{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":138,"pdf_page":146,"physical_index":146,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"68c0b098058017f11899bd40119d72603957fb4a0536c784c6118ee0410a4817"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Transition, published almost a decade later, describing the “master formula” at play in Middletown (and by extension in American industrial capitalism more generally) as “Work = money; money buys leisure. Non-work = loss of opportunity to make money, and therefore loss of opportunity to buy leisure.” They continue, “It is thus that pecuniary culture transmutes even leisure into its own terms” (Lynd and Lynd 1937 p. 294). The Lynds are drawing attention here to the commodification of all dimensions of life, but especially of leisure, in a town in which most people got their living by selling their labor. As social life became increasingly mediated by money transactions, a process at the root of which lay the growing importance in all aspects of life of the wage relation, so the meaning of everything became “strained through a pecuniary sieve.” The point about the commodification of life, how leisure became mediated by money, seems clear enough and very much in tune with standard criticisms of capitalism. Yet what is peculiar and interesting in the Lynds’ account is the suggestion that this “pecuniary straining” was not a source of disenchantment but rather a means by which an otherwise quite alienating form of life, and especially work, became imbued with “vital meaning.” What might it mean for the wage to endow deadening work with “vital meaning”? A wage taken in nominal terms is just a number, perhaps functioning like points in a game. But while accumulating money in this nominal sense might serve as a measure of relative success for the archetypal Weberian capitalist, something so abstract would hardly seem suficient to imbue alienated wage work with vital meaning. And how could money in its nominal form secure the idea of fair compensation for work? Money construed as an end-in-itself is surely much too abstract and anemic to make up for the real deficits—of freedom, time, self-ownership, and so on—incurred through subjection to the labor process.19\n\nAssuming that the Lynds were on to something in their analysis—that the filtering of deadening wage labor through a “pecuniary sieve” did indeed somehow redeem the otherwise deeply alienating activity of labor—surely this efect must be explained by the use of money to buy wage goods, in conjunction with the particular meaning taken on by those goods in the notionally free sphere of consumption. I suggested in the last chapter that in order for the equivalence between work and wage to be established, and some semblance of moral balance restored to wage-labor exchange, the wage must be converted into goods, framed as congealed reserves of potential activity. If that is right, then the flow of influence that the Lynds describe in their analysis of leisure, from the wage / money economy to the form of life of the community, travels in both directions. While wage labor leads to the commodification of various aspects of life, at the same time, deadening labor becomes retroactively reanimated through the conversion of wage money into objects seemingly endowed with a vital power. Consumption, when directed at the possession of empowering objects, thus projects an animating meaning back on work.\n\n138\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":137,"next_page":139}