodernity onto another level. The critical moment of this tactical shift in his work was the publication of Liquid Modernity (2000a). Bauman argues that, in no uncertain terms, in the last few decades of the twentieth-century modernity was fundamentally transformed. It changed so rapidly and radically that it can be reasonably interpreted that by the 1970s the longue durée of modernity had entered a new conjuncture in which the social arrangement (and its attendant social inequalities) that had emerged during the Industrial Revolution moved decisively away from a specific and distinctive producer ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’, ‘hardware-focused’ shape to take the form of a more uncertain but distinctively consumer ‘light’ and a ‘liquid’, ‘soft-ware-focused’ one (Bauman, 2000a). If ‘solid modernity’ was one of the rationalization of objects (and human subjects) through standardization, abstraction and mass production, Bauman asserts, the liquid modernity that superseded it was one of rationalization through cultural difference, reflexive individualization and consumerism. In Bauman’s view liquid modernity is a sociality which ‘ “unbinds” time; weakens the constraining impact of the past and effectively prevents colonization of the future’ (Bauman, 1992b: 190). That is, it is underpatterned rather than patterned, accompanied by many branchings and extensions, trunk lines and switchback tracks, and yards and sidings, its trains of experience busy with unremitting new arrivals and speedy departures, as well as unexpected diversions, derailments and cancellations, rather than the secure tracks that once sustained modernity in its formative years. What we are dealing with here is not just the fragmentation of reality and the emergence of multiple new realities but countless forms of cognitive rewiring – from which none of us is immune. Life is often lived on the surface – or so it would seem – and the surface is always liable to break, fragment, and some people know this but many others don’t. Liquid modernity is a world that slips out of reach just when you think you have a grasp of where it’s going. What this suggests is that any understanding of leisure in liquid modernity must be able to grasp the meaning of uncertainty, risk and fragmentation, which are the hallmarks of liquid modern times. It is my view that we must necessarily resort to using some other new metaphors that in the nature of the case draw unexpected connections between different aspects of reality, and indeed derive much of their power precisely from the fact that they are unexpected. However, before we look at the ways in which I suggest we do this we must dwell for a moment to account for the apparent insistence in Leisure Studies that continuity is more preferable to change.

Some interim conclusions So far I have argued that sociology is the academic discipline that provides the discursive formation known as Leisure Studies with its critical perspective, and that there is a crisis in Leisure Studies that has its roots in the deep structure of sociology. I have also argued that the functionalist epistemic that informs Leisure Studies is governed by a ‘historical a priori’ which foregrounds certain

The end of Leisure Studies

21

tacit assumptions about how and in what ways certain social groups experience leisure. Epistemologically, this functionalist synthesis of leisure has never been entirely stable, but from the inception of critical Leisure Studies it seemed to have had supplied a comprehensive account of leisure, somehow slipping the surly ties of the quotidian to become timeless and universal. I have argued that important to the deep structure of Leisure Studies is social inequality on the one hand and on the other a system of classification which assumes that rigorous theorization and empirical study into the social presuppose one another. The next chapter will highlight the impossibility of classifying social life systematically through a model of functional equilibrium which has difficulty in analysing change; it will argue that the study of leisure needs some new ‘rules of method’; and finally it will offer an alternative sociological approach with certain epistemological, ontological and ethical implications. In the rest of this chapter I will argue that the necessity of bringing to attention social inequality in constraining the freedom and reducing the ability of some social groups to take up ‘leisure’ on their own terms was important 30 or 40 years ago, but it has by now run its course and is in need of an alternative vision. Why? By continuing to pose social inequality – particularly though not exclusively of class, of gender, and of ethnicity – as the primary ‘fact’ that needs to be explained with regard to people’s leisure, Leisure Studies has ended up explaining its necessity (Rancière 2004). This might appear a somewhat scandalous proposition; it is meant to be. As such, it demands a critical discussion of some of the dominant critical perspectives in leisure studies. In the following discussion I will consider two. On one hand there is the massive legacy of Bourdieu, the social theorist of Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984), whose theories and concepts are some of the most regularly and uncritically applied in Leisure Studies; on the other is feminist sociology, and in particular its foregrounding of intersectionality in the current theoretical landscape in Leisure Studies (Caudwell and Brown, 2011; Henderson, 2013; Watson and Ratna, 2011; Watson and Scraton, 2013). Here my aim is to simply give two illustrations of what happens to understandings of leisure when social inequality is presupposed. Of course, it is important to remember that the intersectionalities perspective must be understood as just one of many developments in feminist sociology of leisure. But there is no getting away from the fact that it is central to current feminist thinking in Leisure Studies and as such it provides an ideal current theoretical and methodological framework in terms of which one could apply Rancière’s polemic and respond to it.

The sociologists of the leisure and ‘their’ poor 1: Pierre Bourdieu Let us begin with Bourdieu. As I have argued elsewhere (Blackshaw, 2013a) he is one of the most studied sociologists in Leisure Studies, and his ‘theory of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1977) is widely taught on undergraduate and postgraduate

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Some considerations of method

courses. And to a remarkable extent he has become Leisure Studies’ key sociologist. This is hardly surprising since throughout his academic career he undertook numerous studies – taste, high culture, symbolic rivalry, photography, sport, education, skholē – so as to raise some compelling questions relating to the study of leisure. Like Adorno, Bourdieu is critical of the economic determinism found in the more unsophisticated versions of Marxist analyses of leisure. His thinking requires that we move towards a more general theory of social inequality in consumer-based societies where social classes are ‘united by the way they spend their money, not the way they earn it’ (Bauman, 1988: 36). In this sense, Bourdieu’s social theory of Distinction is an explicit attempt to understand the nature of social class and social class divisions in a complex world in which production has largely given way to consumption. Accordingly, he offers what is essentially a treatise on taste. For Bourdieu (1984), social class, like gender and ‘race’, needs to be understood as much by its perceived existence as through its material existence in the classical Marxist sense. To make this synthesis he draws on a theoretical toolkit featuring the concepts of field, habitus and capital. Fields reflect the various social, cultural, economic and political arenas of life, which form their own microcosms of power endowed with their own rules. Leisure is structured in this way. Power struggles emerge in leisure fields as a result of the belief of social actors that the capital(s) of the field are worth fighting for. To draw on one example, the question is not just whether Italian opera is superior to Chinese opera, but also ‘the series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles’, which constitute the objective hierarchy of opera, ‘and which produce certain discourses and activities’ (Webb, Schirato and Danaher, 2002: 21–22). Analogous to fluctuations in the stock market, the ‘currency’ or rates of exchange attached to particular capitals in particular fields are also vulnerable to change as these are continually contested. In order to synthesize the relationship between the individual and society, or more precisely, his or her relationship with a highly differentiated consumer world constituted by these fields of power, Bourdieu draws on Marcel Mauss’s use of the concept of habitus. Bourdieu (2000) suggests that the habitus is an embodied internalized schema, which is both structured by and the structuring of social actors’ practices, attitudes, and dispositions. The habitus also constitutes and is constituted by social actors’ practical sense of knowing the world and it is through their ‘feel for the game’ of the leisure field in question – in our example, the world opera – that they come to see the world and the position of themselves and others in that world as unexceptional. Vital to understanding this ‘perfect coincidence’ is the idea of the social actor’s doxa values or ‘doxic relation’ to that field and world, which Bourdieu identifies with that tacitly cognitive and practical sense of knowing what can and cannot be reasonably achieved. In this sense, the habitus constitutes only an ‘assumed world’ captured as it is through the confines of the individual social actor’s ‘horizon of possibilities’ (Lane, 2000: 194).

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In leisure, the practices, attitudes, and dispositions which social actors both adopt and embody ultimately depend on the extent to which they can position themselves in any given field and their particular ‘endowment of capital’. For Bourdieu, a capital is any resource effective in a given social arena that enables one to appropriate the specific profits arising out of participation and contest in it. Capital comes in three principal species: economic (material and financial assets), cultural (scarce symbolic goods, skills, and titles), and social (resources accrued by virtue of membership in a group). A fourth species, symbolic capital, designates the effects of any form of capital when people do not perceive them as such . . . The position of any individual, group, or institution, in social space may thus be charted by two coordinates, the overall volume and the composition of the capital they detain. (Wacquant, 1998: 221) What this suggests is that ‘the profits of membership’ offered by leisure are not available to everybody in the same way. This is because, as Ball (2003:4) asserts, the point of all ‘capitals’ is that they are resources to be exploited and it is their exclusivity in the battle for distinction that gives them their value. In other words, people who realize their own capital through their leisure interests do so specifically because others are excluded. Bourdieu explains this process through his theory of cultural capital, which identifies the forms of value associated with culturally authorized consumption patterns and tastes. Bourdieu identifies three separate strands of cultural capital – (1) incorporated, which is seen as indistinguishable from habitus and confined to the embodied experiences and knowledge of class groups across the life span, (2) objectivated, which is independent of individuals and located in material culture and its value in the market place, and (3) institutionalized, which is located within establishment structures, such as appointments, titles, awards and so on, and their implicit and explicit relations of power. Despite their distinctions, these different forms of cultural capital should be seen as co-existing within specific cultural fields defined by their own institutions, conventions and dispositions. According to Bourdieu, social capital, like cultural capital, has two decisive features: on the one hand, it is a tangible resource made by the advantage of social networks, and on the other, it has a symbolic dimension, which contrives to hide networks of power woven into the fibres of familiarity. In the event, Bourdieu’s understanding of capital suggests that it is related to the extent, quality and quantity of social actors’ networks and their ability to mobilize these, which is always governed by the mutual understanding that any given leisure field is an arena of struggle and it is the battle for distinction that gives capital its qualities. The upshot of this ‘battle for distinction’ is that it ends up symbolically approving the leisure interests of the most powerful e.g. opera, ballet, classical

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music etc. and disapproving those of the weakest groups e.g. shopping, sport, pop music etc. What this tells us is that the world of leisure is made up of different sites of symbolic rivalry. As Skeggs (2009) argues, the battle for distinction in leisure is also often accompanied by ‘a gaze’, or a ‘look that could kill’, that embodies a symbolic reading of who has and who hasn’t the right to certain kinds of leisure, and which makes those who are perceived as unworthy feel ‘out of place’. This is what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. One of Bourdieu’s major themes in this regard is people struggling with their own embodiment, with the fact of having bodies in the modern sense. If how a body looks makes some individuals happy, it can also make others unhappy with their bodies, particularly when they feel that they fail to match the social norm. This can persuade some individuals to pretend things are not as they are or encourage them to pursue leisure pursuits that will give them a better ‘look’. It can also lead some individuals to follow conventions which, while they complement some bodies, must be stretched over others; this can also lead to a situation where those (deviants) who contravene the social norm are over-identified with and through their bodily ‘look’ and deportment. In other words, and as Bourdieu would say, violence is exercised upon individuals in symbolic rather than in physical ways. Symbolic violence is the non-physical, emotional violence that is exercised upon individuals with their complicity that plays a key role in underlining the socially reproductive nature of the status quo (Bourdieu, 1989). Individuals are represented as the reproducers of ‘objective meaning’, ‘who do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning that they know’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 79). Symbolic violence works to ensure the reproduction of class and gender dispositions and the habituses most advantageous for maintaining the order of things. In other words, symbolic violence is one of the tools which enables the activator class to impose a cultural arbitrary as an arbitrary power – it does this by making class and other inequalities seem both natural and necessary. In the event the most powerful groups in society maintain their positions in the social hierarchy, not only with the aid of economic capital, but also the social and cultural capital embodied in their leisure lifestyles: a combination of earning power and superior taste. On top of that, the most vulnerable groups tend to be blamed for their own misfortune since it is presumed they lack that right social and cultural resources to determine their own lives, which in turn encourages the superior ‘us’ to determine what is appropriate for the inferior ‘them’ (Blackshaw and Long, 2005). Such has been Bourdieu’s influence in Leisure Studies that in the mid-1980s some scholars began to argue that social class is becoming less significant to understanding leisure behaviour than individual lifestyle choices centred around patterns of consumption based on youth, gender and ethnicity. However, as Veal (2001) points out, there soon emerged a resistance to the use of the concept mainly based on the idea that leisure lifestyles may change but social classes and their identities remain essentially the same (as coal and diamonds are essentially

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always carbon) (e.g. Critcher, 1989). However, such accounts tended to gloss the changed climatic conditions of neo-liberal capitalism, finding it difficult to reimagine ‘workers’ recast as ‘consumers’ – they merely saw workers consuming – who were increasingly able to occupy the place of consumption in new and imaginative ways through their leisure interests and activities. During the 1990s the concept of leisure lifestyles continued to grow in significance, especially with more and more people rejecting lives made to the measure of social class, and even to some extent age, gender and ethnicity, for those which they perceived did not restrict other potential outlets for credulity. Leisure lifestyles today are thus seen by Bourdieu-inspired Leisure Studies scholars as the practical expression of the symbolic dimension of class relations based on consumption rather than production (see for example Wynne, 1998). In this view, leisure lifestyles have little to do with other significant aspects of our sense of social self either, such as national identity – except during major international sports tournaments such as the association football or rugby union world cups – rather they are seen as identikits constructed and facilitated by global flows of consumer products and culture. The upshot is that rather than seeing leisure lifestyles as being unable to provide the kinds of stable identities associated with social class or work, leisure scholars have to come to grips with the idea that there has emerged a new kind of society – what some leisure scholars call postmodernity (see Rojek, 1995) – in which there is an increasing recognition of the notion of the quick fix self-effacement and re-assembly, rather than some gradual shrinking, fading away, ultimately disappearing notion of fixity. In this view, the adoption of a new leisure lifestyle – we must accept – is often nothing more (and nothing less either) than something more, hopefully, much more potentially exciting, empowering than the last one. Homo Bourdivinus: the arbitrary as necessity Bourdieu did not pursue the opportunity to apply this kind of reconceptualization of leisure lifestyles in his own work. In this regard he remained firmly within the Marxist tradition of foregrounding ‘structure’ at the expense of ‘agency’. This has led Jeffrey Alexander to argue that his ‘theory of practice’ is ‘nothing other than a theory of the determination of practice’ (1995: 140). This observation has led Richard Jenkins to argue that Bourdieu’s sociology is reductionist, deterministic and tautologous since its overriding focus is on social stability rather than social change. ‘Objective structures . . . are somehow given as ‘cultural arbitraries’, which the actions of embodied agents then reproduce’ (1992: 82). Nowhere is this criticism more apparent than in Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, which he uses to attempt to transcend the ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ debate in sociology. As Peter Sloterdijk explains, in typical acerbic fashion: The habitus, then, is the somatized class consciousness. It clings to us like a dialect that never disappears, one that not even Henry Higgins would be

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able to drive out of Miss Doolittle. When Trimalchio, the freed slave who subsequently acquired wealth, tastelessly displays his wealth at his banquets, the members of the old elite recognize the typical slave in him. When Bourdieu, on the other hand, the grandson of a poor metayer and the son of a postman from Beam, rose to become a master thinker and dominate the ‘field’ of academic sociology in France, the thought of the ineradicable habitus of his class helped him to allay the suspicion that he had betrayed his origins through his career. From this perspective, the theory of habitus has the inestimable advantage of serving the moral reassurance of its author: even if I wanted to betray my own class, it would be impossible, because its absorption into my old Adam forms the basis of my social being. (2013a: 180–181) What this suggests is that there is a paradox at the heart of Bourdieu’s sociology: although it is extremely critical of social inequality, its subjects have no social role in it other than to perform this social inequality as they endure it as their life. As Swenson explains, for Rancière, this leads to ‘a theory of the necessary misrecognition of social relations as the very mechanism of their reproduction’ (2006: 642). This tautology is important for our purposes since it clearly identifies the limits of Bourdieu’s sociology for understanding leisure. Not only is social inequality built into the deep structure of Bourdieu’s sociology, but it also performs the brilliant feat of making ‘the poor’ feel ennobled while confirming their exclusion from the world of leisure choices (see for example Bourdieu’s Magnus Opus The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al., 1999)). My use of the term ‘the poor’ here is Rancière’s which works with the assumption that the history of Western thought is one in which freedom and the right to think are premised on situating and excluding those whose social role is perceived other than to think. In applying the term in this way I am also using it as shorthand to include all those social groups who are in one way or another subjugated and/or excluded. It isn’t that Bourdieu’s respect for ‘the poor’ isn’t genuine, it is simply the case that his insights are not convincingly constituted of the different situations in which social inequality occurs. In a nutshell, the great sociologist of reflexivity thinks that the majority of ‘the poor’ do not have any time for leisure and he presumes that those who do are incapable of having any – well, any that don’t incite the kind of disapproving, puritanical look made corporate by the Frankfurt School, whose ghost lives on in Bourdieu’s sociology, grimly looking down and shaking its mocking head at those amongst ‘the poor’ aspiring to reranking [reclassement] through [their] feats in the great simile industry of the new petty bourgeoisie: the manufacture of junk jewelry or sale of symbolic services; the commerce of youth leaders, marriage counsellors, sex therapists, advertising executives, or dieticians determined to create

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within people the symbolic need necessary for the enlargement of their market, hence for the reconquest of their inheritance. (Rancière, 2004: 192–193) In other words, in Bourdieu’s sociology, leisure practices are understood through their necessary misrecognition. In his obsession with imposing his own grand narrative, Bourdieu’s ends up with a thesis of the ‘working class’ with neither the leisure to think of itself in other ways (Rancière, 2004) nor alternative ways of thinking about leisure other than those imposed on them by the theorist of Distinction. As Sloterdijk explains, the upshot of this is that Bourdieu is unable to grasp the individualized forms of existential self-designs. Bourdieu’s analysis necessarily remains within the typical, the prepersonal and the average, as if Homo sociologicus were to have the last word on all matters. In a certain sense, Bourdieu parodies the analysis of the ‘they’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time from an inverted perspective. While human Dasein is, for Heidegger, ‘proximally and for the most part’ . . . subject to the anonymity of the ‘they’, and only attains authenticity through an act of decisiveness, the authenticity of existence for Bourdieu lies in the habitus, over which a more or less random superstructure of ambitions, competencies and attributes of distinction accumulates. This reversal of the ‘they’ analysis follows almost automatically from agreement with the political ontology of practical thought, which states that the base is more real than the things that are superstructurally added. This would mean that humans are most themselves where their shaping through the habitus pre-empts them – as if the most genuine part of us were our absorbed class. The part of us that is not ourselves is most ourselves. The habitus theory provides a clandestine hybrid of Heidegger and Lukacs by taking from the former the idea of a self dispersed among the ‘they’, and from the latter the concept of class consciousness. It builds the two figures together in such a way that the pre-conscious class ‘in itself ’ within us becomes our true self. This corresponds to Bourdieu’s division of the social space into diverse ‘fields’ – in which one naturally finds no ‘persons’, only habitus controlled agents who are compelled to realize their programmes within the spaces offered by the field. (2013a: 181–182) What this suggests is that issues of critical self-reflection and authenticity for socalled ‘working class’ individuals remain largely unaddressed in Bourdieu’s work. What this also means is that his sociology is limited ontologically in the sense that it ignores that fact that all of us, notwithstanding our social background, are existentially individuals for whom being is itself also the performing of distinction. There is some leisure research that demonstrates that, notwithstanding the social, economic and political context in which individuals find themselves, they

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will always find ways of resisting the status quo and that this often occurs through their leisure. An example that illustrates this to good effect is Blackshaw and Crabbe’s (2004) discussion of car cruising, which demonstrates how heterotopias – Foucault’s (1984a [1967]) term for those sequestered places in which normal social structuring is contested and subverted – operate in modern societies. Blackshaw and Crabbe argue that car cruising is a ‘deviant’ leisure activity with its own kind of detached existence, of being ‘in’ but not ‘of the space it temporarily occupies, and which is capable of transforming ordinary life into a form of theatre. They also contend that car cruising is a ‘deviant’ leisure activity as much without a history as it is one without a future and that car cruises are imaginary communities, whose inspiration tends to spring from the performativity of individual cruisers: they are both events for consumption and things to be consumed by. The affiliation found at cruises is not really one of friendship, or of a community proper, but one of symbiosis and its only glue is cruisers’ insatiable appetites to connect with like-minded others. Building on this critique, Rojek and Blackshaw (2013) argue that the bearing of ‘generative principles’ (Bourdieu, 1977) that produce and reproduce the social practices underpinning leisure choices in contemporary societies are of a different order in the contemporary world than those suggested by Bourdieu. In other words, Rojek and Blackshaw call into question Bourdieu’s tacit assumption that social structures are deeply incorporated into individuals’ ‘dispositions’ in such a way that we can anticipate what their leisure choices are going to be over time. As they point out, drawing on the work of Bauman, liquid modern consumers prefer to wear the more informal gear of habitat rather than the more regimental class uniform of habitus. Whereas habitus is uncomplicated in the sense that it is relatively fixed because it is predetermined by social class location, the habitat is ‘a space of chaos and chronic indeterminacy’ . . . which is a schema of self-regulation subjected to competing and often contradictory meaning-conferring claims that nonetheless appear equally contingent. The ontological status of liquid moderns is for this reason not one of ‘durably installed generative practices’ (Bourdieu, 1977), but of under-determination, liquefaction and rootlessness. (Rojek and Blackshaw, 2013: 553)

The sociologists of the leisure and ‘their’ poor 2: the limits of the leisure intersectionalities’ perspective and methodology Another version of this theme is replayed in the theoretical perspective and methodology known as ‘intersectionality’, which some feminists have adopted in Leisure Studies. This perspective works on the basis that social inequality in leisure is relational and has multiple dimensions. The clear, rational logic of this perspective suggests that by taking into account the concept of ‘class’ multiplied

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by ‘gender’ multiplied by ‘race’ and so on what is revealed is something even more unequal. However, it never stops to consider, that in practice, an odd kind of polarizing effect might just take place. Rather than amplifying each other, social inequalities multiplied might just cancel each other out. A good example of this approach is Watson and Ratna’s (2011) research in the UK. Their article claims that intersectionality offers us a way to move beyond static interpretations of compound social inequality by taking into account representations of shifting, multi-layered social inequalities, which are constructed across racialized, classed and gendered social relations in particular leisure spaces. Yet Watson and Ratna’s account offers very little that is concrete or geared to representing the social conditions under scrutiny. What it does instead is lock the ostensibly multi-disadvantaged into a singular, self-contained leisure world. In so doing, what it fails to recognize is that ‘the poor’, in common with most other men and women in liquid modern societies (Bauman, 2000a), actually inhabit pluralized worlds where there are different possibilities. In liquid modernity, everyone wears many hats and inhabits many worlds. It is Leisure Studies that wishes to lock them into a single, disadvantaged world. Whereas those who theorize leisure by ‘thinking intersectionally’ see a singular world made up of complex intersections of social inequality, there is another approach to thinking that sees worlds in the plural. This is a view that is not only critical of the assumption that the theoretical world is the only horizon from which really existing realities take their meaning, but one which argues that when we understand the world in the plural, as the social philosopher Peter Sloterdijk does, ‘then there are different existential possibilities, that is to say, difference itself becomes the unity into which life draws its breath’ (Davis, 2013: viii-ix). This view is confirmed by some research in Leisure Studies, which suggests that an individual may inhabit several different worlds at once and often within an ordinary day (Blackshaw, 2003; Blackshaw and Crabbe, 2004; Blackshaw, 2013a). It is scarcely any longer possible (if it ever was) to explain with any kind of fixity, really existing realities (or identities) rationally as unfolding in time and space. Let us explore this argument in a little more detail. Robert Musil, the great Austrian writer, suggested 80 years ago (in his highly influential unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities) that what gives modern life its uniqueness in the absence of any sign of singularity is the universal ability of people to exceed whatever identity they have been allotted. In other words, we learn from Musil that ‘universal man can only be a man without qualities, for a man without qualities is the only one who can possess any quality’ (Jonsson, 2010: 117). That is, whilst there are many ways of becoming-in-the-world, all humans share the meaning of what it means to be human – in other words all human beings have the sense of an inevitable, universal, relation but with contingency attached to the individual form their life will take. As Jonnson goes on to explain: There is a slogan for this mode of universality as negativity: the right to difference. But human beings possess no such ‘right’; rather, they practice such

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difference inseparably from their life process. There are situations in which this negativity becomes politicized, such as when an external power seeks to fix a person or a group in a certain identity – as Jews, women, Muslims or youth – thus disavowing their capacity for negativity. (Ibid.: 117–118) Indeed, the satisfaction we find in our leisure is often the satisfaction of finding another aspect of ourselves, which permits us to be somebody else and this has nothing to do with the desire of external powers (such as Leisure Studies) to recognize us ‘for who we really are’. This observation leads to a further troubling aspect of intersectionality. This is the argument that despite its adherents’ claims to the contrary, ‘thinking intersectionally’ does a double disservice to ‘the poor’, by not only being resolutely determined to ‘give voice’ to the conditions of the multiplicity of their subjugation, but also by judging ‘them’ as oppressed creatures. As Rancière (2004) would say, in the kind of sociology promulgated by the intersectionality perspective, there are no ‘thieves’, only ‘the possessors and the disposed’. One of the consequences of this is that in trying to understand leisure through relational and multiple dimensions of inequality, the world of the research subjects under scrutiny is always bound to remain partial to say the least, and if the intersectionality perspective is one that is successful in giving voice, the only voices really heard are those of the sociologists. One of the other consequences is that ‘thinking intersectionally’ has to nurture with its thought the lives of its ‘subjects’; but in so doing it fails to grasp the fact that its monsters cannot be tamed by bolting together objectified versions of their existence from intersections that never quite cohere with one another. The overall effect is so full of its own virtuousness that it gives the impression of showing little regard for its respondents, and the arch structuring the sociology – with its inability to grasp the existential contingency of the individual lives at stake in the commentary – renders the perspective critically inert. As that most discerning critic of this social scientific fixation with turning subjectivity into objectivity and converting people from subjects into objects of investigation, Jacques Derrida, once put it, ‘One cannot say: “Here are our monsters”, without immediately turning the monsters into pets’ (1990: 80). What is perhaps most problematic with ‘thinking intersectionally’, then, is that it ends up overstating the significance of the relationship between difference and subjugation. This constitutes the limit of a particular sort of thinking about leisure, for which true freedom is only that of the theorist, and which is conceivable and functions as the exact opposite of the ostensible powerlessness of those who are subjugated. As Rancière would say, here Leisure Studies ends up as the very thought of inequality because by posing social inequality as the primary fact that needs to be explained, it ends up explaining its necessity. What ‘thinking intersectionally’ also does in this regard is deny the interpretive role of thinking sociologically since its conception of reflexivity (in common

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with Bourdieu’s), foregrounds social inequality at the expense of understanding leisure worlds through the self-understandings of social agents. In fact, the theoretical perspective and methodology known as ‘intersectionality’ and Bourdieu’s sociology are mirror images of each other. The awareness of what is lost, overlooked, and distorted in the process of transforming people’s everyday worlds into Leisure Studies cannot help but be missing from ‘thinking intersectionally’; and what it shares in common with Bourdieu’s sociology is the inability to escape the tendency to impose its own narrative order on all kinds of untidiness – worst of all, the necessities of sociological theory above the identification with and compassion for those whose worlds it claims to be explaining – while failing miserably to reflect on the process by which that order has been achieved.

Rethinking social inequality and its relationship with leisure The argument developed so far suggests that in Leisure Studies ‘the poor’ have to stay in their place: on the one hand, they have no time to go anywhere else because work won’t wait for them, which is an empirical fact; and on the other, their immovability rests on the belief that ‘God mixed iron in their makeup while he mixed gold in the makeup of those who are destined to deal with the common good’ (Rancière, 2009: 276). This second reason is not an empirical fact, but it provides the alchemical myth (‘the story of the deity who mixes gold, silver, or iron in the souls’) that underpins the ‘natural’ order of things and which sustains the idea that ‘the poor’ have to remain in their assigned places. In other words, in order for sociology to function it has to rest on the idea that the social divisions and the inequalities emanating from these are performed by those who endure them ‘as their life, as what they feel, and what they are aware of ’ (ibid.). To use one of Rancière’s analogies, the identity of someone from ‘the poor’ must fit like a handmade pair of shoes, but the type of shoe is never in question. Obviously, Rancière doesn’t think that ‘the poor’ actually believe that God mixed iron in their souls and gold in the souls of those higher in the system of social stratification, but it is enough that they sense it and as a result feel obliged, responsible and actively committed to this idea as if it were true. In other words, for Rancière, social divisions are not only a reflection of actually existing conditions of existence, but also the extent to which sociologists (or in our case Leisure Studies theorists) believe that they are natural and inevitable. In Rancière’s scheme of things, ‘myth’ and ‘reality’ and ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ are not opposed – just as a ‘reality’ always goes along with ‘myth’, so ‘activity’ always goes along with ‘passivity’. In other words, for Rancière, sociologists give their own meaning to the world through the patterns of hierarchy and order which appear in their theories and which they help to create and sustain. Indeed, the ‘poor’ in the two sociological approaches discussed above not only have a fixed past but do not have a future as their destiny has been foretold. They have come into existence only with the functionalist epistemic we see them in. And

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yet, on some level, the theories used by these two approaches invite our narrative participation – as if to show how inadequate they are. They are each selfenclosed universes devoid of any human mysteriousness. To have a fixed past and a destiny foretold means only suspension, not perception – the objectionable erasure of democratic narrative, or any formal structure that would help normalize the milieu which constitute hitherto unexplained lives. In the event, theory as it has been developed in these two approaches only helps its users in the academic world and the open intellectual market alike to maintain the pretense of critique by providing them with a means of reducing the manifold vertical differentiations of ‘society’ to the simple matrix of the privileges of power – be they . . . capital owners, material or symbolic. (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 181) Rancière (2009) argues that what sociologists need to grasp is that actually existing reality and the ability to transform it lies not in their theories or their research but in the collective passion of individuals. What he also argues is that when the status quo of actually existing reality is challenged, ‘a break of epistemology as the qualifying perceptual criterion for political participation’ (Panagia, 2010: 98) takes place, which leads to a demand for a share, a place, a part des san-part, in the social order by those who do not have one. To this extent, Rancière understands politics as a form of disruption of the established order of things by those who challenge their own invisibility, silence and unimportance within that order. Here Rancière is not talking about the empowerment of a group that already has a subordinated part or a place. Rather, that ‘politics is the emergence of a claim to enfranchisement by a group that has been so radically excluded that its inclusion demands the transformation of the rules of inclusion’ (Martin, 2005: 39). What this suggests is that people acting politically not only demand to be included in the world in ways that have previously not been open to them, but that they are also intent on a total transformation of the ways in which they are seen in this new ‘part’ or role – that is, they are after a radical transformation of experience. In other words, in order for them to be included, the world has to be transformed to accommodate them in different ways than it has done previously, and in order for the world to be transformed, people acting politically need to conjure a different world. This is often where leisure comes in. The essential point I want to make here can be made by briefly discussing some of the findings from my study of the ‘Inbetweeners’, the intermediary generation that provides the focus of a life history interpretation of working-class life in northern England in the period after the Second World War (Blackshaw, 2013b). Amongst other things, this study explores the extent to which a generation of working-people found, through their leisure interests and activities, the means to transform a world in which they had hitherto been predisposed to remain invisible. As this study shows, through the life course this generation would re-discover life as unintended and contingent and they would as a result

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set about re-making new worlds in their own image, and discovering also, by extension, that leisure is often pivotal to these reconstructions. What the evidence emerging from my study suggests is that when the balance of work and leisure tilts over from the former to the latter, as it did for many working-people in England in the post-war period, the distribution of iron and gold is disturbed. Indeed, by stealing ‘a certain sort of gold, a sort of gold which is at once more and less precious than the gold which is supposed to be mixed in the soul of the rulers’ (Rancière, 2009: 278), the Inbetweeners were at the vanguard of the dawn of a new order of things in which leisure moved steadily into its position as the principal driving force underpinning the human goal of satisfying its hunger for meaning and its thirst for giving life a purpose (Blackshaw, 2010). In other words, what the findings of this study demonstrate is that leisure was key to understanding the interruption of a tacitly accepted order of things by working-people who had hitherto been invisible in it. The result was, as the evidence of the study demonstrates, in the post-war period, that leisure as a certain kind of gold, instead of being out of the reach of most working-people, began to take up a more central and radical place in their lives.

Conclusions Amongst all the issues that emanate from the cognitive dissonance found in Leisure Studies discussed in this chapter, the following stand out. First and foremost, the prevailing discourse underpinning sociologically informed Leisure Studies accounts is premised upon situating ‘the poor’ in a singular, selfcontained leisure world. This social group figures in this world of leisure at the periphery, sometimes out of focus or only by omission. That is, Leisure Studies is weak on understanding ‘the poor’ and what ‘they’ might choose to do with their individual agency. Leisure Studies is alert to recognizing that social inequality in leisure is relational and has multiple dimensions, but it does this at the expense of understanding that everyone today – notwithstanding whether they are ‘the poor’ or not – inhabit pluralized worlds where there are different possibilities for leisure. We also saw that such an outlook can lead to some theorists equipping ‘the poor’ with an excess of the most unattractive, but also most necessary features of ‘people like them’ – features that while purporting to ‘give them voice’ actually turn them into monsters, or even worse still, pets, whose leisure interests incite the kind of disapproving, puritanical look made universal by the Frankfurt School. What is also clear from this discussion is that the discursive formation known as the Leisure Studies has been too insular, too parochial, and too complacent in framing the idea of its subject, and while many of the once bright academics from the 1970s are still around, the waves that they make nowadays seem much more modest. Beyond the odd blue-moon gem from Rojek, Leisure Studies seems to have reduced its ambitions to the shrinking comfort zone of coterie approval that is linked to its key associations, conferences and journals.

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Moreover, what is hardly debated in Leisure Studies is that the subject field has lost its lustre. The study of leisure has, by and large, dropped off the curriculum at most universities and most bright young postgraduates nowadays seem more attracted to subjects like sport, criminology and cultural studies. The fundamental issue at stake here can be found in the failure to incorporate into critical Leisure Studies what has happened in social, cultural, political and economic life over the last 30 or so years. It is important to qualify something at this point. I am not suggesting for a moment that social inequality is by now unimportant to the study of leisure. That is not my argument. Of course social inequality continues to have a massive bearing on people’s leisure and the opportunities afforded to some groups are clearly very different to others. This is exactly the sort of situation Miriam Pawel identifies in her study which reports the plight of farmworkers living in the canyons of Carlsbad north of San Diego in California who have to ‘burrow into the hills each year, covering their [plastic] shacks with leaves and branches to stay out of view of multimillion-dollar homes’ (cited in Noah, 2015: 33). These farmworkers have to live without running water, toilets, refrigeration, yet they live within hearing distance of the fireworks and music that regularly perforate the night skies from nearby LEGOLAND. Here the juxtaposition of two kinds of existence – the rich at leisure and the poor having to eke out a subsistence existence – couldn’t be starker. The respective divisions between what kinds of leisure are available to the rich and poor are indeed often very different. But what we need to recognize is that what human agency does not respect is the divisions placed on the ‘poor’ by Leisure Studies. My argument is that critical Leisure Studies, just like sociology, too readily accepts the shapes that capitalism, patriarchy, racism and convention have forced on our lives. To understand the implications of social inequality for leisure we have to look at the present day context in which it takes place. Being ‘poor’ in liquid modernity is radically different to being ‘poor’ in solid modernity in the sense that it is experienced in a world in which contingency takes the place of necessity. One of the upshots of this is that old forms that used to explain social inequality no longer provide accurate insights of our experiences – there is too much of a slippage between word and world. The truth is that today, notwithstanding our social origins, we expect more from life than our forebears did. We get frustrated or feel let down when our expectations rub up against much the same, but the difference in the twenty-first century is that we don’t succumb. Instead, in order to try to shape our lives on our own terms, we stand up and fight. That TINA dictum, ‘There Is No Alternative’, is confronted daily by myriad tiny, irrepressible grenades that explode deep inside countless imaginations. Some of us are better placed, and for that reason more successful, than others in overcoming the obstacles that capitalism, consumerism, patriarchy, racism and convention have forced into our lives, but whatever cards we have been dealt we ensure that our destiny takes shape in a way that accords with our own sense of things. In this way we are able to find some agreement

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between what life throws at us and our own expectations. As I suggested in the introduction to this book it is my view that it is more often than not in our leisure that we are able to dissolve these old social forms and replace them with new ones: all kinds of habitats (Bauman, 1992b), social networks, social spacings and social arrangements where we find new equilibriums. Leisure Studies has to date failed to recognize any of this. Subsequently there is now an unacceptable gap between Leisure Studies accounts and quotidian leisure. This gap has arisen as a result of the discursive formation’s anxious reluctance to let go of the ‘zombie categories’ – zombies frighten us by being both dead and alive – associated with orthodox sociology, which no longer have a compelling grip on reality. What I am talking about especially in this regard are the zombie concepts associated with social inequality which have a strange ghost-like presence in Leisure Studies, which still uses them as if they represent something, including power; and to some extent they do still represent power. But the social networks and patronage, the paddings of privilege and the stereotypes leftover from modernity in its ‘solid’ phase, do not carry the same power that they once did – even if Leisure Studies carry on ‘business as usual’. Breaking this spell is a game that all scholars need to play if the study of leisure is to emerge from the current crisis. So how to refresh the study of leisure in a way that thinks outside social inequality? The first answer to this question must be that the explanations I have given for the end of Leisure Studies have implications that reach much further than the issue of social inequality. Indeed, the whole function of Leisure Studies is in question if we can no longer accept that it has the authority to either lock individuals (no matter how ostensibly multi-disadvantaged) into a single identity or to convince us that the theoretical Leisure Studies world is the only horizon from which human existence we find in our free time takes its meaning. What this suggests is that Leisure Studies needs some new ‘rules of method’. To understand why (and to consider what these ‘new rules’ might look like) we must consider yet another answer. This is the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Some ‘new rules of method’ after Leisure Studies

Today we find ourselves living in a sociality at once strange and yet strangely familiar. It is still far from being an equal one, which means that a democratic deficit continues to bedevil the leisure opportunities of many. And yet there has been a shift from a structured and structuring society in which our identities were largely predetermined by our social class, gender, ethnicity, and the like, to an unstructured and de-structuring one in which the art of living dominates more than anything else, and where our selves always remain a work in progress. Social class, gender, and ethnicity may still exert some degree of influence on our leisure lives, but they certainly do not dictate them. There are many reasons why this is so, but it is still difficult to define this fundamental transformation briefly. But what this new mode of living involves, fundamentally, is the change, as Raymond Williams (1977) once observed, from unaware alignment to active commitment, or in other words, the moving of social relationships to human consciousness. ‘Unaware alignment’ refers to the kind of life you are born into and stuck with, while ‘active commitment’ refers to self-production and the kind of life we make for ourselves because we feel it our duty to do so. And this is because all of us – the privileged and the non-privileged, the haves and the have-nots – are existential agents who are very much aware of our social contingency. When the whole idea of contingency of the social arrangement comes over you, with the realization that the present is as it is but things could always be different, the world is inevitably going to look like a different place. Not only is immortality transferred from the domain of predestined fate to that of achievement (Bauman, in Bauman and Raud, 2015: 10) – which in principle is never fixed or conclusive – but the confidence to be the author of your own destiny begins to take charge. As has been well documented in sociology, in ‘solid modernity’ self-production was discovered and developed as the art of living by the middle classes, awkwardly positioned as they were between the upper classes who needed to do nothing in order to maintain their position guaranteed to them by birth, and the lower classes who could do nothing to improve the positional constraints imposed on them by birth (Bauman and Raud, 2015: 124)

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but the research emanating from the study for my book Working-class Life in Northern England 1945–2010 (Blackshaw, 2013a) suggests that it was the onset of the ‘interregnum’ in the last few decades of the twentieth-century which in no uncertain terms precipitated the universalization of this shift from unaware alignment to active commitment. Interregnum is a concept that denotes conjunctural change signifying the period between the ending of one kind of society and the birth of another. Following Bauman (2010), the term is defined here as the time-gap that appeared in the last decades of the twentieth century when modernity entered a huge state of flux as the old, producer-based ‘solid modernity’ was dying and a new modernity was still (is still) a para-ontology. Bauman’s name for this indefinite period of interregnum is ‘liquid modernity’. In Working-Class Life in Northern England, I speculated that the interregnum was precipitated by the ‘arrivance’ of what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘pure event’ which was so profound that it disturbed the established order of things, eroding the assumptions and presuppositions that supported the status quo. This ‘pure event’ was a new thing, original, individual, arriving out of nowhere. It constituted a ‘rupture in the nature of being and seeming that [allowed], momentarily, the omnipresent, unchanging and therefore invisible truth to become evident’ (Kelly, 2012: 9). What happened was far more than an unveiling; something occurred in the last few decades of the twentieth century that defied rational explanation. When the ‘pure event’ took place something unprecedented happened. We no longer knew ‘how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on in unforgettable: an ineffaceable event’ in what we had hitherto tacitly taken for granted as ‘the shared archive of a universal calendar’ (Derrida in Borradori, 2003). The idea of the ‘pure event’ provides us with a particularly potent analytical tool for making sense of the factors that lead to the onset of radical historical change. It suggests that although it is impossible to be precise about the why, the when, the where and the how the ‘pure event’ led to the twentieth-century interregnum: at what point did the established order of things – whose order of thought still bore the stamp of the nineteenth century – begin to lose its grip? Who knows? Still, I concluded that it would not be too far wrong to suggest that at some point in the last few decades of the twentieth century the cognitive frame that had hitherto kept burgeoning ‘solid modern’ social life on track was rendered useless, seemingly overnight. Before we go on to look at the consequences of this revolution in social life for understanding leisure, we need to first of all understand ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘how it really was’), to quote the great nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke, in ‘solid modernity’, before the interregnum, since this is useful in explaining how unaware alignment turned into active commitment. In what follows ‘how it really was’ is explained through Jacques Rancière’s partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible). This offers us a theoretical approach with which to explain the meaning and the organization of power (and

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violence) in a society based on social class (and gender) divisions and how these intersected with the reproduction of social order and authority in ‘solid modernity’. What is most compelling about Rancière’s thesis is that it provides a convincing way to link bottom-up individual experience to broader questions about the ways in which societies are able resist processes of change even when modes of living and social categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the burgeoning social reality.

