Re-Imagining Leisure Studies

Tony Blackshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138494220
• eBook ISBN: 9781317482475
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 Leisure Studies 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, 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.

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 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-first-century 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.

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 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 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 shape-shifting 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 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 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 r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction – the issues at stake
• 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
• Conclusion
• References
• Index