Adorno on Free Time

To elucidate the problem I would like to use a trivial personal experience. Time and again in interviews and questionnaires one is asked what one has for a hobby. Whenever the illustrated newspapers report one of those matadors of the culture industry -whereby talking about such people in turn constitutes one of the chief activities of the culture industry- then only seldom do the papers miss the opportunity to tell something more or less homely about the hobbies of the people in question. I am startled by the question whenever I meet with it. I have no hobby. Not that I'm a workaholic who wouldn't know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies -that is, activities I'm mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time- if my experiences had not toughened me against manifestations of barbarism that have become self-evident and acceptable. Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would make a mockery of them. -T.W. Adorno, from his essay "Free Time" (1969)

If you can get past the apparently curmudgeonly veneer of this passage, there is a really interesting argument here. The first thing Adorno notes at the beginning of this essay is that the expression "free time" is itself a recent development, thus asking anything about it in abstraction from concrete developments in contemporary societies is a question without content.

What is "free time" for us? Adorno points out that in order for the phrase to even be intelligible, it must be "shackled to its contrary": free time is the opposite of "unfree time", or time "occupied by labor... [which is] determined heteronomously". In other words, the expression "free time" is meant only to mark off those time intervals in which we aren't working or laboring according to the dictates of some job or task whose imperatives issue from without.

As Marx argued, labor becomes a commodity in capitalist societies, that is, it becomes reified (i.e. it becomes thought of as an exchangeable object, rather than a contingent ensemble of social relations).

But the paradox is that free time, "which understands itself to be the opposite of reification, a sanctuary of immediate life within a completely mediated system, is itself reified like the rigid demarcation between labor and free time. This border perpetuates the forms of social life organized according to the system of profit".

Now, it's important to note here that it hasn't always been this way. Societies have been configured differently in different historical epochs, and the idea of "free time" or "leisure" would not have made sense within these social formations in the ways that it does in our society.

As sociologist James Fulcher points out:

Industrial capitalism not only created work, it also created "leisure" in the modern sense of the term. This might seem surprising, for the early cotton masters wanted to keep their machinery running as long as possible and forced their employees to work very long hours. However, by requiring continuous work during work hours and ruling out non-work activity, employers had separated out leisure from work. Some did this quite explicitly by creating distinct holiday periods, when factories were shut down, because it was better to do this than have work disrupted by the casual taking of days off. "Leisure" is a distinct non-work time, whether in the form of the holiday, weekend, or evening, was a result of the disciplined and bounded work time created by capitalist production.

But there was also another way in which capitalism was implicated in the creation of "free time":

Leisure was also the creation of capitalism through the commercialization of leisure. This no longer meant participation in traditional sports and pastimes. Workers began to pay for leisure activities organized by capitalist enterprises...The importance of this could hardly be exaggerated, for whole new industries were emerging to exploit and develop the leisure market, which was to become a huge source of consumer demand, employment and profit. [see Fulcher's excellent (2004) Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP)]

Now, although we've re-situated the idea of "free time" back into its social and historical context, we've still yet to say anything substantive about it.

The first question to ask is: what role does it play within contemporary societies?

For Adorno, the effect of contemporary capitalist societies is to "hold people under a spell", under "an existence imposed upon people by society" that is "not identical with what they are in themselves or what they could be". Now Adorno doesn't want to claim that we can or should make any simple division between "what human beings are in themselves and their so-called social roles". But the important point here is that the way that human beings behave/act under certain conditions is by no means inevitable, since those conditions could be changed. The crucial thing to note here is that social institutions could be otherwise, they could be organized according to different principles, and as a result we can imagine people in contemporary societies being very different as well. The upshot is that the generalized picture of the consumerist, egoistic subject is deabsolutized: it is not inevitable that people will behave in this way, that their desires be configured in this way, and so on.

Because capitalist processes have begun to colonized the spheres of leisure and culture, Adorno worries that "even where the spell loosens its hold and people are at least subjectively convinced that they are acting out of their own will, this will itself is fashioned by precisely what they want to shake off during their time outside of work."

In short, "unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most of the unfree people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own unfreedom". "The irony in the expression "leisure industry" is as thoroughly forgotten as the expression show business is taken seriously."

A peculiar development of the colonization of leisure time by the dictates of profit is that consumption itself has become a pastime. Think of the phrase "consumer goods". What are these? They are goods produced for consumption, that is, goods produced for the sake of the activity of consumption. Consumption itself is the purpose of this activity.

The "Teen Talk Barbie" strikes me as the perfect metaphor for the barbarism of this process. First consider that the doll's bodily proportions are perfect distillations of a set of oppressive norms prescribing what a woman's body "should" look like (incidentally, the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, concluded that "Barbie's figure would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to menstruate"). The "beauty" norms according to which Barbie is fashioned are ubiquitous, and contribute to the reproduction of the idea that women should think of themselves according to certain prescribed criteria.

Moreover, the "teen talk barbie", itself something people are expected to purchase, is programmed to say things like "I love shopping!", "Math is hard!", "Will we ever have enough clothes?".