Solid modernity and the distribution of the sensible What kind of phenomenon is the distribution of the sensible in concrete terms? What Matthew Hannah (2000: 25) said of the ‘rationality’ or ‘logic’ of Foucault’s concept of governmentality is true of the distribution of the sensible, it needs to be understood first and foremost as a discursive formation. Rancière (2009: 275) defines the distribution of the sensible as a relation between occupations and equipment, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capabilities of seeing, saying, and doing that ‘fit’ those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it. It ties occupation to presupposition. The distribution of the sensible, as its name suggests, is always a double: it signals both a sense of sharing and partitioning. It is a discursive formation that operates with a social logic based on hierarchy and domination which excludes some social groups by rendering them invisible, or at least obscuring their voices, even though it depends on their existence to establish and maintain the hierarchy. In other words, the idea of the distribution of the sensible invokes ‘both a sharing and a division of what is offered to perception’ (Swenson, 2006: 642). The sensible thus always involves both the sharing of a universal experience of the world and a division of that experience, and it is the dialectic between these two senses that constitutes the political nature of everyday experience. This is where social inequality comes in. In any sensible world reality is an unwritten agreement between the different social divisions that make up that society. In this sense, the distribution of the sensible does not refer to something like an ideological state apparatus (Althusser, 1971) that allows one class to dominate all others, but to a discursive formation whose organization and rules of partition are so deeply located in consciousness that they appear natural and inevitable to everyone. The distribution of the sensible does not so much run in parallel to normal existence – it is normal existence. In Rancière’s thesis we essentially encounter the integration of the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: reality is everyday social reality, while the Real is the inexorable

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‘abstract’, shadowlike logic that determines what goes on in social reality (Žižek, 2009). The power that sustains any sensible world is one that not only defines reality, but also validates the quotidian experiences that cede to the prevailing definitions on which social cohesion depends. The ministrations of the distribution of the sensible are everywhere in the world – and yet are never brought into public discussion by a sensible code that prohibits any dissent. This dualism runs as a secure thread through the discursive formation of any sensible world. What Rancière (2005) is alluding to is the idea that there is always another side to any actually existing reality, a side which is firmly planted in the everyday, a discursive side of it that is overlooked, but is always there, determined and determining. What Rancière’s concept brings to our attention is the crucial observation that when an entire world and its way of thinking is swept along by one institution, then everything – its culture, its customs, its mores and so on – is defined by that institution, irrespective of whether people agree with it or not. The distribution of the sensible is a world with an almost transcendent order that embraces the everyday. It has a structure. It has uniform repetitiveness. It is ruled by a centre and a hierarchy. It is the lack of confusion – the clarity and orderliness – that is most important in any distribution of the sensible. A sensible world is one of coherence, of particulars, of relations, of belonging, of specific place, all of which exist in microcosm of the broader whole. In this world things have their appointed places. One way of characterizing a sensible world is to subvert the existentialist slogan, ‘existence precedes essence’. That is, ‘essence precedes existence’. People are divided into social divisions and men and women are divided by gender. Place, belonging to place, wholeness of self, tacit understanding of the world and the certainty of its continuation are all part of the process of life. A distribution of the sensible is a world of belonging. People have their appointed places and these are inseparable from identities. Everything is interconnected. You can connect one thing to another because everything has its appointed place. In this distribution everything is ‘sensibly’ either altogether one thing or altogether another; any compromise, any hint of contagion, jeopardizes its ontological certainty. When the occasion demands, the distribution of the sensible, as Rancière points out, resorts to ‘police’ power (la police), including the kind of sheer brute force that is inherent to all imperializing projects. This observation notwithstanding, the concept as it is used by Rancière refers not to the ‘police force’ as such (although it does involve formal authorization of the police force, judiciary, legal systems and prisons), but to the functional ordering of social reality that is responsible for the right and proper distribution of societal places and roles. The function of la police is to determine the field of intelligibility concerning the distribution of the sensible by maintaining the symbolic power of all things, which obey ‘conventional’ rules of discourse. Put simply, the assigned role of la police is both absolute and totalizing and its function is to make sure that the order of things – what is visible, sayable, doable, imaginable, and crucially, by whom – remains unambiguous.

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People might be divided but the distribution of the sensible is one where everyone sees, hears, feels and has the same understanding of the world, everything divisive melts away into an essence of equivalence – it is the affiliation of this essential inequality, each social group separate and different but in essence bound with everyone else to the same hierarchal conditions, which sustains the status quo. Such society is bound up with an ontology of totality: the scene is set, the script is written and the facts of life are given. In this regard, the concept of the distribution of the sensible brings to light the socially constructed nature of identity, and especially the idea that appearance makes some social groups disappear – that they don’t have a place in the univocal order of things. What this means is that identity is not self-determined, but shaped by a more radical foundation, which is the tacit knowledge that in all cases people know who they are and who they are not. What this means is that to be an individual, to be someone different is in all cases accompanied by Otherness (who you are not) as the radical guarantee of authenticity. This is what Rancière understands as the dialectic of the distribution of the sensible and what ultimately guarantees its power and authority. A sensible world is a world in which the ‘solidity’ of things holds everything together. In ‘solid modernity’, the era of industrial society, ‘work was simultaneously the pivot of individual life, social order and the survival capacity (“systemic reproduction”) of society as a whole’ (Bauman, 2005: 17). Leisure, just like everything else in this society was very properly regulated, as if this was how life was supposed to be. Solid modernity was a liquidizing, yet resistant to change, world. The image of the world daily generated by everyday concerns was underpinned by assumed habit and the preservation of its continuity. At the root of this way of life lay the idea that truth depended on deep obedience, or receptivity, to the whole structure and substance of the distribution of the sensible. The hold of a particular discourse on the world, as well as its internal organization – the kind of depth it offered, the superficial degree of attention it paid to incident and dissent, its notion of orderliness – was inseparable from reality itself. To paraphrase Diski (2009: 21), in ‘solid modernity’ things were also kept separate and in their appropriate places: ‘certain clothes for particular occasions, work marked off from play, private walled away from public, formal disassociated from casual.’ The terror of mixing things up, of losing the order of things, was palpable. In this sensible world, people, like things, also had their appointed places. People, like things, were inseparable from their designations; they were interconnected plenitudes. In the totalizing clarity of ‘solid modernity’ there was a place for everything and everyone and everything and everyone had a place in it. That is the key feature about this particular sensible world: everything in it was essential – even the inessential aspects. Indeed, the things that were not essential were also very important. In this kind of world everyone also knows their place. The social world is squared and ruled. The essential point is not simply the clarity of things. It is the

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similarity between the order of things and the people who inhabit the world. This sensible world was one where orientation had both a social and a moral dimension. Everybody cared about what was right and wrong. They also cared about hierarchies. There was a difference between working class and middle class, between middle class and upper class, between men and women, but also between groups within classes. Everyone in ‘solid modernity’ had a finely tuned sense of class. Your class identity meant who you were, it gave a clear indication of what you were worth; it suggested something about you as an individual and your character, about your self-awareness and grasp on moral responsibility for your place in the order of things. It was assumed to be an absolutely reliable index for what the world needed to know about you and, crucially, what you should expect out of life. If you were working-class your social inferiority was already pre-determined. As a result, people were perpetually aware of a distance between people ‘like them’ and their necessary others. As my research in Working-Class Life in Northern England (Blackshaw 2013a) demonstrates, la police (school, education, work and leisure and so on) took care of this. One of the main social tasks of la police is to ensure the reproduction of, in the language of Bourdieu’s sociology, class and gender dispositions and the habituses most advantageous for maintaining the order of things. In other words, symbolic violence was one of the tools which enabled la police to impose a cultural arbitrary as an arbitrary power – it did this by making class and gender inequalities seem both natural and necessary. Perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of the brunt edge la police, however, was the prevalence of a specific moral code that was the guarantor of the order of things. From the evidence of the research it is clear that even by the middle of the twentieth-century this code was still ‘nineteenth-centuryish’, just as the Victorians understood it, which according to MacIntyre (1990), had five important features. First, it constituted a well-defined and relatively autonomous set of beliefs, attitudes and rule-based activity, which was ordered in accordance with the systematic compartmentalization of life in this sensible world. Second, morality was first and foremost a matter of obligation and ritualized responses to rule breaking through moral condemnation. Third, moral condemnation invited negative prohibitions or sanctions. Fourth, morality had been established in a culture in which impropriety was understood as accepted wisdom and it was expected that people would tacitly know what behaviour and action was appropriate as the occasion demanded; any deviation from the expected norm was understood as a particular, unforgiving kind of immorality. Fifth and finally, morality was a kind of rationality in the sense that there had to be, and indubitably was, consensus across the social classes concerning the nature of its justification. My research found that few people revolted strongly against these conventions. ‘Solid modernity’ was a largely predictable, rarely surprising and stubbornly familiar world, the prospect of it changing in any radical way was hardly ever given a thought by anyone. Ever pliant, most people allowed their freedoms

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to be restricted. The freedom of ‘living outside of the law’ of the sensible was for the most part an outlandish fantasy. What appeared to be rebellious or dissenting actions were more often than not directed not against the experienced reality of social inequality but against enduring clichés, or that is, what the sensible deemed was permissible to dissent against. In other words, dissent was produced through the distribution of the sensible, which rendered it impotent. One of the virtues of Rancière’s thesis is that, without denying people an iota of agency, it resolutely offers us a way of understanding the ‘solid modernity’ into which individuals were ‘thrown’, which was society as a totality, in which every individual, each gender, each social class and every institution existed in some relation to every other – the distribution of the sensible is both a sharing and division of the world – and people behaved according to the limits and choices they found set before them, more than according to whether they deviated from the norm in Foucault’s (1977) sense. What made this state of affairs even more remarkable was that by the middle of the twentieth century the sensible world of ‘solid modernity’ did not exist as a reality or an ideology. It was simply the residue of an industrial world, preserved in a discursive formation, which blurred the distinction between reality and illusion. People knew and expected this sensible pattern: they weren’t taught it; they simply swallowed it with everything else they were told. What that most astute student of the particularities of waste disposal Colin Burrow (2006) once said of the lives of clothes, furniture and writers was true of ‘solid modernity’ as it approached the twentieth-century interregnum: it was a social arrangement at that awkward period in its existence when it had become more than dated but something less than a piece of history. Its dominant modes of living and social categories might have been past their sell-by-dates, but society was still captivated by them. It was as if it was unable look at itself with a sense of historical contingency because, to tweak Burrow, the social divisions underpinning it remained much more formidable than they might have appeared on the surface since they were successful in opening a gap in perceiving that fell between society’s aesthetic and its material sense. What this observation suggests is that when a society gives the impression of being unable to recognize that an age has past, and it does not have the means of giving its modes of living and social categories the benefit of a historical perspective, it tells us that the society in question has developed neither the reflexivity nor any effective ways to think about how particular social arrangements come into being and why they change. In sum, by the middle of the twentieth century, ‘solid modernity’ was a society whose collective conscience was not yet preoccupied with its own senescence, with its place at the tail end of a nineteenth-century world that had run its course. My research in Working-Class Life in Northern England shows that the set of dispositions, rules, values, attitudes and responses inherited from a nineteenthcentury class society, despite becoming increasingly detached from the real world, still had a powerful aesthetic existence by the beginning of the second

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half of the twentieth century. On the bare face of things, it is astonishing how this social arrangement should have had this sense of continuity for such a long period of time, since this was not a social arrangement that could be understood in a static or unchanging sense, for it was a modern society changing all the time. But then something inexplicable took place and it did change. Looking back it was as if working-people were sleepwalking through life, doing what was expected of them. They might not have been in control of their lives, but they were secure in the fact that the life course would progress in a straight line: leaving school, starting work, courting, marrying, having children, becoming grandparents, retiring, without thinking very deeply about anything; and then, with a little shove, everything seemed to change, and they suddenly had to learn how to wake up, and discover themselves.

The implications of the interregnum for individuals and sociology and Leisure Studies As I see it, it is no coincidence that the end of Leisure Studies coincided with the end of a particular kind of modernity and the beginning of a new one. In the last decades of the twentieth century, society entered a new period, which as we have seen, Bauman (2000a) thinks of as the end of ‘solid modernity’ and the beginning of something that as yet lacks a distinct historical designation, an interregnum, and what he calls ‘liquid modernity’, which today we find ourselves having to deal with everywhere in life. In the last chapter we explored the implications for Leisure Studies of the predisposition to foreground social inequality in such a way as to lock certain social groups and individuals into a single identity. This chapter begins by suggesting that it was the interregnum, the one of ‘liquid modernity’ that precipitated an abrupt shift in tectonic plates that exposed in no uncertain terms the crisis in Leisure Studies, which I have argued has its roots in the deep structure of sociology. The rest of the chapter involves the exploration of the consequences that follow when a liquid modern sociality emerges that is radically different from the ‘solid modern’ society that preceded it, and the question of that shift becomes pressing for what passes as convincing ‘theory’ and ‘method’ in Leisure Studies. It takes some ability and imagination to be practiced and adept at explaining what happens in the advent of conjunctural change. This is because in the aftermath of such momentous events our cognitive apparatus for making sense of what has occurred comes up against its limits, our ability to conceptualize falters and how we customarily make sense of the world literally ‘falls away’. We know that ‘something’ has taken place, but we do not yet have words for it. Indeed, the most remarkable feature of conjunctural change is that it says no to conceptualization, because of its absence of a clear cognitive presence – convention having disappeared as convention itself adjusted – and as a result the world remains ineffable to the existing episteme for making sense of it. We can sense that something has changed, has happened for the first time (and perhaps the last),

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but cannot say exactly what it is, its precise meaning always evading our attempts to put it into words. To tweak a little Bauman’s (2010: 120) words, with the instigation of the events that led to the conjunctural shift in modernity in the last decades of the twentieth century, the established order of things began to lose its grip and could no longer keep burgeoning social life on track, and a new episteme, made to the measure of that which was responsible for making the old episteme useless, was still in the design stage, had not yet been fully assembled, and had not been made strong enough to be enforced and settled in place. Here we had an event of such significance that it ushered in an interregnum; that is, an ontology that still had to be thought. In an interregnum, where world and the cognitive understandings used to keep social life on track fall ‘out of joint’ with one another, a ‘deconstruction takes place, an event that does not await deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity’ (Derrida, 1985: 4). The significance of conjunctural change is only felt when it initiates a shifting ontology between the normal ‘state of the situation’ and what turns out to be exceptional and discontinuous, when it leads to a ‘repeatable authentic possibility’ (Badiou, 2005), which for Heidegger is the most important aspect of history; this is an event ‘which can be repeated so that the power of the possible is felt in present existence’ (Macquarrie, 1973: 156). But when a radical rupture and discontinuities in the historical process occur, so suggests Zehrer (1952), more people start to ask the question that we hardly ever care to ask. What is the meaning of life? When someone asks this kind of question, Terry Eagleton has argued, they are usually asking what all the various situations of their life add up to (2007: 57). Zehrer suggests that from this we can deduce that something that has hitherto given them security has been broken or has come to an end. When this kind of ‘question emerges in the historic course of a given culture, it is a sign that the foundations of the culture have become faulty, and that people are no longer unselfconsciously at home in it’ (Zehrer, 1952: 28). Like Ortega Y Gasset (1933) before him, Zehrer is arguing here that a cultural crisis follows whenever inherited beliefs lose their authority. As someone modest about his own achievements, Bauman would no doubt argue that we still await the demand for an entirely new episteme to be finally satisfied; and that ours continues to be an era of cultural crisis. But I would argue that by now the episteme made to the measure of a specific and distinctive ‘light’ and a ‘liquid’, ‘soft-ware-focused’ modernity is no longer at the design stage. It might not be fully assembled, but it is now beginning to enforce itself and settle into place. What this tells us is that not only does conjunctural change signal a definitive epistemological rift, but also that in showing itself as such it eventually produces a new ontological context which is accompanied by a new episteme for understanding the new ‘order of things’. In my view, Bauman is what Wallace Stevens (1997) once described as a ‘thinker of the first idea’, who has provided us with a new kind of sociology for understanding the interregnum.

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Perhaps the most useful way of explaining this is by applying Giddens’ idea of the double hermeneutic, which illuminates how burgeoning social life and sociology have a two-way relationship through which one continually informs the other. There is a paradox that surrounds sociology (and by default Leisure Studies) today: the capacity of ordinary people to embrace liquid modern change is precisely what makes sociology so interesting. And yet change to sociology’s doxa is often resisted. Perhaps this should not surprise us since the categories sociology works with were acquired in the ‘solid modern’ episteme to become part of its cognitive apparatus. One of the upshots of this situation, though, is that since it is unusual to be in the position to simply replace old categories with new ones, the temptation in sociology, and as we have seen invariably in Leisure Studies too, is to suppose that the old ones will do as inferior substitutes. As a result, these invariably end up operating as ‘dead living’ zombie categories – social class, community, society and so on – which are all too often inappropriately assigned to new social phenomena. In challenging this state of affairs, Bauman’s starting point is that in order to understand the conjunctural changes instigated by the onset of the interregnum we must take into account social practices as they emerge contingently in people’s everyday lives. What this means specifically is that we need to look beyond the idea predominant in sociology (and Leisure Studies) that social structure simply advantages some social groups at the expense of others. Bauman insists on a new kind of sociology suitable to the under-patterned and underdetermined nature of the liquid modern social arrangement, which in his view is best understood as a sociality rather than a society. Sociality is the category Bauman uses to get across to his readers the processual nature of liquid modern life that he insists ‘refuses to take the structured character of the process for granted – which treats instead all found structures as emergent accomplishments’ (1992b: 190). There are two principles that underlie Bauman’s interpretation of our current interregnum. The first principle is that we must focus our attention primarily on human agency, or more precisely, ‘on the habitat in which agency operates and which it produces in the course of operation’. In other words, it is important to recognize two things: first, that people today have an unprecedented power to make individual choices, and, second, that these choices must be understood within the habitats in which they take place. Let us briefly consider the implications of these two observations. Bauman operates with Husserl’s admonition that we need to give sufficient attention to the workings of human consciousness. It is lazy to assume that people’s minds today work in the same way as they did in the not too distant past. In identifying ‘self-constitution’ and ‘self-assembly’ Bauman (1992b) supplies us with an alternative language with which to accommodate this metamorphosis in modern life, and which recognizes that ‘liquid modernity’ is a parallel social arrangement to the ‘solid modernity’ that went before, intimately connected with it, but existentially different.

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The question of what habitat ‘is’ or ‘means’ can always be considered in relation to the question of how it works as a means of expression for the self. What this suggests is that habitats are social forms which can be defined in a variety of ways as forms, patternings, networks, spacings or arrangements. How can habitat mean so many different things? In much sociology, ‘time’ and ‘space’ tend towards abstraction; what Bauman shows us, however, is that, taken together, time and space constitute the habitats where we live our lives and continually remake our sense of ourselves. The other advantage of using this term is that it allows us to grasp both the specificity and generalizability of social forms, patternings, and so on. For example, habitats could be described as ‘cleaves’ (Blackshaw, 2010). The cleaves of all habitats are both noun and verb: we identify with them collectively, but live (and leave) them on individual terms. What this tells us is that although we are always situated in the world and this means being in the balance of a power relationship in which human agency is enabled or constrained, there is no other person or institution that has the power to determine the conduct of individuals nor to define its meaning. This is because today we insist on our own individuality: we think of our self as an independent, absolute individual, the type of person who always chooses freedom over circumscription. Agnes Heller’s work is useful in explaining the implications of this for sociology and Leisure Studies. She argues that modernity is a society with a sense of social contingency (Heller, 1999). This entails individuals being ‘thrown’ into the world and challenged to make their own individual destiny. As contingent individuals we are already determined in infinite ways for which we are not responsible. Although we can try to understand this choice sociologically, the actual choice cannot be reduced to sociological explanation. We can assume that class, gender and culture may to some extent help nourish who we are but necessity is not the fate of modern individuals. Modern individuals are neither locked in narrow class identities nor are they cultural dopes. Neither are they mere ‘relays’ for reproducing the everyday. Individuals add their own experiences and contributions to the social world (Heller, 1984: 7). It is indubitably freedom that is the destiny of the contingent individual. The self, chosen as personal destiny, is not a product of introspection but the result of essential action: this is a ‘becoming’ whereby the self reaches out to find the kind of actions appropriate to the self-chosen character and destiny. This is the meaning of the idea of choosing ‘to become the person you already are’. This framework allows the individual to continue making consecutive choices bound by the telos of the initial existential one. In this sense, existence precedes essence. (Grumley, 2005: 192) This choice is an ‘existential leap’ into authenticity which is neither determined nor controlled by any external agency or institution. The existential leap is the

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fundamental freedom of modernity and the basis of all others. The existential leap defies reduction to purely rational interpretation. The choice of this life over any other is an unknown, which reason might try to explain again and again, but without much reward; it is in the existential leap that lies the most satisfactory explanation (Grumley, 2005: 282). Authenticity is the foremost virtue of the existential leap. It signifies bringing our everyday existence into accord with our chosen possibilities. While contingency remains an inescapable constituent of our lives, the choices we make take on an appeal that separates them from what went before. According to Heller, choice is realized in a series of challenges we put to the character we have chosen for ourselves, the personality we hope to become. Existential choice is always multidimensional. In one key dimension, it concerns developing basic personal abilities into talents. This is the existential choice according to difference. In making this choice, we choose to distinguish ourselves from others around us. In making such a wager we expose ourselves to the contingency of good and bad fortune. This choice of destiny is also more often than not pursued with the kind of single-mindedness that may seem eccentric or even unethical to the external observer. For Bauman, as for Heller, today it is extremely difficult for individuals to envisage that they inhabit a society whose members’ awareness of themselves is as part of some greater whole. What Bauman and Heller are not saying, however, is that individuals are merely independent self-creations. As Bauman puts it, our freedom to choose our own sense of self is always a social relation: ‘the difference between action dependent on the will of others and action dependent on one’s own will’ (Bauman, 1988: 9). Hidden or only partially acknowledged influences from the circumscribing society: social class, community, family and friends, continue to play a large part in making us the sort of people we are, but these are secondary to any consciously (or unconsciously) made decisions of our own. The difference between liquid modernity and the solid modern world that preceded it is not so much the nature of such influences as the kind of attitude with which they are regarded. The tendency today is to try to shake free of any such circumscribing, as far as possible. The liquid form of modernity ushered in by the interregnum brought in its wake a sui generis defiance of any form of categorization. ‘To be put into a category is to be put in a coffin’, said one of Theodore Zeldin’s (1998: 224) research participants: ‘I am a bar of soap’. In other words, what she meant in using this metaphor is not that a bar of soap symbolizes cleanliness. In her hands it becomes a metaphor for freedom. The bubbles that the soap makes are ‘impossible to capture’, just as she is (and all other liquid modern individuals we can add). Bauman (2008a) is not suggesting that human agency has been set free unconditionally from the confines of social structure. He argues that the trajectory of our lives is two-dimensional in the sense that it is plotted on two vertical axes: this of ‘fate’ and that of ‘character’. If the former is represented by the accumulation of factors on which we have no influence, the latter is embodied in

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the subjective ‘assets’ and ‘liabilities’ we might choose or choose not to hone. As Bauman explains, the nitty-gritty here is the entwining of the influences of ‘fate’ and ‘character’ in the course of self-realization. The other point he makes is that to be liquid modern is to have contingency-awareness; it is to know that you just come from anywhere, and that your place in the world could always be different. Yet he recognizes too, as Varcoe points out, that individuals are together, structuring, order-needing, order-creating creatures. Their struggles and strivings are carried on in the field of culture of which ‘social structure’ is only the sedimented result at any given time, i.e. what appears to be solid (in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of common sense) . . . It is crucial to Bauman’s view that structuring is ongoing, all the time, we never start from a clean slate, we are both free (structuring) and unfree (structured). (Varcoe, 2002: 39, 41–42) In this regard, Bauman is acutely aware that the freedom individuals have to make their own luck too often fades as the fluid possibilities of modern life harden as a result of individual ‘fate’. Yet he recognizes too that whatever cards we are dealt we ensure that our destiny takes shape in a way that accords with our ‘character’, our own sense of things. In this way we are able to find some agreement between what life throws at us and our own expectations. The second principle underlying Bauman’s interpretive framework is that we should recognize that if habitat performs some determining role, it is only in the way that it sets the agenda for the ‘business of life’ through supplying the inventory of ends and the pool of means . . . For this reason the choices through which the life of the agent is construed and sustained is best seen (as it tends to be seen by the agents themselves) as adding up to the process of selfconstitution. To underline the graduated and ultimately inconclusive nature of the process, self-constitution is best viewed as self-assembly. (Bauman, 1992b: 191) The freedom it affords individuals is the most important aspect of habitat. Finally, in light of these two principles, we should endeavour to understand the liquid modern social arrangement through the categories of ‘sociality’, ‘habitat’, ‘self-constitution’ and ‘self-assembly’. As Bauman points out in the same discussion, these four fulfil similar roles as those held in reserve for ‘society’, ‘normative group’ (such as social class and community), ‘socialization’ and ‘social control’ in mainstream sociology. The implications of these observations for the study of leisure are profound. In the following chapter we will start to explore what a ‘liquid’ sociological approach with its new, interpretive episteme tells us about twenty-first-century leisure. In the next part of this chapter I shall develop a thumbnail sketch of what

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this alternative way of studying leisure with certain epistemological, ontological and ethical implications incorporates. In so doing, my approach differs noticeably from the discursive formation known as Leisure Studies. The views that I shall develop below have their point of origin in another kind of thinking which begins with the assumption that truth is better revealed through essential action rather than ‘theory’ and ‘method’. As the reader will see, these views are intimately shaped by the work of Bauman, Heller, Rancière and Peter Sloterdijk, who each stress the social contingency (and ambivalence) of modern life, which culminates in a way of thinking that reverses a number of assumptions underpinning sociology’s rational theorization of the modern world.

Thinking (liquid) sociologically in leisure studies The first merit of this alternative way of thinking sociologically is that it abandons the binary oppositions sociology inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. Its second strength, and a considerable one, is that it inscribes social theory within modernity by taking it out of the academy and placing it politically into everyday life (Badiou, 2005). Its third virtue is to foreground the question of what it means to be human in the modern world. In so doing it frames human life as an existential problem. Above all else, existentialism is a practical philosophy, a philosophy of existence, and of freedom. In this sense existentialism is concerned with the thoroughly modern condition of how people live, which compels us to become a personality so as to live our lives in the manner of their own choosing. It is a way of being that also releases individuals ‘from illusions or deceptions which estrange them from the world, each other, and themselves’ (Cooper, 1990: 169). I’d say all this makes existentialism an ideal philosophy for informing any exploration of leisure. However, contra Heidegger, my approach stresses ‘becoming’ over ‘being’ and the recognition that modern life is irreducibly mutable and heterogeneous. ‘Becoming’, as Nietzsche said, ‘must be explained without recourse to final intentions’; unlike ‘being’, it ‘does not aim at a final state’ (cited in Nehamas, 1985: 171). In addition, it recognizes that rather than finding ourselves merely ‘being-thrown-in-the-world’, we are knowledgeable actors who recognize the conditions of our own social contingency. The fourth virtue of this way of thinking is that it replaces the idea of a singular world as an ontological given with the idea that we in fact inhabit pluralized worlds – contingent, shape-shifting, fractured, under-designed and undesignable, fuzzily-hierarchical, imperceptible worlds – in which life is lived noch nicht, surrounded by possibilities that have not yet been realized, and where freedom is considered as our duty. Its fifth distinguishing feature, and perhaps its most contentious, is that it brings the idea to sociology and leisure studies that what we understand about the pluralized worlds in which we find ourselves is only knowable through some kind of story. Let us look at this fifth feature in some more detail. It will be suggested below that my way of thinking sociologically attempts to fasten the delight we find in

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the pluralized worlds of liquid modernity onto new kinds of narrative informed by the kind of passion found in the best works of literature and poetry. In other words, in deconstructing binary oppositions – between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘concept’ and ‘existence’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘action’, and so on – and in the absence of ontological certainty, it is my contention that ‘rules of method’ have to be assigned on what are essentially aesthetic grounds – on the basis of whose narrative has the more attractive language, or the more engaging style. For a second time in this chapter, I have put forward what might appear a somewhat scandalous proposition – though once again for good and assignable reasons.

Telling stories: sociology as hermeneutics Sociology will never be quite equal to the complexity and infinite nuance of what takes place in everyday life, but it is impossible to think sociologically without arriving at some kind of interpretation. However, and to paraphrase what the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1963: 24) in his Massey Lecture Giants in Time, drawing on Aristotle’s idea of the ‘universal event’, said of the work of poets, what we meet in any interpretation is neither ‘real’ nor ‘unreal’: it is the product of the educated imagination – if by imagination we mean not, as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent, but the ability to disclose that which exists (Berger cited in Burn, 2009). Thinking sociologically in liquid modern times is neither fixed nor definitive. It is, on the contrary, a place of perpetual deliberation, speculation calmed by an awareness of the ‘facts’ that lie behind what is often naïvely called ‘reality’ and the sociological imagination, and which makes them one and indivisible. Quite simply, sociologists make a good deal of assumptions about everyday life and there is a good deal of truth behind these, and these assumptions are as good a place to start as any. To continue with Frye’s synopsis, sociologists should never try to make any ‘real’ statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones. It is not our job to tell our readers what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the thing that always does take place. The biggest charlatans in sociology are the ‘theorists’; the ones who claim that they are telling their readers how things ‘really happened’. As Giddens (1984) has convincingly argued, the relation between sociology and its subject matter – the two-way process by which everyday experience is turned into sociology and sociology is turned into everyday experience – has to be understood in terms of a ‘double hermeneutic’. In volunteering themselves as cultural intermediaries in this way, what sociologists do is demonstrate that virtue is better revealed in ‘action’ rather than through ‘theory’. In so doing they reveal themselves as the most honest of sociologists who say This is my interpretation of the world and I’m going to try like hell to make you believe that it’s true; all I ask is that you suspend your own ontological assumptions for a little while until I have told you my story.

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In other words, sociologists as interpreters and cultural intermediaries challenge their readers to engage in what Rorty (2007) calls ‘cultural politics’: the beginning of a conversation about what words to use to create a better vision of the society we want to live in. What this tells us is that rather than trust sociological ‘theory’; we should trust sociologists’ stories instead. This is because sociology and leisure studies conducted under the auspices of cultural politics can only be good or bad in its own categorization. Sociologists as interpreters and cultural intermediaries know that what they are presenting us with is both a superior and an inferior world to the one we usually live with, but what they demand is that we keep looking steadily at them both. In this way of thinking sociologically, no idea of reality is final and no interpretation, however good, is going to pronounce some final absolute truth. Every new interpretation, every new formulation emerging from this or that interpretation has the potential to change our understanding. In anticipation of my critics, I am acutely aware that, as the eminent philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1994) famously pointed out, the work of the scholar is constrained by two important issues that need not concern the novelist or the poet. First, its narrative must be localized in a time and space that has actually existed; and, second, it must be allied to evidence that the scholar has gathered from reliable sources. In other words, as sociologists, we do not have the freedom of the novelist or the poet; we are constrained by the evidence. Walter Benjamin, a scholar who occupied the opposite pole on the continuum on which the rather conservative Collingwood’s views could be plotted, offered a more radical solution. To scholars who wish to capture the lives and times of any era, Benjamin (1974) suggested, they should develop a ‘procedure of empathy’ by turning to the period in question in order to redeem its sufferings. Benjamin’s invocation gives a crucial role to developing solidarity with the worlds of those whose lives we seek to understand. This concern is captured succinctly by Brewer’s (2010) practice of ‘refuge history’ whose ‘procedure of empathy’ forms the basis of the ‘rules of method’ underpinning my book Working-Class Life in Northern England, 1945–2010. As Brewer explains, ‘refuge history’ is close-up and on the small scale. Its emphasis is on a singular place rather than space, the careful delineation of particularities and details, a degree of enclosure. . . . Within the space of refuge historical figures are actors and have agency, motives, feeling and consciousness. They are the subjects not objects of history. The emphasis is on forms of interdependence, on interiority and intimacy rather than surface and distance. The pleasures of refuge history derive not from a sense of control of history but from a sense of belonging, of connectedness – to both persons and details – in the past. Whether as the expression of a certain common humanity or as an identification with a particular group, this sort of history sees sympathy and understanding – a measure of identification which can range from the quite

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abstract to the deeply emotive – as essential to historical knowledge and insight. Refuge history is therefore . . . Heimleich. (2010: 89) Trying to understand different worlds with different rules demands a special kind of sociological inquiry. This is the kind of inquiry that takes into account the objective features of the world while contemplating real-life situations – research respondents’ inner and outer worlds – by accounting for their personal priorities and relationships with others. There are two other important building blocks to this kind of inquiry. First, it begins with the assumption that the human ‘becoming-in-the-world’ is knitted together with its own sense of security and comfort – with feeling just right – and second, is concerned with the idea that every world has its own sense of morality – its inhabitants living life in a way that they deem right.

Thinking with feeling: how to make sociology and leisure studies Heimleich (or homely) These foregoing insights form the basis of my own sociological ‘rules of method’, which demand that if we seek to record the leisure lives of our research respondents accurately, we must also aim at getting into the evidence of how and in what ways they experience leisure and its social meaning for them, as well as something of its disorderly continuity – often invisible, but all the more consequential for being so – which makes life palpable, and in some cases, bearable. To paraphrase Foucault (1970: xi), the purpose of researching leisure Heimleich is to try to restore what usually eludes the consciousness of the sociological imagination, which is looking at a milieu and its people from the inside and trying to feel what it feels, what they feel. One of my key concerns in the book Working-Class Life in Northern England, 1945–2010 (Blackshaw, 2013b) is to explore and evoke the emotional contours of my respondents’ collective history. In other words, to paraphrase Nora, it is concerned with what wells up from this generation that memory has welded together (1996: 3). In developing the study, I inhabited a realm between the past and the present, moving back-and-forth, in dialogue, constructing a narrative as an interpretive device made between my respondents and me. In the event, the book works with the assumption that reality cannot be reproduced in history, but the concentrated act of reproducing some of reality’s dynamics can, by turning history into an essential action – even if the best it can hope to achieve is to make the world it renders in its pages feel human and not merely an academic machination. In other words, refuge history – understood here as the empathetic study of what Hegel called ‘absolute spirit home-experience’ (Heller 2011: 213) and the narrative that moves it – is the domain par excellence of sociology as hermeneutics. Hermeneutics in sociological mode is reminiscent of what Foucault termed a ‘general’ history (as opposed to a ‘total’ history). Whereas a ‘total’ history draws

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its resources around a single unifying centre – ‘a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a worldview, an overall shape’ – a ‘general’ history, deploys ‘the space of a dispersion’ (1972, 10). Foucault’s critical method recognizes that all historical (and sociological and leisure studies) accounts are embedded in, and concerned with, the exercise of power-knowledge. This critical awareness informs this generational study in the sense that it deploys its own ‘space of a dispersion’ in the gap between what is necessarily present and unnecessarily absent in the individual and collective memories of its research respondents. What this tells the reader of the book is that between the past and memory there is something else at stake that is much more important than ensuring reliability and representativeness. This is that interpretation itself is a moral issue: ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the ‘counterfactual’ and the ‘factual’, the ‘necessary’ and the ‘contingent’ are intermingled; in this study, contraries always come together. The first key aspect of sociology in hermeneutic mode is its transcendentalist capabilities, its ability to convey mutual feeling and the warm glow of collective consciousness which logico-scientific sociologies are unable to feel and convey. According to Bauman (1992b: 42), what its practitioners are after is a ‘mimetic representation’ of the social world. To put it another way, hermeneutics works with the assumption that it has the ability to tell its readers things about human life that they wouldn’t, couldn’t get in another way. Along with this intuitive insight, hermeneutics operates with a keen moral awareness. This is because it recognizes that the world as an object of investigation is in fact the globality made up of a countless number of worlds, cultures and communities, which as a result of the historical process to date, appear to each other as at once familiar, but also fascinatingly Other. In this sense it recognizes that the world is in fact a multitude of alternate universes sometimes intersecting with each other to create an infinite number of slightly different versions of reality. The conspicuous implication of hermeneutics is that since we cannot know everything, we cannot know anything for sure; but its actual effect – and its success – is to suggest something different: that hermeneutics confirms the idea of truth instead of dissipating it, that the difficulty of explaining ‘how things really happened’ doesn’t disprove those things but authenticates them. The watchword of any hermeneutical account is the mindfulness of its own contingency, or in other words the need to be aware that there is an unbridgeable gap between what it says about the world and what might be going on in the world. Indeed, it is the acceptance of this kind of responsibility ‘over meaningproduction and truth-validation’ that casts the hermeneutician into the role of the cultural interpreter, of the cultural intermediary, whose specific role it is to facilitate communication between different audiences (ibid.). Hermeneuticians not only recognize that their research findings will always remain partial, but they are also cognizant of the limitations of research ‘data’, which is typically illustrated with characteristic examples from field notes, such as interview quotations. Instead hermeneuticians look to develop writing techniques that attempt to reflect the worlds of those under scrutiny. This way of

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writing revels in accretions of detail, speaking to the important things that govern men’s and women’s lives: their loves, their memories, their families and the many other beauties and truths and quidities and epiphanies that give meaning to their individual and shared existence. The second key aspect of sociology in hermeneutic mode is that it works on the basis that the best studies work their magic through the ability of their authors to convince their readers about the reality under scrutiny, rather than through any direct correspondence with that reality. This approach also works with the assumption that, like all good novels, cultural studies must be well written, but its real strength and power lies in its ability to construct the world as having ‘ideal-typical’ meaning (ideal types are not descriptions of reality, but analytical tools we use to try to understand it). This enables them to capture the contingency of the world – what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the il y a or the unconditional ‘there is’ of life lived just then, at that moment, before our own ready-made interpretations get in the way – as it is revealed through the order that we have imaginatively posed on it by using these ‘ideal-types’. In other words, hermeneutics gives us thick descriptions, as Geertz (1973) conceived them, that should be free of jargon and editorializing, and capable of engaging the reader with what makes life for the men and women who are its topic of attention intimate and real, by evoking the actual feeling of day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year quotidian life, but as an abstract idealization which is constructed from a particular point of view (Weber, cited in Parkin, 2002: 30). To borrow an expression from Bauman, this is the ‘irreparable and irredeemable ambivalence’ of sociology in hermeneutical mode. The present study’s cognitive framework is derived from the dialectic between what Bauman (1992a) calls ‘sociological hermeneutics’ and ‘hermeneutic sociology’. The most accomplished practitioners of hermeneutic sociology tend to be those ethnographers who succeed in ‘reaching the totality through a case study’, by interpreting social figurations and then producing both thorough and profound insights into people’s leisure experiences – and that is different from documenting the ‘facts’ (see for example my study of the liquid leisure lives of working-class men in Leeds in Leisure Life (2003)). But this is only half of it. Bauman’s own sociology focuses its attention fully on the translation of hermeneutic sociology to sociological hermeneutics, which demands that the continuous and changing aspects of life strategies alike be traced back to the social figurations they serve (in a dialectic process of reciprocal determination) – and forward, to the patterns of daily life in which they find expression. (1992b: 11) In other words, sociological hermeneutics entails transforming how it is into something emphatically political. Hermeneutic sociology can tell us what it feels like to be a working-class man in his leisure in liquid modernity; hermeneutic

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sociology cannot explain the consequences of liquid modernity for the existences of working-class men. Sociological hermeneutics can. As hermeneutics, sociology fulfils its vocation to address modernity’s big issues, and we are pulled away from glimpsed ethnographies of individual lives into dense, critical accounts of the larger factors that bear down on them. What changes when we embrace the continuous reciprocal process that emerges between hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics is not just how we think sociologically about leisure, but also how we think about certain epistemological (what we consider we know and how we know it) and ontological (what we consider to be ‘real’ in the world) issues raised when it is assumed that the study of leisure bears a closer relation to art than it does to social science – the present book is in this regard not merely concerned with exploring the art of living but also developing artistic practices that enable rigorous scholarship. Sociology in this dual hermeneutical mode marks a departure from Leisure Studies in that it offers a different way of seeing. One key way in which it does this is by ironizing perception – in other words, boundedness and selfsameness – in order to challenge common sense doxa so that the liquid modern world, which is always in flux, impelled as it is by contingency, might flash up before us, as only language can, in alternative ways. To this end, the approach developed to understand leisure in this book is geared towards the poetic, to the confluence of language in surprising ways: metaphor, analogy, juxtaposition, all sorts.

