The question of free time—what people are to do with it, what possibilities its development offers—cannot be posed in abstract universality. The expression “free time,” incidentally of recent origin—formerly one said “leisure” [Muße], and it was a privilege of an unconstrained life and hence surely also something qualitatively different, more auspicious—refers to a specific difference, that of unfree time, time occupied by labor and, one should add, time that is determined heteronomously. Free time is shackled to its contrary. This opposition, the relationship within which free time appears, even shapes some of its essential characteristics. Moreover, and far more importantly, free time depends on the totality of societal conditions. That totality now as much as ever holds people under a spell. In reality, neither in their work nor in their consciousness are people freely in charge of themselves. Even those conciliatory sociologies that apply the concept of ‘role’ like a master key acknowledge this fact to the extent that the concept, borrowed from the theater, hints that the existence imposed on people by society is not identical with what they are in themselves or what they could be.1 Certainly no simple division should be attempted between human beings as they are in themselves and their so-called social roles. The roles extend deep into the characteristics of people themselves, into their innermost composition. In the age of truly unprecedented social integration it is difficult to discern anything at all in people that might be other than functionally determined. This has important consequences for the question of free time. It means nothing less than that, even where the spell loosens its hold and people are at least subjectively convinced that they are acting of their own will, this will itself is fashioned by precisely what they want to shake off during their time outside of work. The question that would do justice to the phenomenon of free time today would surely be: What will become of free time in the context of the increasing productivity of labor, yet under persisting conditions of unfreedom, that is, under relations of production that people are born into and that prescribe for them the rules of their existence nowadays just as much as they ever did? Free time has already expanded exorbitantly, and thanks to the inventions in the spheres of atomic energy and automation, which by no means have yet been fully exploited economically, free time should increase enormously. Should one try to answer the question without ideological asseverations, then the suspicion is unavoidable that free time is tending toward the opposite of its own concept and is becoming a parody of itself. 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.
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 about 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 experience 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 be a mockery of them. And conversely, my work, the production of philosophical and sociological studies and university teaching so far has been so pleasant to me that I am unable to express it within that opposition to free time that the current razor-sharp classification demands from people. Certainly I am well aware that I speak as someone privileged, with the requisite measure of both fortune and guilt, as one who had the rare opportunity to seek out and arrange his work according to his own intentions. That is not the least important reason why there is no strict opposition between my activities within and outside of circumscribed working hours. If free time would really finally become that state of affairs in which everyone would enjoy what once was the prerogative of a few—and compared to feudal society bourgeois society indeed has had some success in this direction—then I would imagine the situation along the lines of the model I observe in myself, although under altered conditions this model would change as well.
If we assume with Marx that in bourgeois society labor has become a commodity and that labor consequently has become reified, then the expression hobby* amounts to the paradox that this condition, which understands itself to be the opposite of reification, a sanctuary of immediate life within a completely mediated total system, is itself reified like the rigid demarcation between labor and free time. This border perpetuates the forms of societal life organized according to the system of profit.
Today the irony in the expression “leisure industry” is as thoroughly forgotten as the expression show business* is taken seriously. It is widely known, but therefore no less true, that specific phenomena of free time, like tourism and camping, are established and organized for the sake of profit. At the same time the difference between work and free time has been branded as a norm into people’s consciousness and unconscious.2 Because, according to the reigning work ethic, the time free from labor is supposed to regenerate labor power, the time bereft of labor—precisely because it is merely an appendage to labor—is separated from the latter with puritanical fervor. Here one comes up against a behavioral pattern of the bourgeois character. On the one hand, one should concentrate when at work, not be distracted, not fool about; this used to form the basis for wage labor, the precepts of which have been internalized. On the other hand, free time should in no way whatsoever suggest work, presumably so that one can work that much more effectively afterward. This is the reason for the idiocy of many leisure time activities. And yet, surreptitiously the contraband of behavioral mores from work, which never lets go of people, is being smuggled in. In the past school reports used to contain grades for the child’s attentiveness. This corresponded to the subjective, perhaps even well-meant, concern of the adults that the children might overstrain themselves in their free time: that they not read too much, or stay up too late in the evening. Secretly parents sense an unruliness of mind or even an insistence upon pleasure that is incompatible with the efficient organization and division of existence. Besides, any sort of mixture, anything not unambiguously and cleanly differentiated, is suspicious to the prevailing spirit. The strict bifurcation of life extols the very reification that meanwhile has almost completely subjugated free time.
