Stuart Hall wrote that race is the modality in which class is lived. To a large extent the same is true about time—that is, through our relationship to how our time is apportioned, we concretely engage with the realities of class, but often without knowing it. And all the more so because we experience the time of our life as a continual interaction not with abstract categories but with concrete, personal, existential questions: our finitude, the need for choices, the commencement and closure in defeat or success of so many life projects. Ours is Job’s complaint, a general, universal one: “Now my days are swifter than a post. They flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships, as the eagle that hasteth to the prey.”
But if one is a Marxist, it is indeed the case that an abstract category, but no less effective for being such, does control our time—abstract labour, realized as abstract value to the ferocious tempo of the capitalist production process. The greater number of us, even in the first world, spend a large part of our day doing work over whose conditions and purposes we have no control. This doesn’t mean we might not have any variety of our attitudes towards our work, but that in it, it’s the valorization process that speaks, that acts, and what we think about it (what anyone thinks about), is systematically sidelined. This is the insight unpacked and expanded in Martin Hagglund’s book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which argues that our freedom is based on our ability to choose how to apportion our time, individually and collectively, whereas capitalism recognizes maximizing profit as the sole criterion for such decisions. Because of this, Hagglund says, only a socialist democracy is capable of making us truly free subjects.
I read Hagglund’s book in 2020, which is when I decided to write an essay like this one, about how we think about free time: how we experience and make use of it. I wrote two paragraphs of that essay, set it aside, and woke up this morning three years older. Despite my claims for individuality, those intervening three years can be explained easily through impersonal economics: time one spends unemployed, that is, in the reserve army of labour that gives businesses a labour pool that can be set in motion as needed and that drives down wages; time spent in education, improving one’s economic prospects through certification, networking, and the like; time spent at work, making money for one’s employer; time on necessary but non-waged labour like cooking, which accrues particularly to women; and as a kind of pendant, that time that is truly one’s own, free or leisure time. Marx himself, and Hagglund follows him, made free time the very index of communism and full human development: “In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” he writes in Capital. Only beyond the time we spend producing for our daily needs “begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
Yet what free time we have under capitalism doesn’t always feel so fulfilling, like “the oasis of unmediated life within a completely mediated total system” in Adorno’s words on an essay on free time. It is odd that, despite a long-term trend in first world countries towards less work hours and more free time, there are high self-reported rates of stress and busyness and often a generalized nostalgia for a fictive past with more free time. How is it that we can look back fondly on the wastoid layabouts of the movie Slacker, or that Mark Fisher can long for the return of the endless days of unproductive leisure called up by the music of the sixties, when we ostensibly have more free time than these people had? And wasn’t the pandemic supposed to free us all up to pursue our projects— wasn’t there supposed to be some explosion of artistic production in music, arts, and writing? What happened to all that?
Part of the answer is simple: money. Linklater’s slackers are the beneficiaries of cheap rents and a fairly prosperous society, and thus live on their savings or work a few shifts each month while spending the rest in luxurious torpor. Similarly, according to Fisher, the heights of cultural production in Britain during the sixties and fifties were the product of a generous social democratic welfare state that gave people the financial freedom to create art on modest lifestyles. Since 2008, those days are over, and if spells of unemployment or bare employment were worth it for some portion of the waged class, these are certaintly felt as much more fraught and financially dangerous.
But another part of the answer as supplied by Adorno, the part that is in some sense decisive for a member of the salariat or laptop-job class like me, is that our free time is not really so autonomous from the inferno of capitalism; in our free time, the realm of necessity seems to have its revenge on the realm of freedom. As Adorno argues in his essay, our “free time” in civilized society is systematically captured by the leisure and culture industries and subjected to a welter of confused demands: that we be productive in some sense, but absolutely not productive in another; that we escape from society but at the same time not contest it; that we do things authentically, but with the aid of any number of commodities. For Adorno, hobbies are “pseudo-activities” that weakly respond to our demand for autonomy and free creation, but in a hobbled and limited form. Our hours of free time are no longer the measure of our freedom because capitalist prerogratives cannibalize and vitiate our use of it.