Turning Leisure Studies ‘hedgehogs’ into liquid modern ‘foxes’ It is my view that we need some new metaphors for understanding twenty-firstcentury leisure. With this is mind we must consider in more depth how liquid sociology opens the way for reading modern life in a new way characterized by the metaphor of the ‘interpreter’ role (Bauman, 1987). In 1989, Bauman contributed a chapter to an edited book titled Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics. He concluded with a challenge. After arguing that sociology is an anachronism with deep roots in the nineteenth century, he said that ‘to claim the right to speak with authority sociology would have to update its theory of society’ (1989: 55). His message was clear: sociology won’t have a future if it carries on as if it is still ‘nineteenth-centuryish’. In other words, we must be foxes, not hedgehogs – to recall Archilochus’s incisive distinction which was made famous by Isaiah Berlin in modern times. We can illustrate this conception by briefly considering Marxist understandings of leisure. Marxists are hedgehogs who know only one big thing that Marx taught them: the weight of human history is the history of class struggle. The upshot of this is that the class struggle is fundamental to shaping our leisure. But what Marxists tend to forget is that Marx’s thesis was written when modernity was still in what Bauman (2000a) describes as its formative, ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’ stage’. In the

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twenty-first century we need to know and do many things because we inhabit a more ‘light’ and ‘liquid’ software-focused modernity, altogether more underpatterned and underdetermined than its predecessor. This liquid modernity, as we have seen, is rhizomatic rather than rooted, its trains of experience busy with unremitting new arrivals and speedy departures, and unexpected diversions, derailments and cancellations, which have replaced the secure tracks that once sustained modernity in Marx’s time. Unlike Marx’s followers, Bauman suggests we should not so much concern ourselves with the accumulated weight of history and how this helps us understand the continuing class struggle in the contemporary world, but instead with the ‘remoteness and unreachability’ of global capitalism that has within its very structure matrices of power that operate like deep currents in the sea. Bauman’s liquid sociology is driven by antinomies – which, of course, includes reflection upon the nature of hermeneutics, and is especially interested in the moments when the ‘solid’ and the ‘liquid’, the ‘heavy’ and the ‘light’ clash. From this shuttling between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ – metaphors as magic wands in and of themselves which illuminate, with an almost miraculous precision, a way of thinking by maximizing contrast – it is possible to weave a larger fabric, a sustained deliberation on some key themes, to be precise, a picture of an always unrestful modernity. Liquid sociology is, as a result, one of dialectical thinking rather than the development of theory. The juxtaposition of ‘solidity and ‘liquidity’ offers a fresh way of thinking about leisure. This is a way of thinking that does not depend on theory, but rather on metaphor, which is the rhetorical tool that enables us to ‘defamiliarize the familiar’ and show it in a new light (Bauman, 1990). Metaphor is that part of language that enables us to practice hermeneutics. That is, on the one hand, to make meaning (i.e. make intelligible that which could not otherwise be grasped), and on the other, to deepen our understanding so as to make meaning even more meaningful, in the process creating some democratic operating principles as we go along. Seen in this way, Bauman presents us with some intellectual devices which signal the continuation of the sociological imagination by an alternative means, which retrains it into looking for both similarities and contradictions, in other words, the ambivalence of what we casually call ‘reality’, and to see significance and meaning in unexpected places. This metaphorical reconstruction of modernity, as liquid sociology conceives it, is by no means a simple replacement of ‘solid’ modern by ‘liquid’ modern considerations: on the contrary, its central tenet is the need to exhort critical analysis to a constant juxtaposition. Liquid sociology recognizes that thinking is unsurpassed when we juxtapose, when we recognize the value of bringing opposites together, when we realize that two ‘realities’, one posed next to the other, are in one way or another connected. As the Wittgenstein scholar, Peter Hacker (2010), points out, questions about ‘what it is like to be something’ require contrasts in order to make sense. What is it like for a person born into the working class to experience leisure? This is

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not a good question. For Hacker, critical inquiry is dialogical in spirit. In other words, we should turn our attention to what two things – in the case of my study Leisure Life (2003), the certain solid modernity and the unpredictable liquid modernity – might say about each other. What is it like for a person born into a solid, seemingly permanent, immutable modernity to find themselves in a liquid modern world? This is a perfectly good question. In other words, following Wittgenstein’s emphasis on seeing things differently and the associated notions of pictorial thinking through ‘family resemblances’, there is a requirement that there be a juxtaposition, and once there is, all sorts of stories are likely to follow. Liquid sociology also uses single metaphors in a comparable way in order to make them carry their full force. Pursue ‘liquid’ far enough and you will discover that the metaphor has the capacity to disclose hitherto unrealized possibilities. For example, in the case of water, we discover that ‘liquidity’ cannot only be provisionally ‘frozen’ to enhance ‘speed’ but also that it holds the potential of ‘threat’ and ‘drowning’. Building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark in his memorable essay ‘Experience’ that ‘we live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them’, Bauman explains how in liquid modernity life accelerates to the point at which speed has become one of our foremost assets: When running among fast runners, to slow down means to be left behind; when running on thin ice, slowing down also means the real threat of being drowned. Speed, therefore, climbs to the top of the list of survival values. (2000a: 209) The range and potential of this ‘liquid’ metaphor mean that we also might think of water as ‘replenishment’ and ‘refreshment’. It is in such terms that the potential of liquid sociology resides. All that we have to do is unanchor ourselves from the functionalist epistemic that prevails in Leisure Studies and set sail into the open sea that is liquid sociology. To borrow an analogy from John Berger (2001), I use the words set sail into instead of read because liquid sociology is like an ocean; you do not attempt to read it, you navigate it because here a new horizon beckons. And all shapes of things rise from below to streak the surface of the water.

From grand narratives to assemblages Liquid sociology takes seriously Plato’s idea of the cave as a metaphor of human life. We sociologists live in such a cave, seeing only shadows cast on its arches and hollows by the light streaming in from the entrance. The objects outside the cave are ideas, and all the things that we perceive inside are imperfect imaginings of ideas. A corollary of this is that it works with the assumption that there is no way to gain access to the ‘facts’ independent of some cognitive frame. Another way to explain this would be to say that it recognizes that we all actually live between two worlds, the observed one and the one in our imagination.

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Unlike mainstream sociologists, liquid sociology regards the two as equals and trusts the imagination as much as it trusts its observations of the empirical world. To favour one over the other is inconceivable. Liquid sociology is not just a record of things observed, then, but also a deeper reading of them with the aid of the imagination. In other words, liquid sociology operates with an impulse to present rather than represent an interpretation of ‘reality’. From such considerations it ought to be clear by now that under the auspices of liquid sociology the common tokens of knowledge and imagination are in and of themselves no longer acceptable as criteria. This is a kind of sociology that undercuts this dualism. That it is written metaphorically does not make it any less ‘real’ than ‘theory’; it is full of stories that pop and hiss with real life. But the underlying truth of it lies in the organic necessity of its parts. It deals with the stuff of everyday life, for sure, usually enacted in the public arena, and most likely familiar to us from some minor or major variation in our own lives. But we are not reading empirical sociology. This is sociology whose power derives from the curiosity of social observation and the sociological imagination. Liquid sociology finds in this arbitrary not Truth but truth. Its adherents write their metaphors so that people with common sense will mistake its sociology for ‘reality’ rather than requiring that we have to lend it the evidence of ‘fact’ through some kind of ‘realist’ licence before it can be believed. Liquid sociology, then, reminds us that we must acknowledge the conditioned character of all thought. It opens up a new prospect, and, like every other sociology, it leaves behind it unfinished business. Nonetheless it makes a new freedom imaginable; and it also throws light upon new possibilities beyond the either/or, the this and that. Far more difficult is fusing these possibilities with magic and ethos. Liquid sociology has a dual aesthetic and ethical strategy in this regard; on the one hand, to use linguistic magic to reveal what is often ‘hidden from view’, and, on the other, an outlier ability to turn conventional wisdom on its head – revitalizing sociology in the process. To think liquid sociologically, then, is to move constantly between ethical criticism and aesthetic contemplation, and we have to recognize that what it does is not ‘find’ or ‘invent’ – but assemble. Human minds are creative. The present book, like other liquid sociologies, is an ‘assemblage’. This metaphor coined by Deleuze and Guattari helps our understanding of liquid sociology. What is an assemblage? What is appealing about this metaphor is that it enables us to dissolve the distinction between knowledge and imagination. An assemblage is neither knowledge nor imagination; it is a more humble, hybrid form that has an entirely different status: ‘it is a collective assemblage of enunciation; it is a machinic assemblage of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 81). In other words, an assemblage is the combining of the two planes of subject matter and expression: a heterogeneous, fluid, patchwork quilt of content, if you like, which is in and of itself expressive, but, as a meeting place of multiplicity, also marks an important threshold in the development of sociology. At this meeting place, to borrow a sentence from

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Mallarmé, ‘an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion’ (McCarthy, 2015: 18). Liquid modern assemblages are first and foremost free creations intended to enhance our understanding of the world. What is most fascinating is that in them knowledge and imagination coalesce to reveal – not ‘reality’ – but as John Berger would say, the freedom to ‘disclose that which exists’. Liquid sociology, in other words, requires you to go with the flow, to suspend your own epistemological assumptions, ignore the idea that the ‘real’ is somehow fixed and only known to us by giving ontological priority to empirical experience, and accept the logic (or lack thereof ) of its way of thinking; the extent to which liquid sociology works for you will depend on your ability to do so. What the foregoing discussion tells us if nothing else is that every study is, in part, a reflection of its author and their putative assumptions. This is not to say that I cannot look at the world other than through the spectacles fitted for me by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman’s sense of sociology, as he once told me, is that it is like a sponge, a creature porous in texture and of uncertain outline, whose hollows embody countless visiting ideas that swim and often stay to breed. Liquid sociology will never be an academic discipline sure of itself, capable of making authoritative statements or offering definitive answers. It will always be, for better or worse, tentative in its deliberations. What this tells us is that thinking sociologically should never be content with any one way of making sense of the world, nor should it rest content that there is any one discipline best placed to make sense of it. Steering a course between different perspectives, my own approach develops its own hermeneutics of ‘undecidability’ and offers a principle of convergence that we extend beyond sociology, history, philosophy and all the rest into the world of culture and our knowledge of it, the world of Kulturwissenschaft. What this tells the reader is that my approach attempts to account for individuals and their worlds by operating on an indisciplinary basis (Rancière, 2008), which is not only a matter of going above and beyond the call of duty of sociology as we normally understand it, but also breaking with it. Whereas interdisciplinarity merely signals a combination of approaches drawn from various disciplines, indisciplinarity moves outside boundaries, setting itself free by subordinating the false divisions between sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy and so on, to the educated imagination, which affects the whole person rather than just training the mind, bringing with it moral development that leads to the discovery that the imaginative world and the world around us are different worlds, and that the imaginative world is more important (Frye, 1963).

Conclusions What these last observations attest is not only that all those awakened anew to rethinking sociologically must be aware that ethical questions are today more difficult (Sloterdijk, 2013b: 90), but also that sociological ‘theory’ and ‘method’

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mean something different. As social and cultural preoccupations change, we need to find affinities with different conditions. In liquid modernity leisure studies has to learn how to operate with some ‘new rules of method’ which, following Wittgenstein’s emphasis on seeing things differently and the associated notions of pictorial thinking through ‘family resemblances’, abandon theorizing altogether. In other words, narrative – another expression for story-telling, as says Sloterdijk (2013b: 11), bent on the ‘musical-rhapsodic transmission of knowledge rather than the ‘prosaic-communicative procurement of knowledge’ – is now resurrected as a viable alternative to ‘theory’, and not just as intelligent but better made to the measurement of the contemporary world. This ‘new’ method doesn’t only entail taking ‘theory’ out of the academy and placing it politically into everyday life. It has also become a way of explaining burgeoning social and cultural life that is on the one hand ‘indisciplinary’ and on the other content to rely on descriptions drawn from metaphors (and by default other tropes drawn from literature and poetry), rather than depending on facts or being fixated with establishing grand theory. As I demonstrated in Leisure Life (2003) and New Perspectives on Sport and ‘Deviance’ (2004), this kind of study requires a new kind of narrative structure, more like a novel than that of the orthodox type of scholarly work. Those of us who use pictorial thinking through ‘language games’ argue two things: first, that it is a different way of thinking that recognizes that as worlds alter, we need new vocabularies with which to interpret them, and second, that sociologically there are many different stories that we can tell and re-tell. What these stories do not do is try to conceptualize the worlds under scrutiny through the rules of logic. What they do, instead, is literalize metaphor. This is what makes pictorial thinking valuable. It alerts us to what abstract conceptual thinking cannot: those stubbornly universal human dilemmas – questions to which sociologists have found few compelling answers – which have never vanished from life. The hallmark of this ‘rule of method’, then, is that it recurs perennially as our understandings are revised and revivified with new metaphors as society and culture shift and change. As we have seen, the practice of pointing out the questionable epistemological grounds which form the basis of orthodox sociological ‘theory’, while simultaneously asking one’s readers to temporarily suspend their own ontological assumptions, is one of the most distinctive features of liquid sociology. Some readers will no doubt find the combination of outspoken epistemological criticism and deferred ontological judgement troubling. Others will be equally unhappy about accepting such a frankly novelizing methodological approach, especially when it is applied to certain aspects of abnormal leisure (Rojek, 2005, 2013), for example. However, the disorderly continuity of liquid modern life is infinitely less predictable and more strangely ambiguous than any sociological theory would suggest. Sociologists must face up to the fact that each and every one of them is standing in a moral quagmire as they try to illuminate the lived (leisure) life through their different stories. As such, to paraphrase Sloterdijk

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(2013b), we have to recognize that as sociologists we must be prepared to be challenged when/where our own tacit assumptions are interrogated. When there is no solid ground under the sociological enterprise, no basis for moral certainty, the truth is that the only other way the authority of any work can be enhanced is through the acknowledgement of its predispositions. The effects of social inequality, we can agree, continue, and will always be important for understanding leisure. In this regard we have learned from Giddens that sociologists and Leisure Studies scholars alike should always promote, as a democratic activity, the two-way process by which everyday experience is turned into sociology and sociology is turned into everyday experience. Any scholar intent on revealing the effects of social inequality on leisure must try to ensure that they are showing us both of these things. There is no one ‘theory’ or ‘rule of method’ in this regard; the genuinely reflexive sociologist will write these the way that he or she must write them. In the most compelling stories the writing will be clear and the ideas will be based on things seen by the sociologist and spoken about by their research respondents rather than on what they think as a professional sociologist and is excited to think they now understand it all. This brings me to the sixth, and final, feature of my ‘new rules of method’. This is the admonition to all Leisure Studies scholars that they must complicate their stories by questioning what it is possible for them as researchers, or anyone else for that matter, to finally ‘know’ about other people. It is all too easy to feel and to ‘theorize’ people less fortunate than yourself (also known as ‘the poor’) as part of a mass – or any other kind of social grouping vulnerable to political manipulation. It is also all too easy to disapprove of what that mass does in their leisure. But that kind of feeling and ‘theorizing’ is as foolish as the disapproving is reprehensible. To put some additional gloss on James’ (2009: 9) perceptive observations, the mass are us: a multitude of individuals. They just happen to be leading less fortunate lives. Any sociologist who speaks about social justice from their privileged position will not be able to do so in any compelling ways unless they can dispel the disapproving, puritanical attitude that often pervades sociology and Leisure Studies. In order to do this, they will not only have to replace this attitude with compassion – as Paul Taylor (2009) observed, identifying with those less privileged than yourself is not enough, you need to really feel their plight: ‘to identify is merely to love one’s neighbour as oneself; to empathise is to love one’s neighbour for himself or herself ’ – but just as importantly recognize that their own fortune begins with their own freedom. What I have argued in this chapter is that, to paraphrase Bauman (1989), if sociology is going to claim the right to speak with authority about leisure in the twenty-first century, it is going to have to update its conceptual, empirical and normative understandings. Currently it presents us with only a two-dimensional understanding of leisure inherited from the dichotomous thinking that underpins the Enlightenment tradition. We need a third dimension. What I have offered in this chapter is the outline of some alternative ‘rules of method’, underpinned by hermeneutics, which gives us this dimension. This is the path forward for leisure

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studies. Bauman, Heller, Rancière and Sloterdijk have led the way. Given the resources of their scholarship, there is no reason not to follow. How their collective insights might be integrated into an overarching study of leisure is featured in the rest of this book. As the reader will see, with these new ‘rules of method’, which turn out to be radical because they are not ‘rules of method’, there emerges an unexpected twist, especially, although not exclusively, in relation to hermeneutics, when it turns out that the encounter between sociological hermeneutics and hermeneutic sociology is not so much a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer, 1979) as a mis-meeting, which as it transpires is a double, or it is nothing.

Part II

Recovering the spiritual foundations of twenty- first-century leisure

Chapter 3

Deconstructing the disenchantment thesis

In this chapter, I want to stake out my claim that Leisure Studies (in common with sociology and cultural studies) has made a serious mistake in withdrawing from engagement with the magic kingdom of enchantment. That development which accelerated with the onset of modernity is generally understood as ‘the disenchantment of the world’, which was coined by Friedrich von Schiller when he bemoaned the fall of the gods of Greek antiquity in his classic eighteenthcentury poem The Gods of Greece (McCarraher, 2015: 86). The perception was in no uncertain terms popularized through the sociology of Max Weber, which is fundamental to arguments put forward in this chapter. As is well known, in the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was written in 1904, Weber famously argued that the emergence of modern capitalism is accompanied by an inescapable process of rationalization that leads disenchantment. As Heller explains, as it is used by Weber, the expression ‘disenchantment of the world’ refers to many related yet not entirely related phenomena – for example, on the one hand, ‘the loss of myth, the end of philosophy, deficit of meaning, loss of beauty or colour – yet also the abandonment of fanaticism, madness, and legitimation through charisma’. But it ‘means first and foremost that the dominating spheres of modern life do not provide life with meaning. As far as the dominating spheres (science, politics, the economy) are concerned, life has no meaning’ (1999: 37–38). The fate of modernity is the subordination of all spheres of life to the overarching authority of rationalization. What this thesis ignores is that people have always been drawn to enchantment. The argument developed in the next two chapters is that the interregnum that precipitated the shift from solid modernity to liquid modernity offers intimations of new kinds of re-enchantment (Bauman, 1992b), or what Heller (1999) calls ‘romantic enlightenment’, since the world is at long last transformed into a plurality of worlds. In these worlds a different kind of imagination takes centre stage and old restraints diminish and new contingencies prosper. The view developed in Part III of this book is that it is especially in value-spheres (Weber, 2008) and heterotopias (Foucault, 1984a) of leisure that we are most likely to find sources of enchantment. My aim in making this argument is to recover this idea in order to reinvigorate the study of leisure. In so doing my starting point is

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that the conventional reading of Weber is unrepresentative, or at least one-sided. As Heller points out, the picture Weber’s thesis paints is bleak, but it is not ‘entirely dark’. As my understanding of Weber is not the usual one, the chapter must first of all give due attention to the conventional reading. This is important since there is a large group of notable thinkers who are inclined to agree that disenchantment coincided with the emergence of consumerism and that this was to have serious implications, not only for leisure, but for human freedom more generally. If there is one theme that unites these thinkers it is the view that rationalization and concomitantly capitalism are at the furthest remove from either enchantment or the Enlightenment view that science and rational progress are freeing for humankind. As we will see below, there is a long history of pessimism about capitalism and especially the implications burgeoning consumerism has for human freedom. Indeed, it is hardly news in Leisure Studies that most people these days tend to see and do leisure in consumerist ways. There is much that I agree with in this virtually unanimous verdict. That said, there is no sure-fire proof that such an intuition is altogether accurate. It is not so much my view that the conventional reading is wrong, such that it gives the impression that Weber argued that with the substitution of the pre-modern social arrangement by modernity enchantment disappears completely from the world. In fact it was his view that enchantment doesn’t so much disappear, but is in effect withdrawn from public life and inserted into ‘the obscure realm of mystical life or the fraternal feelings of direct relationships among individuals’ (Weber, 2008: 51) – whereas throughout most of history it was seen as having a bearing on all aspects of life. If we are prepared to accept this alternative reading of Weber, then an alternative understanding of enchantment under modern conditions also becomes possible. So in what follows I proceed by five parts. First, I unpack Weber’s disenchantment thesis. A discussion of the major perspectives on the relationship between rationalization and burgeoning consumerism that developed in the slipstream of this conventional reading of Weber is then offered along with some insights of their relevance for understanding leisure. This discussion, which focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on the Frankfurt School, prefaces a thoroughgoing discussion of Bauman’s (1990) argument that in liquid modernity the ‘marketmediated mode of life’ – the penetration of market mechanisms, norms and values into every aspect of human existence – has replaced things like autonomy, authenticity, the engendering of personality and other kinds of meaning-rendering activity, and even ideology, as the primary definer of social identity and difference. Within Bauman’s vision the drift is clear enough. Individuals shedding the social class identities to which they were subjugated in solid modernity are drawn towards freedom, but in a liquid modernity this can also lure them to a life of consuming, another kind of subjugation – this time through seduction rather than repression (Bauman, 1992b) – which has all the hallmarks of a medical disorder in the form of a ‘consumer syndrome’ (Bauman, in Rojek, 2004).

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After outlining how Bauman’s arguments advance the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the discussion looks at the way George Ritzer has attempted to rehabilitate Weber’s disenchantment thesis for the global present through the metaphor of McDonaldization. The limits of Ritzer’s thesis are exposed through a comparison of McLeisure and IKEALeisure. In the next part of the chapter, I identify the significance of Lyotard’s (1984 [1979]) ‘performativity criterion’ thesis (discussed in some depth in Chapter 4) for an understanding of ubiquitous consumerism. Lyotard advances the idea that in our present age the status of knowledge is altered and performativity comes to represent a kind of hyper-capitalist efficiency. It is argued that this thesis provides us with a more thoroughgoing epistemological basis for understanding how and in what ways consumerism washes through leisure worlds as forcibly as it does the wider social world than does either Bauman or Ritzer. What Lyotard’s thesis suggests is that the onset of fundamental societal change has the power to usher in a new ontological context. Following in the footsteps of Marx, Lyotard advances the idea that in the present day capitalism exerts an extraordinary hegemony that not only entails that the language of the market becomes the language of the world but also in the process charges public life with a new kind of theatricality. Subsequently, I consider the impact of hyper capitalism, and the pervasive consumerism that accompanies it, on leisure, but in a manner that leads to the development of a critique that readers may well not expect. I have already discussed this relationship in my book Leisure (Blackshaw, 2010) and in a chapter on shopping in The Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies (Blackshaw, 2013b). In these two publications something has already been said about the consensus in Leisure Studies that the market and consumerism together present the most insidious and entrenched challenges to human freedom today. Clearly such a view grossly simplifies some complex issues. In response to this view, in Leisure, I challenged Rojek’s (2010) tacit assumption that consumerist activity is not authentic leisure. In this book I want to suggest that focusing on consumerism in this way leads our attention away from the wider social, cultural, political, economic and technological context in which we live our lives in liquid modernity. For many that may seem a purely peripheral concern since any opening up of possibilities in a society in which consumerism is universal is filled with the prospect of new types of entrapment. But that is to ignore the impact for better or for worse of what is enchanting about our leisure despite the fact that we inhabit a consumer society. To close the chapter I offer a misleadingly simple proposition that informs the rest of the book, which is that when the ‘pragmatic functions of knowledge’ elevate all ‘language games’ to the performative pursuit of ‘self-knowledge’ (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]) the distinction between authentic leisure and consumerist leisure (or any other dichotomy) loses its meaning and the world is opened up to new possibilities of enchantment.

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The disenchantment thesis: rationalization, capitalism and the rise of mass consumerist leisure Weber’s (1992) starting point is that it is the incessant drive to the accumulation of knowledge and wealth that underpins modernity. This is because in modern societies rationalization becomes all-pervasive, and culture, like all other distinct realms of human activity (including leisure), is increasingly rationalized – what Weber called the ‘iron-cage of rationalization’ – for the major needs of modern society are ‘cumulative, quantified and quantifiable’ (Heller, 1999: 39). The duality of value rationality and purposive rationality is central to Weber’s sociology, which enables him to distinguish the values that guide human actions, on the one hand, and the expectations that often serve for a particular individual to attain ends, on the other. Weber insists that in the modern world it is the latter that prevail most frequently. Historically, the modern rationalization process not only strips the world of the invisible universe of the spirits and deities that had hitherto inhabited the natural world and had given human life its meaning, substituting the magical and the mystical with alternatives open to the calculations of technical reason, but there also emerges the tendency to view the world in mechanistic terms, leading to the following: the displacement of traditional values by purely instrumental rationalization; the emergence of an attitude of impersonal worldly accomplishment, grounded in the Puritan ethic of vocation; the growing importance of narrow specialized knowledge in economy and administration, and the concomitant development of bureaucracy. As befits a society accompanied by the demise of value rationality in which people subject their lives to means-end rationalization, Weber observed (quoting Goethe), moderns become individuals alienated from one another, ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’. He then goes further, describing modernity as a ‘nullity’ which stupidly ‘imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved’ (Weber, 1992: 124). In Weber’s view, the truth is that modernity, with its obligation to capitalism (in his view the rationalization of the economy was the major influence if not necessarily the cause of capitalist development (Heller, 1999: 34)), its introverted asceticism, its concentration on material things, its merciless search for profit, is ill-disposed to Enlightenment values (Gay, 1969). The upshot of this is that the substitution of capitalism for religious faith does not so much signal the end of religious and other forms of mystical control that undergirded the premodern social arrangement, but rather the substitution of new technically rational means of social control for the old ones. As Weber writes in what is perhaps the most quoted paragraph from his famous essay: The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos

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of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (1992: 123) Those early cultural studies interpreters of twentieth-century modernity who had been taught on the one hand to believe that there are human universals which remain constant from age to age and on the other that culture can both ennoble and demean the human condition, knew that they were living in radically changing times, as in Gramsci’s (1971: 276) gloomy observation that ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’, which is perhaps best captured by the term ‘consumer revolution’. In common with Weber, and Georg Simmel (the ‘tragedy of culture’) and Marx (‘commodity fetishism’) these interpreters were pessimistic about capitalism with its goal of continuous accumulation in the pursuit of profit and the ways in which it was fast infiltrating every area of social and cultural life. Foremost amongst these cultural critics were Adorno and Horkheimer (1944), who explain how, under the auspices of modernity, the Enlightenment actually turned into its own mirror image, transforming what promised to be a new means of freedom into new instruments of power and social control. In their thesis, technological rationalization entails the commodification of culture into mass consumer products. Drawing on the metaphor of the ‘culture industry’, they argue that by the middle of the twentieth century most people with leisure have been trained to accept what is offered to them. This is because the ideological power of the ‘culture industry’ is firmly locked in their minds. As a result, the entertainments manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure – which is akin to work. (1944: 13) In his classic study One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse (1968) offers a similar scenario, arguing that if leisure flourishes in modern societies, it is essentially ‘unfree’ since it has been reduced to consumerism. In the event, Marcuse concludes that leisure has two functions in modern societies (MacIntyre, 1970). On the one hand, its role is to placate material needs that might otherwise lead to social disorder; and in so doing, it ensures that these needs encourage identification with the established order of things, on the other. The motors underpinning

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this process are improved equipment and superior management technologies which work in tandem to disguise social differences and inequalities: If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television programme and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer . . . if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. (Marcuse, cited in MacIntyre, 1970: 64–65) Marcuse thus understands leisure as part of a flattening out process of culture, a collapse of the two-dimensional into the one-dimensional. In books such as Everyday Life in the Modern World (1984) and The Production of Space (1991), Henri Lefebvre was subsequently to argue that by the middle of the twentieth-century capitalism is well attuned to the business of creating ‘imaginary needs’ in popular culture. Lefebvre organizes his thesis around three broadly defined and interconnected modernizing trends, which begin in the midnineteenth century and come into their own by the onset of the 1950s (Gardiner, 2000: 87). First, the gradual disconnection between quotidian and more specialized activities, which results in everyday life entering the consciousness to be claimed as ‘personal property’; second, the substitution of use-value for exchange-value; and third, the concomitant fragmentation of organic communities and their replacement by impersonal and contractual relations of a more calculating kind. In this view, moderns might have thought they were breaking with the past through the new found freedoms they had discovered (more often than not in their newly acquired leisure time), but in fact were, with the best of intentions, merely feeding the proliferation of the universal commercialism of culture that had begun to take shape a century earlier. This is a ‘mass’ culture, to summarize Mary Poovey (1995), that establishes itself as a series of repetitions, which encourages its adherents to assert themselves by consuming leisure products that are differentiated yet already the same, resulting in human uniformity over individuality. This is also a theme taken up by Richard Hoggart in his classic study The Uses of Literacy, which was first published in 1957. In this book Hoggart devotes much scholarly energy into what happens once an organic working-class culture, whose ‘public values and private practices are tightly intertwined’, and which bears all the hallmarks of a folk society that is free of the spoils of manufacture, starts to give way to a new mass popular culture, which displays all the ‘shiny barbarism’ of a ‘candy floss world’ (Hoggart, 1992[1957]), when an era had come to an end, the era when – at the risk of being tautologous – world and being-in-the world were of two kinds: the moment when a way of life was altered and diminished permanently. The Uses of Literacy is a book of two parts, the first ‘An “Older” Order’ a study of a parochial, working-class social milieu, the second ‘Yielding Place to

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New’ a damning critique of the accelerating stage-show of popular cultural change. The difference in style and focus between the two halves of the book also intensifies the contrast between rich lives that had been and the regrettable reality of a burgeoning consumer existence. The first part of the book opens a world that is hitherto closed and visible to only those who have lived it, and what it offers us is a historical tapestry of a noble working class, embedding it in a series of well-conceived period tableaux and vignettes. The immense accomplishment of this part of the book is to make that world and its culture so fully perceptible. With his gift for pointed observation and shaping pitch-perfect images with words, Hoggart delights in evoking the everyday character of south Leeds life whose solidity is everywhere: in its idioms: ‘’E’s got a right chest on ’im’ and: ‘Sh/’E’ as a lovely ’ead of ’air’ (Hoggart, 1988: 58); in its food: ‘something solid, preferably meaty, with a well-defined flavour’ (Hoggart, 1992 [1957]: 37); in its names: Ethel, Ida, Edna and Hilda and Walter, Fred, Harold and Bert and the like – which as Alan Bennett (2000: 31) observes are not names you can easily dissolve because they are carved into every cell of their owners bodies; its traditions; its culture and routines; its families; its work and leisure lives; its implicit class structure and the indifference to escaping it [. . .] in the process painting us a picture of a quotidian industrial milieu that seems to remain intact, even ‘though much works against it, and partly because so much works against it’ (Hoggart, 1992[1957]: 33). The truth is, though, that Hoggart is interpreting a world already disappearing into social histories and what he presents us with is an extraordinary sense of intimacy with a vanishing way of life. In the second part of the book, Hoggart is a man at loggerheads with the increasingly crass commercialization of culture. He isolates and castigates a trend that he saw as inimical to the full rich life: the descent of culture into tastelessness and falsehood. This was the tendency – one that had already been identified by T. S. Eliot (1949) in his Notes Toward the Definition of Culture and in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse – of the standards of culture (already eroded by mass culture) to plummet to evermore new depths. Yet Hoggart is unusual amongst scholars of his generation in also focusing his attention on the social conditions of working-class life which had fostered values of long-term substance, but were also now increasingly coming under the pressure of mass culture, which Fredric Jameson (1979: 141) would later argue must be understood not as empty distraction or ‘mere’ false consciousness, but rather as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be ‘managed’ or repressed. True to the critical prophecies of the early cultural critics, in the northern, working-class culture in cities such as Leeds in the 1950s, the hitherto univocal order of things is all but gone and people are no longer content to fit into their

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assigned roles; especially significant is the new cult of youth embodied in ‘the Juke-Box Boy’, the ‘hedonistic but passive barbarian’ who is a ‘portent’ of things to come (Hoggart, 1992 [1957]: 250). To borrow an observation from what Paul Tillich said about the Christian Fall (Irwin, 1991), Hoggart World is transforming, signifying a passage from connections of communal essence based on working-class solidness to the connections of commodified existence made to the measure of an amorphous world incorporating ‘the new great classless class’ of mass-produced individuals. Firmly entrenched in Hoggart’s analysis is the idea that this ‘Fall’ – what Graeme Turner (1990: 48) aptly describes as the ‘cultural Fall’ that ‘seems to have taken place during the 1930s rather than the nineteenth century’ – is an event both precipitous and of tragic proportions. New fates wash up with every generational tide and the appearance of the generation represented by ‘the new great classless class’ is that one which signals the end of an essentially noble working-class way of life. According to Hoggart, its ‘cultural Fall’ marks a turning point in the history of working-class culture. It cut off one generation from another, providing a shibboleth for admission into a world of cultural homogenization. Existing outside time, divorced from the past, denied the conditions through which communal bonds can be obtained, workingclass men and women had begun to live life in an absolute present. As Deleuze, in Marrati, was to say a few years later, from now on the question of the history would be substituted with the question of the ‘new’ (Marrati, 2008). It wasn’t just socio-economic relations that had given the ‘working class’ its structure, but also its culture; and with the substitution of the ‘new’ for the ‘old’ is all that remains by the mid-1950s, notwithstanding the obdurateness of the ‘earnest minority’, its rituals and the physical landmarks – the tours around family and friends on Whitsunday, the pub sing-alongs, the charabanc trips to the seaside and all the rest – is the ghostly presence of a once full, rich life. When you reach the end of the book, it dawns on you that what Hoggart is really providing his readers with in the first part of the book is merely a historical representation of a once upon a time, thoroughly decent way of life. The real subject matter of his critique is the undignified new generation throwing itself into the crass new consumer culture seemingly intent on embracing an altogether different kind of death-in-life zombie existence outside the limited range of a few immediate appetites. Souls which may have had little opportunity to open will be kept hard-gripped, turned in upon themselves, looking out ‘with odd dark eyes like windows’ upon a world which is largely a phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulations. (Hoggart, 1992 [1957]: 246) During the latter decades of the twentieth century, the critique of capitalism and consumerism was subsequently taken up by Baudrillard (1970), who expanded Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to argue that, in modern consumer

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societies, a symbolic realm of ‘sign values’ supplements ‘exchange vales’. However, he was later to become disillusioned with Marxism and it became one of his prime targets of derision because of its epistemologically and ontologically naïve attempts to understand a society that had become postmodern (not his own preferred term) and had in the process inadvertently become a simulacrum of itself. Contrary to what his critics said, Baudrillard was not arguing here that life had become fake or bogus, simply that the modern world had become hyperreal, rendering null and void the opposition between truth and falsity. The subject of Baudrillard’s critique here is the pervasive power of consumer society – the habituation of a life that has been reduced to lifestyle shopping and the reduction of humankind to the status of commodities and insipid manufactured sameness. But the essence of this critique of consumerism and its implications for leisure is best captured, not by Baudrillard, but by Bauman in his insightful paraphrasing of the above-cited quotation from Weber, which describes in no uncertain terms the fate of leisure in a modernity in which flâneurie (the quintessential modern leisure practice in which the human imagination and urban environment intersect) has been privatized: The flâneur wanted to play his game at leisure; we are forced to do so. For when flâneurism was carried out of the Parisian arcades into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly aesthetics, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the post-modern consumerist order. The order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with living their life as play, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last bit of information is turned out by the computer. In Baudelaire’s or Benjamin’s view the dedication to mobile fantasy should lie on the shoulders of the flâneur like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Bauman, 1994: 153) For Bauman, as for Baudrillard, this consumer approach to modern life is more insidious than the secure and carefully controlled producer environment of Panopticon social control (Foucault, 1977) that preceded it: it is a de-differentiated environment of Synopticon social control based on insecurity, which breeds competition and a dog-eat-dog world in which everyone feels entitled to be someone. Once the market-mediated mode of life catches hold of the imagination, so Bauman (1990) argues, most human activity is marketized, commodified, privatized and individualized. In liquid modernity, then, there is now only the ‘consumer attitude’, which has little to do with real choice or real freedom – or so it would seem. As befits a consumer society, the kind of freedom leisure offers is increasingly imagined as someone who reinvents him or herself daily in the mall, the

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incessant shopper, whose purchasing power is fuelled by credit and debt. As Bauman knows, though, it is not our love of shopping that’s really the crux of the problem, so much that we mistake the endless cycle of buy-use-throwaway encouraged by the market as freedom, instead of realizing that it is perhaps in the ups and downs of life itself – the highs and lows, the frustrations and disappointments, the inevitable mixture of partial successes and unfulfilled dreams – where intimations of the absolute really lie, and the rewards that it yields go to those who are prepared to give themselves up to the struggle. To use Bauman’s (2001) ‘hunter’ analogy: to be really free is to chase the hare, not just to catch it. In other words, in throwing in our lot with the market-mediated mode of life we are in danger of losing sight of the ambivalence of freedom. It is intriguing to ask the source of such ambivalence in times when consumerism is so ubiquitous. But this kind of assessment is not without its critics. Bauman’s work on consumerism, just like Adorno and Horkheimer’s before it, has been criticized for its elitism, on the one hand, and because the theorist himself has a tendency for ‘armchair theorising’ (in the event relying too much on ‘anecdotal evidence’), on the other, which renders most of his arguments about consumerism out of proportion to the everyday reality of the contemporary world (Fearn, 2006). I will deal with these two issues in turn. As Ian Varcoe suggests in the same article, if Bauman is an elitist, it is in the cultural rather than the social sense. As he is constantly reminding us, lives ought to be different from consumer lives and one of his central concerns is that when areas of life previously not commodified, such as leisure, are opened up to consumerism, what, then, happens to culture? For Bauman, a consumers’ life, however exciting it may seem, is nothing more than a likeness of a life, and any likeness, however exciting it is lived, does not make for a life, and our tacit acceptance of its ways and means is as good as accepting that it is only death that can give life its true intensity. What is implicit in Bauman’s sociology is the message that, because we are dealing with consumerism in a liquid modern sociality, one that is no longer coextensive with a solid modern society, we need the help of a sociology of a new kind that is not necessarily guided by orthodox logic, believing that you should stick to the clearly discernible ‘facts’, concentrating only on what you observe yourself, or what people tell you, and little else. In other words, to be blessed with the sociological imagination these days is to not only know that we live in an Unsicherheit world, that is all the time fragmenting and constantly changing, irresolute and incomplete, but it is to have the ability to know that what you can see, or what people tell you, habitually is not what it seems. This suggests that there may well be reasons unique to liquid modernity that explain why Bauman is dogmatic in his critique of consumerism, which seems to suggest that the influence of the market has penetrated our lives in a way not previously seen. It is to these reasons that we must now turn.

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Leisure in the society of hegemonic consumerism Bauman has written prolifically about consumerism and what I offer below is a general outline of the central planks that capture the basic essence of the ideas. This is a difficult task, not least because over the years Bauman has constantly shifted his conceptual gears to capture the significance of consumerism at a number of different levels, moving from understanding it as an idea which ‘stands for production, distribution, desiring, obtaining and using, of symbolic goods’ (Bauman, 1992b: 223), involving a kind of rivalry over the meaning of commodities and the differences and distinctions they signify vis-à-vis Pierre Bourdieu, to a much more discursive approach which suggests that men and women not only do not know why they are consuming but that their sole objective seems to be to keep in what has become essentially the only game in town, where ‘sporting a fixed taste and narrowing one’s choices could be only a symptom of deprivation and retardation; not the “culturally correct” model of conduct, not a model likely to be embraced and practiced by those aiming at the top’ (Bauman, in Rojek, 2004: 303). Still, if Bauman’s discussions in his latest works are speaking with a new accent, they are not novel, and there is no doubt that in his writings in the 1990s he was already foretelling the prospects for an even deeper penetration of the ‘consumer attitude’ and the reduced possibilities for the transgression of its hegemonic authority: Bit by bit, problem by problem, the consumer attitude refers the whole of life to the market; it orients every desire and each effort in the search for a tool or an expertise one can buy. It dissolves the problem of control over the wider setting of life (something most people will never achieve) in the multitude of small shopping acts that are – at least in principle – within your reach. It privatizes, so to speak, issues so that they are not perceived as public; it individualizes tasks so that they are not seen as social. It now becomes my duty (and, as I am encouraged to hope, also a task I can perform) to improve myself and my life, to culture and refine, to overcome my own shortcomings and other vexing drawbacks to the way I live. (Bauman, 1990: 204) As Bauman points out in the same book, the ‘consumer attitude’ leads to a radically revised sense of the self which entails perceiving life as a series of problems, which can be specified, more or less clearly defined, singled out and dealt with. It means, secondly, believing that dealing with such problems, solving them, is one’s duty, which one cannot neglect without incurring guilt or shame. It means, thirdly, trusting that for every problem, already known or as may still arise in the future, there is a solution – a special object or recipe, prepared by specialists, by people with superior know-how, and one’s task is to find it. It means,

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fourthly, assuming that such objects or recipes are essentially available; they may be obtained in exchange for money, and shopping is the way of obtaining them. It means, fifthly, translating the task of learning the art of living as the effort to acquire the skill of finding such objects and recipes, and gaining the power to possess them once found: shopping skills and purchasing power. (Ibid.: 203–204) Notwithstanding the significance of these five central features of the ‘consumer attitude’, the bigger point that Bauman is making here is this: Einmal ist keinmal, or to paraphrase Milan Kundera, what happens once might well not have happened at all. If we only have a consumer life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. In other words, the question Bauman’s analysis returns us to most often is why do individuals – who are ostensibly free to develop a form of subjectivity that creates the possibility of their own individual transcendence – choose a life that is not conducive to freedom de facto, only freedom of a very limited (consumer) kind? Bauman’s response is that the answer to this question lies with the redundancy of ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’ hardware-focused modernity with its largely ‘predictable and therefore manageable’ habitat (read: social class structure) and its replacement with a more ‘light’ and ‘liquid’ software-focused modernity in which the art of living is understood, not just as a possibility, but the right of all men and women, notwithstanding their persisting economic differences. According to Bauman, the ideal bourgeois citizen of modernity in its ‘solid’, formative stage was cautious and apprehensive ‘given to deferred gratification, to considering the rainy days ahead, and to paying the price of present pleasures forgone’ (Ryan, 2006: 70). However, the ideal ‘liquid’ modern bourgeois citizen (read: consumer) is not averse to throwing caution to the wind, and is, on the contrary, given to instant gratification, to putting off until further notice planning for future hardships, and unwilling to forgo pleasures – in liquid modernity the lived life is the only one worth living (Blackshaw, 2005). In essence, once we were freed from the shackles of the imagined ‘social contract’ that accompanied the legislating virtues and the habitats of a ‘solid’ modern society based on industrial production – from the social solidarity and community formations associated with the working classes, via the self-interest and propriety of the middle classes, to the mimicking ‘aristocratic’ virtues of generosity and courage of the upper classes – which cast us ‘ready-made’ through our rank in the class hierarchy, we needed an alternative raison d’être, or in other words, some element of transcendence for making ourselves anew in a ‘liquid’ world whose deafening silence on matters of legislature (with the exception of what to do with the persistently intransigent) now enveloped our newly individualized lives and characters. Thus, the crux of Bauman’s thesis is that once we recognized that it was in our grasp to find a place

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in that under-defined and under-determined social space stretched between the well-marked top occupied by the aristocrats who had their position guaranteed by heredity, and so did not need to ‘achieve’ or ‘prove’ anything, and the bottom – where people who for the lack of resources could not try, even if they wished, to achieve a position different from the one in which they were born, were cast – apparently once and for all, no appeal allowed (Bauman, in Rojek, 2004: 294) for the first time in history we were in a position to think of ourselves as individuals de facto, which also meant exceeding the possibilities of the formative experiences of modernity with its rigid class and gender differences. So why is it that when the world is saying to us, ‘forget who you are and if you cannot be what you want to be, imagine that you can’, we are by and large only capable of rethinking ourselves as individualized consumers? Or, to put the question in a more metaphysical form, why did we move, as Eric Fromm used to say, from a state of ‘being’ to a state of ‘having’? The straightforward answer is that liquid modernity emerged at a time when the majority of people – for the first time – could afford to consume items that were not necessary for mere survival. And given the fact that from the very beginning, consumerism has always been about transport, taking the consumer out of the penumbra of the present and into another world, its success in engaging us as consumers first and foremost should perhaps come as no surprise. These observations notwithstanding, the more complicated answer to this question is never ever sufficiently articulated in Bauman’s work. I will return to this issue later in this chapter. But at this point we must first of all consider what happens when individuals appear content just with ‘having’. If solid modernity was a world of men and women beset by fear that they would never arrive, but would always be passing through, liquid modernity is a world in which passing through is an obligation, the only obligation. Bauman alerts us to the different paths that a liquid modern life can take and what he suggests is that today we are not so much challenged with finding our essential identity as being open to the challenge of making and remaking it. We act, are compelled to act, in a world which is always on the move and where nothing stays the same for very long. Liquid modernity is episodic and contingent and life’s essential incompleteness doesn’t merely invite us to fill its gaps; it compels us to do so. It is no wonder we are always on the lookout for guides to living – those institutions of ‘lifelong consumer education’ (Bauman, 2004: 66) – which tell us how to live, how to pose, what music to listen to, where to shop, what to eat and drink and where to go for our holidays. What this suggests is that consuming life makes perfect sense, since it is through consuming that we perceive we are best able to exert our individuality. If the major accomplishment of the centred ‘roots of order’ underpinning solid modernity was to turn life into a regimentality in which the work of homo faber and the leisure of homo ludens was divided (Rojek, 2005), the major

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accomplishment of the decentred disorder sustaining liquid modernity has been its ability to turn the attention of homo faber and homo ludens to the life of homo consumens (Bauman, 2007). Indeed, as Bauman argues, it is the instantaneity of consumer culture and its ability to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’ in delivering homo consumens’ hopes and dreams that is today what is imagined as the measure of the success of a life worth living. Bauman’s understanding of consumerism is suggestive of the way Hannah Arendt understood totalitarianism. To paraphrase Corey Robin (2007), it is the product of mass sociality which arises from the breakdown of classes and nationstates. Neither a class in itself nor for itself, the mass now engages with consumerism individually, together – divided, they shop. Its members have no interests, no concern for their ‘wellbeing’, no collective beliefs, community or identity they can call their own. What they do have is an anxiety brought on by loneliness, or what Arendt (1972: 477) called ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to subsume themselves in consumerism even if this means ultimately extinguishing their ‘individual identity permanently’. With its insistence on absolute loyalty and unconditional obedience to the market-mediated mode of life, consumerism satisfies a need once fulfilled by totalitarian movements: it fastens individuals with its own ‘band of iron’, providing them with a sense of structure and belonging. If Ernest Gellner’s ‘industrial man’ could be compared with an artificially produced or bred species which (could) no longer breathe effectively in the nature-given atmosphere, but (could) only function effectively and survive in a new, specially blended and artificially sustained air or medium, Bauman’s homo consumens can be compared with a virtual species which thrives in the marketdriven atmosphere of capitalism, and through his own self-interest finds inchperfect personification in the market-mediated mode of life, which ‘starts early, but fills the rest of life’. The problem is that a life spent consuming is essentially an incomplete life – incomplete in its inability to recognize alternative forms of emancipation. In his famous essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, the existential philosopher Albert Camus (1955) suggested that if we admitted to ourselves what most people feel about the meaning of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose whatsoever, we would be inclined to keep going, grumbling and stoically resigned to our fate, in the manner of Sisyphus, condemned in Tartarus, endlessly pushing his boulder to the top of the hill only to see it roll down again. What Bauman is suggesting is that we are by the same token resigned to our fate, but not so much cussed as happy with our lot and not so much pushing rocks as consuming and throwing away our unwanted waste and leftovers along the way. Like Walter Benjamin before him, Bauman knows that you learn more about a civilization from its waste than from its great architectural achievements: we are what we throw away. The ‘picture of publicly produced inauthenticity’ (Bauman, 2000a: 87) that is contemporary consumerism might suggest that it is a fake way of life; but it is

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still life itself, the opposite of death, yet in quite alarming proximity to it: obesity and anorexia nervosa and other diseases promoted by the market-mediated mode of life. Addicted to consuming as well as having a consuming fear of its risks, we appear incapable of doing anything about either. This is because the consumer syndrome has its own code of aesthetics that excuses us from the effort of hard thinking. What Bauman is essentially saying is that never mind not contemplating our unconscious desires, we do not in fact deal with consciousness particularly well either. This sense of powerlessness that accompanies a life spent consuming is summed perfectly in Paul Laity’s observation of the irony of the recent trend for ‘ethical living’, which relies somewhat perversely on its own kind of consumerism and even ‘being green can seem merely a question of where one shops’ (Laity, 2006: 22).

