{"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":222,"pdf_page":221,"physical_index":221,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6358a36a2fa80544514e0beb69ad0accec17a6a7d95dddcdfc0b8082db74732d"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"I can only gesture at some key moments in that history. For example, the idea of a hobby first emerges as a popular label in the late nineteenth century from the English ‘riding your hobby horse’ – a persistent, almost uncontrollable, focus on a private obsession. Bicycle riding and snapshot photography in the 1890s and 1900s were structured, private activities that could attract obsessive involvement, and a worklike level of seriousness and commitment to what was – after all – a merely private and leisure enjoyment. In the 1930s, hobbies were prescribed for unemployed men to give structure and purpose to a life without public significance and pay. The hobby was both approved as socially responsible (an extension of nineteenth-century espousals of ‘rational recreation’ to both improve and control working-class men in the interest of public order) and at the same time seen to demean: to be involved in a hobby is to treat as serious and consequential what is really only a replication or simulation of ‘real work’, while at the same time the hobby structures and routinizes private, leisure time, and emasculates the working-class man. This latter theme continues strongly into the 1950s and 1960s, in which the hobby is seen as part of the feminization and domestication of the rising new middle-class men, as intrinsic to suburbanization: men are to return from the public world of work directly to their ideal home (and not by way of the pub); the hobby is designed to structure their time and activities in a home in which they have no pursposive activity under the prevailing gender division of labour. Indeed, hobbies were routinely discussed in terms of therapy (office workers and junior managers need hobbies to unwind after work so they don’t get ulcers) and in terms of keeping the man from getting in the way/under the feet of the home-making woman. The phenomenon of Playboy magazine in the late 50s and 60s is interesting in defining a new version of male consumerism that was libidinal rather than domestic, and not subordinated to the logic of suburban home-making routines (Ehrenreich 1983).\n\n‘Hobby’ was therefore a judgement upon those who believed themselves to have found a self-defined sphere of free and purposeful activity contained within a freely chosen sociality: in fact their activities are densely and obsessively structured, and in ways that replicate the world of work but without its reality and consequentiality. Hobbies are rather silly ‘escape attempts’ by people who believe themselves to be doing something serious and free but are in fact constrained by much larger structures (unemployment, suburban domesticity). The very framing of practices as hobbies is – within critical thought – a judgement on the inconsequentially routinized nature of everyday life.\n\nRoutine as Technique\n\nIn critical thought, the figure of the hobby brings out the intrinsic silliness of routine as a potential site of meaning, agency, consciousness or rupture. Adorno’s pride in ‘reading with all my attention’ inherently requires and asserts his rejection of the work/leisure dichotomy: to regard his own reading as a ‘hobby’ would routinize it as a stable practice within a stabilized diremption of the modern world. Even to frame his reading as routine – let alone to practise it as one – is a fatal surrender of critical consciousness.\n\n222\n\n• Don Slater","previous_page":221,"next_page":223}