It's as though, on a scale larger than Barbie dolls, we're called on by inert plastic objects on a shelf to think about ourselves and consumption in ways that are sick.

Happy Holidays! I've got to go get some shopping done before time runs out.

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Why is the new art so hard to understand?

The above is the title of a marvelous short lecture delivered by Theodor Adorno in 1931 (published in English for the first time in 2001 in Richard Leppert's (ed.) huge collection of all of Adorno's writings on music). Its striking how much is packed into this short piece. It is also very refreshing to read someone as erudite (and also, not accidentally, very challenging to read) as Adorno trying to answer this seemingly straight-forward question before a very wide audience. What's interesting is that Adorno's talk is not ostensibly addressed to philosophers, theorists, academics or artists. Rather, he addresses the general public who is confronted by artworks. Think of the 'average' person wandering through a museum.

The first thing he does is delimit the scope of the talk to a specific sense of the question ('why is the new art so hard to understand?'). After all, what is "the new art' and what does he mean by 'hard to understand?'. Adorno has in mind art that is specifically modern in the "sense that it is accompanied by the shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form, the shock that is actually the basis of all the talk about its being hard to understand."

Whatever we might say about 13th and 14th century European painting, for example, the content and formal characteristics of such works are, more or less, readily intelligible to a modern Western audience. A straight-forward representational painting, or even better a painting trying to achieve perfect mimesis, would hardly strike the average viewer as shocking, strange, enigmatic or confusing.
We wouldn't expect any person on the street to say of a painting by Michelangelo or even Monet, for example, 'that's not art'. In contrast, it would not be difficult to imagine this same 'average' person on the street standing before a Pollock, or a Richter, or Rothko, Stella, etc. in a confused (or, perhaps indignant and resentful) fashion, perhaps even wondering whether there is anything of value about such works (if they are even to be considered 'art' in any meaningful sense at all). I'm reminded of numerous times when I stood before works of this sort in a state of confusion: what is this about? what is going on here?
In other words, "older art", as Adorno points out, "possesses a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, while this immediacy is no longer present in the new art, and hence some kind of helping operations are required in order to penetrate its center."

For Adorno, this experience of difficulty derives from the fact that the production of art, artistic material, the demands and tasks that confront the artists as they work, etc. have all become divorced from consumption. That is, artistic production has been divorced from "the presumptions, claims and possibilities of comprehension that the reader, viewer or listener brings to the works of art." Another way to put this would be to point out that artistic production in modern capitalist society (in contrast to other eras in which artistic production was explicitly embedded in other life-activities), art is removed from all immediate use and thus from all immediate comprehensibility. After all, "art for art's sake" is not a call to make art conform to the demands of daily life activities (e.g. to force works of art, on pain of dismissal as 'useless', to have some immediate purpose such as getting stains out of clothing).

Hostility to 'modern' works of art (be they paintings, music, etc.) takes many forms, but one common reaction I've observed is the impulse to point to the past as an era (before things took a 'wrong turn') which must be recovered. I am reminded here of certain types of conservatory-student musicians, totally hostile to Webern or Berg, who might instead recommend a recovery of tonality or a return to the 'beautiful' music of earlier (Romantic, in particular) periods. Schoenberg's music is 'bad', for example, to the extent that "the chords, which are built in many layers and do not have a given function within a given key, cannot be repeated as arbitrarily as the old ones, or because the rhythms cannot be combined into regular, symmetrical forms".

Another way to characterize this attitude would be to posit the history of Western music as a continuous, internally coherent progression which made sense until the isolated aberration of artists associated with 'modernism'.

Adorno points out, however, that the relevant consideration here is not the psyche of modern artists (as deviant individuals, or as having orchestrated this 'wrong turn' into smug incomprehensibility), but rather the socio-economic situation of contemporary society itself. The difficult, challenging character of modern artworks, for Adorno, is "the result of a socio-economic development that transforms all goods into consumer goods, makes them abstractly exchangeable, and has therefore torn them asunder from the immediacy of use." In modern art's struggle to maintain its own autonomy from the demands of 9:00-5:00, from the banality of mass markets, it has generally endeavored to abjure the dictates of 'use' altogether. In earlier societies, art was bound up with ceremonial and religious functions; this is no longer the case in contemporary culture. Whereas most all consumer products (themselves a strange development: 'products made for the purpose of consumption') retain some inkling of use-value, art is purportedly exceptional precisely to the extent that denounces all considerations of 'use' in this sense.

