Abstract
The starting point of this article is that the ultimate objective of sociology so far as the study of leisure is concerned should be with understanding the ways in which twenty-first century modern men and women attempt to reconcile the demands of individuality and community (aka freedom and security) by focusing on what they choose to do when they can do anything at all. The first introductory part sets up the rest of the article by offering a brief critique of the sociology of leisure which operates with the somewhat startling assertion that in modern societies leisure is largely consumerist in orientation and that as a result freedom is a fiction. Counteracting this assertion with a startling one of its own it is subsequently argued that the twentieth century interregnum saw modernity radically revise its modernity which led to a transformation in the power of human agency and emergence of the insistent voice ‘I too am in individual’. Taking as its starting point Peter Sloterdijk’s reading of Nietzsche’s imperative to ‘Become who you are’ articulated passionately in his book You must change your life (Sloterdijk 2013), the second part of the article argues that in the twenty-first century terms like authentic leisure and consumerist leisure, work and leisure are not antithetical to one another, and there is a radical need to rethink how people give meaning and order to their lives though their leisure pursuits. Here the article explores the relationship between Sloterdijk’s concept of anthropotechnics, the art of living and leisure. The next part of the article fleshes out the theory of devotional leisure which is one part of a more embracing project set out in the book Re-imagining leisure studies (Blackshaw 2017). Here the article explores two contrasting ways of understanding devotional leisure practice, namely ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ by drawing respectively on the examples of surfing and car cruising. The article concludes with an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory forms of devotional leisure practice with a discussion of urban exploration, speculating that their uniqueness to one another is never absolute, and the more you perceive their particularity, the more you understand their double nature, as simultaneously aspects of a third endeavour.
Highlights
It was over a century ago that Friedrich Nietzsche made his famous attacks on the abstractness and artificiality of the academic philosophy of his day and called for an impious alternative which would do justice to the most important concern of any free person which, as he said, is to ‘Become who you are’
Individuals have been experimenting with new forms of life over the centuries, Sloterdijk argues, with the interregnum we realize that we are ‘beings for whom being is a question’ who want to determine our own worlds rather than be determined by the social, economic, political or cultural situations in which we find ourselves
As is evidenced in a massive literature straddling cultural studies, leisure studies and sociology, subcultures burst onto the scene in no uncertain terms at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century and emerged in the form of life-worlds to do with leisure, consumer choices, lifestyles, with class, gender, generation and sexuality, and involvement in political movements playing a key role
Summary
It was over a century ago that Friedrich Nietzsche made his famous attacks on the abstractness and artificiality of the academic philosophy of his day and called for an impious alternative which would do justice to the most important concern of any free person which, as he said, is to ‘Become who you are’. As is evidenced in a massive literature straddling cultural studies, leisure studies and sociology, subcultures burst onto the scene in no uncertain terms at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century and emerged in the form of life-worlds to do with leisure, consumer choices, lifestyles, with class, gender, generation and sexuality, and involvement in political movements playing a key role These two tendencies become the two metaphors of twenty-first century spiritualization: sport as a symbol of acrobatic achievement and popular culture as a locus of devotion which ‘covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency’ (Sloterdijk 2013, 38). This is because the major needs of leisure value-spheres are neither progressive nor accumulative but concerned, to repeat, with companionship and solidarity which together provide the necessary conditions in which individuals render meanings to their joys and sufferings, through the connection of the ways ‘I’ say ‘yes’ to my vocation; that is, we keep ourselves culturally alive through the continuous absorption and digestion of the spiritual nourishment that our value-sphere cooked up in the past and continues to serve us in the present
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