It's the long weekend in South Australia and the start of the school holidays, so many of those who were not in Melbourne for the AFL final, are out and about in relaxing in Victor Harbor. They are walking the beaches, going to the cafes and restaurants, and hanging out on the balcony's of the beach houses with their friends.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, dogs Bluff, 2007

It's a moment of leisure time used to recover from the effects of work time --a profit oriented social life' a moment that avoids the market's version of leisure time (eg., that offered by the the entertainment industry). This time off work that helps us to fit into business life is what Adorno called free time.

Adorno argued in his 'Free Time', essay that the apparent separation of work and free time is only maintained because free time is needed for recreation, to recreate labour power: this explains its importance in bourgeois society, and the way in which it is seen to express a relation of opposition to work.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Middleton, Fleurieu Peninsula, 2007

In the 'Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno argue that:

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. All amusement suffers from this incurable malady.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Middleton Beach, Fleurieu Peninsula, 2007

Comments

Posted by: Pam | October 2, 2007 12:37 PM