{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":220,"pdf_page":219,"physical_index":219,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"010814ff45f1844997d883ea5908665d4db78d7149a245591fc1a7a38a2ad2ef"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Historically, the idea of a ‘hobby’ has often served as a symbol of everything the critical theorist takes joy in hating about routinized everyday life. Adorno’s outraged response when asked by an interviewer about his hobbies tells pretty much the whole story:\n\nI have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now wide-spread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them. On the other hand, I have been fortunate enough that my job … cannot be defined in terms of that strict opposition of free time, which is demanded by the current razor-sharp division of the two . . . (Adorno 1991: 163)\n\nAdorno’s patrician distaste rests on two interrelated sins of routinization, both conventional for critical thought. Firstly, the hobby can only be defined in relation to the banal routinization of everyday life in the modern world. Everyday life is constructed within a larger routine division between public and private domains; in the case of the hobby, this is manifested in the structure of work versus leisure. Under capitalism, both sides of this structure are largely organized into routine practices, alienated and non-agentic. However, leisure carries an extra ideological burden, and critical animus, because it appears as a domain of freedom (free time, free choice, autonomous relationships) and yet it is entirely determined by the needs of capitalist reproduction: leisure is structured into consumerist choices required for the reproduction of markets; and into domestic chores required for the reproduction of workforces. Hence, Adorno’s view of everyday life as a sphere of recuperation, in which all forms of ostensibly autonomous pleasure are in fact deeply functional to systemic operation. What seems an expression of self-determination really immerses us deeper into neurotic and habitual adaptations to existing structures rather than producing an enhanced domain of consciousness and agency. At the same time, what critical theory finds most tragic about private activities, like hobbies and leisure, is their sheer insignificance: however important they are to actors experientially, they are socially inconsequential. We are therefore all trapped within private activities in which we seek our true meaning but which are trivial and socially marginal. Cohen and Taylor’s (1976) book Escape Attempts (its title itself states the case) is a wonderful exploration of this paradox of meaning and meaningless. The inconsequential and the routine character of the everyday are strongly connected in authors like Heller (1984): the problem with everyday life is that it is particularistic, it does not transcend one’s immediate environment in order to develop generic or species-specific human powers and capacities; rather, it is reified and habitual because of the structure of modern social conditions. In fact, Heller argues, everyday life does contain imaginative and creative practices, but these cannot be fully utilized within essentially repetitive and habitual mundane activities; this produces what she calls an unrealized ‘cultural surplus’.\n\n220\n\nDon Slater","previous_page":219,"next_page":221}