Why is modern art alienated from use? Adorno rightly points out that to "describe how this alienation came about would be nothing less than to sketch the history of our society". But what is it about contemporary society, then, that accounts for this divestment from use and this struggle to preserve art's particularity? As suggested earlier, For Adorno it has to do with the separation of production from consumption. Production tends to behave in a way that expresses the tensions and contradictions of existing social relations prevailing in a certain society. Production, through being directly subjected to these forces often becomes the site of calls for change. Consumption, in contrast, tends to "lag behind in unchanging existence, because it does not posses the force of production, which would point beyond what is unchanging; socially consumption is merely produced without itself seriously helping to produce -and only mirrors relations whose primary need is to maintain themselves". In other words, the methods/trajectories/goals of producing tend to be a site of change more so than the tendencies of consumption. Consumption is in important respects more conservative and passive (think of someone sitting in front of a TV) whereas production tends to play a more active role in shaping/changing current consuming habits (think of the production of the TV shows in question). The interaction between the two, however, is not a one-way street. Without getting into too much detail here, the relationship is dialectical (they mutually interact with each other and causation does not proceed linearly from production to consumption). Nonetheless, 'dialectical relationship' does not mean that production and consumption are equally efficacious with respect to the other. Moreover, we must not only consider the dialectical interplay between production and consumption, but also the internal dialectic between different modes of production throughout history (i.e. the ways in which certain productive activities are influenced by/reactions to/caused by earlier productive activities).

I've taken this discussion astray a bit, so let me try to bring it back to Adorno's point about the separation of consumption and production and its consequences for art. In impressionist art, or the music of Wagner, for example, the "lines between consumption and production had not yet been cut... but were merely wired in a more complicated way... in Wagner the preexisting schema of a harmony, which always grows out of a tension and resolution, did not emerge from the work itself but was still carried by social tradition." The shock that accompanied cubism and futurism, in contrast, was qualitatively different from the "agitation over Wagner's supposedly wrong notes, or the supposed daubings of the Impressionists". The radical break between consumption and production as it regards modern art of the early 20th century, for example, was such that art no longer "had the task of representing a reality that is preexisting for everyone in common, but rather of revealing, in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety; and that, in so doing, it repels reality". [my emphasis]

But must art be divorced from use? Why can't art continue to be embedded in the life-activities of contemporary society and take a form that is both useful and immediately comprehensible? The answer is that it can and in many cases it does; but what are the political stakes in doing so? The "really useful art, which serves the purpose of distraction -entertainment reading and kitsch prints, blockbuster films and hit dance tunes - is historically innocent and, despite all apparent timeliness of content, formally on a technical level this material is long out of date." Thus, even as certain cultural artifacts have an immediacy that seems to suggest how timely they are, they are 'historically innocent' in that they recycle old forms and endlessly re-issue slightly modified and repackaged forms as new and exciting. This repetition, banality, etc. is a feature of our current social/economic order. So,also, is this 'historical innocence' (a mode of repression, of forgetting) in which knowledge of the processes (read: political and economic struggles) by which 'we arrived at the present situation' is omitted.

Thus, rather than opting for complicity and unreflective (i.e. conservative) affirmation of the current state of society, progressive and avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century have sought to resist the current order. Its another issue entirely how successful their strategies have been. But perhaps we could relate this question to the issue of the 'difficulty of the new art'. Consider the following objection. If art is so difficult, obscure, inaccessible, challenging and so on, that it is in many ways "secluded, off by itself", how could it play a politically progressive role if so few people can be affected by it? Adorno is worried about this problem and he notes that the "separation of art from reality endangers art itself... [this seclusion] threatens to become ideological -to be self-satisfied in a muffled, petit-bourgeois way, to forget its supportive human function, ultimately to become petrified into bad guildmanship." The danger here, in part, is that contemporary art could become all of the things that its philistine detractors love to say about it. But clearly this danger cannot be remedied by "arbitrary adaptation to the state of social consciousness... by reversion to older, outlived and outmoded way of proceeding" for in so doing art would sacrifice consciousness of itself, a sacrifice no critical art can afford to make. Moreover, we should not assume that the political solution to this problem can be solved by art alone, for it cannot. The economic/social conditions would themselves have to be changed as well; thus it is hardly a progressive position to simply chastise art for failing to 'reach out to all people as they are'. For the material, economic and political conditions would have to be different for such a widespread 'reaching out' to be a progressive move at all: it would require that the stark work/life (work versus leisure) divide of modern capitalism be abolished, that people "independent of privilege, be able to spend their leisure time occupied substantively and extensively with artistic matters." For things to be different, there would have to be an abolishment of the "demonically precise mechanism of advertising and anesthetization that -in every moment of people's leisure time- prevents them from occupying themselves with actual art".

Art alone cannot secure such a change in material conditions, but this is not to say that such conditions cannot be changed by any means. Recognizing the role that the social/economic structure of society plays in circumscribing the efficacy of art as political resistance requires also recognizing that many consumption-related 'needs' and desires are themselves the congealed effects of social/economic order on people's consciousness.

For Adorno, the argument that "the public wants kitsch" is dishonest. The need for "bad, illusory, deceptive things is generated by the all-powerful propaganda apparatus", to put the point in slightly overstated terms. In addition, the need for relaxation (instead of seeking out, during leisure time, cognitively challenging/demanding activities) is justifiable, but only because so many people are forced into "circumstances that absorb their strength and time in such a fashion that they are no longer capable of other things."

He ends the lecture with an imperative: "Let no one come back with a rejoinder about the slothful nature of human beings. For the suspicion is not so easily allayed that the consciousness of the person who responds in this way is more slothful than those on whose behalf he is responding."

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