Even as the world accumulates ‘devices’ of leisure — resorts, clubs, package tours, entertainment parks, restaurants, computer games, etc. — people feel that they have less time for leisure. This is inevitable, because of the way we understand leisure.
Despite its roots in the Latin ‘licêre’, which means ‘be permitted’, leisure is understood as the withdrawal from activities and work rather than a permission to do things. In short, the term, as it is constructed today, is basically part of the work/leisure binary. This is problematic. Once leisure becomes the other of work, it can only run after work, trying desperately to catch up and largely failing to do so. Because, even if it is celebrated, it remains impossible: leisure ends up being either that empty space where one does not really act (work) or that mirage one is always working to reach. In the latter sense, which predominates, the only way to obtain leisure is to work more in order to work less one day. So, the more leisure one wants, the harder one works.
The fisherman and businessman
In Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Hartmut Rosa begins with an illuminating story: A rich businessman, who is on vacation, passes a fisherman sitting on a flat seaside beach and fishing with an old fishing rod. The businessman finds the fisherman stupid or incomprehensible. He suggests that the fisherman should fish further out at sea. What for, asks the fisherman. Then you will catch more fish, the businessman replies. What for, asks the fisherman again. Then you will earn more and buy better equipment. What for? Then you can catch even more fish. What for? Then you can sell more and buy a boat. What for? Then you can make more money and buy a fleet of boats to do the fishing for you. What for? Well, replies the businessman. Then you can fish at your leisure. But I am already doing that, answers the fisherman.
Rosa rightly points out that the story appears a bit naïve and is not actually circular: “The fisherman has to fish because that is how he makes his living and has no alternative. The rich entrepreneur, on the other hand, can fish, although he can also do a thousand other things. The expansion of our horizon of possibility is thus an essential element of the promise of technology.” If, however, we see this reading of the story as signifying a difference between a world in which there is no leisure and no work and a world in which there is leisure and work, then we might look at the matter in a different way.
Shredded moments of leisure
Some Indian English writers have done so. These authors have noted or shown in their fiction how Indians tend to have, or have had, a different notion of leisure. I agree and disagree with some of these portrayals. Indians, or at least Indians on the fringes of capitalism, did not have a different notion of leisure. They simply did not have separate areas for work and leisure. They could walk a colleague into their drawing room for a chat and make him the ‘uncle’ of their kids, but also let their children run about in their working spaces. (This was not a solely Indian phenomenon, by the way.) To some extent, this is still the case in smaller places, but it is dying out.
But what happens to this space — the mythical fisherman’s space, where there is neither leisure nor work and there is both leisure and work — once we return to it after we have computers and iPhones that can enable us to take work home, as is widely prophesied and celebrated? Do we then return to something like the mythical fisherman’s world?
The answer is no. By bringing work home, you do not get more leisure. Actually, the work/leisure binary gets refracted into even smaller bits. So instead of five days of work and two days of leisure, or eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours of (presumably) leisure, you have a crazy quilt of chopped-up work/leisure. Your time is divided into smaller bits of work/leisure, where work essentially takes over. This chopping up of time also seems to make time speed up, leaving you with less time. The mythical fisherman remains impossible. Leisure has become a hectic movement away from work, and one works desperately in order to have these shredded moments of leisure.
If one returns to the lost meaning of the Latin etymology, then, actually, we have moved further away from this significance of leisure. The interpretation of work and leisure not only leaves us running to make space for leisure by working more, it also makes it impossible to experience time and place in the sense in which that mythical fisherman did — because he had neither leisure nor work, and he had both at the same time. What he could do was concentrate on time, space and his activity which was neither work nor leisure. This gave him more time.
Tabish Khair is a novelist and academic who works in Denmark