Post-structuralist philosophies: Towards an etho-politics of everyday leisure practices

Abstract

This article draws upon Foucault's (1988; 1990; 1997) later work on ethics and subjectivity to consider Socrate's timeless question ‘how are we to live?’. In this way philosophy and leisure practices can be brought together to problematise and open up different ways of thinking about the nature of everyday freedom. Specifically, a case study of an Australian community garden project (Northey Street City Farm) outlines the transformative potential of leisure practices that are produced through emerging political formations and urban public spaces. Drawing upon a governmentality perspective (Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999) leisure is conceptualised as an etho-political practice of freedom that constitutes the self, and is constituted through, the complex discursive formations of advanced liberalism. As a public space Northey Street invites, and incites, participants to constitute themselves in particular ways as ethical subjects through leisure practices and power relations. This article adopts a deconstructive approach as it reconsiders certain assumptions about subjectivity and freedom that have informed leisure theory through a focus on the parameters of ‘activity, time, space and experience’. An etho-politics of leisure can open up alternate ways of thinking about the particular relationships between power and freedom that shape contemporary forms of subjectivity and social engagement.