Consumerism liquid modern style: the Frankfurt School reconsidered What I have discussed so far might lead the reader to conclude that Bauman’s analysis belongs to the Frankfurt School tradition of hostile critiques of consumerism. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical position had its own foundation stone in the idea of the ‘culture industry’. What this provided them with was not only a foil against which to build their arguments in favour of, but a paradigm for, the construction of the type of subversive analysis designed to undermine the central assumptions of the culture industry, both philosophically and sociologically. Such a foundation stone is missing from Bauman’s account. When he surveys consumerism it is from a post-ideological vantage point, and if he perceives a similar outline to the Frankfurt School, he takes its measure differently. Although he accepts the problem of the dominance of a mass consumer culture, the idea that the consumer attitude stunts the imagination and leaves little room for critical reflection, and the dearth of a political will to imagine things differently, he invests this story with a very different meaning. Indeed, in two striking ways Bauman turns away from the Frankfurt School tradition and marks its limits. What is significant in his story is that it is about action in spite of knowledge (rather than false consciousness) and the inability of liquid moderns to deal with ambivalence. If Bauman’s critique is a revealing account of consumerism and the grip it has on us, it is also something much more than that. He demonstrates that the thrill of consuming is in the ambivalence it represents in the swinging hammock between freedom and security. In a nutshell, not only are consumer desires pleasures we can never adequately fulfil, except only temporarily, but the act of consuming itself is more thrilling than actually acquiring consumer goods. The real pleasure of shopping lies in the thrill of seeking rather than the acquisition of commodities. Bauman suggests that consuming might have a wide range of meanings and come with a wide range of practices but the fact is that it is not really consumerism per se that interests us. In other words, the meanings and

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practices that come with consuming are not really about satisfying consumer needs. On the contrary, it is ambivalence that counts; the accomplishment of a consumer aspiration with the insight that it was the chase – not the commodity itself – we really wanted. The upshot of Bauman’s analysis is that with this abnormally high propensity to consume and normally low ability to understand our own behaviour, we are bound to carry on acting without the knowledge of freedom, and we will be destined to experience ambivalence, and as a result are likely to remain unhappy people who – despite our ostensible addiction to consuming – know deep down that we already have everything we could possibly consume. And not only that, it would seem that rather than contemplate why we always seem to be unhappy, we would presently more willingly close our eyes and project our unhappiness onto the lives of others (read: expendable relationships, exploitation of third world workers making goods for first world consumers, etc.). Pace the Frankfurt School, consumerism is not so much an ideological conspiracy in which we collude, as a competition between sellers and buyers who try to get the best value for their money. Capitalism wants nothing from consumers but our capacity ‘to stay in the game and have enough tokens left on the table to go on playing’ (Bauman, 2004: 52). The contingent worlds that constitute liquid modernity operate as a matter of action in spite of knowledge: as individuals in roles as consumers are not so much brainwashed as lacking the appetite for the struggle – beliefs and ideologies are relegated to the background. In other words, from the moment the market laid its friendly hand on our shoulder in this all-encompassing way, we were, to a previously unimaginable degree, touched and moved. It was as if the roads to shops opened before us, giving the reality to the TINA dictum: ‘There Is No Alternative’. In this sense, Bauman captures the irony that if for the majority of people solid modernity was a time when freedom was seen as an astonishing but largely unachievable hope, in the time of liquid modernity we appear to be prepared to surrender our hard fought freedoms to the vast decentred power-knowledge of consumer capitalism, which we happily (and unhappily) allow to deregulate our lives. To put it another way: rather than just being a ‘January’ or ‘Summer’ treat, the ‘sales’ have become a ubiquitous feature of the liquid modern landscape and Bauman recasts us as ubiquitous sales shoppers too heavily weighed down by all the delightful purchases we have been making to devote any of our time to more serious issues. Consumer capitalism bombards us, every day, with images of things that we can and cannot afford to pay for, and encourages us to want all of them. As rational individuals we know that our economic survival depends on buying only what we can afford, but the availability of credit encourages us to live above their means. Liquid modernity is in effect a sociality in which these class-bound virtues have been subsumed by credit, which, as Peter Conrad (2006) argued, lasts as ‘long as you pay your bills, [provide] proof of moral standing, and the merchants who extend it express their own faith in your probity’.

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As Bauman suggests, it is the configuration of economic arrangements associated with consumer capitalism which is of far greater importance for explaining patterns of social control today. To put it another way, social control – like much else in liberal democracies – has by and large been commodified and privatized. The comfortable majority no longer lives in the shadow of tyranny of the state; instead they create their own turmoil, their own paroxysm, driven by market forces that they have no authority over, but which at the same time have no final authority over them. The turmoil is barely noticeable – publicly at least – it is simply how people live. As Bauman (2004: 74) puts it, it is as if ‘we have been trained to stop worrying about things which stay stubbornly beyond our power . . . and to concentrate our attention and energy instead on the tasks within our (individual) reach, competence and capacity for consumption’. In liquid modernity, consuming replaces work (and leisure) as the backbone of the reward system in a sociality that is underpatterned rather than patterned, disorganized rather than ordered. It is only the poor who are still controlled through the ‘work ethic’. To put it simply, liquid modernity redraws the boundaries between social class divisions as a relationship between those who happily consume and those who cannot, despite their want of trying. Instead of being repressively controlled, this fragmented sociality is driven by the ‘pleasure principle’. Bauman ventures the across-the-board generalization that if solid modernity was a class society based on Panopticon surveillance, the single dominant symbol at the core of liquid modernity is consumerism with its (dis)organization of social control based on ‘precarization’, as the ‘reality principle’ and the ‘pleasure principle’ strike a deal. All of this has served to liberate us from the Panopticon belief that the institutions of governmentality that make up civil society should unfailingly try to set the parameters of right and wrong. Instead they are today presented with a celebration of everything that makes life magical as well as irresponsible, at least within the boundaries of consumer culture. The repressive apparatus of the Panopticon has largely been supplemented by the seductive allure of Synopticon watching, whose central organising principle follows the legendary Hollywood star Mae West’s maxim that ‘it’s better to be looked over than overlooked’. Unable to find our authentic selves and fearful of not having just the right ‘street cool’ – most of us have difficulty keeping on the right side of the line dividing cool from naff – we also constantly crave the confirmation of others that is the Synoptic other side of liquid modern surveillance. Social control is barely noticeable, except for the flawed consumers, incapable of fulfilling their designated social positions as ‘consumers first, and all the rest after’ – whose subordinate position prevents them from participating freely in what has become for the masses a dream world of consumption. Bauman implies that what we are dealing with in liquid modernity is the kind of sociality, once again so aptly described by Albert Camus (1953) in the opening chapter of his book The Rebel, that is knowledgeable but is incapable of contemplating itself, and which asks no questions because it allows consumerism to

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provide all the answers – in other words, a sociality which has not learned rebellion. Accordingly, he suggests that we need to recognize that it is not ideology but the power of seduction that is central to understanding the social control of the majority in liquid modernity. As he suggests, it is the willingness to be seduced – but not in any deep way – combined with something to believe in and belong to that drives us on. Indeed, it is faith – whatever its ephemeral currency – that is the key to understanding the ways and means that seduction works in our lives; faith in the clothes we buy, our faith in ourselves, our faith in our relationships, our faith in the market, our faith in religion – faith is all the rage. Yet, Bauman is at pains to point out that for all its surface toughness and apparent impregnability, we ought to remember that faith is a surprisingly fragile thing, liable to shatter should we lose the slightest bit of interest. If Bauman has rehabilitated the work of the Frankfurt School beyond ideology, George Ritzer has similarly attempted to rehabilitate Weber’s disenchantment thesis for the twenty-first century. Ritzer analyses the fast-food giant McDonalds in light of Weber’s identification of the rationalization process. In particular Ritzer attempts to show how rationalization is enacted globally through the metaphor of McDonaldization in ways that even Weber could never have anticipated. This is a compelling metaphor, and it has important implications for leisure – or so it would seem.

Leisure and consumerism: McLeisure and IKEALeisure McDonaldization and McLeisure McLeisure can be defined as the process by which the principles of McDonalds are progressively dominating more aspects of leisure as well as having a significant bearing on the way that globalization works. McLeisure is derived from George Ritzer’s (1993) McDonaldization thesis which re-imagines Weber’s rationalization thesis as involving, by bureaucratic means, the organization of what is by now a global world. The key distinction between McDonaldization and Weber’s original thesis is that Ritzer argues that the principal form of rationalization is assumed by the flexible, global corporation, best exemplified in the fast-food giant. However, Ritzer draws on the key aspects of Weber’s work to demonstrate how rationality and rationalization through McDonaldization pervade everyday life to the extent that they are little by little producing, out of the world we have to live in, a ‘disenchanting’ world that we might not want to live in, but appear not to be able to do much about. Ritzer’s thesis is well known and here I shall merely summarize its key principles. According to Ritzer (2003: 138), there are five essential dimensions that distinguish the essence of the McDonaldization process. The first of these is efficiency, ‘or the effort to discover the best possible means to whatever end is desired’. A McDonaldizing society is a speeded up, time conscious and

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consumption-based society and consumers expect to be served promptly and efficiently. In order to make this possible McDonalds and its customers strike a deal. The fast food corporation puts into place an inventory of norms, rules, regulations and structures to ensure that its employees perform as efficiently as possible and its customers react by dining in a similar manner. The ‘drive-thru’ window is the example Ritzer usually uses to illustrate this dimension. The second dimension concerns calculability. This emphasizes quantity – perhaps best personified in the ‘Big Mac’ burger – which is often accompanied with the loss of quality. Time is of the essence here. Just as the efficiency of McDonald’s staff is measured by the speed in which they can produce food and serve it to customers, so McDonald’s restaurants are designed to coerce customers not stay around for too long after they have finished eating. As we have seen, the expectation is that ideally they will buy ‘drive-thru’ and not come into the restaurant at all. The third dimension is predictability. Not only is it expected that McDonald’s products and services will be the same the world over – a Big Mac is always a Big Mac – but so also will be the McDonaldization experience. In another book, Ritzer (2004) likens the predictability found in McDonalds restaurants to what Marc Augé (1995) calls non-places, which in marked contrast to places (those topographical sites loaded with substance) are merely repositories of liquid flows, or what he, borrowing from Weber, calls ‘nullities’, globally conceived and controlled and lacking the distinctive substance – conversation, flexibility, localism, humanity – that make experiences, products and services real. In other words, McDonaldization is too superficial to be authentic. The fourth dimension of McDonaldization is control. In explaining this, Ritzer turns to technology and the example of French-fry machines: just as McDonalds employees are controlled by the bell that rings to tell them when the fries are cooked to just the right colour and texture, so customers are controlled by their inability to choose well-cooked fries. The final aspect of McDonaldization is the irrationality of rationality, which also affects both employees and customers. Basically, in the process of rationally organizing its business McDonalds ends up removing all the things that make work rewarding and eating (read: leisure) a pleasurable experience. The upshot of this is dehumanization: ‘Employees are forced to work in dehumanizing jobs and customers are forced to eat in dehumanizing settings and circumstances. The fast-food restaurant is a source of degradation for employees and customers alike’ (Ritzer, 2003: 141). Ritzer himself often refers to the package holiday as the exemplary application of McDonaldization to leisure (Harris, 2005); to travel as a package tourist is to be forced into being an incessant consumer. The scope of McLeisure is far reaching in its application and has been applied to a broad range of other leisure activities including: dining, shopping, theme parks, television and sport (Rojek, 2005). The metaphor is significant for a number of reasons. Two are especially worth mentioning for our purposes: First, McDonaldization is not just another cunning business model. As Bauman (2000b: 234) points out,

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there must have been a fertile soil for the seed, once sown, to grow so quickly resonance (indeed, a degree of mutual adequacy) between the changes in the existential conditions of postmodern individuals and the escape-from-uncertainty-through-designed-standards which McDonaldization is all about. Second, McDonaldization shows us that the difference between consuming and leisure is ‘getting more blurred by the day and for many practical purposes has been already obliterated’. Ritzer’s metaphor has been much debated and there are a number of general criticisms of it that can regularly be found in the literature. This is not the place to provide an exhaustive discussion of these criticisms as the inventory is much too long, encompassing the full range of social, economic, cultural, political and ethical implications and connotations of Ritzer’s work (see, for example, Alfino, Caputo and Wynyard, 1998). Here we will only discuss some general criticisms of McDonaldization insofar as they highlight its main deficiencies specifically for understanding leisure. The idea of McDonaldization is, in large measure, depressing. It is a highly speculative metaphor, and its incorporation of (post)modernity into the ideal type just described is dubious to say the least. This has led a number of commentators to criticize Ritzer for failing to provide solid empirical evidence for his theorizing. That is, like many other people, Ritzer has obviously spent some time in McDonald’s, observing how its business concept works in action in order to build his evidence, but he doesn’t appear to have researched in any great depth the relationships between ‘the changes in the existential conditions of postmodern individuals and the escape-from-uncertainty-through-designed-standards which McDonaldization is all about’, identified by Bauman above. McDonaldization emphasizes the point that not only is our leisure circumscribed by rational systems that we have little control over, but also that the cultural standardization and normalization of experience these present us with is inevitable (Rojek, 2005). If, in Foucault’s language, McDonaldization expresses a particular combination of power and knowledge, then this does not vary between different national configurations; this is because it is able to cater efficiently for needs that, as Weber explained, are ‘cumulative, quantified and quantifiable’ (Heller, 1999: 39). The upshot of rationalization through McDonaldization is the homogenization of leisure. Those who want to be themselves in their leisure have to overcome the feeling of ‘disenchantment’, throw off ‘the iron cage’ mentality pressing down on them and find their own authentic voices – but this is unlikely since the progressive accumulation of McDonaldization is an infinite process. However, the notion that employees and customers simply acquiesce to the roles ascribed to them by McDonaldization is open to theoretical reductionism; that is, Ritzer reduces practical knowledge to theoretical knowledge and ignores the fact that whatever its dark side, leisure, like culture, is praxis (Bauman,

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1999). On the one hand, Ritzer seems to assume that we do not have the necessary skills to outwit McDonaldization and we passively accept its authoritarian powers and, on the other, that we do not want products and services with a human face. He also ignores the possibility that people might seek alternatives to the irrational, antisocial and dehumanizing affects of McDonald’s. This leads us on to the foremost criticism of Ritzer. Just like Weber, he assumes that modernity is a ‘disenchanted world’, which is characterized by a deficit of meaning. However, by turning away from everyday life to theory, both Weber and Ritzer choose not to focus on the freedoms and the opportunities that modernity offers us by focusing instead on its ostensible deficits. Contrary to what Weber and Ritzer suggest, liquid modernity, especially, is characterized by a surplus of meaning. Indeed, in the last 30 or so years we have witnessed an exponential growth in leisure, and importantly, not just the kind that is provided for our consumption through rational expert systems. Most of these new leisure opportunities might not be entirely divorced from commercialization, but many of them are marked with a significant degree of meaning – vocation, innovation and devotional practice – rather than merely reflecting cynical attempts by rational systems to ‘re-enchant’ a modern world that has lost its aura by ‘adding leisure values’ (Harris, 2005). Examples that fit this trend include brewing real ale, growing fruit and vegetables in allotments, eco tourism, and much else besides. What is also significant about these new leisure trends is the way in which people work to create, through their leisure interests, new synergies that carry both the weight and the meaning of culture. What this tells us is that McDonaldization is simply not sophisticated enough to be the principal driving force of disenchantment in the consumer society. It appears to be because Ritzer tells us it is so. But he never gets far with saying what matters about MacDonald’s for other cultures. The fast food giant is a product of the United States of America and ‘belongs to the American people and them alone’ (Heller, 2005: 76). Exporting one of your country’s cultural products is one thing, however; quite another, trying to universalize culture with it globally. Even if we agree with Bauman (2000b: 234) that McDonald’s is one of the ‘seminal of the many present-day trends since it augurs, or brings in its wake, a thorough revolution in business practice as well as in the most essential aspects of daily-life culture’; it is clear that it is not the only one. And it is certainly not the one that best reflects our experiences of leisure. From McLeisure to IKEALeisure During the last 30 years IKEA has had a massive influence on the development of the business of the home furnishing market, turning furniture into a fashion item, while making it affordable and disposable (Simmons, 2005). The IKEA brand is a good example of what Rojek (2010) refers to as neat capitalism. Through this term Rojek identifies the knowing, deliberate attempts by entrepreneurs such as Ingvar Kamprad to offer clever but cool solutions to pressing

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social, cultural and economic questions. His use of the term ‘neat’ here is intended to express the self-aggrandizing manner in which neat capitalism is promulgated and practised, especially the way in which it sells itself as offering ‘savvy stateless solutions’ to the problems of society and the world by drawing on the sentiments of popular imagination. There is no better example of the success of neat capitalism than IKEA. At the time that Simmons wrote his book in 2005, IKEA had 202 shops in over 32 countries and was printing 145 million catalogues in 48 editions and 25 languages; it had 410 million customers worldwide, 1 million of whom visit its shops everyday; and employed 84,000 staff. Between 1994 and 2005 its income increased from $4.3bn in 1994 to $19.4bn, representing a growth of more than 400 per cent (Bailly, Caudron and Lambart, 2006); this occurred while the company reduced its prices between 15–20 per cent during the 5-year period 2000–2005. In achieving this success, contrary to McDonald’s, IKEA has not had to sacrifice its integrity, undermine its brand or alienate its customers. Notwithstanding its axiomatic power as the liquid modern business model par excellence, what is hardly commented on, however, is that during its 60-odd year existence, and particularly over the last 15 years or so, IKEA has become the paradigm for understanding changes in all areas of contemporary life. IKEAization has changed the way that people shop. It has helped realign our economic social class system. It has changed the way we interact. It has become part of our social and cultural fabric. Let us consider its key dimensions and how we might apply the metaphor to contemporary leisure. First, IKEAization emphasizes the essence of the notion of home in a modern world in which it cannot help but be missing (Bauman, 2001). It answers the ultimate question modernity poses us: how can one find a home when the things that make it so – continuity, warmth, comfort, safety – are always on the cusp of being taken away? The essence of the IKEA brand is the idea that feeling at ‘home’ is a nourishing antidote to a thoroughly individualized modern life. The wonder and the warmth of a home – you can’t beat it. This is what makes IKEAization so absorbing: in this metaphor men and women can find a readymade solution for subtracting themselves from the exhausting experience of being alone in the world. In other words with IKEAization the world becomes homely. You might say that the core business philosophy of IKEA is to give people a home as they have never experienced it before. To this extent IKEAization stresses the significance of the experience of intimate places for human beings, identifying the interior spaces of the house – bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, attics, stairs – and the small spaces contained within it – drawers, sideboards, chests and wardrobes, as our ‘first world’. As Bachelard puts it: Before he is ‘cast into the world’, as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more, since this fact of value, an important value, to

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which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house. (1994: 7) We also see the ‘home’ in a different way through IKEAization: as a source of self, an enriching collective world. But the products of IKEAization are much more than lifestyle accessories. In IKEA stores shoppers find what middle-class fans find in the working-class game of association football: a sense of home. A second of the primary dimensions of IKEAization is its democracy. Unlike McDonaldization, which seeks uniformity by trying to absorb disparate personalities, IKEAization recognizes that this is an impossible task. Here lies IKEAization’s moral aspect: not only is it keen to promote its social and environmental image, but also that it is democratic. No apparent stratification as such; no fixity of social class, no patriarchal, racial or age hierarchies: it is open to allcomers. As Donald Sassoon puts it: IKEA is the place where ‘workers and burghers alike buy the contents of their homes’ (2005: 147). Questionable though it may be, it is the assertion that it includes everyone that gives IKEAization its sting. It knows exactly what it stands for, and it is not for the social class society of the past – even if, as we have seen, it offers its customers the warmth and comfort of that past if they wish to purchase it. Third, as we have seen already, contrary to McDonald’s, great importance is given to incalculability and unpredictability. IKEAization emphasizes ‘affordable solutions for better living’, but not to the detriment of quality (‘Who needs a new kitchen with more than good looks?’: IKEA kitchens come with a 25 year ‘everyday quality guarantee’) diversity (Everyone’s welcome in an IKEA kitchen’) and innovations in style, but not with an expensive price tag (‘Big on style . . . Not on price’). Not only does IKEA have its own teams of product designers (‘Why do designers work for us?’ IKEA asks. ‘Because they are passionately mad.’) for coming up with goods it stacks on its warehouse shelves, but it also offers its customers pre-fabricated furniture arrangements which are both ‘jaw-dropping’ and made to measure in its very own ‘have-it-all-approach to affordable design’. IKEAization does what McDonaldization could only dream of: it outstrips the imagination of any consumer. Fourth, IKEA might be a global brand, but unlike McDonald’s, there is something inherently provincial about its character and this is a cause for celebration. Its lack of USA hegemony is a key part of the appeal of IKEAization. It anthropomorphizes its products by giving them Swedish names that charm its customers and which they can relate to: Aneboda (chest of drawers), Ektorp (armchair), Grimen (bed), Mysa Rönn (quilt cover), Pax Ådal (wardrobe), Tuvull (travel rug), and much else besides. In so doing it offers its customers a shopping experience with a homespun, European feel about it, rooted in the experience of the IKEA ‘family’, and delivered by ‘co-workers’, who are expected to care. Unlike McDonaldization, IKEAization is warm, intimate and enchanting.

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IKEAization is also unlike McDonaldization in another key way. Fifth, its roots lie, not in the hegemony of the cultural practices of USA free-time activity, but in the Protestant work ethic (Simmons, 2005). Ingvar Kamprad knows that the satisfaction that comes through giving your home an IKEA makeover cannot just be bought: it has to be earned, learned and worked at. As Simmons points out, IKEA’s customers recognize that the way in which IKEA operates is largely to do with lowering costs and that there is complicity between them and the company to make this business model work. The upshot of this is that IKEA’s customers have developed a disciplined and diligent commitment to picking up their own furniture, carrying it home and making it themselves. Yet at the same time IKEAization offers the tantalizing prospect of maximum Puritanism for the minimum of sacrifice – another underlying irony. Crucially, IKEALeisure caters for consumers who are looking for something that is a tad more challenging than the straightforwardly ‘off the peg’: selfassembly can be a bit tricky, and everyone struggles a bit, but with a bit of effort you get there in the end. IKEAization recognizes that the real pleasure of consuming lies in its ambivalence: the enthralment of the search and the exhilaration of discovery. IKEA customers not only get off on acquiring stylish new furniture but also the anticipation and thrill of gaining new knowledge and skills in the process of putting together their acquisitions. As we have already seen, what also makes IKEA attractive to consumers is that its products are as elastic as the tales of its marketing spinners and extendable enough to fulfil whatever dreams they have in mind. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Weber famously identified the Protestant work ethic as the crucial cultural feature in the development of industrial capitalism. The way in which the Protestant work ethic becomes discernible with IKEAization is also with the productive use of leisure time. To this extent IKEAization blurs the distinction between serious and casual leisure (Stebbins, 2006). In other words, even when leisure is commodified it does not rule out the fact that it provides men and women with the enthralment and satisfaction that is assumed by Stebbins to accompany only serious leisure activities. This can be seen in Baudrillard’s (1989, 1990 [1983]) idea of the ‘into’, which suggests that the point is not to just have a leisure interest, but be ‘into’ leisure, which he suggests is a new form of ‘voluntary servitude’. This dimension of IKEALeisure can be seen in the imposition of the strict and punishing regimes in sport, exercise and keep fit, which provides us with a broad range of elaborate ways for refashioning the body. In these ways we assert our freedom, refuse our physical limits and transform our bodies (just like our homes) into what we want them to be. It is in these ways that IKEAization also emphasizes the idea of cool. Cool is at best an elusive disposition. If ice and fire are binary extremes, cool is a zombie category somewhere in-between. It is a way of being in the world which is ‘defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative’ (Filler, 2012). The cool attitude is the mindset of

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IKEAization. The cult of cool, of cultivating a cool appearance, criss-crosses all aspects of IKEALeisure: rappers justify their lyrical extremities with it; some football fans found their identities on it; consumers always seem to be on the lookout for guides to living that tell them the coolest ways to live and how to pose and what the coolest music to listen to is and where to shop for the coolest clothes and what to eat and drink in the coolest restaurants and where to go for the coolest holidays. What this suggests is that the technologies associated with IKEAization facilitate freedom rather than control. Shopping has by now replaced work as the backbone of the reward system and it is only the losers in the liquid modern board game of Snakes and Ladders – the ‘flawed consumers’ (Bauman, 1998) – who are still controlled through the work ethic. As we have seen, IKEAization redraws the boundaries between social class divisions as a relationship between those with different abilities to shop. In an IKEAizing society, control is barely noticeable, because there is always something to fit even the smallest budget and the shallowest commitment. It is this last dimension that perhaps best exemplifies why it is precarized IKEAization rather than progressive McDonaldization that is ‘the most seminal of the many present-day trends’. To tweak what Bauman said of consumerism generally and what can be applied to IKEALeisure specifically: What makes the freedom offered by [IKEALeisure] more alluring still is that it comes without the blemish which tainted most other forms [for example, public sector leisure facilities]: the same market which offers freedom offers certainty. It offers the individual the right to a ‘thoroughly individual’ choice; yet it also supplies social approval for such choice, thereby exorcizing that ghost of insecurity which . . . poisons the joy of the sovereign will. In a paradoxical way [IKEALeisure] fits the bill of the ‘fantasy community’ where freedom and certainty, independence and togetherness live alongside each other without conflict. People are thus pulled to [IKEALeisure] by a double bind: they depend on it for their individual freedom; and they depend on it for enjoying their freedom without paying the price of insecurity. (Bauman, 1988: 61–62) The mantle of the principal driving force of consumer society is assumed by IKEAization and in the species of leisure known as consuming, IKEALeisure is ‘good of its kind’. McLeisure is not. For all its established ‘production methods’ IKEALeisure is not the kind of consumer leisure that can be standardized and then endlessly replicated, since each instance of IKEALeisure is its own innovation and as such has to balance familiarity and surprise. That may be so, but what emerges most powerfully in Bauman’s critique of consumerism is that in a liquid modern world in which the market is assumed to be the source of freedom there are many things about consumerism that should make us feel uneasy – from its

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polluting waste, to the diseases of consumer culture, to the ‘until further notice’ ways of relating that consumerism encourages at the expense of longer-term commitments – and that if we are prepared to ask ourselves the kinds of questions he asks, we may find out a good deal about our own consumer habits that we did not know before, or we were not prepared to admit to ourselves. And, above all, the confidence to recognize that even if we have left our children a planet more environmentally damaged than when we inherited it, things could still be different. As Peter Beilharz points out, for all his criticisms of the ‘consumer attitude’ Bauman prompts us to recognize that ‘even in consumption there is creativity of action, for culture is praxis’ (2002: xxx). What is the greatest virtue of consumers, in Bauman’s eyes, is their ability to forget the world in the way that children do, to play, to be irresponsible, and to delight in it. But what is missing in such free-wheeling flights of fancy is any attempt to play around with the rules that govern the market-mediated mode of life and consuming itself, as well as all other attempts to legislate the known world. In other words, what Bauman is saying is that liquid modern consumers might spend the whole day at leisure, but what we lack is the deepest conviction that the freedom which allows us to do so has been hard won, which makes our leisure more serious than we know. What we need to remind ourselves of is that because freedom has given us the power to look directly into the centre of things the way only children can, we have the ability to imagine things anew. But what we need to find first is the courage to set some new rules for the games we play so freely, and only then will we be able to take responsibility for the responsibility that freedom brings. While we may be slaves to consuming, another life is not only possible, it is vital, for humanity, for the planet. Liquid modernity is a world starting over, a world forever in embryo, and the best, most human thing that we should all learn by heart is that if this means our lives are inevitably governed by contingency rather than by fixity, and ambivalence rather than by certainty, and that if all of this weighs heavy on our individual shoulders, it also presents us with the opportunity for perpetual renewal and the concomitant changeability of reality, which can only mean, as Hannah Arendt would have been pleased to observe, the arrival of new beings ‘who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before’ and who ‘might move others to speak and act in new ways as well’ (Robin, 2007). Bauman’s message is clear: what we need to do is develop the ability to get away from the dominant re-usable language of consumerism to an alternative discourse that speaks itself for the first time. Instead of greedily consuming, we need to get greedy for the small, true details of life. It is only when we are able to grasp this possibility that we will be able to step clear of our consumer cluttered lives into a new relationship with the world, one that is at once fuller and more responsible than our present circumstances allow.

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Overcoming the authentic leisure- consumerist leisure dichotomy As we have seen in the discussion developed so far in this chapter there is a widely disseminated view in Leisure Studies and beyond that with the onset of modernity, enchantment disappeared from the world, and that in consumerist liquid modern times such a thing is unlikely ever to be regained. In Leisure (2010) I argued that in developing its critique of consumerist leisure, Leisure Studies has replaced the negative dichotomy between work and leisure (leisure is not compensation for work) with the positive dichotomy between consumerist leisure and authentic leisure (leisure is skholē or a school for life). As I pointed out, the ultimate discriminating factor here is not rational justification so much as taste. But not everyone’s taste counts equally. Bourdieu (1984) argues that the kind of sophisticated self-justification of taste when it is used in this way is a result of the speciously constructed interests of dominant groups, such as intellectuals – what he calls the ‘cultural arbitrary’. That intellectuals have the power to classify cultural practices under conditions that put their own tastes to the fore and in terms of their own distaste for the tastes of others, means that they ultimately subject less powerful social actors to a kind of symbolic violence, which not only legitimizes the systems of meaning constructed in their own interests, but also maintains extant structures of social inequality. Understood in this light the counterintuitive impression that skholē is leisure and consumerist leisure is not, is at once an elitist and undemocratic conception of leisure. Importantly, it is also in essence an injunction not to seek a more complicated explanation for twenty-first-century leisure because there is already one available. In response to this state of affairs I also argued in Leisure that the upshot is that Leisure Studies does not pay sufficient attention to the fact that the true terrain of leisure is the human imagination, that special way of feeling and seeing, an outlook turned outside of itself rather than simply reflecting it, which provides us with our own unique window onto the world. In other words, leisure is for many people a kind of spiritual practice or a source of enchantment, which enables them to render their lives meaningful, as well as put them on the road to authenticity. The trouble is, if Bauman is correct, in order to do this we need to relieve ourselves of the ‘consumer attitude’. But this is impossible since the ‘consumer attitude’ is all-pervasive in liquid modernity. Like Weber, Bauman in this reading paints a gloomy picture, running together the loss of enchantment to religious-economic changes that ushered in modern producer capitalism to the putative effects of a post-producer society based on consumerism, leaving us with little to be cheery about. As Heller’s (2005) critique suggests, this type of mindset is a product of a ‘romantic tendency’ in Leisure Studies, sociology and cultural studies rather than clear-eyed assessment, a danger that preoccupies most excesses in cultural pessimism. This last observation notwithstanding I have hopefully demonstrated in the forgoing discussion that Bauman’s sociology is perhaps the most important

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source of research and debate about the impact of consumerism on our leisure. Even so, his sociology is tautological and provides a weak account of how, in spite of consumerism, ‘there is creativity of action’ in leisure. Indeed, for all the strengths of Bauman’s understanding of the market-mediated mode of life which he rightly argues has become the central feature of contemporary existence, what his work lacks is a convincing understanding of what happens to ‘culture as praxis’ under these changed conditions. However insightful his line of thought, like Adorno et al.’s before him, it is restrictive and misplaced. This is principally because it continues to regard modernity as a battleground between enchantment and disenchantment, rather than as a field which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief – and it comes down, finally, on the side of disenchantment. Adorno’s modernism opposes the magics of Enlightenment ‘means-end rationality’ as well as those of capitalism and its fetishes. In taking this stance, however, he loses sight, first, of the spread of pleasures, competencies, and experiences that flourish within the modern culture of secular magic, and, second, of the capacity of modernized individuals to fall almost simultaneously into enchantment and disenchantment (to use Adorno’s phrasing) at their own leisure and pleasure, with little subjectivity – or political agency – engaged. (During, 2002: 65–66) Following the same line of thought in one of his most recent books, drawing on Hochschild’s (2012) study, Bauman (in Bauman et al., 2015: 133–134) observes that under the hegemonic conditions of market-mediated mode of life we have effectively ‘outsourced’ subjectivity and agency which means first and foremost the forfeiture of the capability to self-manage. Deeds our parents used to do, and things they used to make themselves – by using their own skills, complemented and magnified in cooperation with kith and kin, friends and neighbours – we would no longer believe to be within our own capability to do or make things. We plug our ears at suggestions whispered by our own experience, intuition and intimations, and don’t trust sufficiently our mind’s judgments – all too often for the simple enough reason that we deny value to things and acts lacking a market tag. In line with expropriation of our craft skills and cooperating impulse, the markets robbed us of self-confidence – of trust in our own ability to do things properly, and in our own authority to pass competent judgment on the results (unless, of course, they call for nothing more than following the drawings attached to an IKEA flat-pack kit). We have been drilled and groomed to follow the market-supplied-and-purchased instructions of a ‘read carefully and follow exactly’ style: to seek them, watch, listen and obey. In the process, we hardly notice our ostensibly autonomous self being recycled into one more of these IKEA-kind kits – meant and destined to be

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assembled, dismantled and reassembled according to the unqualified and indisputable, ‘open and shut’ commands. ‘The big question’, Bauman argues, is whether this trend can be reversed. The answer to this question I shall argue in the rest of this book is that Bauman rather misses the point. The question is not so much about the ‘whether?’ as the ‘where is?’ That is, what can society at large learn from our leisure life-worlds, the natural habitats of self-management, cooperation and social solidarity – and what During (2002) has dubbed the secular magic of enchantment. There is no doubt that in the above reading Bauman’s sociology could be read as yet another allegory of modernity, whether of the erosion of an enchantment lost to consumerism, the culture industry or mass culture. I prefer here to read the other Bauman found in books such as Intimations of Postmodernity, which presages another kind of modernity in which enchantment is not always in the shadow of the overarching authority of rationalization. Bauman is right: there is much of what we do in our leisure today that is explicitly consumer oriented. But modern leisure has always been a balancing act of artistic production and consumerism, even if in the twenty-first century there are different thumbs on the scale. What remains most important in his sociology is its recognition that: Freedom of individual self-assertion, if combined with the generative personality, is capable of multiplying the material and spiritual affluence of the human world, and with it – and thanks to it – also the meaningfulness and moral quality of human existence and coexistence. Such a combination, if we succeed in the effort to substitute it for the present-day mode of selfcreation and self-assertion based as they are on rivalry instead of collaboration, has a chance of preventing the demotion of humanity to the level of a zero-sum game. Freedom of individual self-definition united with the practice of ‘excorporation’ is a warrant for growing richness and diversity of human potential – but also for enhancing the space of self-definition and self-constitution of all of us and each of us. (Bauman, in Bauman and Raud, 2015: 129) What makes us human is our openness to enchantment and the universal need to make our lives momentous in one way or another, to render life meaningful – or perhaps simply to perform it. It is my view that many of us attempt to realize our potential in the enchanted kingdom of leisure. To understand what this entails in the twenty-first century we must shift our critical focus away from the prevailing ‘disenchantment of the world’ mindset which implies cultural determinism, as though this were the only way history could have gone, can go. In liquid modernity the distinction between authentic leisure and consumerist leisure loses its meaning. There is only leisure that is more and less capable and worthy of propagation: ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’. The false dichotomy of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ becomes beside the point and is replaced by the

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distinction between the committed and the uncommitted: on the one hand, those after rendering their lives meaningful, and on the other, those who prefer instead to take life as it comes, or – alternatively – who just want to forget life’s existential meaninglessness. In the rest of this book we are going to critically explore the leisure lives of those who decide to make what they do in their free time the focal point of their commitment: that is, those who are concerned with rendering their lives meaningful through ‘devotional leisure’ (the ‘enchanted’) and those for whom leisure is ‘performative’ and perhaps best understood as merely the ‘effect’ of their commitment – it is its ‘watchableness’ (Wallace, 1993) that counts first and foremost. It is in our leisure then that many of us are truly intent on stepping outside of the lifestyle options available in the consumer world. Indeed, liquidity has not so much made enchantment obsolete as shifted it firmly into the orbit of leisure. In a consumer society nothing is sealed off from commodification for private gain and the status of the norm might be that of a consumer – to be seduced or to be a seducer (Bauman, 2007); and when consumerism is hegemonic it privatizes, individualizes and disempowers us by making us depend on it. Yet, in spite of consumerism, liquid modern life is restless and open-ended: it is, to repeat, ‘creativity of action, for culture is praxis’ (Beilharz, 2002: xxx). To put some additional gloss on James’ (2009: 9) perceptive observation, what sociologists too often forget is that the masses are us: a multitude of individuals. They just happen to be living different kinds of lives than we do. Liquid modernity is populated with infinite stages on which all of us – this multitude of individuals – perform our various selves. It is in this ‘creativity of action’ that takes place on these stages that there lies hope of authenticity as well as enchantment in liquid modernity. In order to understand what this means for the study of leisure, we need to go beyond the familiar homo faber and homo ludens dichotomy – Leisure Studies has for far too long struggled with and through this duality of ontology – or the idea that homo faber and homo ludens have simply dissolved into homo consumens, to understand twenty-first-century leisure as a life practice carried out through aesthetics and ascetics: homo artista, homo repetitivus (Sloterdijk, 2013a). What this entails for the study of leisure is the topic of the next two chapters.

