[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

Wed Jan 10 01:45:07 EST 2007

I'm forwarding this debate to some other interesting people I know, I hope
it is not against netiquette. Nathan is the blogger beind Swarming Media,
which deals a lot with networked identity, Pat Kane wrote the recent Play
Ethic which deals with this very issue of the blurring between work and
leisure; and Adrian focuses on relationalit.

Perhaps Trebor can point to the url of the previous threads around this
topic?

See 1) http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Relational ; 2) www.*
swarmingmedia*.com <http://www.swarmingmedia.com>; 3)
www.the*playethic*.com<http://www.theplayethic.com>
As a general remark to Jean's thoughts, I think that many of concepts and
practices we refer to are contested terms, they are both emancipatory, and
part of the existing system of alienation, it's not <or> but <and, and>, and
it is up to us to work, with our human intentionality, for these practices
to move towards autonomy-in-cooperation.

I think many of us have experience with 1) the classic work/employee
paradigm (which is both alienating but can be interesting/passionate as
well); 2) being independent entrepreneurs (being slave to the market, while
attempting to follow's one purpose/passion; 3) having sabbaticals, which is
both leisure and related to 'future work'.

In that context, 'just reading a book', and this is why I like Hardt/Negri's
take on this, are in fact also 'immediately productive', again a point that
points towards the dissolution of the work/leisure boundary in our times,

While I find the distinction of interest, I think it is also part and parcel
of the alienating industrial/capitalist mode, and therefore problematic in
its usage,

Michel

On 1/10/07, Jean Burgess <jean at creativitymachine.net> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone, long-time lurker, etc. I've really enjoyed the
> discussions on this list so far. To introduce myself, I'm completing
> a PhD called 'Vernacular Creativity and New Media' at Queensland
> University of Technology. But rather than being too long-winded, I'll
> just point you to my research blog: http://creativitymachine.net
>
> A few thoughts:
>
> I believe that Rojek's appropriation of 'serious leisure' comes from
> Robert Stebbins, who is generally credited with coining it, and he
> has explored it across several books. As well as two other categories
> - from memory, they were 'casual' and 'project-based' leisure, I
> think.  I definitely have my doubts as to how far those distinctions
> can be pushed in relation to contemporary new media participation, or
> 'convergence' culture, but still, it's important work.
>
> Also, I may have missed it being mentioned in this discussion, but
> two or three years back there was a lot of attention given to the
> Charles Leadbeater's work for Demos on the 'ProAm' phenomenon - which
> is most definitely describing purposeful, ambitious, persistent forms
> of non-professional participation across a range of domains (science,
> research, sport, creative practice). The main point being that
> voluntary, 'serious leisure'-based forms of participation are now
> central, not peripheral, to the market and government.  The report is
> available as a free pdf download here:
> http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/proameconomy/
>
> But again, I'm not at all sure that 'casual', ephemeral forms of
> participation, especially en masse, aren't even _more_ important (or
> perhaps should be, especially from an 'ethical' perspective) than the
> 'serious' or 'proam' ones.
>
> And, as others have suggested, probably one of the most pressing
> issues is the tension between the idea of participation as agency or
> enfranchisement, and participation as a form of free labour that is
> required before we even appear to _exist_.  An opposition that is
> probably too stark in the face of real experience, but some of the
> debates around this stuff at least tend to assume it exists.  So,
> inspired by the recent holidays, what about the right to 'useless
> unemployment' - forms of leisure that require an investment in time
> but leave no commodities behind - time spent reading books, say?
>
> Cheers
> Jean
>
>
>
> On 10/01/2007, at 5:05 AM, 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
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> >> (distributedcreativity.org)
> >> iDC at bbs.thing.net
> >> http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >>
> >> List Archive:
> >> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
> > (distributedcreativity.org)
> > iDC at bbs.thing.net
> > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >
> > List Archive:
> > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at bbs.thing.net
> http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
>
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>

-- 
The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer
alternatives.

Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at
http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html;
video interview, at
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20070110/34b58059/attachment-0002.html