(see Version 1.1 of this card)
Topology threads all spaces together, cave after cave, each as ludicrous as the next. No wonder people find their leisure as dull as their work — leisure is work. How times change…. Karl Marx: “The working-day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labor-power absolutely refuses its services again… Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of… bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) — moonshine!”* But that moonshine has become legitimate business. The free time available for education, culture, sport, even faith, were once the hard-won fruits of labor’s struggle to free time from work. This free time gave rise to heterotopias of sport and art that at least held the intoxicating illusion of autonomy from the necessity of work. Now they become work, disguised as games, just as games become the disguise of work itself. The sporting metaphors and slogans migrate from leisure to work — and back again. They cease to be metaphors and become mere descriptions, in a language stripped of any terms other than those of competition. Almost every moment is swept into a relentless agon.
Well Prof. Wark, as a result of your fascinating lecture at McGill people will actually comment on the hidden paragraphs of your work now. That was an incredible presentation, despite what some of the Q&A session goers would’ve had you believe.
As for this particular point, I’m not entirely sure if the alternate heterotopias such as sport and art and faith that you describe are really completely and uniquely separated from work; for example, sports and faith require just as much personal, emotional, and often financial labour and effort as typical work involves. This in turn makes the distinction between work and play all the more arbitary, and makes the idea of financial renumeration all the more critical to our distinction between labour and leisure.
All of that said, that was still quite the lecture and this paragraph surely fulfills it’s duty as the unit of thought
Alex, thankyou for your kind words. Yes, the work leisure distintion does become more and more arbitrary, i think. Hence the collapse of the heterotopias of play into the atopia of gamespace.
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