Part III

Towards an understanding of devotional leisure

Introduction: the art of living and leisure In the interregnum that got underway in no uncertain terms in the last few decades of the twentieth century many people began to awaken to a new sense of life. This was a historical period when it seemed that everyone now felt it was within their grasp to begin the search for some overarching narrative of meaning for their lives. This tsunami wave of change washed through the world of leisure as forcibly as it did the wider social world. Most ordinary people were now, in Douglas Reid’s words, free to achieve ‘a massively expanded realm of choice about how to develop their humanity outside the necessity of making a living’ (Reid, cited in Russell, 2013). As a result they experienced an expansive sense of power over themselves and their understanding of their place in the world. Fear of radical social change, up to that time almost universally imagined as transforming oneself within one’s social class rather than from it, began to give way to a new fear of appearing ‘under-animated and mechanized’ and possessed by ‘habits and inertias’ (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 168); as a result the words creation, design, branding, traditionally terms associated with the market, became the new watchwords of the zeitgeist. The very emergence of these ideas into everyday life was a result of the substitution of the ‘orderly reason-led’ ‘solid modernity’ (Bauman, 1992b) that placed limits on the ways individuals could imagine themselves for a new ‘as yet under-defined and most certainly under-determined’ ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, in Bauman et al., 2015: 17) which foregrounded self-transformation: an ‘under-defined’ and ‘under-determined’ world does not need the strictures imposed on it by social class, gender or any other kind of social order. In my view, there is little doubt that in the struggle between freedom and social control the balance of power had (well before the end of the last century) shifted in favour of the former. Humankind had, of course, begun to trust in the power of individual agency to gain more freedom with the onset of modernity, but never so justly as it does now in the midst of the present interregnum; in the twenty-first century, for the second time in the history of modernity (the first time was of course the rationalistic Enlightenment), confidence is the companion of commitment to robust

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selfhood and the right to freedom, rather than a symptom of what Peter Sloterdijk calls the ‘demons’ of custom or routine. Contrary to what many social theorists in Leisure Studies, sociology and cultural studies seem to think, the self-assurance of individuals is not the conceit that conceals subordination to means-end rationalization, capitalism and mass consumerism; it is, as Sloterdijk (2013a) argues, a rational (and often irrational) reliance on the efficacy of energetic action awakened with one goal in mind: to achieve the impossible. As we saw in the arguments developed at the beginning of Chapter 2, the event that marked the onset of this new temper was not just a consequence and expression of a revolution in people’s minds; it was also its principal cause. Twenty-first-century uses of leisure, I shall argue in the next two chapters, played a pivotal part in the construction of this new temper; it is through ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ that we undertake to devise new lifeworlds – habitats, spheres, forms, networks, spacings and other kinds of social arrangement – for the sake of our freedom. For some individuals, such extraordinary uses of leisure lead to enchantment and the search for meaning. For others, to paraphrase a remark from the great essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on ‘Manners’, their uses of leisure are transcendental, providing them with the self-assurance to carry the holiday in their eye; exhilarate the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; shake off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor – if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions. In making such claims I do not of course intend to imply that all leisure pursuits actually carry with them such meanings or experience, only that they may for certain individuals under the right circumstances. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about twenty-first-century leisure is its openness to both meaningrendering experience and the performative dimension of meaning production and its consumption – which Peter Sloterdijk (2013a) gave the name vita performativa. This dual understanding of the plurality of leisure life-worlds which began to appear in earnest as the new freedoms instigated by the interregnum firmed is something like Zygmunt Bauman (1992b) envisaged when he argued that the changed social, economic, cultural and political conditions that he had observed emerging in the last decades of the twentieth century promised (if without any firm guarantees) ‘intimations’ of another, more egalitarian, kind of modernity which foregrounded ‘romantic enlightenment’ as well as ‘rationalistic enlightenment’ (Heller, 2011). As we saw in the last chapter since Bauman wrote those words, he seems more often than not to have gone with pessimism about the present condition of ‘uncertain and chronically underdetermined ends’ (2000a: 67), whether because of the disintegration of the certitudes of the Enlightenment or the institution of

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mass consumerism under hyper capitalism. But like Antonio Gramsci before him, Bauman is someone who might be pessimistic because of his intelligence, but he always remains optimistic because of his will. His is not only a sociology rooted in a thoroughgoing critique of the depredations of liquid modernity, but one that floats in on warm airs of hope. In Intimations of Postmodernity he repudiates the pessimistic view that modernity only leads to ‘disenchantment of the world’. Like the older Foucault, Bauman is in this book suggesting that the project of the Enlightenment is still not over and that modernity has entered an unprecedented era of change which has not only given a ‘new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’ but also involves a new artistic or experimental attitude practiced at the ‘limits of ourselves’ (Foucault, 1984a: 46). As Foucault explains: What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? (1984b: 350) Just as the young Foucault’s two suicide attempts in his early twenties enabled him to rationalize suicide by reclaiming it as an original gesture ‘in which I make myself world’, so argues Sloterdijk, the older Foucault discovered the art of living ‘as the movement arising from one’s own most possibility of existence: beyond oneself with oneself ’ (2013a: 150). In this new aesthetic existence there is no repetition of the past or putting off the future, which always already belongs to the self. The dichotomy between life and art no longer exists. The artist of life is always in a hurry to squash all reality into the present; as Nehamas (1998: 10) explains, in the same way as ‘the acknowledged arts, the aim is to produce as many new and different types of works – as many different modes of life – as possible, since the proliferation of aesthetic difference and multiplicity . . . enriches and improves human life’. As the reader will see, the discussion developed in the rest of this book reflects a similar optimistic sensibility, with added motivation to explore how and in what ways ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ foreground new kinds of enchantment and self-realization for liquid modernity’s artists of life. To add some gloss to an insight from Theodore Zeldin, it is my view that if leisure has a purpose today it is to enable us to do things that we haven’t been able to do before (Snowman, 2007). It is in our extraordinary uses of leisure where we are constantly reinventing life in order to experience new kinds of becoming-in-the-world, which also bind us to new kinds of communal life. Mary Douglas once argued that each era determines the specific conditions under which we are able to express ourselves; as she puts it, the ‘social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived’; and what applies to the body

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also applies to the self: it ‘must correlate closely with the categories in which society is seen in so far as these also draw upon the same culturally processed idea’ (1970: 72). As will be demonstrated in the following pages, in the era of our interregnum, the time of liquid modernity, the specific conditions under which we are able to express ourselves are correlated with freedom. It is through making our own choices – in the process developing some new techniques, practices, moulding and self-shaping rules – that we artists of life seek either selfactualization or set out to achieve that most highly prized attribute of art: admiration, as well as the mutual self-awareness that constitutes social life amongst like-minded committed and spiritually-oriented artists. Amongst these new rules, often used in combination, emerge various forms of life practice, which are developed with the aim of transforming the self and revolutionizing our relationships to be ‘other’. It is in the act of choosing what we would like do in our leisure that translates necessity into freedom. This does not mean, however, that necessity disappears. On the contrary, it takes on a new qualification since it is through freedom that we are able to give it a new meaning. ‘This is not a goal to be achieved, but a practice to be kept alive’ (Heller, 2005: 23). What this tells us is that the practices of becoming-in-leisurelife-worlds and freedom are correlative. As Sloterdijk points out, regardless of whether the ‘social body’ continues to try to adapt us to the demands of these new conditions of freedom is beside the point since the aim of modernity was always to bring back those who had voluntarily become estranged from the world in their secession from the ‘country home of the self ’ to ‘reality’. Its ambition was to imprint on them a single citizenship that gives and takes everything: being-in-the-world. It binds us to a communal life that knows no more emigration. Since living there we all have the same passport, issued by the United States of Ordinariness. We are guaranteed all human rights – except for the right to exit from facticity. Hence the meditative enclaves gradually become invisible, and the residential communities of unworldliness disband. The beneficial deserts are abandoned, the monasteries empty out, holidaymakers replace monks and holidays replace escapism. The demimondes of relaxation give both heaven and Nirvana an empirical meaning. (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 437) The holidaymaker is the embodiment of the artist of life. Indeed, all holidaymakers are ‘the masters supreme of the art of melting the solids and unfixing the fixed’ (Bauman, 1997: 89). Holidaymakers are enchanted by the possibilities that the very thought of travel presents to them and always embark on their travels by choice. In liquid modernity there is no ‘social body’ that is allowed to place limits on where my imagination might take me and with it my right to vacate the social identity I am presently occupying. The purpose of the art of living is, as Sloterdijk’s invocation of the figure of the holidaymaker suggests, to live a life exclusive of any fixity and which is freely chosen.

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In the rest of this book my aim is to demonstrate that for many individuals today this is a life in great part dedicated to leisure. It will be argued too that ‘life’ and ‘leisure’ are often more entangled with one another than ‘life’ and ‘work’. In the latter relationship, as the aforementioned quotation from Sloterdijk suggests, leisure is imagined merely as an escape route, not a transcendence. In marked contrast, in the former relationship, how individuals spend their free time – what one chooses to do when one can do anything at all – is one of the most important things about being an individual. For many individuals today, I will suggest that ‘life’ is invariably shaped by ‘leisure’; that is, they manage to establish a homelier relationship between the one and the other. To borrow an insight from Agnes Heller (2011) some individuals discover in their leisure that the world has a centre and this takes the form of a vocation, to which they are deeply committed, and they live their lives trying to find its secret. Here choice translates freedom into necessity. To choose this way of life is to both feel unconsciously at home in a leisure life-world and to succeed in becoming someone in the world, that is, someone distinctive. It is to become an individual de facto, to acquire a personality, a set of features and a leisure life that firmly locates one in a home, as a member of a community, but also which sets one apart in it by making one memorable for what one does, says or is. But not all leisure homes require such a level of commitment. For other individuals, who have different powers of imagination, the world has no centre; they are truly individuals who ‘carry the holiday in their eye’, who move between leisure life-worlds, without pathos. Where they lay their hats makes no difference to them. They feel at home anywhere and everywhere in their leisure and the kind of community they hanker after may initially appear to be quite uncommunity-like, but which on closer examination is merely derived from the category of difference which replaces anything that might be called a binding sense of community purpose or a shared project. Here choice translates necessity into freedom. What these individuals are really after is the kind of existence that David Foster Wallace, not without some sense of irony, once described as ‘the unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching’ (1993: 155). These two contrasting ways of understanding leisure – what I call ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ – developed by historical agents have been designed to establish two modes of existence fit for twenty-first- century artists of life. Explaining what these mean for individuals in the act of mutual discovery is the topic of the next two chapters.

Chapter 4

Twenty-first-century devotional leisure practices Seeking self- realization and authenticity

The starting point of this chapter is Max Weber’s assertion that the individual is the only discernible reality and that any analysis worth its salt must start with the actions of individuals. Casting society’s members as individuals is the trademark of modernity (Bauman, 1999). This casting, though, is not a once in a lifetime act and in twenty-first-century societies this is a practice that has to be re-enacted on a regular basis. Drawing on the work of Bauman it is argued in this chapter that individualization is the destiny of all individuals today. In other words, in the twenty-first century freedom is based on the classic template of self-choice: gnothi seauton, the ancient Greek injunction inscribed in gold letters over the portico of the temple at Delphi, which means to ‘know thyself ’. This mode of life brought into universal being by modernity and transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ (Bauman, 2000a: 31) as a personal destiny in the interregnum is not, as Agnes Heller argues, ‘a product of mere introspection but the result of action; this is a ‘proving’ or a ‘becoming’ whereby the self reaches out to find the kind of actions appropriate to the self-chosen character and destiny’ (Grumley, 2005: 192). A starting-over life of ‘becoming’ admits no fixed identities; what this suggests is that it must be understood as irreducibly mutable and heterogeneous. This is first and foremost because the precondition of the de facto modern individual is the ‘potential to live a life not yet determined’ (Levine, 2013: 92). As its title suggests, this chapter is concerned with developing a new understanding of devotional leisure practices in relation to the self. The first thing to say is this kind of leisure lends to its adherents the promise of being carried beyond the everyday into the transcendent, of being raised onto quite a different existential level. We should recall at this point the observations made earlier about what happens when a radical rupture and discontinuities in the historical process occur. According to Zehrer, more people start to ask the questions that we hardly ever care to ask. When someone asks these kinds of questions, as you will recall, they are usually asking what all the various situations of their life add up to (Eagleton, 2007: 57). It is my view that this is the prevailing mindset of our era and the foremost reason why today the need for transcendence is great and growing, and is perhaps one of the most seminal uses of leisure.

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But what is transcendence, and how might we conceptualize this phenomenon? As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his famous essay on the subject: ‘The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy’. In twenty-first-century lives that are shaped on the basis of such an imagination – as an indispensable constituent of life and a developing dynamic of self-realization – our uses of leisure often indicate such a transcendental dimension. As we shall see, for devotees of leisure, the spiritual sooner or later transmogrifies into what is a deeper aspect of the self: in Kantian lexis, emphasizing a noumenal value that is not usually found in the everyday world; for those individuals whose uses of leisure are ‘performative’, such encounters only become possible through some kind of transcendence beyond the limit of everyday life situations which come with their own specific kind of social approval. In this chapter, it is argued that individuals relish losing themselves in their leisure because it is here that they hope to know themselves. Leisure, they believe, is the means by which they can discover how to control and order their lives. When that control and order is established leisure disappears and becomes the art of living. To put my own spin on an idea from Walter Benjamin, the leisure life-worlds individuals often encounter when they lose themselves in this way come with their own ‘now of knowability’. Each and every one of these leisure life-worlds has its particular ‘index’, offering the individual in question their own personal rendezvous with the present. In responding to such observations we must recognize that in modernity the imagination has not stood still and has changed as a result of complex interactions between existing modern assumptions and those emerging with the new cultural context ushered in with the interregnum. As Agnes Heller has suggested, we must appreciate that not every kind of modern imagination is directly related to the same kind of imagination. With this in mind I take the frame of the imagination associated with ‘devotional leisure’ as roughly corresponding to ‘the paradox of freedom and truth’ (Heller, 2011: 144), and the imagination of ‘performative leisure’ as roughly corresponding to freedom and the paradox of a different kind of truth that emerges in situ, takes the look of the things with which it is filled, but is true only in a succession of episodes that do not in any way mark it as permanent in their brief station. This chapter proposes that when individuals situate themselves in the leisure life-worlds that capture their imaginations they no longer require rituals of ‘horizontal’ coordinates which align them to the social class, gender or ethnicity in which they are thrown into at birth; what they require instead are ‘vertical’ coordinates – as Peter Sloterdijk (2013a) points out, all individuals today are by default embedded in what he defines as something like practice-divided competency fields of achievement. What this means is that we must understand individuals first and foremost as practitioners of the art of living. It is my argument that it is in these leisure life-worlds that we perceive that we will find our own

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version of essential truth and hopefully an authentic existence, which we view will be inseparable from the style in which we hope to find the secret to our own individual existence. As already indicated, I will argue that this process of ‘re-spiritualization’ has proceeded in two different directions, one ‘devotional’ (homo repetitivus) and the other ‘performative’ (homo decadencia) – although these should not necessarily be seen as separate. As is demonstrated throughout the chapter, in understanding how uses of leisure relate to devotion and performativity we need to go beyond any dichotomy, and especially the ones between homo faber and of homo ludens, and homo ludens and homo consumens, to understand leisure that results from the twenty-first-century human being-in-the-world: homo artista. Following Foucault (and the Ancient Greeks) this chapter is also interested in the ways in which twenty-first-century artists of life are concerned to foster the ‘care of the self ’ (Foucault, 1986). This is an understanding of the self that is opposite to the typical modern understanding of the development of the self, which sees it as ‘a sphere of subjectivity containing its own experiences, opinions, feelings and desires, where this sphere of inner life is only contingently related to anything outside itself ’ (Guignon, 2004: 55). The discussion developed here is underpinned by an existentialist ontology, which assumes that Dasein and the world are one (Heidegger, 1962): to exist is always to exist in interdependence with other selves. What this tells us is that the self and the world are correlative: ‘Without the world there is no selfhood, no person; without selfhood, without the person, there is no world’ – in Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic formulation. To put this sociologically, selfhood is always constructed in social relations, and doesn’t exist outside social relations. As Bauman (in Bauman and Raud, 2015: 2–3) explains, in modernity, the self obtains three qualities: First, it becomes the object of ‘attention’, ‘scrutiny’ and ‘contemplation’. Second, it is thereby set apart, as a subject of consideration, from other entities, which are as a result perceived as its objects; this helps to elevate the self from its existential uncertainty. Third, the self is at the same time promoted to the new status of the principal focus of that newly interpreted subject which entails that the duty to and care of the self – self-attention, selfcreation, self-scrutiny and self-control and so on – becomes the self ’s primary concern. What applies to self applies to body. The discussion in this chapter assumes that self and body are indivisible. It focuses on the experience of the self in the visceral, constructed sense of not so much ‘having a body’, as ‘being embodied’, which offers a way of understanding the body as ‘yet to be determined’ and the self as ‘heavily infused with reflexivity’ (Giddens, 1992: 31). What Giddens is suggesting here is that modern men and women must strive to reconcile the paradox of freedom for themselves existentially by undertaking a ‘reflexive project’ of the self: ‘each person is required to steer his or her own, individual course between the threats and the promises of modern society’ (O’Brien, 1998: 19). As in previous eras, ‘the body remains mortal and so transient, but its

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mortality-bound brevity seems like eternity when compared with the volatility and ephemerality of all reference frames, orientation points, classifications and evaluations’ which liquid modernity puts on offer (Bauman, 2000a: 182). Self-realization involves becoming one’s self through personal and social encounters and does so precisely because custom no longer guarantees who we are; this is the condicio sine qua non of liquid modernity. As we saw in the introduction to this chapter, Bauman argues that liquid modernity is ‘under-defined’ and ‘under-determined’; it is in this sense a condition that encourages freedom and autonomy from the entrenched expectations of the ‘social body’ (Douglas, 1970) and opens up the world to the art of living: we can and do choose who we are for ourselves; and those of us who can’t try to approximate it as closely to who or what our abilities allow. The analysis developed in this chapter also assumes a particular kind of selfhood found in all those who commit themselves in their leisure. To draw on an insight from the British philosopher Bernard Williams, prompted by D. H. Lawrence’s approbation that you should ‘Find your deepest impulse, and follow that’, if there is one theme that stands out in developing the following discussion it is the demand for authenticity that accompanies self-realization. In other words, the idea that one lives one’s life on the basis that some things are in some real sense really you, that dovetails nicely with those of others like you, and expresses what you and others like you are (and are not). To quote Williams, this is the notion that there is something that is one’s deepest impulse, that there is discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, although unclear where it will lead – these, rather, are the point. The combination – discovery, trust, risk – are central to this sort of outlook. (Williams, 1972: 79) As this chapter demonstrates, the kinds of ‘discovery, trust, risk’ found under the umbrellas of ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ hold no bounds. These occur in no uncertain terms in many conventional leisure practices. But as we know, for many people leisure functions as a private repository for truths that are unconventional, some might say peculiar, abnormal or deviant – and therefore too objectionable to be shared with others. It is through these leisure practices that we seek intense moments of experience, which involve Dionysian encounters with life. Here, life is often made up as it goes along and we encounter individuals acting out new versions of themselves, which is their answer to life’s refusal to any longer be framed. As Theodore Zeldin (1998: 226) observes in his ground-breaking study An Intimate History of Humanity, we are all in this regard escape artists: Every religion has been an escape from the sordidness of real life, a withdrawal from the aching body into the safe haven of the soul. When religions

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have become too conventional and superficial, there have always been escapes into mysticism and fundamentalism, away from reality. Industrial society began as an escape from poverty. Now it has become an escape from work to leisure, hobbies and sport. But even a civilisation dedicated to leisure contains enemies, so the art of escape has been refined still further: detachment, humour and parody have been cultivated to prevent any worry from being taken too seriously. . . . Escape has been an unrecognised art, because the many forms it takes have never been seen as a unified response to life. It is too often the case that its ‘enemies’ do not treat all leisure practices equally. To tweak a juxtaposition from Slavoj Žižek (2009: 11), it is in putting this multitude of leisure practices into discourse that we encounter the difference between what society simplistically calls ‘reality’ and ‘irreality’: ‘reality’ is the reality involving social interaction in the everyday, including the agencies and institutions which take care of the division of labour, commodities and services, and leisure, while ‘irreality’ is the reality some of us have to invent to make ‘reality’ bearable. ‘Irreality’ is understood in ‘reality’ through an inescapable ‘abstract’, shadowlike logic that has no positive or substantial meaning, but which must be presumed in this way in order to justify reason’s negative reference to it and its distance from it. In other words, as society reflects on how it reproduces itself it differentiates between knowable leisure practices that take place at society’s centre and unknowable leisure practices that it can’t quite bring itself to name and which must remain at its periphery. It is in the juxtaposition of these two ‘realities’ that the negative or insubstantial meaning of unknowable leisure is presumed to justify its place beyond or beneath the grasp of rational interpretation. To understand any individual who has decided to live their life on the basis that there are some things that are in some real sense really them, and that whatever this kind of life entails dovetails nicely into the lives of others who have chosen to follow the very same path, means that the individual in question has chosen to pursue the kind of life that must be understood as embedded in a hermeneutic tradition, which demands that a vital, ongoing conversation about what things matter is really important for a community, even when that ‘community’ is one only in the loosest and most precarious sense. The contrast between the two senses of community found respectively in ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ is an issue to which I will return in the next chapter. Before I turn to these two modes of existence fit for twenty-first-century artists of life and how these relate to leisure I must clarify one thing. In my discussion, as should be becoming clear by now, I shall set up a juxtaposition of the two. As we know, liquid modernity is characterized by the fact that things do not always fit neatly into place. This is also the case, here. If we consider for example the practice of urban exploration, it turns out immediately that it

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cannot be identified solely as ‘devotional leisure’ or ‘performative leisure’, as its adherents exhibit both inclinations. As Kevin Bingham’s unpublished research suggests, urban exploration mobilizes both kinds of enchantment. With this in mind, to borrow an idea from Peter Sloterdijk (2013a), we must recognize that the twenty-first century is the age in which the practices of all those who commit themselves to ‘devotional leisure’ and/or ‘performative leisure’ dissolve in anthropotechnics.

Re- spiritualization, anthropotechnics and leisure The crux of the theoretical framework underpinning the following discussion takes its inspiration and point of departure from Sloterdijk’s social philosophy, especially his book You Must Change Your Life (2013a). In this book Sloterdijk celebrates the evocation of continually living as a person for the first time, of being prepared to change one’s life. The book is conceived as a parallel reading of Nietzsche’s imperative to ‘Become who you are’. To be who you are, to extend your capacity for responsibility for yourself, which Nietzsche called ‘freedom’. While Sloterdijk brilliantly demonstrates a contemporary understanding and application of Nietzsche’s (1974: 335) celebration of ‘human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’, this chapter attempts to illuminate the very same issues of interpretation by focusing on leisure as a particular kind of life practice that comes into its own in the twenty-first century. The following discussion is in this regard an exercise at the intersection of sociological hermeneutics and hermeneutic sociology, an interpretive account that tries to demonstrate what happens when social contingency comes over you, with the realization that the present is as it is but things could always be different, and that when this happens the world and your place in it is inevitably going to change. No words could better set the stage for such an exercise than the words ‘You Must Change Your Life’ that recognize that the ‘fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mould’ – in Sloterdijk’s view, anyone who founds themselves on the basis of any identity is an anachronism. ‘So you must change your life and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear’ (Wittgenstein, cited in Sloterdijk, 2013a: 138–139). What is at stake here is a chance to grasp our present age in its full significance, since the refining and purifying work involved in changing your life holds the potential for unlocking new secrets about individual and collective human endeavours, including a reinvigoration of the ways by which we understand enchantment, in words such as ‘magical’, ‘spiritual life’, ‘devotion’, ‘aesthetics’, ‘ethics’, ‘ascetics’, ‘performativity’ – and, of course the one that often encompasses all of them, ‘leisure’. Consider the following assertion: leisure comes into its own as the form of life practice par excellence in the twenty-first century. This statement builds on Peter Sloterdijk’s (2013a) view that we make ourselves through anthropotechnics:

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forms and networks of cognitive, physical and social training through which we live our lives and construct our worlds in the face of the uncertain risks presented to us by modern living and the certainties of death. It is my view that uses of leisure are primary spheres (forms and networks) of anthropotechnics. In these uses of leisure we perceive that we can become ourselves, in a radical way. Although individuals have been experimenting with new forms of life over the centuries, Sloterdijk argues, in the twenty-first century we now realize that we are ‘beings for whom being is a question’ who want to determine our own worlds rather than be determined by the social, economic, political or cultural situations in which we find ourselves. Just as producer ‘solid modernity’ stood cognitively under the sign of the work ethic, twenty-first-century ‘liquid modernity’ presents itself under the sign of ‘Mußt dein Leben ändern’ (‘You must change your Life’). Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk celebrates the view that freedom does not await the arrival of some kind of external liberator, but is available to individuals in this world at every moment. Vis-à-vis Max Weber (1992), Sloterdijk argues that what once entailed developing a union with God changed to the personalized and emotional notion of life practice. In this regard, contingent individuals are not interested in the ‘innerworldly asceticism’ associated with the work ethic as identified by Weber, but in anthropotechnics (Sloterdijk, 2013a). According to Sloterdijk, the human world is one that has a need for ‘spiritual regimens’ and the cultivation of matters relating to the body and the soul. It is religions, moral judgements or appeals to tradition that have historically tried to attend to this essential feature of our existence. The argument that this is the job best carried out by religion returned with a vengeance in the last decades of the twentieth century after the purported failure of the Enlightenment project. Sloterdijk argues that this view needs to be challenged since religion does not, in actual fact, exist. In pursuing this argument Sloterdijk argues that human beings are always subject to a sense of ‘verticality from above’ which, after Nietzsche pronounced the death of God, was revised into a new version that ‘permits a deeper understanding of the emergence of embodied improbability’ (2013a: 86). This signalled a shift from the maxim ‘God told me’ to the human claim to miraculous powers. In the place of religion what exists today are only new kinds of discipleship (sometimes taking on fundamentalist tendencies) that must be understood as attempts to appropriate religion in order to fulfil human spiritual needs. This view assumes a dichotomy between believers and unbelievers, which in the modern world collapses. In place of this dichotomy, we should distinguish between those concerned with life practice (homo artista, homo repetitivus) and the untrained (homo Bourdivinus) – those other ‘last humans’, the ‘identicals’ or ‘conformists of being different’ who prefer to retain the identity of the ‘superhabitus’ and safety of the ‘base camp’ (Sloterdijk, 2013a). In other words, as individuals free to choose our own destinies we are entitled to choose ‘unfreedom’ should we so wish. The point is that we are all required to make a choice. For Heller, this requirement explains the groundless ground of freedom, or the

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idea that freedom doesn’t have any foundation, and the insight that we are compelled to take the existential leap. This leap cannot be explained sociologically, but only legitimated by the leap itself. Ultimately, this is the choice each one of us must take for the responsibility of our responsibility. Before we begin to contemplate such a set of circumstances for understanding ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’, we first of all need to follow up Sloterdijk’s distinction between those individuals whose leisure is concerned with radical life practice and those whose inclination is towards leisure that is conformist, preferring the safety of the ‘base camp’ or of the ‘human zoo’.

Homo Bourdivinus, leisure and sociology in the human zoo Homo Bourdivinus is named after the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Although people have experimented with new forms of life throughout history, we now become conscious that we are, regardless of the social, cultural, economic and political conditions in which we find ourselves, not only contingent spacecreating beings but that the spaces we create, what Sloterdijk (2011) calls ‘spheres of immunity’, are essential to deepening human experience. As we have seen anthropotechnics is the unifying idea with which Sloterdijk attempts to tie this all together. He thinks that earlier theories, such as Bourdieu’s theoretical amalgam of habitus, cultural capital and field, is too narrow to encompass the range of possibilities now available to individuals. Here sociology itself is also replaced by anthropotechnics so as to better understand the actual practices of human beings. Sloterdijk wishes to overcome the limits of ‘dull-witted sociology’ that presumes that the ‘pre-conscious class “in itself ” within us becomes our true self ’. In this Bourdieuian view the ‘division of social space’ is theorized into diverse ‘fields’ – in which one naturally finds no ‘persons’, only ‘habitus controlled agents who are compelled to realize their programmes within the spaces offered by the field’ (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 182). These leisure worlds of ‘pseudo-verticality’ are effectively ‘playgrounds’ of identities in which individuals act out ‘unrevisable personal and cultural inertias’ (ibid.: 188). To paraphrase some insights from John Berger (2001: 271–272), Sloterdijk’s metaphor of the ‘human zoo’ symbolizes a species of human whose leisure has been ‘rendered absolutely marginal’. Within the limits of their leisure interest the individuals in this species are free but that freedom is tokenistic. Without interaction with that other species of human engaged in anthropotechnics, they become utterly dependent upon the human zoo. What was once central to their leisure interest and made it special has been replaced by a passive waiting for a series of arbitrary interventions to kick start them into action. The events they perceive occurring around them become as illusory in terms of their natural responses. At the same time their isolation (usually) guarantees their longevity as specimens and facilitates their taxonomic arrangement. All this is what makes them marginal. The leisure life-worlds they inhabit are in this sense artificial.

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In all cases the environment is illusory. Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity. Those who inhabit the human zoo have nothing to act upon. (Hence their perennial actions become marginal actions without an object.) Lastly, their dependence and isolation condition their responses so that they treat any event that takes place around them – usually it is in front of them – as marginal. Everywhere the élan vital in this species disappears. By remaining in the human zoo they constitute the living monument of their own disappearance. Ultimately, leisure is used as a form of protection against change, which those who prefer ‘pseudo-verticality’ brandish apotropaically. Were they to actually adopt the stoic and artistic precepts of anthropotechnics, their experience of leisure would be different. As it is, they choose the safety of the ‘base camp’, which serves them as defensive consolation from a fulfilling life, a carapace for their inveterately domesticated nature. Indications of these ‘rules for the maintenance of the human zoo’ (Sloterdijk, 2009: 25) can be found in a whole range of zombie leisure pursuits and activities, and especially in McLeisure, but perhaps the best single example comes from my own research with ‘the lads’ in Leisure Life (2003). The crux of my thesis in this book is that ‘the lads’ may not live in solid modernity anymore – likely never have – but their shared leisure, just like their collective consciousness, still dwells there and the universe that is their leisure life-world is framed by a solid modern discourse. Even though the wider world which they individually inhabit has become liquid modern, in their leisure lives ‘the lads’ are still animated by their belief in an imagined community which is perceived as the cornerstone of their shared masculine working-class existence. There is a warmth, a particular feeling of home about this leisure life-world which offers ‘the lads’ a protective cocoon where they are ‘naturally’ safeguarded from the uncertainties of liquid modern change. They close its shutters to guard against their mutual homemade models of themselves losing credibility, and the intricate cogs of their masculine realism from being damaged or lost. The leisure lifeworld enables them to keep these ready-made narratives alive in their collective memory, their own private gallery, which is the legacy of their youth. My central argument is that it is this shared passion for a solid modern missing world, sometimes proudly resurrected and celebrated, sometimes merely borne out of the private burden of individuality, which gives this shared leisure life-world its depth. The book charts ‘the lads’ intermittent forays into Leeds city centre on Friday and Saturday nights, which constitute a memorable vindication of this missing world. Nights out with ‘the lads’ tend to spin themselves out into a familiar web which feels like one of those reunions which famous rock bands have when the group get back together after playing with other people. When ‘the lads’ are on stage together once again it feels great and everything just clicks into place. They drink their beer faster than is good for them and conversation moves from subject to subject. They finish each other’s sentences, and communicate, more remarkably, without speaking at all. With a real affinity, and in the spirit of the communion that exists between them, they use gestures known

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only to them. They drink and they drink. As the evening moves on they feel themselves become fully one, the leisure life-world’s machinations in fine fettle. When ‘the lads’ are as one you have the illusion that nothing exists but them and the sense of belonging that frames their leisure life-world, a closed universe of warm feeling, with an undertone of nostalgia uplifted by the precision and grace with which each one of their actions and behaviours is shaped. Here, at least until the evening ends, everything comes together in one place. However, on these nights out ‘the lads’ do not so much re-live their youth as recreate through their leisure its unheroic aftermath. In truth the leisure lifeworld has, to use the rock band analogy once again, been turned into a monument for ageing lads, which in recent years has become more a duty than a pleasure and whose nagging subliminal power reverberates only on the edges of individual lives lived in the main elsewhere. Indeed, although it is the ultimate experience of a solidly modern leisure life they desire but cannot really capture, it does not deter them from endeavouring to regain the power and certainties of its past, and seeking a realm of mutual happiness that was once upon a time theirs. In the leisure life-world it would appear that ‘the lads’ have the best of both worlds: they have their myth and are able to relativize it as a contingent leisure experience, which has its own monologic. Indeed, the modus operandi of ‘the lads’ leisure together always presumes this form of closure: the conformation of hegemonic masculinity and the restoration of disrupted stability, both of which provide intimations of a past world of communal bliss in a protected time-space in which the leisure life-world attempts to impose the fixity of a masculinist, working-class myth on to the fluidity of contemporary everyday life. Yet ‘the lads’ ’ apparently granite authenticity isn’t at all what it seems. In their leisure ‘the lads’ are figures carved in the past, and to paraphrase Sloterdijk, in actual fact ‘no persons’, the living embodiment of ‘habitus controlled agents’ who are compelled to realize their collective fate within the time-space offered by this life-world, which is essentially a ‘playground’ of ‘unrevisable personal and cultural inertias’. In any event, it is only because of its own impossibility that the leisure life-world of ‘the lads’ is possible at all.

Anthropotechnics and devotional leisure: the attack on inertias or ways of escaping the human zoo In Sloterdijk’s (2013a) view it is human beings who produce themselves as individuals, for we are existential beings who not only pose the question of our own existence but reproduce ourselves as personalities through our actions. For Sloterdijk self-realization is no longer a political ideal but a widespread reality. This does not indicate a loss of this phenomenon’s importance; on the contrary, it reveals how the art of living has spread to influence all aspects of life. Indeed, since the art of living has become commonplace in the twenty-first century those

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who create themselves have begun to appreciate the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. In fact, so argues Sloterdijk, the discovery of the ordinary has actually become the great subject of the art of living which actually proceeds from and is in parallel with what he calls ‘acrobatics’ – which he is of course using here as a metaphor. In common with Max Weber, Sloterdijk (2013a: 38) suggests that modernity must be understood as a process that radically secularizes life practice by removing spirituality from its religious context and replacing it, not in work, but in leisure. First, to borrow an insight from Debray (2007), Sloterdijk suggests that unbending reflexivity has led to a shift in the subjective centre of gravity from human consciousness to the realm of the corporeal, which is valued in and for itself and has a material significance to which we feel a sense of moral obligation. In other words, the legitimating reference for the work ethic is no longer spiritual (i.e. God tells me it is sacred) or an ideal (i.e. my consciousness tells me it is true) but effective (i.e. my body shows me it works). This somatization of spirituality is best illustrated in sport: No one can be credible as a contemporary today, then, unless they sense how the performative dimension is overtaking the work dimension. Thus the sports system has developed into a multiverse with hundreds of secondary worlds, in which self-referential motion, useless play, superfluous exertion and simulated fights celebrate their existence somewhat wilfully, in the clearest possible contrast to the utilitarian objectivism of the working world. (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 212–213) This first kind of spirituality is accompanied by a second tendency, what Sloterdijk calls the ‘informationalization of spirituality’, which can be found in popular culture and its myriad subcultures. As is evidenced in a massive literature straddling cultural studies, leisure studies and sociology, subcultures burst onto the scene in no uncertain terms at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century (for a summary see, for example, Turner, 1990) and emerged in the form of life-worlds to do with leisure, consumer choices, lifestyles, with class, gender, generation and sexuality, and involvement in political movements also playing a key role. These two tendencies become the two metaphors of twenty-firstcentury spiritualization: sport as a symbol of acrobatic achievement and popular culture as a locus of devotion which ‘covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency’ (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 38). Once discovered as metaphors of spiritualization, these two tendencies make palpable the difference between those who make something or often a great deal of themselves in their leisure and those who do not. Anthropotechnics rather than work becomes the test of the will of those of us who ‘must change our lives’ (which means all of us), the measure of our concentration, and the personal litmus test of our self-worth. As soon as we know this, we have no more need to ask why individuals fulfil themselves through action, through ‘acrobatics’.

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Anthropotechnics is less a plan of action than a practice. It is about living in a certain way. We are not equipped to adopt a theoretical attitude to ourselves. Creative individuals fulfil themselves in their becoming, through action. We cannot know in advance the value or the consequences of our actions at the point of decision. Choice is not the issue of self-knowledge but an existential leap into our destiny (Heller, 1996: 147). In this sense we need to understand anthropotechnics as another rendition of Agnes Heller’s invocation of the existential leap of the contingent individual. This is not the path laid down by anyone else. This is our path, the one we have chosen for ourselves. We have to follow this wherever it may lead us. It is through anthropotechnics that we pursue ourselves, that we hope to find ourselves in what we have created, meaning that what we make in our leisure reflects us, not so much through an identity but something fundamental about us as a personality. For Sloterdijk, as for Foucault, the art of living is both at once an aesthetics of existence and an ascetics of existence. The point of ascetics is the same as the point of aesthetics: the creation of life as a work of art. He suggests that this duality is perhaps best captured in the term ‘spiritual life practice’. As we have seen, Sloterdijk differs from Marxist sociologists in not wanting to place the stress on work as the key category by which to understand this ‘self-forming and self-enhancing behaviour’. He suggests that the discourse of work be reformed so that the individual is understood more like a trainer who administers his or her own talents and ‘drives the team’ of his or her own habits. Whether we call life practice the ‘art of living’ or ‘self-design’ and ‘virtuoso asceticism’ (Sloterdijk, 2013a) is purely a matter of taste. Each era determines the specific conditions, techniques, practices, moulding and self-shaping rules that constitute social life amongst committed and spiritually-oriented individuals. As we have seen in our era, it is sport and popular culture that are the guiding metaphors. These metaphors, sometimes used in combination, offer various forms of life practice that are developed with the aim of transforming the self and revolutionizing relationships to be ‘other’. Individuals are driven by a sense of duty they feel to change their lives since they know what duty is. They have no intention of joining up with social groups that are a normal, part of the order of things. According to Sloterdijk, this is because committed individuals are those who set out to live as full a life as possible.

‘Devotional leisure’ as skholeIn Leisure (2010) I argued that in our era ‘devotional leisure’ practice is the means by which many of us attempt to fulfil this ambition since this is the kind of leisure practice that appeals to the sixth-sense in all of us – that special way of seeing, whose doxa we cannot precisely put into words, but which provides us with our own unique window onto the world – which animates us to reach out

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towards some spiritual truth, higher than ourselves, that provides us with meaning and a purpose for living. To borrow some insights from Benjamin Crowe, what Heidegger said of religion is true of ‘devotional leisure’ practice, it insists on the idea that meaning is hermeneutical and is passed down rather than constructed. In other words the meaning of ‘devotional leisure’ practice depends upon an unequivocal and straightforward response to an independent realm of meaning. What shapes a leisure life built on devotion and motivates those who commit themselves to it is self-evident as an experienced reality of the meaning of devotion. The crux of ‘devotional leisure’, then, lies in ‘a way of being, of inhabiting a determinate “space” or “nexus [Zusammenhang]” of meaningfulness’ (Crowe, 2008: 65). The practices that go on in this space can be understood as a tradition, as a set of tacit agreements about meaning that grounds interpretation. As Crowe (2006: 248) points out, this ‘includes, above all, self-interpretation. In this case, tradition gives shape and content to our identities’. A devotional leisure practice that proceeds by creating meaning arbitrarily is, in this view, not a ‘devotional leisure’ practice. ‘Devotional leisure’ practice proper signifies obligation, responsibility, and especially desire. Since ‘devotional leisure’ is hermeneutical – it is that rare thing whose stories of emancipation and of belonging are a single story – it presupposes that there is something about the leisure pertaining to our chosen devotional practice that cannot be disciplined – its secret (its unknown known). When we engage with leisure as a devotion we know that commitment to it is our duty, but its secret is beyond interpretation; we do not know, cannot know about its secret; rather we feel its warm glow, we sense it. Yet knowing all this does not stop us trying to find out its secret. Interpretation of leisure is a devotional practice. To paraphrase Heller (1999: 144), the object of devotion is the ‘this-ness, the ipseity’ of my chosen leisure practice that makes it distinct from other freely chosen leisure practices. When we choose leisure in this way we do so with a sense of feeling, as though it were something holy, as though engaging in it were a religious function. There is more to leisure, this attitude would seem to suggest, than mere leisure activities or recreational pursuits; it is to live one’s life in a certain way. What I have in mind when I use the term ‘devotional leisure’ practice is something like Weber’s (2008) idea of a value-sphere. Adopted from Weber’s belief that politics and science must be understood as autonomous or distinct realms of human activity, involving existential choice and which have their own ‘inherent dignity’ (Brubaker, 1984), the idea of a leisure life-world as a valuesphere suggests that not only is leisure governed by particular set of norms, rules, ethics and obligations that are inherent, but also that those who commit themselves to leisure often do so as a vocation; the relationship between their life and their leisure is fundamental. There is, however, a critical distinction between skholē and other interpretations of leisure. Skholē is interpreted as sacrosanct, which means that devotion

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goes not only for what makes it distinctive, but also the authority of the tradition it has behind it. In fact, it turns out that skholē is actually hermeneutics since it is its tradition that ties ‘us’ (the current keepers of its secret) to the ‘other’ (those keepers of its secret who came before us). In the case of all other devotional leisure practices, devotion alone is the basis of authority; the leisure practice in question can only speak for itself – this is what I call ‘performative leisure’. What this tells us is that the selection of all leisure worthy of devotional interpretation is a spiritual practice. Since those who are committed to devotional leisure practices cannot ever know the secret of the source of our spirituality, what needs to be determined first and foremost is who is ‘us’ and to what do ‘we’ belong. There is also a critical distinction between all devotional leisure practice under the dual auspices of solid modernity and liquid modernity. Under the auspices of solid modernity spiritual practice was circumscribed by two distinguishing factors: on the one hand, taste, and on the other, the legislating power of the keepers of its secret. Judgement of taste was determined by the authority of these legislators. According to Bauman (1987: 4–5), the legislators are those keepers of secrets who make authoritative ideological statements about the world and who have the power to make the ‘procedural rules which assure the attainment of truth, the arrival of moral judgement, and the selection of proper artistic taste. Such procedural rules have a universal validity, as do the products of their application’. Under the auspices of solid modern conditions then, it was unlikely that the selection of a devotional leisure practice would be something fit for ‘ordinary’ people since it was in the legislating spirit to say that devotional leisure was ‘ordinary’ while meaning ‘extraordinary’. With the onset of liquid modernity, however, the legislating authority of these keepers of secrets was downgraded after being replaced by an alternative interpretive mindset. This meant that not only was devotional leisure practice to become more democratic since ‘everyone is related to a greater or lesser extent to the same ethical powers’ (Heller, 1999: 37), but also that it was now within the means of ‘ordinary’ people to forge their own path to self-realization through leisure. In his book The Art of Philosophy, Sloterdijk (2012: 52) argues that this changed cognitive sensibility also helps explain the emergence of ‘people fit for epoché’ which has led to the social differentiation of devotional leisure practice and the establishment of what Bourdieu would call a new educational ‘field’ inhabited by myriad interpreters or deeper and wider ‘expert’ analysts.

