The extent, structure and intrinsic quality of time free for consumption follow from what is produced and from the working conditions in which it is produced. 'The long arm of the job'still continues to reach into life, of course, but it becomes longer and more mediated. How time free for consumption is spent today, what is done in it and how, has resulted from two initial conditions: from one's own working conditions and from the nature of consumer goods and services, i.e. of that which others produce. They bear within them their built-in 'time', which makes certain temporal demands on all those who want to consume them. Where the work processes can be temporally uncoupled, optimized and above all intensified, the same will also be true of the chosen leisure activities. Where consumer goods bear within them their built-in, pre-produced and programmed complexity for the self-development of the user, where every kind of sport has its own outfit, kit, and practice and journey times, where every hobby insists on assuming a professional character and together with free time a lifestyle’ and a corresponding feeling are propagated, consumption becomes the mimicry of production and cannot do much more than follow the given times. It used to be the content of work, its duration and burden, which moulded – in an immediate and unprotected manner – the remaining time, which was preeminently experienced as time free from work. What could be done in it was, like a cruel parody, dictated by work, for which the content and the structure of free time were only able to fulfil a compensatory role. Today, it is admittedly still one's position in the hierarchy of income and qualifications in the labour market, and the job patterns connected with it, which are dominant in the choice of freedom of consumption and its activities, but these are joined by the mediation via consumer goods and by the time structures built into it. The time for consumption becomes independent as part of a comprehensive process of social differentiation. But unlike the potlatch and other festivals which were held in tribal and agrarian societies, the festivals in industrial societies are rationed in terms of time and mostly of brief duration. They tend to become everyday routine themselves, which then sparks off the desire for new festivals which are themselves soon submerged in everyday routine again. In contrast also to the former alternation between maximum labour intensity and idleness, resulting from a primarily task-oriented division of time which had imposed on agrarian societies an irregular system of time adapted to the rhythms of nature, the tendency today is rather to extend labour intensity to the idleness which has become time free for consumption.
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Politics of Time