[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

[molly wright steenson]

Architect Cedric Price's entire body of work deals in various ways  
with the notion of leisure. His 1963 Fun Palace was proposed to  
provide for new needs for leisure in a postwar society; the Generator  
project (1977-79) provided for open-ended leisure yet if its elements  
were not used frequently enough, the site would reprogram itself when  
it got bored. Leisure is about distortion. Boredom plays an important  
role here.

(If you're interested in Generator, let me know: there is little  
available online or anywhere about it. I spent 2 weeks in the  
Canadian Centre for Archive researching it; it's the subject of my  
thesis. It is too big for me to email.)

On Jan 9, 2007, at 2:05 PM, andrew mount wrote:

> Ever heard of Ivan Illich's 'the right to useful unemployment and its
> professional enemies' (ISBN:0714526630)...
> Its perhaps a forerunner to some of these ideas. I believe he  
> follows up the
> thread in  "shadow work', which may be more well known.
> A
>
>
> On 1/8/07 7:57 PM, "Ryan Griffis" <ryan.griffis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 7, 2007, at 11:02 AM, idc-request at bbs.thing.net wrote:
>>
>>> This is the intellectual market dialectic as I see it - As more  
>>> noise
>>> flourishes, one has to be on lists, blogs, etc constantly - the
>>> more the
>>> better.  On the other hand, this consumes one's life to point where
>>> there
>>> can be nothing but practice.
>>
>> Patrick's post called up some recent reading - Chris Rojek's "Culture
>> and Leisure" (2000), where he has a pretty thorough analysis/history
>> of criticism surrounding leisure and work. This discussion on the
>> list seems to be covering some similar territory...
>> Rojek talks about 2 kinds of leisure (borrowing from someone, whom i
>> can't remember) - "Serious leisure" and "casual leisure" - serious
>> being the kind of activity that is focused and "beneficial" to life
>> goals (participating on lists, or going to art museums for example),
>> casual being things like drinking and surfing the tv. He does a
>> pretty good job of critiquing this dichotomy while finding a use for
>> classifying leisure time. Most significantly, he discusses the need
>> for an "ethics of leisure" to help shift things from the "work ethic"
>> that dominates US life especially. he marginally gets into the
>> implications of distributed technology upon both of these "ethics",
>> mostly using the cache of Western critical theory surrounding
>> rationality and commodity fetishism (predominantly the Frankfurt
>> School).
>> he also goes over some post 1970s theories that attempt to solve the
>> problem of work, following post industrial criticism (Galbraith, etc)
>> - namely in ideas like guaranteed wages, decreasing work hours,
>> redistributing wealth to narrow the income gap, etc. he has some good
>> criticism of these as solutions, especially the idea that more
>> leisure time wouldn't improve many peoples' lives without developing
>> a radical ethics of leisure. he goes a little too far in the
>> direction of arguing "human nature" as a barrier to solving wealth
>> inequities for my predisposition, but he makes some valid points
>> nonetheless.
>> anyway, i thought i'd throw out another discourse around ethics that
>> seems to intersect with the discussion here...
>> best,
>> ryan
>>
>>
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