Devotional leisure as ‘performative leisure’ In liquid modernity, ascetical practices are the rule rather than the exception. Like Heidegger, Sloterdijk argues that no practice can exist unless it is practiced by the many. But ascetical practices can take two very different forms. In this regard, the human subject needs to be understood as a carrier of ‘toughening’ exercises’ and ‘un-toughening’ exercises. While the latter are favoured by

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‘habitus-controlled agents’, on the inactive practicing side, the ‘no persons’, content to live their lives in the ‘human zoo’, the former are pursued by the ‘acrobats’, on the active practicing side, who strive for what Sloterdijk in various places of his book calls ‘self-governance’, ‘self-mastery’ and ‘self-display’. With the death of God, argues Sloterdijk, it suddenly became possible to turn the attribute ‘living’ into a superlative and to multiply the noun ‘life’ by itself. Whoever says ‘life’ will sooner or later also say ‘life of life’. Then, however, ‘learning for life’ means learning for pure surplus. (2013a: 200) Here Sloterdijk is describing in general terms the perfectionist tendencies of humans which are developed not so much to surpass their creator, but to surpass themselves. What this leads him to suggest is that, as a result, there is in humans an inbuilt sense of vertical mobility, and this means that whenever we encounter people, we will always find ‘acrobats’. Sloterdijk is primarily concerned with committed individuals who are drawn to changing life for its own sake. In particular, he identifies with those who push themselves in their leisure to extremity, who commit themselves wholly to selftransformation, beyond what seems reasonable. It is suffering that excites these individuals. Pain breaks them open and lets other people in; suffering is the core of what it means to be human. And yet individuals are able to achieve all this in a way that seems effortless: Whoever has practised properly overcomes the improbability of good and allows virtue to seem like second nature. Second natures are dispositions of ability that enable humans to stay on their level as artistes of virtus. They perform the near impossible, the best, as if it were something easy, spontaneous and natural that virtually happens of its own accord. (Ibid.: 184) As Sloterdijk explains: The technical definition of practice I have posited opens up a first approach to the phenomenon of involuntary verticality. In every performance of practicing, an action is carried out in such a way that its present execution coconditions its later execution. We could say that all life is acrobatics, although we perceive only the smallest part of our vital expressions as what they really are: the results of practice and elements of a modus vivendi that happens on the high wire of improbability. (2012: 8)

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Spencer Seabrooke’s lesson in ‘performative leisure’ That liquid modern life can involve the fulfilment of the desire for ‘verticality’ in spite of the obstacle of being ‘ordinary’ to become simply ‘human beings’ is testament not only to the democratic nature of ‘performative leisure’ but also of individuals who manage to make a great deal of themselves. Spencer Seabrooke is a young man who has pursued a number of ‘performative leisure’ practices with determination since a very young age. As he explained to the audience at the BIL conference in March 2015 at Imperial Vancouver in ‘true unconference style’: My name is Spencer, I am 26 years old and was born and raised in Ontario. I currently live in Vancouver and I am a professional concrete finisher with a passion for extreme sports. I grew up skateboarding and snowboarding and always push the limits in everything I do. I excelled in doing big tricks, whether it being the biggest set or biggest handrail. I also excelled in alpine snowboarding and was at one point best in the province for junior men’s snowboard racing. Shortly after moving to Vancouver I began exploring the mountains with a mixture of rock climbing and alpine ascents and was soon introduced to the sport of slacklining. While watching the Real Rock tour I came across a video of professional high liner Andy Lewis or ‘Sketchy Andy’. The video immediately inspired me and I felt motivated. It was the perfect mixture of rock climbing, alpinism and creativity I had been looking for. Since 2012 I have accomplished many personal goals with slacklining, all of them leading up to my now longest tethered highline at 72 meters long and 600 feet high as well as my longest free solo highline walk at 40 meters long and 500 feet high, only 14 meters short of the world record. In this time my best friend and I started Slacklife BC. We volunteer and organize many community events to share the sport of slacklining. Our YouTube channel was created to hopefully inspire others and as a result has been successful. For Seabrooke, the dichotomy between life and art no longer exists. His life is nothing other than the hard-won art of being true to his personality, doing normal things like concrete finishing, as well as less normal things like extreme sport. Seabrooke knows full well too what it takes to break away from ‘horizontal’ effort, that is to say, imitation and the nurturing of routine, to fulfil the human desire for ‘verticality’ – the desire to walk with apparent effortless abandon the way he did five months after the BIL conference when he broke the slacklining world record by making his way across a 305-metre deep gully at the Stawamus Chief in Squamish, British Columbia on 2 August 2015 (Schmunk, 2015). Fundamentally, the practising life is ascetic. As Seabrooke said after breaking his world record: ‘The day I started slacklining was the day I started training’. Asceticism is the term Sloterdijk uses to encompass all those exercises and forms of self-discipline that are necessary to training for the practising life.

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Asceticism is regarded as a prerequisite for the higher reaches of secular spiritual life, particularly the dimension of performativity, which are conditioned by powers which flow into the intensification of the practising subject, which progresses to ever higher levels of a purely performative mode of being in the course of the exercises. What was once called the vita contemplativa to contrast it with the vita activa is, in fact, a vita performativa. (Sloterdijk, 2013a: 212) As Spencer Seabrooke is no doubt aware from the moment he puts his first foot on the slackline he must be ready, since it not only tests his ability to keep his balance on the slackest foundation, but it is also there to show that if he is not too sure of himself, he will fall. As he put it after crossing the gully at the Stawamus Chief, ‘When you’re at the edge, it’s so grippingly terrifying that your body wouldn’t even let you do it unless you were ready’ (cited in Schmunk, 2015). It is in this regard that slacklining, as a form of ‘acrobatics’, is a useful metaphor for understanding the art of living. In Sloterdijk’s view, human life itself is just like slacklining in that it is ‘an acrobatic achievement, and no one can say with certainty what training provides the necessary skills to master this discipline. Hence the acrobat no longer knows what exercises keep him from falling – aside from constant vigilance’. This democratization of the artist’s life which is heavily dependent on practice and learned skills by no means indicates a loss of the significance of this phenomenon; on the contrary, so argues Sloterdijk, it reveals how such practices nowadays ‘affect all aspects of life’ (2013a: 63). This is why in his view the ideal metaphor for ‘normality’ is acrobatic exercise. It is not enough, however, to walk the slackline and perform the salto mortale at a great height. As Sloterdijk explains: the acrobat’s decisive message lies in the smile with which he bows after the performance. It speaks even more clearly in the nonchalant hand gesture before his exit, the gesture one could take for a greeting to the upper tiers. In reality, it conveys a moral lesson: for our like, that is nothing. Our like – meaning those who have completed the course in impossibility, with making an impression as a subsidiary subject. (Ibid.: 196) What this tells us is that the imperative ‘You Must Change Your Life’ also entails taking yourself seriously by turning yourself into an object of admiration. This dual position yields the image of what Sloterdijk (2013a: 329) calls an ‘ontological hybrid’: a theatre director who has been condemned to a practising self-reference from early on, and now faces the task of realizing the script of their own

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existence on stage and observing how others observe them. One can now say it explicitly: in Homo artista, the agent and the observer merge to form a single dynamic dual. In other words, it is not enough to have achieved great heights in ‘performative leisure’, it is also important to have done so in a way that is ‘fit to stand the gaze of millions’ which, as we have seen, David Foster Wallace argues is ‘the unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching’ (1993: 155). This phenomenon implies a particular relationship between an audience and a performer and it is to this that I would now like to turn by discussing the ideas of ‘performativity’ and ‘performative leisure’ in more depth.

Performativity and performative leisure The conventional meaning of performativity in leisure studies is with the act, process or art of performing, particularly with reference to performance arts such as theatrical production, which incorporates acting, song or dance. Performativity has also always happened in everyday leisure spaces, involving traditions of singing in pubs, fancy dress parties, the pleasure and enjoyment we get from identifying with great sportsmen and women, mimicking of swashbuckling characters from the silver screen, the fuck-you-cool of gangsta hip-hop culture, and a whole host of other expressive practices that are central to the life of individuals and groups in their leisure time. Leisure life-worlds are filled with performativity: people erecting countless stages for their own productions, performing pliable bodies, hard bodies, sexy bodies, hybrid bodies, fast bodies, languorous bodies, pleasuring bodies; amongst them sport fans, strippers, dancers, men and women in the gym sculpting and re-sculpting themselves, the list is endless. Bodies competing, bodies hurting, bodies dancing, bodies playing, bodies posing, bodies being exploited, all of them, most of all, performing. People put themselves together and announce themselves to the world through performativity. What this tells us is that bodies are not just bound by their biology, but shaped in the imaginations of their owners and moulded to their relaxations and exertions. The preponderance of the vita performative today would appear to suggest that we embrace a conception of life that might be summed up in the following slogan: ‘Better living through performativity’. What this tells us is that in our contemporary ‘individualized’ times we should recognize that the value of the body is on its surface, in its performativity, and this is fundamental to the performative mode of being that prevails in liquid modernity. Two images of what it feels like to perform our bodies in the hope of catching the attention of an audience, and the societal implications for the individuals involved, have dominated the literature, and both of them seem less than

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adequate. One is that of the young Foucault who argued that social norms and societal conventions are established and lived through performing bodies. The ‘ideal’ body is, to paraphrase Foucault, something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit. (1984c: 179) Here Foucault is suggesting that it is not just that we perform our bodies that is important, but body discipline, or as he would say, having docile bodies. The other is that of Baudrillard who takes this critical interpretation one step further when he describes those who participate in individualized leisure pursuits, such as the skate boarder, the jogger and the body builder, as those who regard the body with the same kind of blank solitude, the same narcissistic obstinacy. For Baudrillard, the cult of the body in modern societies is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone today seems to be able to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure. In Baudrillard’s ‘cult of the into’ exercise is a kind of self-torture, not only in being painful, but also in the way of forcing the body to perform its own truth. Being ‘into’ leisure is key to all of this. It is quite wrong to set off the idea of abstract mechanisms of social control over compliant individuals through body discipline, against the intimacies of personal expression through the body as the young Foucault and Baudrillard do. As we have seen, Sloterdijk, in common with the older Foucault, argues that the body is now the subjective centre of attention today for the reason that the practising mode of life, the vita performativa, the art of living, is today the fate of free individuals who ‘must change their lives’. Sloterdijk’s thesis is a compelling one but he is not able, however, to satisfactorily integrate the concept of performativity with his other theoretical ideas. It is to this task that we must now turn. Unpacking the key theories of performativity Performativity derives from linguistics, and most uses of the concept can be traced back to J. L. Austin’s (1975) classic studies, How to Do Things with Words. I will return to some of Austin’s key ideas in due course. But we can begin to unpack performativity by briefly considering its place in the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman. According to Goffman (1969), it is not just actors, musicians, singers and dancers who perform. In the modern world we are all performers (even those of us who are not performers); and everyday life as a whole is guided by performativity. Drawing on a number of theatre analogies, Goffman set out a categorization of dramaturgical contingencies through which

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he identified the key ‘stage props’ or strategies individual actors might draw on in order to negotiate their way through the ups and downs and the challenges and embarrassments that we are confronted with in everyday life. At the same time that Goffman was developing these ideas about performativity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, studies in ethnomethodology, which set out to uncover the ‘methods’ by which actors construct their everyday lives, were also being developed. These sought to show that, in performing the self, individuals are not only able to convince others about their social identities – through the structures of everyday activities which they ordinarily and routinely produce and maintain – but sociologists better understand human interaction by disrupting tacitly agreed and taken-for-granted assumptions about everyday life through ‘breaching experiments’ (see Garfinkel, 1967). Like the ethnomethodologists, Goffman centred his own analysis on individual actors and the ways they present themselves in everyday life, but differently to them, what he was also offering was a form of analysis that took more account of the institutional and structural aspects of the interaction order. In this respect Goffman was alert to the point that although individual actors can draw on a range of techniques in order to maintain the presentation of the self, performativity comprises, not merely singular acts in order to perform a ‘personal front’, but also established or institutionalized roles. For Goffman, then, dramaturgical performances tend to be embedded in an already existing reality and are selected rather than individually created (Ritzer, 2003). In other words, regardless of our individual abilities to act, this suggests that our leisure still tends to reflect everything about what it means to be born in a particular place and time as well as our class, gender and ethnicity. These latter points notwithstanding, the ‘centring’ of a ‘solid’ modern self remains at the very heart of Goffman’s analysis and from Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) poststructuralist perspective, this reflects the major weakness of his sociology. Even though Goffman takes into account both institutional and structural aspects of the interaction order, he understands the individual presentation of the self as a performance rather than the ‘front end’ of performativity. Goffman’s understanding of the self is ‘fixed’ and ‘deep’ rather than ‘liquid’ and ‘aesthetic’; he constructs an understanding of the self at the ‘centre’ of things and this understanding is underpinned by a foundationalism which, in Butler’s terminology, ‘presumes, fixes and constrains’ the individual subject. What Butler is suggesting is that conventional wisdom tends not only to be preoccupied with the ‘individual’ or ‘individual experience’ but also understands the human habitus as something that lies deep in the human condition, like some sort of trace that is deep rooted and a seemingly ‘natural’ basis for people’s interaction with the world. Yet, what her critique of Goffman is suggesting, is that there is actually nothing below the surface of the self as it is presented in everyday life and the individual does not exist outside of discourse – what you see is what you get – and what the self performs is performativity, which contrary to conventional wisdom actually turns assumptions about the ‘natural’ back

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on themselves. As Butler (1990: 186) argues, ‘just as bodily surfaces are enacted as natural, so these surfaces can become a site of dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveal the performative status of the natural itself ’. Contrary to Goffman, from Butler’s perspective it is a waste of time attempting to find or uncover the ‘true’ or ‘real’ self; the self is always defined in the performativity of the business of everyday life and this is always a transaction with others. Performativity produces a mode of living artistically that is performative, deconstructing the very notion of a fixed subject by activating (rather than quashing) the myriad differences that give shape to human life. This is the central difference between Goffman and poststructuralist interpretations of individual subjectivity. The most radical use of the concept is to be found in the work of JeanFrancois Lyotard (1984 [1979]), who argued that the contemporary significance of performativity is indubitably linked to the emergence of hegemonic consumerism in the late 1960s and early 1970s which was in keeping with the other social, cultural, economic and ideological changes that were occurring at this time and that led to a conspicuous shift in the way in which knowledge claims came to be legitimated. In a nutshell, Lyotard’s argument is that by this time science (like religion) has been turned into yet another commodity. In turn, truth is now determined, like everything else, not by its ability to tell the Truth, but by its exchange value. If solid modernity stood for the language game of denotation (the difference between true or false), post-industrializing liquid modernity now stands for an alternative, ‘technical’ game of efficiency v. inefficiency. As a result performativity has become the new criterion of the legitimacy of knowledge claims. Today everybody seems to have a view about what constitutes the truth and as a result various ‘language games’ or knowledge claims and these are now played out through the ‘techniques and technologies’ of performativity. For Lyotard, this plurality of competing voices is made possible by the ‘performativity criterion’ which invokes an ‘incredulity to metanarratives’ – in short scepticism towards universal truth claims. For Lyotard, this period proved to be a watershed in the history of Western democracies, which saw a new reoriented capitalism become so pervasive that it appeared there was nothing left that could not be commodified. The status of knowledge has altered as a result and ‘performativity’ has come to represent a kind of hyper-capitalist efficiency which is able to bring the ‘pragmatic functions of knowledge clearly to light and elevate all language games to self-knowledge’ (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]: 114). To borrow Austin’s (1975) terminology, truth is now performative rather than constantive and the most convincing truth claims are those which the market determines as the most efficient. In short, by now everything is to be judged by its market value; if it doesn’t sell, it isn’t what is wanted, purely and simply. Truth now has to exercised and measured in the manner of its performativity. The upshot is that the very cohesion of public life is now charged with a kind of theatricality. Every one of us is by decree a performer and a spectator – even if there is no changeover from one to the other and

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we must be both at the same time. ‘Performativity’, it needs to be said, however, is not the same thing as ‘performance’. It is the effect of ‘performativity’ that matters and not what might or might not have been said through the performance. In solid modernity social class had to be performed in no other way than what the hierarchy decreed. People who inhabit a society based on the secure structures of social class instinctively know ‘who they are’ and are always unlikely to be interested in acquiring another kind of life. Fear clearly played a part in this – fear of leaving a ‘happy’ world in which everything fits neatly into place or of seeking a life outside of the familiar comforts of ‘knowing your place’. The key to leaving the security of social class behind is the confidence of knowing that there are many ways of being human to choose from; it is the way in which societies based on social class are structured, both materially and ideologically, that prevents those – especially the working-classes at the bottom end of the social hierarchy – from partaking in this kind of activity. In a dedifferentiating liquid modernity everyone is compelled to spend time and energy performing themselves. In their infinite varieties, liquid modern selves are unlikely to have the hegemonic power to speak for themselves, unless there is some element of theatre about them. This is where performativity comes into its own, since it has the power to produce new insights that are less easily generated in other ways. Through performativity it is vital that some kind of image with its own symbolic authority be encouraged, while at the same time the actions underpinning it should be such as to bear frequent repetition in the kind of imagery that is conjured in the mind’s eye of the spectator. But the issue is not just one of communication. As John Berger (2001) points out, this is because there is always a sense of indifference between audience and performers. Every performer – that is to say everyone – knows that eventually the audience will leave, the theatre will empty. Equally, every spectator in the audience knows that the performativity of others is largely irrelevant and indifferent to their own personal situation. The upshot of this is that the fear that envelopes every performer is not the fear of performing, but the fear of not being recognized on their own terms. Another way of understanding performativity is to draw a parallel with the art of living. By the way in which each and every one of us, as artists of life, is compelled to present ourselves we ask to be recognized on our own terms, for who we are; thus our aim is to make discernible to others our individual ‘star quality’, which may not be immediately perceptible. My ‘self ’, therefore, needs to be performed in a way that allows it to be understood on its own terms without antecedent knowledge. In other words, as Berger suggests, performativity is aimed at giving better shape to perceptions of the presence of ‘star quality’ (read: ‘watchableness’). The hope is that, by picking out and emphasizing certain features rather than others, what is not immediately apparent will be brought into sharper relief. When we perform ourselves, then, what we are after is public approval.

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Even so, as we have seen, the public at large may choose to remain indifferent to our ‘star quality’. This is especially true in liquid modern times when you have somebody who is trying to be seen, trying to exist, because there will inevitably be countless others pushing you out of the way as they also try to achieve ‘watchableness’. So the trick is to find your own ‘attention community’. As Rudi Laermans (2011: 125) has argued, ‘We nowadays all belong to various kinds of attention communities, often without realizing this’ which ‘are continuously constituted anew, with shifting borders and in changing numbers’. These ‘attention communities’ are often distinguished by shared leisure lifestyles and leisure tastes. Here style is much more important than substance. What Simmel (1957) once said of fashion is also true of the performativity that sustains these ‘attention communities’; it is noticeable for its clashing of two equally strong momenta: the one of joining up and the other of standing out. It is through design that we try to make ourselves noteworthy. We ‘design’ ourselves in relation to our tastes which are themselves products of design. In this sense ‘attention communities’ are reminiscent of ‘neo-tribes’, otherwise known as the ‘little masses’ of the uncertain and fragmenting consumer society (Maffesoli, 1996). It is virtually always the case that these ‘attention communities’ operate on the basis of social inauguration, on the one hand, as people seek to captivate and aggregate attention, and social dissolution, as they shift their allegiances or lose the audience’s attention, on the other. Instead of up-rooting and rerooting, we are constantly ‘disembedding and re-embedding’, to use Giddens’ (1990) apt description, which is a result of the shifting sands of symbolic rivalry between status groups performing their loyalty to consumer brands (iPhone vs. Samsung Galaxy, Diesel v. Guess, Lancôme v. Estee Lauder and so on). Performativity as revelation This proliferation of performativity stretches the limits of definition found in any one interpretation. What is clear, though, is that performativity has become something like a determining ground for truth and that liquid modernity is the era when the performative has shifted decisively from work to the art of living. In a performative culture attracting attention has become an essential personal, social, cultural, economic and political activity. This also means that for the first time the self-referential process of performativity and the creative energies that shape it are perhaps found first and foremost in the realm of leisure rather than work, which provides innumerable stages as performers drift from one performative status to the next. Here the ability to move translates necessity into freedom. This is the kind of existence that David Foster Wallace has in mind when he coined the term ‘watchableness’. The performer lives for the moment, for the successive ‘nows’ of achieved ‘watchableness’, which loses its significance as soon as the episode comes to a close. As Lyotard (1988) argued in Peregrinations, the world of performativity is in this sense an ‘open space-time’ consisting of the perpetual ‘present’ and

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ubiquitous ‘here’ which is real only in the moment. The past consists of episodes that are gone and have no more relevance for existence. The future holds episodes that may become relevant for the present when they arrive, but as yet they are not real. When existence is based on achieving ‘watchableness’ there is no repetition of the past and no facing of the future which always already belongs to the self – to have no future and no past ultimately means suspension and the erasure of narrative, of any sense of hermeneutics. As Bauman puts it, this is the reason why life can only be conducted in the dramatic mode. Drama may have a stiff scenario closely followed by the actors, but the stiffest of scenarios remains a scenario, a contrived text scripted in this rather than that way, and a text which could well have been scripted in that way rather than this; and even the most disciplined of actors remain actors, playing their parts, this part rather than some other which they could play instead with the same flourish and dedication. . . . events, emotions and all – happens here, inside the theatre, during the performance; there is, perhaps, a candlelight dinner waiting for the final curtain to fall, and the curtain will surely fall on this story here and now, only to permit another to rise and another story to begin (or this one to be repeated). Drama may be a serious matter (one tries to be very serious indeed about drama one watches – otherwise there will be little fun in watching it), but the seriousness, like drama itself, is but a convention – the seriousness, like the drama itself, is ‘but a play’; one knows all the time that disbelief is only suspended for the duration, that the trust invested may be at any moment withdrawn. There is nothing irrevocable, irreversible about the drama; the ostensible irrevocability of dramatic play is itself a play, a makebelieve and thus a revocable event . . . and it will remain forever a rehearsal, never the ‘real thing’. In a world that remains permanently in the dramatic mode, how one would tell the ‘for real’ if one saw one? Ours is, as Michel Maffesoli suggested, a form of life of the theatre, and in the theatre each scene – serious, not very serious, and not at all serious – counts: ‘in theatricality nothing is unimportant, because everything is important’. (1992a: 184–185) In other words, by attempting to squeeze all reality into the present, performers sacrifice not only their unity but also their integrity. The upshot is that in a performative world we become nothing more (and nothing less either) than a heterogeneous self, striving to fulfil our perpetual desire to achieve ‘watchableness’, but which ultimately leads to the loss of sincerity and authenticity (Trilling, 1971) since we have no self that is greater than the always short-lived present one. This way of understanding the ‘performative’ present day world is reminiscent of David Harvey’s (1989) thesis that what we ordinarily used to understand as reality, the one we all experience and take for granted, has become fragmented

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as a result of some profound developments in information technology and global economic production, which have in no uncertain terms created two contradictory phenomena: the diffusion of time and space, on the one hand, and the compression of space and time, on the other. A consequence of these changes is that distances have diminished, everything seems to take place in the ‘now’, and there appears no longer to be any past and future. When reality is sliced into episodes, the principal life strategy adopted is (has to be) a performative one. The trouble with this way of understanding performativity, however, is that it looks like a purely personal matter. In contrast to old ‘solid’, homogeneous time-space, which guaranteed us more ontological certainty and existential security, new ‘liquid’, heterogeneous time-space encourages performativity, the sole aim of which is, as we have seen, ensuring personal truth by achieving ‘watchableness’. Seen from this perspective, we only have to worry about getting our selves noticed. Being for others is frowned upon, feels like bad faith, a personal failing or a loss of nerve in our project of being true to ourselves. There is one major problem with this line of argument. This concerns the assumption that the past consists of episodes that are gone and have no more relevance for the present; and that the future holds episodes that may become relevant for the present when they arrive, but as yet they are not real. We might live (and leisure) in pointillist time-space but as Butler (1993: 19) has convincingly argued, performativity succeeds only when it has gathered ‘the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices’. She insists that what is performative only works ‘to the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive elements by which it is mobilized’. In other words, for any action to function performatively it must have a history and be recognizable. Butler here offers a way to think about performativity as a social relation since it assumes that our actions have to be sanctioned by, to repeat, a ‘prior, authoritative set of practices’. My own approach demands that we also recognize that performativity and especially ‘performative leisure’ is not only a personal experience but also always a social activity – in acting we cannot only be ourselves but actively participate with others in something bigger than ourselves. What this suggests is that, contrary to the received wisdom, there is perhaps sincerity and authenticity to be found in performative leisure. As we will see in the next chapter, these are two of the conditions Austin (1975) refers to as ‘felicity’, which stands in place of truth or falsity as the indicator of legitimacy when we understand the world in the plural, and we recognize that there are different existential possibilities, because the twenty-first century is one of all kinds of devotional leisure life-worlds.

Conclusions We can say that Sloterdijk’s social philosophy is Nietzscheian insofar as it is obsessed with humans who create themselves. To think yourself as new, unique, unsurpassed, to make your own laws, to create yourself through new designs,

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which is for Sloterdijk the possibility of becoming someone, is to build on Nietzsche’s thesis in a radical way. As we have seen, humans who create themselves in the twenty-first century are both extraordinary and ordinary, individuals whose everyday actions are remakings of history and of human beings who are responsible for them. You Must Change Your Life represents the most exceptional attempt to reformulate and formalize the conditions of ontology with resources laid out by Nietzsche, and to show how and in what ways we are impelled to change our lives. Implicit in Sloterdijk’s thesis is that leisure rather than work is where this radical change occurs. Sloterdijk also aims to demonstrate how in understanding social change we need to close the partition between individual and society; this is suggestive of the human need for both solitude and togetherness. In my view devotional leisure is to what we turn in order to fulfil this need since it is the root of freedom and the common link to a community amongst many other communities. Building on this observation, the next chapter will explore in some detail how these communities – theorized here as valuespheres of leisure and leisure heterotopias – have become central to the art of living in the twenty-first-century modern world. But before I do I shall attempt, in conclusion, a summary of the similarities and differences between ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’. These conclusions might accurately be described as an extended reflection and an attempt to build on the theory of authenticity found in Agnes Heller’s two important books A Philosophy of Morals (1990) and Ethics of Personality (1996). Both of these books indicate that authenticity must be understood as an aspect of personality. For Heller, authenticity is the foremost virtue of the existential leap. Here there is the assumption that authenticity must also be understood as achieving a new level of self-knowledge and vocational commitment which comes with the existential leap. An authentic person, then, is someone with a personality, which never succumbs to insecurity and meaninglessness because it always lives up to the commitments it entails. But whereas Heller associates personality with an attitude of authenticity which can only be achieved by exceptional individuals through an ideal of ‘being true to oneself ’, my own understanding extends this definition to argue that twenty-first-century authenticity can be achieved by all individuals if combined with sincerity, ‘which aims at ensuring truthfulness in our relations to others’ (Guignon, 2004: 80). In other words, we cannot even begin to determine someone’s ‘authenticity’ until we have some sense of that individual’s personality – of their ‘sincerity’. Sincerity and authenticity are indelibly related and must be communicated through a struggle, through a connection of the ways ‘I’ say ‘yes’ to my vocation or to perform on my stage; in both cases I make an affirmation, a social commitment to a community, and what is most important is how that is embodied, enriched, and transformed as a result. That is missing in Heller’s thesis. We know from reading Heller that existential choice is differentiated from universal choice under the category of difference. Building on Heller’s thesis it

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is my view that there are two types of existential choice (rather than just one) available to liquid moderns under this category: one made with the intention to turn contingency into necessity (read: ‘devotional leisure’) and one made with the intention to turn necessity into contingency (read: ‘performative leisure’). In both cases, we are also talking about a form of devotional leisure. But the difference between the two is that whereas ‘devotional leisure’ has a hermeneutic tradition, ‘performative leisure’ does not. In both cases, there is the pull of fellow feeling. The latter realm is the domain of performativity, of those ‘truly alive’ individuals who ‘carry the holiday in their eye’. In the former, vocation has priority; the existential choice here involves the whole self, which is derived from total commitment to a chosen destiny. In both cases, existing endowments (personality, aptitude, social class, gender, ethnicity and so on) will inevitably push the individual in a certain direction. But this ‘push’ must be differentiated from the ‘pull’ that follows from the existential leap. The choice here results in a moral imperative, a commitment not only to one way of life rather than another but also to the leisure life-world (the valuesphere) that embodies it. Primarily the choice of those individuals committed to a vocation (which always feels like it has chosen them), devotional leisure goes beyond an inclination. The existential leap individuals make here is nothing like the choice of a leisure career (see for example Stebbins’ (2006) serious leisure perspective). The specificity of the choice of difference lies in the total identification of the individual with their destiny. Life becomes galvanized around one purpose with an intensity that consumes all other interests and social attachments and relations. Existential choice, of course, does not exclude other activities, but these do not ‘pull’ with such a force of self-fulfilment as does the focus of our devotion. When the intention is to turn contingency into necessity remaining true to one’s vocation requires the coming together of the virtues of sincerity and authenticity. At times this can involve enormous personal suffering and feeling of profound loneliness. The temptation to take an easier course, to abandon the path of self-determination for the allurements of performativity especially, is ever present. What signifies truthfulness when we decide to turn contingency into necessity is a difficult question to answer. We know that learning how to ‘know thyself ’ is important. However, Heller (1996) argues that these efforts will always be at best partial. Never fully self-transparent, since selfhood is always a social relation in the making, we lack the power to fully understand what motivates us. The meaning of existential truthfulness evades any epistemological reading. When someone follows the path of authenticity in devotional leisure, truth signifies the pursuit of the difficult rather than the easy, the pursuit of the centre rather than the allure of the periphery. Against Bauman’s inclination that such unwavering commitment is an unlikely notion in conditions of liquid modernity, we might retort that devotional leisure is not only confirmation of the existence of sincerity and authenticity, but also that there is enchantment to be found in the world, should we choose to look for it.

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When necessity is superseded by contingency, sincerity and authenticity take on a different guise. Those individuals who follow the path of ‘performative leisure’ (which always feels like it has been chosen by individuals themselves) have different powers of imagination. The world has no centre; they are truly individuals who ‘carry the holiday in their eye’, who move between leisure lifeworlds, without pathos. To be authentic here is to follow the path of an alternative kind of authenticity. To repeat, the assumption is that ‘genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching’ (Wallace, 1993: 155). It is ‘watchableness’ that is the deepest pulse of being. As we saw in the discussion of the exploits of Spencer Seabrooke, sometimes becoming ‘watchable’ can involve great risks but these are worthwhile since they are what make life palpable. To achieve ‘watchableness’ is to become sincere and authentic in another kind of way. As I just pointed out in the discussion of ‘devotional leisure’, the meaning of existential truthfulness evades any epistemological reading. But what we do know is that when someone follows this path of sincerity and authenticity, truth – which to borrow Austin’s (1975) terminology is only ever ‘felicitous’ within a certain context – emerges in situ, as the intersection of the pursuit of risk in the hope of finding some kind of transcendence beyond the limit of everyday life situations and the approval of what might be described (very loosely) as a community (what Foucault (1984a [1967]) called a heterotopia), which is unavailable in the centre but found on the periphery. I shall have a good deal more to say about ‘devotional leisure’ practices and ‘performative leisure’ practices in the next and final chapter. But the primary focus is on what Heller specifically neglects: the intersection of sincerity and authenticity and, in particular, the ways in which our relations to others in devotional leisure life-worlds make self-realization possible. As we have seen in the twenty-first century we have to constantly make ourselves up (‘You Must Change Your Life’). We also, as a result, have to constantly make ourselves at ‘home’, in some kind of community, because, as Sloterdijk (2011) argues, our becoming-in-the-world is never being alone; it is always becoming-with-others. This leads to the transmogrification of community, which is the continuance of self-realization; and it connects in an immediate way with issues of sincerity and authenticity in devotional leisure.

Chapter 5

Twenty-first-century devotional leisure life-worlds Authenticity and community in the spirit of our congregation

By way of conclusion in the last chapter I argued that twenty-first-century men and women are artists of life who have to make themselves up; they also as a result have to make themselves at ‘home’. In the modern world, ‘homes’ must always be built, and then re-built. Individuals seldom belong securely and contentedly to any place or to the identity that we inherit – we feel compelled to move around and travel. Just as this involves movement of bodies, it also involves movement of the mind, of curiosity. It is my view that one of modernity’s most homely terrains is leisure – not just because it may offer us a personal fulfilment, but because it is a ‘home’ with a social dimension which brings with it a sense of belonging and obligation to the wider social context that makes it possible. In other words, leisure is the most ‘homely’ of modernity’s ‘homes’ because it is not only an experience but also an activity – in acting we cannot only be ourselves but actively participate with others in something that we find not only ‘sensually satisfying’ and ‘cognitively rewarding’ but also sometimes ‘dense with meaning’ (Heller, 2011: 211). Of all the interpreters of ‘home’, Agnes Heller has gone the furthest in explaining how, when people no longer feel unselfconsciously at home in the world, we might find happiness, might find a new ‘home’. As she argues, this is always something of a challenge, for modernity is a forever starting over world without any secure foundations; though this is not to say that life needs to be one of universal homelessness, because modernity provides innumerable places where we might find new ‘homes’ to belong. In this regard, Heller (2011) argues that there are actually three types of ‘home-experience’ we can choose from: spatial homeexperience; temporal home-experience; and absolute spirit home-experience – the kind which is associated with the search for meaning. Heller borrows the idea of ‘absolute spirit’ from Hegel which he expresses in the following way: ‘absolute knowing’ achieves a form of perception that ascents to an awareness of ‘absolute spirit’ (Hegel in Stern, 2002: 195); and all that now remains to be done is to supersede this awareness by giving shape to the ‘absolute spirit’ as an experience, which means turning it into a hermeneutic activity. What this tells us is that the ‘density of meaning’ found in the absolute spirit home-experience cannot be explained ontologically since it is interpretation that is the source of this density.

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Heller’s understanding of ‘home’ as hermeneutical indicates that if with the onset of modernity we can no longer provide definitive answers to ultimate metaphysical questions, the collective human imagination has instead become ingeniously and increasingly empowered. This ushered in a new phase for ‘home’ which saw it become increasingly a hermeneutic exercise. In Heller’s view, in modernity, it is hermeneutics that deepens things, making them more meaningful. To paraphrase what she has said about culture more generally, with the onset of modernity, ‘home’ was transformed from a way of life to a narrative, a task of interpretation (Heller, 1999: 124–125). That is, once ‘home’ ceased to be a thing in itself, it instead became more and more meaningful. This stimulus towards the interpretation of ‘home’ brought with it a new twist. Not only did it emerge that the idea of ‘home’ has the ability to fire the imagination like no other idea – to pursue an ideal, to embody a dream, to struggle against loss – but also that it is actually another word for ‘community’. This alternative interpretation strengthened the aura of ‘home’ even more. ‘Words have meanings: some words, however, also have a feel’, Bauman tells the reader at the beginning of his book Community (2001: 1). ‘The word “community” is one of them’, he continues. ‘It feels good: whatever the word “community” may mean, it is good “to have a community”, “to be in a community”.’ In this regard, community is special because, through interpretation, both difference and closeness are made to look attractive. What this tells us is that not only is it connection where ‘community’ lies, but also that the feeling of ‘home’ becomes important when it registers with the imagination. In other words, all modern communities are hermeneutic communities. Hermeneutics is the art of dialectical retrieval in changed modern circumstances, and ‘community’ will only be found again, it says, by accomplishing something collective which is ‘sensually satisfying’ and ‘cognitively rewarding’, which is also potentially ‘dense with meaning’.

Hermeneutic communities and historical consciousness Hermeneutic communities, then, are different to pre-modern community. Premodern community is the only community; and in pre-modern societies it serves as the foundation of human existence. It is in this sense that community should be understood as a strong ontology (White, 2005) guided by its own telos, which takes it as given that our individual being-in-the-world is pre-determined. In modern societies, by contrast, community is entirely unfit to serve as such a foundation, since the basis of modern life is freedom (Heller, 1999). We are individuals first and foremost. Our lives are governed by our own choices, but also by the contingency of events that are often out of our individual control. Hermeneutic communities are best seen as weak ontologies that have the ability to animate our lives because we have identified something in them to which we attach a fundamental importance, are prepared to deeply commit ourselves to

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and share what we have with other like-minded individuals, who also have the same shared, deep commitment to finding meaning. Weak ontologies have no foundations and are always contestable, but we are often deeply committed to them because they have fundamental importance to how we see and reflect on ourselves as individuals, our sense of who we are, and how we want to live our lives with other people. Heller (1999: 1–4) provides a new way of reading and understanding the relationship between hermeneutics and historical consciousness. I suggest that this provides us with a compelling way to understand how and in what ways twentyfirst-century hermeneutic communities differ from other kinds of communities. But what does Heller mean by the term historical consciousness? What the final point in the last paragraph makes clear is that in the modern world human beings can have potentially many identities. However, as Heller points out, in any historical epoch we are conscious that we are human beings of at least two: we are identical with ourselves and we are identical with the social group into which we are born. How we understand our individual situation in that social group and the possibilities and responsibilities this affords (i.e. the prospect of becoming an authentic individual) comes either before or after identity. Identity is temporal and spatial (i.e. we are all born into a social group at some time and in some place). The meanings that a social group attributes to its way of life (language, beliefs, ceremonies etc.) are normalized into a world and this is the cultural narrative of its people. This narrative raises a number of questions i.e. ‘What are we?’ ‘Who are we?’ ‘Who should be included in the social group and who should not?’ ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ and so on. It is the answers to these kinds of questions that Heller calls historical consciousness. Historical consciousness can be reflected or unreflected, and universal or generalized. As its designation suggests, a historical consciousness that is unreflected is one that is incapable of reflecting. Thus a body of people with a historical consciousness of unreflected universality is one in which everybody is incapable of reflecting on its existential situation, while a body of people with a historical consciousness of unreflected generality is one in which the incapability of reflecting is widespread. A body of people with a historical consciousness of reflected generality is one in which the capability of reflecting is widespread – but not universal. I propose that the most illuminating way of understanding twenty-firstcentury hermeneutic communities is to summarize the trajectory of community in the four stages of historical consciousness that broadly reflect the substitution of ‘solid’ modernity for pre-modernity and the onset of the interregnum and the shift from ‘solid’ modernity to ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2000a): 1

Community Consciousness – Community is the period preceding modernity and is dominated by the consciousness of unreflected generality. This is an agrarian subsistence world based on ascribed social stratification and patriarchal social relations. Authenticity comes before identity, i.e. the elite

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thinks of itself as authentic and all others are excluded. Social life is built on necessity. The putative harmony and order of community life is an imposed one – a ‘mutuality of the oppressed’ (Williams, 1973). Social mobility is not possible. The spiritual class is the church. The figure of time is circular: there is no future, only the repetition of the same. Leisure is generally the jurisdiction of the elite. As far as the rest of the community is concerned only religious holidays provide any respite before another round of intense labour starts over again. Class Consciousness – Modernity in its formative ‘solid’ phase begins with a change in consciousness to unreflected universality. Society is productionbased and capitalist (or quasi socialist) and made up of social hierarchies built on the work ethic and sustained by economic stratification (upper class, middle class and the working class (Marx)). The baton of authenticity has been passed on from community to class (classes in themselves and/or classes for themselves). Unlike community relations, class relations are not backed up by any authorized sanctions, but authenticity still comes before identity, i.e. freedom is mitigated by one’s place in the social class system. Social mobility is possible but always circumscribed by class. The spiritual class is the industrialist entrepreneur. The figure of time is linear: the past is the known and the future is presupposed as an element of the unknown. Although work takes up only a portion of people’s lives, their leisure activities are undoubtedly conditioned by the various factors associated with the ways they work (Parker, 1971, 1983). People who work together are not only assembled in the same time and space, but are also required to focus their collective attention on a common objective or activity, which means that they also share a common experience, whether it is positive, negative or neutral. Consequently, for most people, their leisure is shaped by how they react to work and its authority predominates over other influences, such as class and gender (Clarke and Critcher, 1985). What this suggests is that leisure cannot simply be understood as reflecting a particular form of work; it is necessary to understand the specific nature and conditions of that work experience, which are pervasive. Consciousness of Classes – Modernity in its mature ‘solid’ stage is dominated by the consciousness of reflected universality. Society is productionbased and the work ethic still prevails but social hierarchies are increasingly defined by consumption and status criteria (leisure class, housing classes, etc. (Weber 1978)). The baton of authenticity is still firmly in the orbit of class. Authenticity still comes before identity, but increasing numbers of people are able to imagine themselves in ways outside the class system. Social mobility is widely available. The spiritual class is the legislators (doctors, professors etc.). The figure of time is linear: the future is modern and it can be known, predicated and conceived. Leisure is increasingly ideological and ‘sold to us as a sphere of freedom from work, from public responsibilities and obligations . . . it is part of a deal that in exchange for

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all this “freedom” and “pleasure” – it secures docile workers and citizens’ (Slater, 1998: 401). Consciousness of Communities – Modernity in the interregnum, in its current ‘liquid’ phase, is dominated by the consciousness to reflected generality. This is an increasingly consumer-based sociality whose social hierarchies are reflected in culture, judgements of taste and the juxtaposing of different lifestyles. The work ethic exists only for the poor. The baton of authenticity has been passed back from class to communities. Class is still especially important to those in whose interest it is to maintain those paddings of privilege leftover from modernity in its ‘solid’ phase, but it does not have within its compass an overarching narrative of sufficient power, simplicity and wide appeal to compete with burgeoning individualization. There is a generalized demand for a better life, but society does not have the economic means for providing all social and cultural groups the means to satisfy it. As a result, extreme social inequalities are palpable. Authenticity now comes after identity, i.e. once social class stopped being the major determinant of authenticity, communities in the plural are now imaginable. Social mobility is understood as a right (if not a reality). The spiritual class is the interpreters (the cultural intermediaries and the media). The figure of time is pointillist: we have no expectations of the future, often look fondly back at the past, but are intent on living life in the here and now.