This analysis, at least in its broad outline, can be brought up to date by analyzing the transformation of the affective texture of our free time under the time economy of neoliberalism—and this was perhaps the capstone theme of Mark Fisher’s writing. Who else has captured the soporific drear of unemployment, the hassle of dealing with call centre bureaucracy, the enervation brought on by a commercial landscape filled with tabloids and surveillance cameras? In Capitalist Realism and his blog k-punk, Fisher diagnosed the “twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus,” exacerbated by social media and cellphones, that afflicts us during and after work. I sometimes think that it’s not until I’ve been reading a book straight through for half an hour that I sink into its temporality and can give it my full focus, and I remember a professor who taught me The Republic and, in explaining the Forms, said that after getting off his phone he feels like he’s coming out of the world of art that Socrates degraded as mere shadows of shadows, twice removed from the Forms. In this affective system, the generative boredom that provides the space of meaningful activity is frayed and replaced by a nebulous anxiety, and all the more when we aren’t working.
This change in the texture of our free time is part-and-parcel of the objective disruption of the barrier between work and leisure hours, value production and rest time. Whereas the Fordist regime honoured this separation, today, the creation of value (in quasi-Hardt & Negri-speak) is spread out in increments and woven into daily tasks; you are on call for work emergencies, for instance, and make Twitter money when you browse past its ads in the supermarket checkout, with deleterious consequences for your attention span and your inclination to engage substantively with hobbies. According to a New Statesmen report, “On a weekend in 1974, for example, someone could expect to spend over five hours on leisure activities, broken up into four episodes across the day. Each of these episodes was, on average, over an hour long. By 2014/15, the number of leisure episodes had increased to seven, but only added up to four hours overall. This means the average length of a “leisure episode” has fallen from one hour 15 minutes to just 25 minutes.”
The issue can be thought of from the side of the stuff we consume in our free time as well. The saddest line for me in Adorno’s very gloomy essay is this: “At best what they [amateur artists] then produce in free time is scarcely better than the ominous hobby – the imitation of poems or pictures which, given the almost irrevocable division of labour, others could do better than these amateurs.” It is no secret that time and money are the prerequisites for the production for “useless” art, and for centuries such art was produced by aristocrats who, removed from the demands of labouring, were able to apply themselves at an intense level to making music, texts, and paintings. Think of Mozart’s musical training beginning age four, or the education in Greek and Roman history and culture that was the special provenance of European aristocrats while the children of industrialists studied engineering, science, and math. These artworks are, of course, inextricable from the social systems from which they arose. ”They owe their existence,” Benjamin writes, “not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But this does not eclipse their great value for culture-lovers (it’s worth remembering that Marx loved music and often read and re-read such classics as Shakespeare, Dante, and Aeschylus).
Nor are such considerations outmoded in a post-feudal society, where corporate largesse and state funding play equivalent roles to rich patrons or others’ “anonymous toil.” In the case of movie-making, it has long been acknowledged that the lack of a national Canadian cinema is aggravated by state-based underfunding, and it’s no coincidence that the most well-known Canadian filmmaker this side of Sarah Polley, David Cronenberg, produced his early seventies works under the aegis of government grants; nor is it a coincidence that the Toronto New Wave of the eighties and early nineties coincided with expanded funding by the Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC) and the Ontario Arts Council, abruptly cut off by the ascension of the Tories to provincial power in 1995. Even corporate interests can be more or less amenable to non-commercial considerations, non-commercial production techniques. The use of AI technology in re-shaping media and reducing the troublesome influence of actual artists, writers, directors, which I’ve written about previously, is one of the primary issues in the ongoing Hollywood strikes. These are strikes about decent working conditions and salaries. They are also strikes about making decent movies and TV, strikes about the quality of what you consume in your free time.
Taken to the limit and in its ideal form, the neoliberal time regime looks like this: hours and hours of free time endlessly shredded by intermittent work demands, by affective demands from your phone and money, and by anxiety over the money you spend guiltily on hobbies, so that we are all so many Actaeons being torn apart by the hounds of our own worries and untamed impulses. And the media that we look to on lonely evenings for surcease from such anxiety, what you enjoy in those hours that you have to yourself—art, books, movies, TV shows, music—all created and served to you by engagement algorithms in form if not literally—what make for our society’s “cultural treasures—these increasingly resemble, in the words of Pope Francis, “an immense pile of filth.”