Leisure, Consumption and a Blaze in the Northern Sky: Developing an Understanding of Leisure at the End of Modernity through the Habermasian Framework of Communicative and Instrumental Rationality

Abstract

The paradigm of leisure studies has struggled to explain the seeming paradox of leisure as action and leisure as constraint. On the one hand, the ghost of Mill allows human actors limitless opportunities to express their individuality within a set of moral and social obligations. On the other hand, the spectre of Marx points to a framework of social inequality hidden by ideological smoke and mirrors, in which we quietly consume our bread and circuses. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a theoretical framework to leisure based on the work of Habermas. Specifically, Habermas' theory of communicative and instrumental rationality is suggested as a way of understanding and defining leisure as (communicative) action and leisure as (instrumental) consumption. In establishing the Habermasian framework and linking it to leisure, the paper will then apply the framework to an analysis of a particular form of commodified leisure—extreme black metal music—to show that we can understand such leisure forms as attempts to resist passive consumption and establish new communities and social identities linked with Habermas' civic society. By restricting theoretical use of consumption to actions and practices associated with instrumental rationality, it will be shown that post-Marxist and liberal accounts of leisure can be reconciled. Furthermore, it will be shown that postmodern accounts of leisure may be fatally weakened by the retention of modernity as an explanatory tool.