The fourth stage returns to the first stage (both are stages of consciousnesses of generality and community), except that the fourth stage is a reflected form of the first and community is superseded by hermeneutic communities in the plural. The authenticity baton has now been passed on to everyone: to women, to people of different sexualities (the ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘transsexual’, ‘bi-sexual’ communities), to different ethnic groups, but also to those social and cultural groups distinguished by shared leisure tastes and leisure lifestyles. Even the people from the far-off, the disadvantaged, the ‘poor’, the parvenus and the pariahs, can now be ‘imagined’ as communities. If, in a world of community consciousness most people are never free, in a world of the consciousness of communities, nobody, to paraphrase the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, is ‘free to cease being free’. Hermeneutic communities tend to attract us in the hope that they will provide us with a sense of passion, pleasure and purpose that reflects what Heller calls the ‘spirit of our congregation’. Not only that, but we are free to enjoy the gifts that being part of these communities bring without any heavy burden, because we have chosen to embrace this community over another. Our ability to choose is the key aspect of our attraction to any hermeneutic community since it raises that community above the ordinary; it is here that individually and collectively we hope to find something that is ‘sensually satisfying’ and ‘cognitively rewarding’, but also ‘dense with meaning’. This also means, however, that just as we can choose to be part of a community, we are always free to choose to no longer be part of it.

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Even communities of the more enduring kind, such as the ones associated with ‘devotional leisure’ value-spheres, hold the possibility that they just might be forsaken at some point. What this suggests is that we often commit to communities sincerely, believing in them ‘as if ’ they are ‘death do us part’ affairs, when in fact they might just turn out to be ‘until further notice’. This paradox is another way of saying that what hermeneutic communities offer us is a special kind of freedom. Heller (2011: 211) argues that it is the ‘existential weight of the single interpretation’ together with the sheer diversity of interpretability available in modern societies that makes up the ‘density of meaning’ found in the absolute spirit home-experience. This is another way of saying that the ‘absolute spirit’ can serve men and women as a ‘home-experience’ (read: community) in either of two special ways in devotional leisure: as a ‘value-sphere’, on the one hand, and as a ‘heterotopia’, on the other. As a first approximation, let us simply say the following: value-spheres are what unite men and women who follow the path of authenticity in ‘devotional leisure’ by pursuing a single interest as a vocation in the hope of finding meaning in its centre, while heterotopias are what unite those men and women who follow the path of an alternative kind of authenticity by pursuing ‘performative leisure’ on the periphery rather than the centre, which can often come with great risks but these are nonetheless deemed worthwhile for those involved since they are what make life palpable. Let us first of all look at the nature of leisure as a value-sphere.

The spirit of our congregation mark one: leisure as a value- sphere As is well known, Hegel argued that there are three spheres of human activity in modern societies – the family and intimate social relations, the numerous institutions of civil society, and the state – each of which embodies its own particular kind of community and sociality (private and public), but it is the state that is the unifying power in society and the guarantor of ethical life (Heller, 1999). In contrast, Weber argued that that modernity is marked by the absence of any such universal binding ethical power. It was his view that moderns have the freedom to connect with their own ethical powers, which means that they have the ability to choose amongst a plurality of communities or social spheres. However, he also stressed that this comes with a requirement of ‘all those who belong to one of these spheres that they acquire the values of their own sphere, and abide by the rules of this sphere as to their own binding ethical power’ (Heller, 1999: 37). It is this sense that all social spheres in modern societies must also be understood as value-spheres. The concept of value-spheres defies the convention of thinking in totalities. In Weber’s view we have the freedom to choose amongst value-spheres, but we cannot join all of them, feasibly not even more than one sincerely and authentically since the ‘choice of a value-sphere is, namely, an existential choice. When

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one chooses a value-sphere, one chooses oneself as a man or a woman who is committed to this sphere’ (Heller, 1999: 38). As Heller points out, Weber identified a range of value-spheres in his writings – including politics, science, economy, literature, the arts and erotica – but he only discussed two from the perspective of existential choice: politics and science (see Weber, 2008). As we saw in the last chapter, I argued that certain kinds of leisure life-worlds can be understood as value-spheres which suggests that not only are certain kinds of leisure governed by particular sets of norms, rules, ethics and obligations that are inherent, but also that those who commit themselves to them do so as a vocation. The absorption into the inner circle of any leisure value-sphere can only be accomplished through a protracted investment of time and emotional effort, which taken together adds up to existential freedom and imaginative ownership. Thus, we begin to learn the secret of our devotion and the leisure domain becomes really ours. And yet, despite how familiar we may become with our chosen vocation, the magic continues, each encounter with it another step towards the realization of sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity and authenticity here are hermeneutical and must be communicated through a struggle, through a connection of the ways ‘I’ say ‘yes’ to my vocation. ‘Devotional leisure’ is like religion and art, it is a value-sphere that ‘can disclose Truth and provide life with Meaning’ (Heller, 1999: 38). ‘Devotional leisure’ in this sense might be understood as a hermeneutic tradition that is always in the process of being reassessed as it is reused, meaning it is craftmanship-like. The word crafts, derived from the old English, meaning skills, refers to a particular set of abilities that are driven by human curiosity, unhurriedness and dedication to a job well done. What this suggests is that craftsmanship is creative only because it is facilitated by a particular kind of leisureliness. As Richard Sennett has suggested, what is also craftsman-like is ‘the desire to do something for its own sake’, which epitomizes the special human condition of being engaged. Sennett (2008) argues that three abilities are the basis of craftsmanship: the ability to localize, the ability to question, and the ability to open up. When these three elements are combined men and women are capable of producing works of art that are not only of stunning quality, but that also carry with them the key to their production. As Weber (2008: 34) said: A work of art that attains real ‘fulfillment’ will never be surpassed, and will never become obsolete; the individual may assess its significance for himself variously, but no one will ever be able to say of a work that attains real ‘fulfillment’ in the artistic sense that it has been ‘surpassed’ by another one that also attains ‘fulfillment’. A leisure value-sphere can serve as absolute spirit homeliness when men and women share aspects of this kind of experience with the rest of their congregation. It is important to note, however, that value-spheres operate on the basis of collaboration rather than competition; their adherents complete together rather

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than compete against one another. ‘Devotional leisure’ is democratic. As I pointed out in the last chapter our era is the time of the interpreters (Bauman, 1987) and hermeneutical practices, devotional leisure ones included, are special cases of democratic interpretation. In Leisure (2010) I identified Spracklen’s (2009) study of the ‘self-referencing community’ built around black metal music as a good example of this kind of interpretation in which action is communicative. But the list of leisure practice that has the potential to become devotional is endless since these days any kind of leisure is potentially and actually a devotional practice because today interpretation is located in popular culture – sometimes even in the market. In this regard we should not forget that leisure value-spheres are hermeneutic communities that first and foremost serve the convenience of their members. A leisure value-sphere can serve as an absolute home experience for all those who share the spirit of its congregation. Let us look at an example. Surfing, William Finnegan argues in his memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, unites all those who have ever made their spiritual home in the world of surfing. To paraphrase him, every surfer has a different experience, but all those who inhabit surfing know that out there in the ocean everything is disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves are the playing field. They are the goal. They are the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they are your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf is your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it is also a hostile wilderness – a dynamic, indifferent world. The ocean is like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure (Finnegan, 2015: 18–19). For surfers, the ocean is the place where they desire to return, again and again, and where they always return, to repeat the same unrepeatable experience. This is another way of saying that surfing experience is a life lived. ‘Devotional leisure’ also performs an important educational function. In various and divergent forms it evinces a cognitive sensibility that leads to the establishment of its own educational ‘field’ inhabited by myriad interpreters who might be understood variously as deeper and wider ‘expert’ analysts, as skholērs. What is conveyed by these skholērs in the pedagogy of surfing is not just the technical aspects of surfing, but an aura of respect for the discourse that surrounds the subculture itself. These two qualities are quoted to good effect in the passage from Finnegan below: Here’s how ridable waves form. A storm out at seas churns the surface, creating chop – then larger disorganized wavelets which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes the storm, radiating outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains – groups of waves increasingly organized. Each wave sets off a column of orbiting water, most of it below the surface. All the wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call swell. The swell can travel thousands of miles. The more powerful the storm, the farther the swell

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may travel. As it travels, it becomes more organized – the distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, becomes uniform. In a long interval-train, the orbiting water may extend a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes. As waves from a swell approach a shoreline, their lower ends begin to feel the sea bottom. Wave trains become sets – groups of waves that are larger and longer-interval than their more locally generated cousins. The approaching waves refract (bend) in response to the shape of the sea bottom. The visible part of the wave grows, its orbiting energy pushing higher above the surface. The resistance offered by the sea bottom increases as the water gets shallower, slowing the progress of the wave. The wave above the surface steepens. Finally, it becomes unstable and prepares to topple forward – to break. The rule of thumb is that it will break when the wave height reaches 80 percent of the water’s depth – an eight-foot wave will break in ten feet of water. But many factors, some of them endlessly subtle – wind, bottom contour, swell angle, currents – determine where and how each wave breaks. As surfers, we are just hoping that it has a catchable moment (a takeoff point), and a ridable face, and that it doesn’t break all at once (close out) but instead breaks gradually, successfully (peels), in one direction or the other (left or right), allowing us to travel roughly parallel to the shore, riding the face, for a while, in that spot, in that moment, just before it breaks. (2015: 41–42) What this tells us is that ‘devotional leisure’ experience is consistently in the process of being shared amongst those who choose to dwell in the value-sphere. In fact, when skholērs come together in value-spheres there is also a wholesale democratizing of the group. Absolute spirit, Hegel said, is about remembrance and recollection (Heller, 2011). Remembrance and recollection is hermeneutics in action – a way not only of sharing experiences from the past but of re-living them in the present. The gap between the past and its reconstruction in the present might be unbreachable, but it is through remembrance and recollection that we encounter this impossibility and in so doing maintain the absolute spirit of our communion. In this regard, Finnegan argues that surfing has its own ‘surfphoto compulsion’. Surfers photographs act not only as keepsakes about what rides on the waves feel like, but as confirmation of the evidence of having participated in the act. As Finnegan puts it, photographs hang ‘in the homes of their subjects, framed like religious icons’ (2015: 314). Even if the viewer was not literally there, the images produced in the photographs function as a means of inclusion. Finnegan’s memoir itself performs a similar function in the sense that it is testament to surfing experience that needs to be remembered even when it was not experienced together. The visitors of the spiritual home together re-enter this home as a congregation and, in reflection and discussion, keep the vision of their spiritual home alive.

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There are further implications as well. ‘Devotional leisure’ practice, shaped by globalization and technology, transforms value-spheres in ways unimaginable to earlier generations. So whereas once upon a time surfing had religious import and surfboards were made by craftsman local to Hawaii and constructed using specialist wood from koa and wiliwili trees, today surfing is a global leisure value-sphere and surfboards are manufactured and constructed using a variety methods which range from polystyrene covered with layers of fibreglass to state of the art carbon fibre technology. Although the application of innovative technology to surfboard production goes on unabated, there is still a strong element of craftsmanship involved in surfing, and not just in the development of surfboard technology. As the foregoing quotation from Finnegan demonstrates, leisure value-spheres are spiritual homes whose members remain highly skilled craftsmen and women (skholērs), who, in acknowledging their acceptance in the surfing community, must also be prepared to offer instruction and guidance that is of true benefit to other surfers. This refers to the duties involved in the act of giving and receiving, or gift exchange (Mauss, 2002 [1950]). This is a form of skills and knowledge exchange that reinforces the social solidarity of those who choose to make their home together in a leisure value-sphere. It is important to recognize that the ‘giving’ in question here is, to quote Zygmunt Bauman, not just a spontaneous outburst of generosity; it is also experienced by the giver as an obligation – though an obligation free of grudge and resentment, its fulfilment hardly ever experienced or thought of as act of self-deprivation or self-sacrifice. In the case of a gift true to its nature, the common opposition between egoism and altruism is cancelled. That opposition is dissolved, we may say, in the state/condition/mentality/ambience of companionship and solidarity. ‘To give’ means to do good, but also feeling good; the two satisfactions merge into one and are no longer distinguishable from one another – let alone at loggerheads. The first wouldn’t happen without the second, and if the second comes to be, it is thanks to the first happening. Unalloyed, untainted joy is . . . what craftsmanship, as well as cooperation, can rely on, needs to rely on and be propelled by. (Bauman, in Bauman et al., 2015: 115) This is because the major needs of leisure value-spheres are neither progressive nor accumulative but concerned, to repeat, with companionship and solidarity which together provide the necessary conditions in which individuals render meanings to their joys and sufferings, through the connection of the ways ‘I’ say ‘yes’ to my vocation; that is, we keep ourselves culturally alive through the continuous absorption and digestion of the spiritual nourishment that our valuesphere cooked up in the past and continues to serve us in the present.

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The spirit of our congregation mark two: ‘performative leisure’ heterotopias As I pointed out in the last chapter, one of the major differences between the two kinds of devotional leisure is that whereas ‘devotional leisure’ has a hermeneutic tradition, ‘performative leisure’ does not. As we have just seen, ‘devotional leisure’ follows the path of an identifiable vocation which finds the absolute spirit home-experience as a value-sphere and as such it carries a historical weight that is dense with meaning but is still open to further interpretability. In ‘performative leisure’, devotion alone is the basis of authority since it is a kind of devotional leisure practice that has no hermeneutical tradition; this means that it can only speak for itself. That may be so. But we have to recognize that ‘performative leisure’ might offer other communal possibilities. In other words we must not rule out the possibility of there being differing interpretations of devotional leisure by those who find themselves in the midst of an alternative kind of ‘community’ that makes it possible to think about absolute spirit home-experience in a different way. Clearly, though, in the case of ‘performative leisure’ which is a kind of devotional leisure practice that is not exemplified in hermeneutics (read: skholē), one is engaged in an effort of understanding that is not without difficulties since, as we have seen, there is the tacit assumption that devotion alone is the basis of authority. So what ‘community’ is in this instance is difficult to say. Another way of articulating this, to paraphrase John Caputo (1997: 84), might be to express the view that the trouble with ‘performative leisure’ is that it is based on a kind of ‘community’ that is unknown to us since ‘it belongs neither to the intelligible nor to the sensible world’ of ‘devotional leisure’ exemplified in hermeneutics, in skholē. It is in this sense, as Plato would have said, “hardly real”. That is, it is not a legitimate son of reason but is apprehended by a spurious or corrupted logos, a hybrid or bastard reasoning. [It] is neither intelligible being nor sensible becoming, but a little like both, the subject matter of neither a true logos nor a good mythos. In other words, ‘performative leisure’ is situated too low on skholē’s conceptual radar to be taken credibly. In differentiating between knowable ‘devotional leisure’ activities that take place at society’s centre and unknowable ones that do not, we can’t quite bring ourselves to name ‘performative leisure’ as a devotional leisure activity or as a community. But what if we tried to understand the ‘community’ associated with ‘performative leisure’ in another way, as khôra, that ‘pre-philosophical, pre-originary non-locatable non-space that existed without existing before the cosmos’ (Lucy, 2004: 68), that is set beyond translation and can’t be defined or explained but which provides a ‘home’ for all things? As Lucy explains, khôra is ‘almost but not quite’ the Ancient Greek word for ‘anything goes’ which resists any attempt

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to pin it down conceptually owing to its ‘textual drift’ (Derrida, 1995: 123). This begs two important questions: Where is the khôra (the ‘home’ for all things) that is ‘hardly real’ but is always on the move? Who are its inhabitants (those khôrasters who move from ‘home’ to ‘home’ without any difficulty since they choose to live in the absolute present)? As we saw in Chapter 4, ‘performative leisure’ exemplifies the kind of openness suggested by the khôra, as a liminal in-between place, in a particularly interesting way, since it breaks with the tradition of ‘devotional leisure’ dramatically – or, at least, the ways in which its performers (read: khôrasters) express themselves and their mutual sense of belonging in a way that differs dramatically from community in the hermeneutical tradition, exemplified in skholē – and thus, by example, brings to the fore the question of how these khôrasters relate to the freedom of their devotion – a performative union as it might be called, a gathering of drifting performers united in a common spirit that emerges in that ‘shadowy realm called khôra’ (Caputo, 1997: 93) as the intersection of the pursuit of risk in the hope of finding some kind of transcendence beyond the limit of everyday life situations and the approval of what might be described (very loosely) as a ‘community’. Foucault gave the name to this ‘community’ (unworthy of the name hermeneutic community) ‘heterotopia’. Too complex for rational interpretation, yet at the same time seemingly a tabula rasa for all individuals’ desires, heterotopias are ‘disturbing’ for hermeneutics as they are traditionally practiced as skholē, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias . . . desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (Foucault, 1970: xix) In an article Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, first published in 1967, Foucault (1984a [1967]) identifies two main categories of heterotopia. There are the pre-modern heterotopias of crisis, otherwise known as ‘elsewhere’ places, which tended to be relegated to the margins of modern societies. Foucault has in mind here privileged places such as single-sex boarding schools where young boys are taken through a sexual rite of passage that is neither homosexual nor heterosexual; sacred places such as pilgrimage sites; and forbidden places such as brothels. In assessing the ways in which these ‘elsewhere’ places have been transformed in modern societies, Foucault offers his second category of

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heterotopia, which at their most basic are the places of deviance, such as prisons and mental asylums, where those considered ‘abnormal’ by the standards of modern norms can be spatially isolated. In developing a more elaborate conception of this second category of heterotopia, Foucault’s analysis suggests that these ‘elsewhere’ places must be understood in relation to the kind of society in which they occur. Where value-spheres fit snuggly into reality, heterotopias do not. In any society there are some people for whom the ‘real world’ does not resonate with their own experiences. Even though we are indoctrinated into thinking that ‘this way, rather than that’ is the right way to live, we tacitly know it is mistaken. In other words, the real world robs some people of the kind of fullness of life others are able to find in normalcy. The ‘real world’ is for these individuals at once too much and not enough. What Foucault’s analysis suggests is that a sense of recompense for a life that is not being lived in the confines of the ‘real world’ leads people down the track of heterotopia: reality and rationality are not on their menus, since what they are after is an unmediated immediacy of something together out of the ordinary. To this extent heterotopias tend to come to life in pointillist time, which means they are experienced as episodic. They constitute sequestered spaces, which have their very own systems of ‘opening and closing’ that both isolate them from the rest of society and operate to exclude those who do not have the necessary credentials to enter. In so doing, heterotopias function by way of opposition; that is, they have a tendency to unfold ‘between two extreme poles’. However, heterotopia offers spaces of compensation (rather than the illusion of utopia) and as such functions in relation to the way that its (deviant) populations understand they are imagined by the rest of society. In heterotopia, individuals do not try to resist reality so much as escape it – and in so doing creatively find their own place in it. Beneath the calm surface of everyday social reality flow strong and deadly currents. Against sad obscurity, against surrender to societal norms, against normalcy, heterotopia suggests desire for an alternative kind of knowledge, for another kind of determination, for ragtag unyielding life, the kind of worlds that provide expression and shelter for the ones who choose to escape meaning there. Heterotopias are a feast for anyone hungry for the otherness of ‘reality’. Their incumbents create spectacular spaces in which ‘reality’ itself seems to dissolve under the pressures of desire and we are left with individuals who shape-shift personalities as their compulsions are let loose. Whoever seeks out a heterotopia knows that once they arrive there, they will find a special kind of freedom in line with Sartre’s observation in The Imaginary, that ‘every consciousness posits its object, but each does so in its own way’. ‘Community’ made to the measure of heterotopic social space is made for individuals first and foremost: what goes on ‘in aesthetic space, is, essentially, a solitaire. Whatever sharing there seems to be is incidental and purely superficial’ (Bauman, 1993: 178).

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Leisure heterotopia 1: car cruising In Blackshaw and Crabbe’s (2004) discussion of car cruising as a heterotopia, familiar urban spaces metamorphose as two different ontological flows fold into one and we witness an exemplary conversion of an ordinary life into a form of theatre. Adapted from customary usage as ‘making trips by sea for pleasure’ into slang employ, cruising is the term used to connote either walking or driving around a locality on the lookout for quick and anonymous sex, or with specific reference to car cruising, which involves a number of other interconnected leisure activities and forms stylistic expression, but particularly the parading and racing of motor cars. Blackshaw and Crabbe argue that car cruising is a heterotopian leisure practice with its own kind of detached existence, of being ‘in’ but not ‘of the space it temporarily occupies. They also contend that car cruising is perceived by both cruisers and the wider society as a ‘deviant’ leisure activity as much without a history as it is one without a future and that car cruises are ‘communities’, whose inspiration tends to spring from the performativity of individual cruisers: they are both events for consumption and things to be consumed by. The affiliation found at cruises is not really one of friendship, or of a community proper, but one of symbiosis and its only glue is cruisers’ insatiable appetites to connect with like-minded others. If cruises are not the ‘real stuff ’ of hermeneutic communities, neither are they institutions, nor even organizations. They are what Scott Lash (2002) has called ‘disorganizations’, those more ‘trivial’ forms of social interaction, which constantly come into being and just as quickly break off, maintained ‘until further notice’. As such, Blackshaw and Crabbe suggest that car cruising is made to the measure of heterotopia: a momentary stopping place more for gestures than consequences, of uncomplicated surface lives manufactured only for the time being, paraded in and for the performative community, aching to be credible. Cruising is merely about performing modified cars, performing bodies. Yet despite its apparent simplicity, cruising is difficult to locate. First, in its disorganization the culture of cruising is dislocated in no place in particular; it is always on the move and the theatre for its performativity is always at an improvized stage set. Second, cruising is about the mundane rituals of displaying and checking out each other’s motor cars and bodies (car cruising is scented with sex) and on the other hand it is centred on street racing. However, both these activities are closely related in the sense that each is about performativity: a hybrid world where the mundane quotidian of performativity – display, gossip and tittle-tattle – collides with the apocalyptic and spectacular performativity of street racing and the performativity of ‘modded’ kit with flashing lights, the resounding sound of smooth clutch plate, purring 24-valve engines, the nitrous blue squirt of purge kit, skirts, spoilers, six-speed gear boxes, alloys and burning rubber. Even the interiors of the cars [are] instruments of performativity: chrome floor plates, leather seats, bucket seats, and chain-mail steering

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wheels, wicked ICE with speakers blasting out drum and bass. . . . It [is] a hive of activity. Drivers intermittently [rattle] about at full pelt. Groups and couples [assess] each other and each other’s cars, admiringly, ears pricking up and eyes lifting only at the sound of a noisy ‘Shaguar’ zooming into the arena, whence a queue of attentive onlookers instantly [form], buzzing over the open bonnet. This cruise [is] quickly turning into a great river of an event and everybody [seems] irresistibly carried away with its flow. (Blackshaw and Crabbe, 2004: 136) This contrast of significance and absurdity, of the spectacular and the mundane, the public and the private is what, for its followers, makes this devotional leisure practice worthwhile. Car cruising, like all other heterotopias, is always a double: ‘it belongs neither to the intelligible nor to the sensible world’, but to that ‘shadowy realm called khôra’, the ‘home’ for all things that is ‘hardly real’ but is always on the move. Car cruisers are also always a double. At the end of every cruise, few of these ‘khôrasters’, who choose to perform their cars and themselves in the absolute present, can remember what it was they were actually caught up with, apart from the pleasure or the emotion of the episode (Caputo, 1997: 84). Before we consider the implications of these observations for the relationship between self-realization and ‘community’ and how this connects with the issues of sincerity and authenticity in ‘performative leisure’ we must first of all clarify a number of issues. In order to do this, let us first of all look at another example of heterotopia, this time at the ‘extreme edge’ of ‘performative leisure’. In heterotopia nothing is straightforward. Because hermeneutics is absent words have their own usages, and nothing is ever quite settled. As we saw in the discussion of car cruising, make-believe is pervasive, often the custom. Leisure heterotopias belong to the ‘communities’ that create and use them. They represent alternative kinds of cognitive, social and moral space, emerging not from established imaginative traditions, but instead from the pursuit of mutual passion, pleasure and purpose, dignified and elevated by the ingenuity of their sense of invention and the centrality of this to the lives of those present. These leisure heterotopias provide access to radically different existential possibilities, and thereby expand what is meant or could mean to be human, by giving reality to what ‘the real world’ cannot quite grasp, to what it wishes wasn’t there, or to what it fears.

Leisure heterotopia 2: the art of erotics and the erotics of art Reader, imagine living in a world that feels all wrong. Things are out of joint. Imagine too suddenly tumbling down a hole into another world which is much more agreeable. There is an element of risk in the air, but this world feels more real than any world you had ever imagined inhabiting before. Everyone around you thinks and feels how you think and feel. The world you have just fallen into has its own lexicon, its own mutual discourse, and if required those who inhabit it could finish

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each other’s sentences, and can communicate, even more remarkably, without speaking at all. An easy-going atmosphere prevails. Everyone is sitting together eating and joking. Still there’s anticipation in the air charged with eroticism. The game of ‘pennies’ we have been waiting for all night will be starting before long. The game did start not long after, and what a game it was, as one of the guy’s recalls: Crazy Joey was the first to get up – the smear of crap he was, indeed, sitting in on my couch, just like it didn’t mean anything to him, kind of shocked me. I’d have thought I would have smelled it. He ‘bought’ Tony from the Mad Man, and had him lick his ass clean. (‘You want me to sit around in that and wait for tonight?’) Kind of old hat after Big Buck. Then Leaky told me to go over and suck Crazy Joey off (‘To shut him the fuck up!’), at which point Big Buck said, ‘Hey, that’s lookin’ pretty good to me – and I already know how it feels. How about I buy that cocksucker from you, Leaky –’ And the funny thing is – really, you should try it – it does make you feel better. Call it structure. Call it whatever. The same thing that seems so abhorrent in Sade, when it actually occurs among people of good will – and I think that’s what we all were – is as reassuring as a smile or a warm hand on a shoulder or a sharp, friendly smack on the ass. What stays with me, of course, were those moments that seemed in excess of this endless systematic interchange: at one point . . . Leaky had pretty much everybody’s pennies; and the Mad Man, by fiat, simply redistributed the wealth, as it were, as absolutely and autocratically as any avatar of Marx might have done. (pp. 441–442) After engaging in a series of sex acts that turned into a full scale orgy Crazy Joey, Leaky, and Big Buck all got together and jerked off on my mattress in one really humongous puddle . . . and I lay down in it on the striped ticking and rubbed my dick in it, while Leaky got up around my head and let me suck on his dick and Tony licked my ass out till I shot. Crazy Joey was sitting beside Leaky, watching me suck him and jerking off – and came all over the hirsute rug of Leaky’s thigh. Then Leaky said, while I came off his still-hard dick, ‘You know what I’m gonna do, Joey? I gonna put your cum inside my skin, and keep it there till it turns into one super crop of cheese.’ ‘Huh?’ Joey said. ‘You mean in that fuckin’ yoni thing you got?’ ‘Yeah,’ Leaky said. ‘How about that’, Joey said, ‘My fuckin’ cheese in your fuckin’ dick? Hey, should’ve thought of that! I could have gotten a fuckin’ penny off you for that, man.’ (p. 444)

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These quotations are from the novel The Mad Man (1994), written by Samuel R. Delany, the story of which foregrounds the world of a certain John Marr, a graduate student in philosophy, who is investigating the life and work of the great philosopher, Timothy Hasler, who was murdered, at the age 29, in a gay hustler bar in New York city in 1973. This novel contains many close correspondences between the author and the two protagonists and between the two protagonists. Hasler’s academic output bears a striking resemblance to Delany’s own, the Eaton, Hugo, Nebula and Pilgrim award winner, who is widely recognized as the world’s foremost author of science fiction. We are told that Hasler published ‘science-fiction stories, that, against titanic intergalactic backgrounds to dwarf Star Trek, Stars Wars, and Dune, turned on some of the finer mathematics that informed his articles on the philosophy of natural languages’ (Delany, 1994: 12); the book invites us to make other comparisons with Delany, but these are too convoluted to discuss here. When the novel opens, in the early 1980s, Marr, in his mid-twenties, confesses to the reader, ‘I do not have AIDS. I am surprised that I don’t. I have had sex with men weekly, sometimes daily – overwhelmingly . . . no, more accurately it’s been – since 1980 – all oral, not anal’. The immediate and the most obvious challenge presented to the reader is the invitation to understand the correspondence between the lives of Hasler and Marr, which are lived two generations apart. The great Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges is never mentioned in the novel but one of his key contributions to literature has an enormous presence. Borges famously argued that reading is a form of rewriting and in his story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (in Collected Fictions, 1998) he set out to create his own Don Quixote without being Cervantes. For Borges, the reader is a participant in any novel, who by reading, changes the text. Juxtaposing two narratives – about the work and lives of two young philosophers who both like to cruise for gay sex – whose interchange produces a text, Delany is able to tell his ambivalent story: an appreciation for the plight of gay men cruising for sex across two generations: the age pre-HIV and Aids and pre-Stonewall and the age of the Aids epidemic. In pursuing the comparison between Hasler and Marr, we are alerted to a number of other points of divergence. The most obvious one is between the two characters themselves: where Hasler was a brilliant young philosopher who liked to cruise gay bars in the era pre-Aids, Marr is a ‘young, bright, moderately middle-class black kid from Staten Island’, who had managed to fluke his way through his undergraduate degree and with the help of his professor (perhaps in exchange for sexual favours?) had got a scholarship to do his PhD, or as he himself suggests, Another way to put it, I suppose: ‘an underweight black cocksucker – with glasses – who knew that Wittgenstein was queer, not to mention Plato; and that there was this Frenchman some of my friends in college used to talk about, Foucault’. (1994: 10)

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With this quotation the novel begins to evoke another powerful countermovement. The novel invites another kind of reading which suggests that it is just as much a treatise on limits of philosophy itself, or more precisely, what philosophy can’t bring itself to name, ‘the “khôral” section of the Timaeus [which] has always been treated as a literary trifle and not as serious philosophy’ (Lucy, 2004: 68). The Timaeus is one of Plato’s dialogues. Derrida argues that, although it is intended to survey the whole of the cosmos, its discussion of khôra is not taken seriously. The upshot of this, Derrida suggests, is that in philosophy since Plato khôra has been reduced to a merely ‘textual’ feature, ‘the sort of thing logo-centric philosophers brush aside because of its seeming irrelevance to the “argument” ’ (Caputo, 1997: 85). It seems to me that The Mad Man is also a close interrogation of the limits of logo-centric philosophy. We learn from reading the novel that in his own philosophical work Timothy Hasler turns the assumptions of logo-centric thought on its head. But what is really radical about this novel for the purposes of our discussion is that it suggests that in order to begin to understand khôra we need to step outside philosophy, and find a new kind of ‘hermeneutics’, more like that of a novel than the ordinary type of scholarly philosophical work. In other words, what Delany presents us with is a story of khôra, ‘of this implacably, impossibly difficult thing, we do not know how to speak or how to avoid speaking; indeed, it is this impossibility that drives the need to say something about it’ (Caputo, 1997: 95). What seemed to be ‘just a novel’ about the plight of gay men cruising for sex across two generations is in fact also an investigation that reveals the limits of hermeneutics. What the above quotation (in fact the whole book) offers us is an interrogation of how the Mad Man, John, Leaky, Crazy Joe et al. relate to the freedom of their shared devotion in their own intermittent forays into heterotopia – a temporary, performative union of sex, a gathering of drifting performers united in a common spirit that emerges in that ‘shadowy realm called khôra’. As David Halperin (2006), W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality, put it in his blog, The Mad Man leads us to think – forces us to think – in ways that are so far from our cultural norms as to be virtually unimaginable. We don’t have the language – outside of the language provided in Delany’s own writing – to conceptualize what he is proposing to us. (It is something that the late-period Foucault pointed towards, with his ideas about ‘bodies and pleasures’ replacing the transgressive logic of sexuality; but I think Delany points us much further in this direction than Foucault did). Delany breaks with the utopian, 60s idea of sex as redemptive; but he also breaks, I think, even with the antiredemptive arguments offered by . . . queer theorists. Another way to put this is to say that Delany’s pornographic vision – the way bodies and pleasures are intensified to a point of impersonality and anonymity – cannot be described in [any other] terms. It’s hard for me to express this as clearly or

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theoretically as I would like; but it has something to do with the way in which ‘extreme’ sexual acts are described both – and simultaneously – as attaining a point where the ego, or the limits between one self and another, are dissolved, so that the experience of sheer intensity is all that remains, and as being experiences of intimacy, ease, togetherness, and (dare I say it?) even a certain homely coziness. As we have seen throughout this section of the discussion, heterotopias are sites of performativity and are as such very much about revelation. It is the unexpected possibilities and the unexpected shapes that ‘real’ life takes in heterotopia that matter. In the heterotopia Delany paints for us in The Mad Man, which repeats its shocking revelations about Marr’s sexual predilections over and over, we are invited to judge human nature, not by the shock of the revelation of his sexual predilections, but by our own responses to it. Delany’s novel alerts us to the difference between living a lie and living a life. But it does much more than that. It transports us elsewhere, into a place that is hidden but familiar. Now other things matter. As Halperin puts it, in this novel, ‘odors of sweat, piss, and cum feel “familiar and comfortable”, and the exchange of bodily fluids are the nicest and sweetest thing one human being can do with another’. This is still the world as we know it, except it isn’t the same, because it is uncanny. It is heterotopian. The Mad Man, expansive and inclusive, is about the opening up of our notions of what constitutes the ‘real’. Here the intelligible/sensible fusion of ‘reality’ – a fusion that produces the possibilities of improvization, a different kind of ‘community’, a sense of play between all the selves involved, of possibilities for quite other selves in those around them and in themselves too – is a question of the openness of interpretation which will always allow for differing interpretations. Delany’s novel suggests that heterotopia makes the world more democratic. It suggests that when we are transported into the ‘shadowy realm called khôra’ the walls between us come tumbling down. This novel is an elegy to our human versatilities, a uniting of khôrasters into new kinds of agreements – even if the deepest sense of ‘community’ on offer turns out to be capturing somebody else’s cum under your foreskin. It is a heterotopic call to action. Heterotopia celebrates the élan vital; it is a demonstration of freedom, an incitement to emancipation. At the same time heterotopia offers khôrasters an alternative kind of belonging. The sense of ‘community’ it generates is defined by a radical alterity: khôra. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would argue, the ‘community’ experienced here is ‘traversal’, very much a plural process of unification, moving beyond the constraints implied by the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, between presence and absence. Transversal unity has an open-textured quality that emerges in democratic communication that enables shared ways of being-inthe-world that know no boundaries. What Lyotard (1988) calls the differend offers another compelling way of explaining this present/absent ‘community’. In a differend there lies something that is beyond mere description. The question then becomes how to do justice to

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the something that cannot help but be missing. Lyotard’s answer is that first of all you have to bear witness to it. Second, you appeal to the kinds of feelings that enable you to supplement this evidence, the kinds of higher pleasure that take you to that extreme where the erotic meets death. As Lyotard points out, only feelings can bear witness to the differend, and in particular the feeling of the sublime. It is the sublime then that enables khôrasters to sense the presence of ‘community’ (the feeling of intense, trembling sexual pleasure that is only found in communion with another human being) and equally to sense the impossibility of ‘community’ (‘fantasies of closeness, of intimacy, that are way in excess of human possibility’ (Phillips, 2006: 31)). In other words, khôrasters’ sentiments operate exactly in an idiom of artificially enhanced reality. This is the double pulse of this ‘community’, between the present and the absent, between the ideal and the real, between the world that opens up in the imagination and world of everyday social relations. What Durkheim once said of religion is true of heterotopian ‘community’: it is conceived of nothing more (and nothing less either) than strangely organized practices that pay due reverence to the actuality of ‘being together’, ‘and thereby ensuring that this “being together” can go on without causing too much trouble’ (Raud, in Bauman and Raud, 2015: 76). The central life strategy adopted by khôrasters is one intent on rekindling the ultimate experience of ‘community’ that cannot help but be missing in the ‘real world’. The khôraster lives for the moment, for the successive ‘now’. The khôraster strives to squeeze all reality into the present. The kinds of ‘community’ found in heterotopia are always affecting, but also always contingent, aleatory, ephemeral and indeterminate. In heterotopia, ‘community’ never goes further than its ‘as-ifness’. Here community envisages eternity, not as permanent fixity, but as ephemeral ecstasy. This kind of ‘community’ is an unknown which reason alone cannot explain. It is the experience of departure that is the key to understanding heterotopian ‘community’. The key point is that we do not really know the significance of what we experienced there – the intense pleasure, the intimate sense of camaraderie – until we leave. It is the experience of departure that is the litmus test, as this tells us how big a part of ourselves we are leaving behind. Heterotopia is somewhere we are always leaving, and we spend much of our lives trying to regain its experience again. This is why the sense of belonging found in heterotopia is perhaps best understood in terms of cleaves – cleave meaning both to slice into episodes and to cling to – which together reflect the sensibilities that underpin heterotopian ‘communities’. The ‘cleaves’ of these ‘communities’ are both noun and verb: we identify with them collectively, but live them on individual terms. Here ‘community’ exists in a reprisal process fixed in a series of episodes, of moments when khôrasters’ attention is suddenly caught by the need to reassert their belonging. Of a particular shared world but wary of group identity, khôrasters seek pleasure and the warm comfort of belonging in heterotopia. Human imagination and human versatility is what it takes to make any lost world live, and this is the point of heterotopia.

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There is always something clearly recognizable and yet at once indefinite about our episodic encounters in heterotopia; something that makes you feel as though you are somewhere real, but not in a place with particularity. This adds to the cosy sense that this is exactly where you want to be in the world. You know its culture, you know the language spoken, you know the familiar faces (in the instance of our example, Leaky, The Mad Man et al.), and it appears as no great challenge to rekindle it yet again, that in-between space full of warmth and security, where everything is familiar and has its customary place, and where history has no real purchase. The ‘community’ found in heterotopia is not really a community, but it is really a ‘community’; it is a ‘community’ only in the loosest and most precarious sense. Here, in heterotopia, it is the breathtaking surety of élan vital that dares to challenge the assumptions of those ‘enemies’ of leisure that does not have a place in what society simplistically likes to call ‘reality’, inviting those who care to go along with its reconstruction. In aesthetic terms, heterotopia trumps everything else. In its squeezed time frames both pleasure and belonging take on a sense of intensity unparalleled anywhere else. Then the real world beckons again and heterotopia simply dissolves and slips from our grasp, from being just there, right then, it vanishes in a puff of disappearance. All the depth of feeling that had been there just a few minutes earlier drained away. But when we resolve ourselves to look for it again, heterotopia is once again reprised in all its warm, sublime detail. And why not? Heterotopia might not have any firm foundations on which to build something more enduring, but it is a different world, it is a world that has room for someone just like you. Despite the fact that it is always temporary, it is always welcoming to people who look and sound just like you – people from elsewhere. The ‘community’ created in heterotopia, if not fireproofing you from danger, at least retards the flame of exclusion. In the ‘real’ world this is something that is never going to happen. Nothing else can provide the supremely comforting sensation of existing in the midst of something temporary, conjured to feel so absolute.

Summary You might not ever be able to fathom khôra, that becoming, non-locatable, nonspace found in that peripheral world of heterotopia, but this does not stop you and others like you from trying to find it. Just to enter heterotopia is to feel a whole different kind of existence evoked. Near and far become elided, presence is juxtaposed with absence, and a version of ‘community’ emerges somewhere between pure being and pure nothingness, which enables a gathering of people from elsewhere – khôrasters – united in their common spirit to collectively overcome the threat of their non-being. Heterotopian ‘communities’ operate in the cusp between imaginary reality and the really existing reality which pass through each other, their shapes muddled, not a perfect fit, but awfully close. To arrive in heterotopia is to pass

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through a chink in the gates of reality and enter a liminal, around the corner universe. Here in khôra (that other word for heterotopia) we can find another way to be otherwise than being through becoming. And what excitement to arrive in a world that ‘is not a universal (abstract place in general), nor a particular (a contained place), but something radically singular: place itself – within which multiple places are inscribed’ (Caputo, 1997: 95). Here, the real world and its other are hard to prise apart: as a result we are insistently forced to acknowledge that there is no solid ground of unassailable truth on which khôra rests; it blurs the boundaries between what is present and what is absent. It is a remarkable creation, not quite of the world – the gap, the slippage, the contingency is the point. Thus the power of khôra, of heterotopia, arises not from the depth of its social relations, but from the ability of the khôrasters, who temporarily inhabit it, to imagine and create it aesthetically. Having said that, the ways in which it is drawn are often compelling and seem all the more powerful for that. And yet, even if it is only the experience of belonging to a ‘community’ that khôrasters desire in heterotopia, but can never capture for long, it does not deter them from pretending it is something deeper, more lasting. This is the untidy, unpredictable world in which all khôrasters have to live ambivalently ever after.

Some interim conclusions And that ought really to be that. We can conclude that, on the one hand, ‘devotional leisure’ is like religion and art in the sense that it is a value-sphere that ‘can disclose Truth and provide life with Meaning’ (Heller, 1999: 38); sincerity and authenticity are hermeneutical and are communicated through a struggle, through a connection of the ways ‘I’ say ‘yes’ to my vocation, making an affirmation, a social commitment to a community, and what is most important is how that community is embodied, enriched, and transformed as a result. On the other hand, ‘performative leisure’ is unlike religion but still like art, it takes place in heterotopia that may or may not be able to disclose Truth and might provide life with Meaning (but just as well could be an escape from meaning); this situation ultimately leads to the loss of sincerity and authenticity since khôrasters drift from one performative status to the next, and although ‘community’ might provide a sense of closeness, of intimacy that is ‘way in excess of human possibility’, it is ultimately always a short-lived present one with ‘no strings attached’. Well, as it happens, I would like to say just a few more small things about devotional leisure communities that do change these conclusions, quite considerably.

Authentic community, hermeneutics and devotional leisure In the critical discussion in Chapter 4 of the two kinds of devotional leisure practice found respectively in value-spheres and heterotopia, I isolated some of the basic difficulties of the above-mentioned line argument, which is put forward by

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Agnes Heller. In the final part of this chapter, I shall attempt to integrate some of the insights discussed in Chapter 4 with those that emerged in the previous section of this chapter which together enable us to overcome these problems. A necessary preliminary to this, however, is a brief examination of Heidegger’s idea of authentic community which suggests that if we are going to reconcile the differences between the two kinds of ‘community’ found in devotional leisure we won’t find the answer in hermeneutics, the spirit of which lies in the weight of the tradition behind it. In his masterwork Being and Time, the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962) argued that authenticity is understood as that mode of human being-in-the-world (Dasein) of interest to those who wish to explore the existential qualities and possibilities that are uniquely their own as individuals; who cannot ignore the fact that as individuals they are ‘thrown’ into the world at a certain point in time and space; and who recognize that their existence has a certain distinctiveness that nonetheless transcends simple analysis, description or perception. Heidegger contrasts authenticity with inauthenticity, which is a mode of existence whereby men and women flee from their responsibility to themselves by reducing their lives to the average or the typical. As we have seen, for Heller (1999), to be authentic is not only to reject the risk of alienation caused by inauthenticity, it is a way of remaining ‘true to oneself ’ in order to achieve the single most sublime virtue of life. As Heller points out, authentic men and women manage to remain faithful to the existential leap, they are individuals ‘who are pulled and not pushed, who are personalities’, which means they are capable of achieving the sort of life as close to perfection as a modern person can get. According to Heidegger, the decisive moment of authentic community is initiated when Dasein becomes the conscience for the Other in the existential leap to authenticity (Schrag, 1961: 205). As Schrag goes on to explain, in Heidegger’s view, this neither delineates any specific programme of social action nor does it identify any specific kinds of commitment. As an ontological designation it remains intentionally neutral to any and all existential experience. It does suggest the set of conditions and the kind of attitude that must prevail if authenticity is to become a possibility for an individual’s lived experience. However, the actual expression of this authenticity is relative to prevailing dispositions and depends upon the special character of the situation in which the individuals involved find themselves as they seek out meaning together. This cannot be explained ontologically since the ontology of human existence is already presumed and will be obvious in that community. Heidegger’s thesis has some important implications for the purposes of our discussion. Most importantly, it challenges the idea that self-realization through ‘performative leisure’ coupled with an excessive, over the top, temporary commitment to a present/absent ‘community’ found in heterotopia leads ipso facto to the end of hermeneutics and the loss of authenticity. In the critical discussion in Chapter 4 of the two kinds of devotional leisure practice found respectively in

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value-spheres and heterotopia, I isolated some of the basic difficulties of this argument, put forward by Agnes Heller. Mostly notably, I argued that Heller fails to recognize that authenticity might be achieved by all individuals if combined with sincerity, ‘which aims at ensuring truthfulness in our relations to others’ (Guignon, 2004: 80). In this chapter I have suggested that in heterotopia there is perhaps another way of understanding authenticity that – which to borrow Austin’s (1975) terminology is only ever ‘felicitous’ within a certain context – emerges in situ, as khôra. As we saw in the discussion of The Mad Man, in trying to get to grips with this ‘pre-philosophical, pre-originary non-locatable non-space that existed without existing before the cosmos’ (Lucy, 2004: 68), that is set beyond translation and can’t be defined or explained but which provides a ‘home’ for all things, Delany offers us a new type of language, a new form of ‘hermeneutics’ without being hermeneutics, which is capable of transporting us to this elsewhere, into a place that is hidden but familiar, and where other things matter. Using language in unconventional ways, Delany is committed to making his readers critically aware of the self-consciousness of this Other world; and all he asks of them is that they put the assumptions of hermeneutics on hold and listen to what he has to say. We know from reading Heller that interpretation reveals truth, which is disclosed through dialogical interaction between carriers of tradition. Delany’s book offers a different twist on this argument in that it works with the admonition that we need to step outside philosophy to find a new kind of ‘hermeneutics’ that will not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to reveal the Truth; it will succeed or fail instead on the strength of its ability to engage its readers, to convince them that it is a world that they have encountered in its pages. In other words, deconstructing Delany’s ‘thesis’ – which I argued is more like a novel than the ordinary type of scholarly philosophical work – using the empirical methods found in sociology and leisure studies or the traditional assumptions of hermeneutics would be a fruitless task; its ability to satisfy readers’ critical faculties is its only benchmark. I think that Delany’s only wish when he wrote this book was that his readers would trust his intentions, and join him on an intellectual journey that is the book. What Delany manages to achieve in this regard is radical. He dramatically expands the possibilities of hermeneutics through performativity. The aspect of life revealed in his novel, that is not based on the search for meaning, but which cannot be understood apart from the meaning of life, is elusive of interpretation. It requires that we extend our understanding of human life in relation to artistic production to include ‘how it is what it is’, or simply ‘that it is what it is’, rather than trying to demonstrate ‘what it means’ (Sontag, 1964: 5). The final effect is not to obscure meaning, but simply to lay it bare. However, what Delany’s novel does not do is bring about what Gadamer (1979) calls a ‘fusion of horizons’ to explain how such radical change occurs, with our inherited prejudices, through confrontation with the text, producing a modified tradition. As Nicholas Smith explains, this is the

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third and crucial principle brought to hermeneutic reflection: the understanding sought has a productive, practical character. As well as being pushed from somewhere – the anticipations and prejudices which inform and guide a tradition – the interpreter is also pulled towards an expanded horizon that cannot be anticipated prior to a dialogical interaction with the text. (1997: 27) It is at this point, at the third moment that new meaning is brought to bear. On the contrary, the encounter between hermeneutics and performativity can be justly dubbed a mis-meeting. The coming together of hermeneutics and performativity is better understood as an ‘imaginary horizon’. But it is not a fusion. Hermeneutics is undertaken by a community of scholars whose task and responsibility it is to ensure Truth. Bearing such a task without relief is what makes hermeneutics itself unique. Performativity defies rational explanation; it is an unknown which reason alone cannot explain. It is in our communicative experience as readers of Delany’s book – which makes it possible to think of that third thing between a novel and a philosophy book – that we come to know and understand more fully what had previously been out of our grasp, our initial horizon. Simply put, I would suggest that in this book Delany succeeds in both a coherent and authoritative way to reconstitute hermeneutics radically by recognizing that the value of the text is on its surface, in its performativity. In the event Delany generates a new understanding of hermeneutics by reorienting its tradition in the direction of what appears at first glance to be paradoxical. In other words, in Delany’s book, hermeneutics takes on a new qualification. Hermeneutics holds that truth lies in its interpretive tradition, in custom. But hermeneutics is held captive by its own prejudices; that is, it remains hostage to the structures of power that are legitimated through that tradition and which remain opaque to it (Smith, 1997: 28). In order to overcome this limit, performativity simply replaces truth with ‘felicity’ (Austin, 1975), or the ability to find an appropriate fitness between word and world. When ‘felicity’ rather than truth is invoked as the crucial criterion a new kind of meaning becomes possible in the form of description. Delany does not want interpretation. He wants us to see and feel the world he is writing about, even if we are unequal to the experience as it folds over us. This paradoxical twist through which hermeneutics finds a new stimulus not only generates a radical kind of understanding by reorienting interpretation in the direction of performativity, but also reveals the paradox of devotional leisure. At the beginning of Chapter 4, I explained that in making a distinction between ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ I was setting up an artificial dichotomy. As it turns out, the paradox of hermeneutics is also the paradox of devotional leisure. All devotional leisure harbours two kinds of desire: a desire to provide life with meaning, fused to an equal desire to perform, to achieve ‘watchableness’. With this in mind, we must recognize that the twenty-first century is the age in which all devotional leisure practices dissolve into the art of living.

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Dissolving the dichotomy of ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’: the example of urban exploration As a final example, let us briefly look at urban exploration (aka ‘urbex’ or ‘place hacking’), the focus of Kevin Bingham’s current doctoral study and the devotional leisure practice he suggests has recently entered popular culture through the adventures of those like-minded individuals interested in the physical discovery of abandoned buildings, bridges, churches, graveyards, drains, power stations, subways and other man-made objects which are abandoned or off-limits. Urban exploration, Bingham suggests, is infused with a sensitivity to the environmental degradation found in modernity’s fading cityscapes, whose haunted past not only excites urbexers’ aesthetic speculations but also presents them with physical challenges – often risky and sometimes hostile – which they look to transcend. Drawing on his own ethnographic research in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Bingham’s thesis argues that, in attempting to transcend the urban environment in this way, urbexers are all trespassers in the sense that they cross the boundary of what is legal to occupy a deviant leisure space; but also, in the sense that they cross a creative boundary by turning themselves against both the shallowness and manufactured certainty of consumerism and the risk averse world of conventional climbing and descending (including outdoor education). In so doing the hope is that urban exploration will enable urbexers to reveal more depth in exercising their talents while also enabling them to establish an outcast identity. It is in this outcast role that urbexers long for respect and for acceptance and they pursue both uncompromisingly. The peculiar visibility–invisibility of urban exploration allows this. At a remove from the synopticon world of consumerism and the panopticon worlds of organized climbing and descending, urbexers seize the freedom to experiment off-limits. Liberated from the market and the normalizing gaze of the climbing and descending professions (e.g. mountaineering, potholing and caving councils and associations), with their formal affiliations and codes of professional conduct, urbexers not only give a new name to the practices associated with climbing/descending but also to each other (Kevin’s ‘Boyz’ go by the names of Box, Ford Mayhem, MKD, Rizla Rider, The Hurricane), and together push the limits of the dominant morality. When one of the ‘Boyz’ lifts the manhole cover and plummets down the drain into Sheffield’s sewer system, a sense of falling quickly gives way to an alternative ontological flow and the everyday one disappears. He is transported elsewhere, into a place that is hidden but familiar, and which facilitates a personal quest for meaning. Now other things matter. The sounds of fetid water dripping and the dank smell in the air. The circumstances of the ‘Boyz’s’ removal from one world to another is felt as fantastical; existentially, their situation is a familiar one, but real in a different kind of way. Each one of them now feels radically of a place, at one with the aesthetics of abandonment and the others who inhabit

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it with him; everyone else here sees the world the way that the rest of the ‘Boyz’ do and revels in the smells the self-same way that they do. For each of the ‘Boyz’ it isn’t only the world that is now recognizably his, but also his body is too: this miraculous metamorphosis, out of his everyday body and into another version of that same body which is still his but in this alternative reality is really his. The world of urban exploration the ‘Boyz’ find themselves in is still the world as we know it, except it isn’t the same, because it is uncanny. It is khôra, it is heterotopic. It is a demonstration of freedom, an incitement to emancipation. To paraphrase Caputo (1997: 94), urban exploration, in common with many other devotional leisure practices, takes khôra off the streets and provides it with a home in the holy family of devotional leisure, somewhere between the intelligible and the sensible, aesthetically evocative, just as much relying on its performativity for its formal qualities as well as its craftsmanship contributions. The ‘Boyz’ are khôrasters-skholērs extraordinaire. Under-imagined urban spaces act as metaphors for the parts of themselves that urbexers are not prepared to supress or ignore. In other words, urbexers set out to explore the other side of the urban environment and, by extension, the other side of themselves rather than to take either for granted. One half of the urbex character is charged with a sense of theatricality typically found in the pursuit of intense moments of experience and the performativity of daredevil exploits which together make urbexers feel ‘real’ as individuals and gives them their own personal urbex identity; the other half, charged with the need to join in, to gain the acceptance and respect of other urbexers. Sincere and authentic urbexers, Bingham’s thesis suggests, instinctively understand both processes. To borrow an expression from Judith Butler (1990), it is in its performativity that urban exploration ‘generates that which it names’. This is not to say that someone who declares ‘I am an urbexer’ does at that moment become an urban explorer. In saying ‘I am an urbexer’ someone may be at the beginning of the process of the social recognition of a new status, but saying ‘I am an urbexer’ is not being an urbexer. In Austin’s terminology (1975) accomplished urban exploration requires its own ‘felicity’ conditions. The statement ‘I am an urbexer’ requires that three verification conditions be met: ‘authority’, ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’ of commitment in subsequent urban exploration exploits. 1

2

Urban exploration is known by the fruits it harvests. To be officially entitled to call themselves an ‘urbexer’, someone must achieve the preparatory conditions of urban exploration. That is, they must act in a way that leads to them being officially authorized by the rest of the urban exploration community. In saying ‘I am an “urbexer” ’ someone must also mean what they say, believe it to be true sincerely. In this regard, individuals must not only be genuinely grateful in acknowledging their acceptance in the urban explorer community, but when required must also be prepared to offer instruction and guidance that is of true benefit to other ‘urbexers’.

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Towards understanding devotional leisure

Finally, becoming an authentic ‘urbexer’ means meeting the essential condition of urban exploration. This involves being obliged to the promise that urban exploration presents; that is, to make a promise is to say ‘yes’ to urban exploration, to make an affirmation, a social commitment to a community. You can’t just say ‘I am an “urbexer” ’ and leave it at that. The words are not enough. It is not enough to say, ‘I am an “urbexer” ’ – you must live your life as an ‘urbexer’. Needing to become an ‘urbexer’ is the essential condition of what an urban explorer is. In this regard, and just like surfers, urbexers are in love with storytelling – just as they take photographs of their exploits and share these on the internet, they also tell each other tales about their exploits. Their shared devotional leisure practice and their community is honed in this retelling.

Conclusions As Wallace Stevens (1997) suggests in the poem ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, most people don’t know what it is like to locate the problem of their own individual experiences in broader processes of social continuity and change – what Stevens calls thinking ‘without the giant’ – and remain puzzled their entire lives by the problem of what to think about, so they think about whatever current circumstances demand. There are some people, however, who know what it is like to be a ‘thinker of the first idea’, who know that they live in a place that is not just their own, ‘and, much more, not our selves’, or in other words, know what it is like to have a deep interest in the world in the hope of finding a home in it. According to Nietzsche, being truly at home in the world ‘requires not only embracing a particular form of being, but also embracing becoming, the impermanence to which all forms of being are subject’ (Dudley, 2004: 230). This embracing of becoming, however, is the activity of a dialectic between the inner life involving the search for meaning with all the successes and failures that involves, and the performative life in pursuit of risk in the hope of finding some kind of transcendence beyond the limit of everyday life situations, which comes about as a result of what Nietzsche calls the ‘tragic’ attitude, the points at which the physical manifestation of achieved ‘watchableness’ connect to inner preoccupation: the affirmation of impermanence, and thus an authentic reconciliation with the world. As Dudley (2004: 233) explains, ‘tragic’ individuals love the possibilities of future creation even more than anything they have already established through the art of living. This depends on showing that the thoughts and values enshrined in the art of living are made up rather than found, through adapting new ways of living from old ones or coming up with radically new designs. When successful, such extraordinary ways of living are truly artistic. Nietzsche thought that the practice of philosophy is one of the primary sources of such an authentic existence. In my view so is the practice of devotional leisure, which, as it transpires, is a double or it is nothing.

Conclusion

It is commonplace to assume that leisure carries an air of ontological inevitability about it. Such is the power of this view that there is often a tendency to assume that what we simply call leisure has a kind of supra-empirical status; it is as it is, so to speak, and its ontological status goes unquestioned. The sense of looking at social phenomena in terms of their ontological inevitability forms part of a general attitude in Leisure Studies that assumes that since things appear in a certain way they might not happen differently. As I argued in Chapter 2, too many Leisure Studies scholars adamantly situate themselves as spectators, watchers on the edge of leisure life-worlds they have no intention of entering because they make the tacit assumption that metaphysics has already done its job, and all they have to do is record the facts. But for all the assumed authority of Leisure Studies it is limited, since, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf (1994 [1925]), it produces a sense of reality that is different than those who experience it see it. As I demonstrated in my discussion of the sociologies of Bourdieu and intersectionalities, Leisure Studies invariably theorizes ‘them’ and ‘their’ leisure lives as they are when ‘we’ are not there. ‘We’ only see life as it is when ‘we’ have no part in it. The upshot of this is that Leisure Studies ends up converting real people, and the myriad leisure life-worlds they inhabit individually and together, into objects of investigation. But as I argued, using Jacques Derrida’s apt expression, ‘One cannot say: “Here are our monsters”, without immediately turning the monsters into pets’ (1990: 80). The aim of this book has been to reinvigorate leisure studies by introducing a new perspective with which it would be possible to analyse leisure in a way that the existing paradigm would not ordinarily distinguish. At first glance it would appear that the thesis emerging out of the analysis developed in the forgoing chapters leads to only one conclusion: that there are two kinds of devotional leisure practice – ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ – which are mutually exclusive and not easily reconciled with each other, but which taken together can be considered as two key aspects of the art of living. But as we have seen in this book, devotional leisure defies rational explanation, it is a mystery for which only the existential leap can provide the most satisfactory explanation, and as such, by definition, carries its own validation; it is that third thing which,

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showing itself as such, produces an ontological hybrid. It is precisely because it is a double, a third thing between the supra-empirical status of necessity and the inferior-imaginative status of contingency, that the understanding of leisure developed in this book makes it possible to think (something perhaps like the difference between ‘pure being’ and ‘pure nothingness’) which is beyond the grasp of Leisure Studies. ‘A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself ’, says the writer M. John Harrison. ‘Ask what it’s afraid of, what it’s trying to hide – then write that.’ You might find yourself at odds with the cultural context you are ‘trying to fit in and failing’, or you are ‘trying to remove [yourself] from and failing’, but the best way to ‘resolve the conflict is an angle – a frame or a context – in itself ’ (cited in Lea, 2012: 11). What I did in this book to resolve my own conflict with Leisure Studies was to come up with, not only my own angle, but a radical way of re-imagining leisure studies for the twenty-first century. The angle was that the interregnum is the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, and not only that, but it is the time-gap at the very heart of the shift from solid modernity to liquid modernity. When the interregnum began – as the upshot of a ‘pure event’ – and when it will end are two questions we are unlikely ever to be able to answer with any certainty. But what we can do, and what I have tried to do in this book, is suggest some new ways of trying to get to grips with the processes of the historical change associated with it, in which, to paraphrase Gramsci (1971) ‘a great variety of interesting phenomena did appear’, but most notably a revolution in everyday life that radically altered the reigning structures of time and order. My way of putting some conceptual flesh on these phenomena was to identify the interregnum with the relationship between the art of living and leisure, and in order to do this I came up with the labels ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’. My thesis was a simple one and went something like this: It provided a coherent, if complex narrative, one with significant epistemological, ontological and methodological implications for how we are to understand twenty-first- century leisure life-worlds. It had a beginning: the end of ‘Leisure’ and the end of Leisure Studies. It was argued that in Leisure Studies the capacity of individuals to amount to more than the sum of a set of circumstances is ignored; the ability to make a choice is glossed over. My response to this was to invoke Peter Sloterdijk’s argument that ours is the age when you are compelled to change your life and when you do so everything that is problematic will disappear. It is by transforming the conditions of existence in which we find ourselves, argues Sloterdijk, that free individuals’ effect the most significant changes in their own lives. In other words, my life might have happened some other way, or perhaps not at all. Sloterdijk is here, needless to say, dealing with the fundamental distinction between necessity and contingency. Necessity supplies the context of preconditions without which my life could not have happened. Contingency provides

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triggers that convert possibilities into actuality – the causes without which my life would not have happened. What is also important, I subsequently argued, is what nobody in Leisure Studies seems to realize – that the attitude associated with the art of living is one of the closest expressions of the category of the leisure attitude. Amongst many other things this means that we are individuals who can yet apprehend authenticity. One conclusion I drew from this observation is that perhaps the main reason leisure has ended is that it is no longer special anymore and, for that simple reason, it can be anything. Maybe there is no longer anything that might simply be understood as leisure. The idea that leisure has ended does not mean that it has died or that people no longer have any leisure. On the contrary, leisure continues to flourish. It too, just like art, is constrained only by the laws of nature on the one hand, and moral laws on the other. Nor does it mean something like leisure has come to the ‘end of history’. ‘End’ as I use it here means something more like a finishing point. The ‘end of leisure’ means that leisure in the functionalist sense of the idea has come to a conclusion. The ‘end leisure’ means that leisure no longer has a grand narrative, a compelling story. After the ‘end of leisure’, there is no such thing as ‘Leisure’ – there is only leisure. My thesis had a middle: modernity has never been disenchanted. Conventional wisdom has it that in its ‘solid’ incarnation, under the auspices of rationalization, modernity supressed enchantment’s magic kingdom. It was subsequently demonstrated that any number of theorists have attempted to harness this interpretation of disenchantment, which is generally associated with Weber, to a critique of consumerism that accepts the fundamentals of this view. In response to this state of affairs I argued that the conventional reading of Weber is wrong and that it was in fact his view that enchantment doesn’t so much disappear in modernity, but is in effect withdrawn from public life. If we are prepared to accept this alternative reading of Weber, I argued, then an alternative understanding of enchantment under modern conditions becomes possible. In the interregnum that got underway in no uncertain terms in the last few decades of the twentieth century, our relationship with enchantment changed irrevocably as many people began to awaken to the new sense of existence associated with the art of living. This marked the onset of an indeterminate historical period when it seemed that everyone now felt it was within their grasp to begin the search for some overarching narrative for their lives. It was also argued that as a result of the shift from solid modernity to liquid modernity leisure emerges for many people as a source of enchantment, a kind of spiritual practice, what Sloterdijk calls anthropotechnics. Using this metaphor, Sloterdijk suggests that the art of living is less a plan of action than a practice. It is about living your life in a certain way, which enables you to render your life meaningful or simply delight in it by putting it on display. I subsequently argued that twenty-first-century men and women are artists of life who have to make themselves up; they also, as a result, have to make themselves at ‘home’. One of modernity’s most ‘homely’ terrains is leisure – not just

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because it may offer us a personal fulfilment, but because it is a ‘home’ with a social dimension which brings with it a sense of belonging and obligation to the wider social context that makes it possible. In other words leisure is the most ‘homely’ of modernity’s ‘homes’ because it is not only an experience but also an activity. It was argued that devotional leisure ‘homes’ are communities that take the form of either value-spheres or heterotopias. While the former provide ostensibly permanent ‘homes’ for those who pursue the meaning of life through ‘devotional leisure’, the latter provide temporary ‘homes’ for those who are more concerned with the manner, the style in which they live their lives, which is ‘the most significant quality of truly alive persons’. My thesis had an end: The first end result was that it exposed the hegemonic assumptions of hermeneutics. Quickly leading from this was the second end result that revealed the paradoxical twist through which hermeneutics finds a new stimulus, not only to generate a radical kind of understanding by reorienting interpretation in the direction of performativity, but also by revealing the paradox of devotional leisure. In both cases this evidenced not a ‘fusion of horizons’, but a mis-meeting. Something important happens, I suggested, at the point at which interpretation and performativity meet. It is at this mis-meeting point of two kinds of meaning where the intellectual has to become a double, a gobetween, a mediating figure, a cultural intermediary taking advantage of his or her intellect to act as a powerfully critical voice on behalf of that third thing that makes it possible to think of the difference between interpretation and performativity. In other words, this mis-meeting creates an ‘imaginary horizon’, a duality that is able to combine interpretation with description which in the age of the ‘performativity criterion’ always has to appeal to ‘star quality’. The result is advantageous to anyone interested in leisure studies, which can now combine an ethical and political consciousness with a commitment to the immediacy of the world afforded by the kind of categorical description found in Samuel R. Delany’s ‘novel’ The Mad Man – which to borrow an insight from Susan Sontag (1964: 10) we might call ‘an erotics of art’ – without relinquishing meaning. It also transpired in the final section in Chapter 5 that devotional leisure is just like that interpretation-description hybrid, it too affords a double meaning. It creates its own ‘imaginary horizon’, a duality that is able to combine ‘devotion’ with ‘performativity’. The resulting ‘felicity conditions’ are advantageous to individuals and the leisure life-worlds they share with others, since they know that their devotion can provide them with access to the immediacy of that compelling attribute of ‘watchableness’ and the opportunity to give their lives a ‘density of meaning’, without relinquishing either. I argued at the very end of Chapter 5 that perhaps the most radical conclusion to be drawn from this study is that devotional leisure is actually the art of living. Like all other works of art, the art of living is also always a double: it is shaped by khôrasters and skholērs following two approved and practised life-strategies: this of felo de se aesthetic design (read: performativity) and that of immortalis interpretation (read: devotion). The former is a strategy geared towards revelation

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and the latter is a strategy geared towards conservation and restoration, of adapting new art forms from older ones. Some devotional leisure life-worlds may play one up and play the other down; but all devotional leisure life-worlds deploy these two strategies. The former is positioned as an individual attribute and tends to surface spectacularly, but it is not fundamentally personal since all those who practise their devotion together have the potential to share in its achievement. The latter is positioned as a collective destiny, but it also serves as a vehicle fit for personal fulfilment. To borrow an insight from Nietzsche (1954), someone who follows the path of devotional leisure, who becomes a personality, who is not only able to disrupt and transform established life practices by turning their own life into a work of art, but is someone who is also able to achieve a reconciliation with the impermanent world. This ‘tragic’ individual is a skholēr-khôraster who is able to combine the dispositions of ‘devotional leisure’ and of ‘performative leisure’, who is able to sustain tough ascetic practices as well as imaginative aesthetic ones in their leisure while knowing that this combination of effort cannot in itself guarantee any desired results since the secret of the meaning of life is unknowable and in the theatrical world of performativity ‘nothing is unimportant, because everything is important’, will at least have the compensation of serving as a double, a go-between, a mediating figure, a cultural intermediary for the leisure life-world that provides the conditions for the freedom of them and their culture. These two kinds of devotional leisure practice, which appear mutually exclusive and not always easily reconciled with each other, are perhaps best considered as aspects of a third endeavour, which I will call simply devotional leisure.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W. 11, 22, 69–72, 79–82, 92 Althusser, Louis 38 anthropotechnics (Sloterdijk) 11–12, 106–12, 159–60 Archilochus 55 Arendt, Hannah 78, 90 art of living, the 36, 55, 76, 110–11, 112, 117, 119, 122, 123, 156; and leisure vi–vii, 4–6, 17, 95–9, 102–4, 126, 153, 157–61 assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari) 57–9 Austin, John L. 119–20, 125, 128, 152–3, 155–6 authenticity vii, 11–12, 17, 27, 40, 46–7, 66, 91–4, 101–56 passim; inauthenticity 78; and sincerity 12, 124–8, 135, 143, 150–6 Badiou, Alain 44, 49 Barrau, Aurélien 9 Baudrillard, Jean 72–3, 88, 119 Bauman, Zygmunt vii, 3, 6, 8–9, 11, 15–16, 19–20, 22, 28, 29, 35, 36–7, 40, 43–9, 53–7, 59, 61–2, 65–7, 73–94 passim, 95–9 passim, 101, 103–4, 114, 124, 127, 130, 136, 138, 141 Beck, Ulrich 17–18 becoming versus being 12, 29, 49, 95–100 passim, 101, 128, 150, 156 Beilharz, Peter 90, 94 Benjamin, Walter 51, 73, 78, 102 Bennett, Alan 71 Berger, John 50, 57, 59, 108, 122 Berlin, Isaiah 55 Bingham, Kevin 106, 154–5 black metal music 136

Blackshaw, Tony 9, 22–3, 28–9, 33, 37, 41, 46, 67, 76, 142–3 Borges, Jorge Luis 145 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 11, 21–8, 31, 41, 75, 91, 108, 114, 157 Brewer, John 51–2 Burrow, Colin 42 Butler, Judith 120–1, 125, 155 Camus, Albert 78, 81 capitalism 2, 25, 34, 56, 65–94 passim, 96, 97, 121; neat capitalism (Rojek) 85 Caputo, John 89, 139–50 passim, 155 car cruising 28, 142–3 care of the self (Foucault) 5, 17, 103 class 2, 6, 8, 15, 18, 21–8, 41–2, 46–8, 54–7, 66, 70–90 passim, 95, 102, 108–11, 120, 122, 127; class consciousness versus consciousness of classes 132–3; middle class 36, 41, 87, 145; ‘poor, the’ 5, 21–35, 61, 81, 133; upper class 36, 41; working class 5, 9, 27–8, 32, 41, 87 cleaves 46, 148 Collingwood, Robin G. 51 community 4, 12, 28, 45, 47, 48, 78, 99, 105–6, 126, 128, 130–57 passim; attention community (Laermans) 123; authentic community, 150–3; cleave communities (Blackshaw) 148; community consciousness versus consciousness of communities 132–3; fantasy community 89; hermeneutic communities 130–4, 136; imagined community 109 Conrad, Peter 80 consumerism 11, 20, 34, 64–94 passim, 96–7, 121, 154, 159; commodity

172

Index

consumerism continued fetishism (Marx) 69, 72; consumer attitude (Bauman) 73, 75–6, 79, 90–1; consumer society 67, 73, 85, 89, 94, 123; consumer syndrome (Bauman) 66, 79; flawed consumers (Bauman) 81, 89; hegemonic consumerism 75–9, 121; market-mediated mode of life (Bauman) 66, 73–4, 78–9, 90, 92 contingency 29–30, 34, 53–5, 90, 128, 130, 150, 158–9; contingency-awareness 48; historical contingency 42; social contingency 36, 46–7, 49, 106; versus necessity 46, 98–9, 123, 127, 131–2, 158 Crabbe, Tim 28, 29, 142–3 Crowe, Benjamin 113 culture 2, 3, 7, 10, 39, 44, 48, 59, 68, 69, 70–5, 84, 85, 130, 133, 142, 149, 161; cultural arbitrary (Bourdieu) 24, 41, 91; cultural capital (Bourdieu) 23–4, 108; ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer) 69, 79, 93; cultural politics (Rorty) 51; culture as praxis (Bauman) 90, 92, 94; high culture 22; material culture 23; popular culture 70, 111–12, 136, 154; subcultures 111, 136; tragedy of culture (Simmel) 69 Danto, Arthur C. 16 Dasein (Heidegger) 27, 103, 151 death of God (Nietzche) 107, 115 Delany, Samuel R. 145–7, 152–3, 160 Deleuze, Gilles 58, 72, 147 Derrida, Jacques 30, 37, 44, 140, 146, 157 differend, the (Lyotard) 147–8 discursive formation (Foucault) 19, 20, 33, 35, 38–9, 42, 49 disembedding and re-embedding (Giddens) 123 disenchantment thesis (Weber) 11, 65–94 passim, 159 Diski, Jenny 40 disorganizations (Lash) 142 Douglas, Mary 97–8, 104 doxa 6, 19, 22, 45, 55, 112 Dudley, Will 156 During, Simon 92–3 Eagleton, Terry 44, 101 Eliot, Thomas S. 71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 57, 96, 102 Enlightenment, The 49, 61, 66, 68, 69, 92, 95–7, 107

enlightenment: rationalistic (Heller) 96; romantic (Heller) 65, 96 ethnomethodology 120 episteme (Foucault) 5, 19, 43–5, 48 Erlebnis 8 erotics of art (Sontag) 160 existentialism 49; existential choice 47, 113, 126–7, 134–5; existential freedom 135; existential leap (Heller) 46–7, 107–8, 112, 126–7, 151, 157; existential possibilities 9, 12, 27, 29, 125, 143, 151; existential security 125; existential truthfulness 127–8; existential uncertainty 103 fate and character (Bauman) 47–8 ‘felicity’ (Austin) 125, 128, 152, 153, 155–6, 160 Finnegan, William 136–8 flâneurie 73 Foucault, Michel 5, 19, 28, 38, 42, 52–3, 65, 73, 84, 97, 103, 112, 119, 128, 140–1, 145, 146 Frankfurt School 26, 33, 66, 67, 79–82 freedom 2–3, 6, 11, 17, 21, 26, 30, 41–2, 46–8, 51, 58–9, 61, 66–7, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 79–80, 88–93, 95–9, 101–8, 123, 126, 130, 132–5, 140–8, 154–5, 161 Frye, Northrop 50, 59 functionalist epistemic 5, 8, 15–20, 21, 31–2 fusion of horizons (Gadamer) 62, 152, 160; versus imaginary horizon 152–3, 160 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 62, 152 Garfinkel, Harold 120 Gasset, Ortega Y. 44 Geertz, Clifford 54 generative principles (Bourdieu) 28 Giddens, Anthony 45, 50, 55, 61, 103, 123 gift exchange (Mauss) 138 globalization 25, 53, 56, 67, 82–3, 87, 125, 138 gnothi seauton 101 Goffman, Erving 8, 119–21 Gramsci, Antonio 8, 48, 69, 97, 158 Guattari, Felix 58, 147 Guignon, Charles 103, 126, 152 Habermas, Jürgen 7 habitat (Bauman) 28, 35, 45–8, 76, 96 Hacker, Peter M.S. 56–7 Halperin, David 146–7

Index Hannah, Matthew 38 Harrison, M. John 158 Harvey, David 124–5 hedgehogs versus foxes 55–7 Hegel, Georg W.F. (1770−1831) 52, 129, 134, 137 Heidegger, Martin 27, 44, 49, 103, 113, 114, 151–2 Heller, Agnes vi–vii, 3, 46–7, 49, 52, 62, 65–6, 68, 84, 85, 91, 96, 98, 99, 101–2, 107–8, 112–14, 126–8, 129–35, 137, 150–2 hermeneutics 3, 10, 12, 61–2, 113–14, 124, 129–30, 137, 139, 150–3, 160; double hermeneutic (Giddens) 45, 50; hermeneutics and historical consciousness 130–4; hermeneutic communities (see community); hermeneutical leisure 114, 127, 135–6, 139, 150–3; hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics (Bauman) vi, 50–9, 62, 106; interpretation 160–1; limits of 143–6 heterotopia (Foucault) 12, 28, 65, 126, 128, 134, 140–1; leisure heterotopias 139–52, 160 Hochschild, Arlie 92 Hoggart, Richard 70–2 ‘home’ 5, 12, 52, 86–7, 99, 128, 129–30, 155, 156, 159–60; absolute spirit homeexperience (Hegel) 52, 134, 139; Heimleich (homely) 52; home and khôra 139–43, 152; home-experience 134, 136–9; leisure homes 99, 109, 139–43, 159–60 homo artista 94, 103, 107, 118 homo Bourdivinus 25, 107, 108 homo consumens 78, 94, 103 homo decadencia 103 homo faber 77–8, 94, 103 homo ludens 77–8, 94, 103 homo repetitivus 94, 103, 107 Horkheimer, Max 69, 71, 74 human zoo (Sloterdijk) 108–15 Husserl, Edmund 8, 45 ideal types (Weber) 54, 84 identity 6, 25, 29, 31, 35, 40, 41, 43, 66, 77, 78, 98, 106, 107, 112, 129, 131–3, 148, 154, 155 ideological state apparatus (Althusser) 38 IKEAization 85–9

173

Imaginary, The (Sartre) 141 indisciplinarity (Rancière) 59 individualism of singularity (Rosanvallon) 3, 5, 17 individualization 20, 101, 133 interregnum 7–8, 37, 42, 65, 95–6, 98, 101, 102, 131, 133, 158–9 intersectionality 2, 11, 21, 157 James, Clive 61, 94 Jameson, Fredric 71 judgement of taste 3, 15, 22, 23, 24, 74, 91, 112, 114, 123, 133 khôra 139–61 passim; and community 147–8; khôrasters 143, 147–50, 155, 160–1; knowledge and imagination 58–9 Kundera, Milan 76 Laermans, Rudi 123 Laity, Paul 79 Lash, Scott 142 Lebenswelt (Life-world) 8–9 legislators versus interpreters (Bauman) 15, 114, 132 LEGOLAND 34 leisure: authentic leisure versus consumerist leisure 3, 11, 67, 91–4; casual leisure 88; decentring leisure (Rojek) 6–7, 10, 18; devotional leisure vii, 4, 11–12, 101, 102, 104–6, 108, 112–14, 114–18, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 139, 143, 150–6, 157, 160–1; ‘devotional leisure’ vii, 11, 94, 96, 97, 99, 126, 127–8, 134, 135–8, 139–40, 150–6, 157–8, 160–1; IKEALeisure 67, 82–90; knowable leisure practices versus unknowable leisure practices 105; leisure and work 2, 3, 19, 31, 33, 41, 69, 71, 77–8, 81, 91, 105, 111, 126, 132–3; leisure as a value-sphere 12, 65, 113, 126, 127, 134–8, 139, 141, 150−1, 160; leisure bodies 88, 118–19, 142, 143–9; leisure homes (see home); leisure life-worlds 9, 12, 93, 96, 98, 99, 102, 108–10, 113, 118, 125, 127–8, 135, 157–61; leisure studies vi–vii, 15–35 passim, 49–55, 60, 111, 118, 152, 158, 160; Leisure Studies vi–vii, 15–35 passim, 43–9, 55–7, 61, 65–7, 91, 94, 96, 157–9; liquid leisure 54; McLeisure 67, 82–90; ‘performative leisure’ 7, 12,

174

Index

leisure continued 93, 96–9, 102, 104, 105–6, 108, 114–19, 125–8, 134, 139–53, 154–6, 160–1; serious leisure 88, 127; skholē 22, 91, 112–14, 139–40; skholērs 136–8, 155, 160–1; zombie leisure pursuits 109 Levinas, Emmanuel 9, 54 life-strategies: acrobat, the 111–18; felo de se aesthetic design 160–1; holidaymaker, the 98; immortalis interpretation 160–1 Lyotard, Jean-François 67, 121–2, 123–4, 147–8 Macey, David 19 McDonaldization (Ritzer) 67, 82–9 Maffesoli, Michel 123, 124 Mallarmé, Stéphane 59 Man Without Qualities, The (Musil) 29–30 Marcuse, Herbert 6, 69–70, 71 Marx, Karl 56, 67, 69, 72–3, 132, 144 Marxism 2, 10, 22, 25, 55–6, 73, 112 Mauss, Marcel 22, 138 meaning: deficit of meaning versus surplus of meaning 85; meaning and leisure 3, 6, 8, 33, 35, 52, 91, 112–13, 129–34; and life 4, 7, 17, 31, 44, 54, 65, 66, 68, 78, 93–4, 95–9, 129–34, 135, 138, 139, 150, 152, 160–1 metaphor 10, 19–20, 55–60 monsters and pets (Derrida) 30 Musil, Robert 29–30 Nancy, Jean-Luc 9 Nehamas, Alexander 4, 97 neo-liberalism 25 neo-tribes (Maffesoli) 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844−1900) vii, 7, 49, 106, 107, 125–6, 156, 161 open space-time (Lyotard) 123–4 partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible) (Rancière) 15, 37, 38–43 Pawel, Miriam 34 performativity 12, 28, 103, 106, 117, 118–23, 125, 127, 142–3, 147, 152–3, 155, 160–1; as revelation 123–5; ‘performative leisure’ (see leisure); performativity criterion (Lyotard) 67, 160; performativity versus performance 120–2; photography 22, 137, 156

Plato 15, 139, 145, 146; Plato’s Cave 57 police, la (‘police’ power) (Rancière) 39, 41 Poovey, Mary 70 postmodernism 2, 7, 10, 19, 73, 84 postmodernity 6, 10, 19–20, 25 Protestant work ethic (Weber) 81, 88–9, 107, 111, 132–3 pure being and pure nothingness 149, 158 ‘pure event’, the (Derrida) 37, 158 Rancière, Jacques 7, 5, 11, 15, 21, 26–33, 37–42, 49, 59, 62 Ranke, Leopold von 37 rationality 38, 41, 159; irrationality of rationality 83; iron-cage of rationalization (Weber) 68; means-end rationalization 68, 96; rationalization 11, 20, 65, 66, 68–74, 82, 93; value rationality versus purposive rationality 68 reality: ‘reality’ versus ‘irreality’ 105; Real, the 38–9 Reid, Douglas 95 refuge history (Brewer) 51–2 Ritzer, George 11, 67, 82–5, 120 Roberts, Ken 2, 7, 9–10 Robin, Corey 78, 90 Rojek, Chris 2, 6–8, 10, 18–19, 25, 28, 33, 60, 67, 77–8, 83, 84, 85–6 Rorty, Richard 10, 51 Rosanvallon, Pierre 3, 5–6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 103, 133, 141 Schiller, Friedrich von 65 Seabrooke, Spencer 116–18, 128 self-constitution and self-assembly (Bauman) 6, 17, 45, 48, 88 self-design (Sloterdijk) 6, 27 self-knowledge vii self-production 36 self-realization vi, 5, 11–12, 48, 97, 101–28 passim, 143, 151 self-regulation 28 self-transformation 17, 93, 95 Simmel, George 69, 123 Simmons, John 85–6, 88 sincerity and authenticity (Trilling) 124 skholē see leisure Sloterdijk, Peter vi, vii, 6, 11–12, 17, 25–7, 29, 32, 49, 59–62, 94, 95–100 passim, 102, 106–12, 114–19, 125–6, 128, 158–9 Smith, Nicholas 152–3

Index

175

sociality 20, 36, 43, 45, 48, 74, 78, 80–2, 133, 134 social control 11, 48, 68, 69, 73, 81–2, 95, 119 social inequality 1–6, 11, 15–35 passim, 36–61 passim, 91 socialization 48 sociological imagination vi, 9, 50, 52, 56, 58 Sontag, Susan 152, 160 spirituality 63–94 passim, 98, 102–3, 106–18 passim, 131–3, 136–8, 159; absolute spirit (Hegel) 52, 129, 134, 137, 139 Spracklen, Karl 136 Stebbins, Robert A. 88, 127 Stevens, Wallace 44, 156 strong ontologies versus weak ontologies 130–1 surfing 136–8 surveillance: Panopticonism 73, 81, 154; Synopticon 73, 81, 154

truth 15–16, 40, 49, 51, 53–4, 58, 102–3, 113–14, 119, 121, 125–7, 150, 152–3

Tillich, Paul 72 Timaeus (Plato) 146 TINA (There Is No Alternative) 34, 80 ‘tragic’ attitude, the (Nietzsche) 156, 161 transcendentalism 53, 96, 102 traversality (Delueuze and Guatarri) 147 Trilling, Lionel 124 Truth 58, 121, 135, 150, 152–3

You Must Change Your Life (Sloterdijk) 11–12, 106–7, 117, 126, 128

unaware alignment versus active commitment (Williams) 36 urban exploration 105–6, 154–6 value-sphere (Weber) 12, 65, 113, 134–5 Varcoe, Ian 48, 74 vita contemplativa versus vita activa (Sloterdijk) 117 Wallace, David Foster 94, 99, 118, 123 watchableness (Wallace) 94, 99, 118, 122–5, 128, 153, 155, 160 Weber, Max 11, 54 West, Mae 81 Williams, Bernard 104 Williams, Raymond 36, 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 56–7, 60, 106, 145 Woolf, Virginia 157

Zehrer, Hans 44, 101 Zeldin, Theodore 47, 97, 104–5 Žižek, Slavoj 39, 105 zombie category (Beck) 17–18, 35, 45, 72, 88

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