This can be seen readily in the ideology of hobbies. The casualness of the question of what hobby* you have also has the undertone that you must have one, if possible even a selection of hobbies* that matches the supply offered by the leisure industry. Organized free time is compulsory:3 woe unto you, if you have no hobby, no leisure time activity; then you are a drudge or an old-timer, an eccentric, and you become the laughingstock of society, which imposes upon you its idea of what your free time should be. Such compulsion is by no means only external. It is linked to the needs of human beings living under the functional system. Camping, which was a favorite activity in the older Youth Movement, was a protest against the tedium and conventionalism of bourgeois life.4 One wanted to get out, in both senses of the word. Sleeping under the open sky meant having escaped house and family. After the death of the Youth Movement this need was taken up and institutionalized by the camping industry. It could not compel people to buy its tents and trailers, along with innumerable accessories, were there not some longing for such items in people already, but business functionalizes, extends, and reproduces their need for freedom; what they want is being imposed upon them once again. That is why the integration of leisure time succeeds so smoothly; people do not notice in what ways they are unfree even in the areas where they feel the most free, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.
If the concept of free time, in contradistinction to labor, is taken in as strict a sense as it had in an older and today perhaps obsolete ideology, then it acquires a vacuous, or as Hegel would have said, abstract aspect. An exemplary instance is the behavior of those who let themselves roast brown in the sun merely for the sake of a tan, even though dozing in the blazing sun is by no means enjoyable, even possibly physically unpleasant, and certainly makes people intellectually inactive. With the brown hue of the skin, which of course in other respects can be quite pretty, the fetish character of commodities seizes people themselves; they become fetishes to themselves. The thought that a girl is especially attractive erotically because of her brown skin is probably only a rationalization. The tan has become an end in itself, more important than the flirtation it perhaps once was supposed to entice.5 If employees return from vacation without having acquired the obligatory skin tone, then they can be sure that their colleagues will ask pointedly, “But didn’t you go on vacation?” The fetishism that flourishes in free time is subject to additional social control. The fact that the cosmetics industry contributes its share through its overwhelming and inescapable advertising is just as obvious as is the ability of complaisant people to repress it.
The state of dozing in the sun represents the culmination of a decisive element of free time under the present conditions: boredom. Thus insatiable too is the spiteful ridicule about the marvels people promise themselves from vacation trips and other exceptional situations in their free time, whereas even here they do not escape the repetition of the ever-same; no longer are things different in the distant horizon, as they were still at the time of Baudelaire’s ennui.6 Ridicule of the victims is automatically associated with the mechanisms that make them victims. Schopenhauer early on formulated a theory of boredom. Faithful to his metaphysical pessimism, he held that either people suffer from the unfulfilled desire of their blind will or become bored as soon as that desire is satisfied.7 The theory describes quite well what becomes of people’s free time under the conditions Kant would have called ‘heteronomy’ and that are customarily called ‘external determination’ in the modern jargon; even Schopenhauer’s arrogant remark that people are the factory wares of nature expresses in its cynicism something of what people are actually made into by the totality of the commodity character.8 The angry cynicism, however, still metes out to human beings more honor than the solemn asseverations of man’s imperishable essence. Nonetheless Schopenhauer’s doctrine should not be hypostatized as something universally valid or even perhaps as the original constitution of the human species. Boredom is a function of life under the compulsion to work and under the rigorous division of labor. Boredom need not necessarily exist. Whenever behavior in free time is truly autonomous, determined by free people for themselves, then boredom rarely sets in; boredom is just as unlikely when people successfully follow their own desire for happiness as when their free time activities are reasonable and meaningful in themselves. Even fooling about need not be inane and can be enjoyed blissfully as a dispensation from the mechanisms of self-control. If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not harnessed to the eternal sameness, then they would not have to be bored. Boredom is the reflex reaction to objective dullness.9 The situation is similar in the case of political apathy. Its most compelling cause is the by no means unjustified sentiment of the masses that their participation in politics, for which society grants them some latitude, can change little in their actual lives, and moreover in each and every political system of the world today. The connection between politics and people’s own interests remains opaque to them, and therefore they shrink back from political activity. The justified or neurotic feeling of powerlessness is closely bound up with boredom: boredom is objective desperation. At the same time it is the expression of deformations meted out to people by the constitution of society as a whole. The most important of these surely is the defamation and atrophy of the imagination. Imagination is as much suspected of being mere sexual curiosity and the desire for what is forbidden as it is suspect in the eyes of the spirit of science that has nothing more to do with spirit. Those who want to adapt must increasingly renounce their imagination. Yet most often the imagination cannot be developed at all because it is mutilated by the experience of early childhood. The lack of imagination that is instilled and inculcated by society renders people helpless in their free time. The impudent question of what the people are supposed to do with the abundant free time they now supposedly have—as though free time were a charity and not a human right—is based on this helplessness. The reason that people actually do not know what to do with their free time is that they have been deprived beforehand of what would make the state of freedom pleasant to them. That state of freedom has been refused them and disparaged for so long that they no longer even like it. People need superficial distraction, for which they are either patronized or reviled by cultural conservatism, in order to summon up the energy for work that is demanded from them by the organization of society defended by cultural conservatism. This is not the least important reason why people remain chained to labor and to the system that trains them for labor, although the system itself to a large extent no longer requires labor.
Under the prevailing conditions it would be absurd and foolish to expect or to demand of people that they accomplish something productive in their free time; for it is precisely productivity, the ability to make something novel, that has been eradicated from them. What they then produce in their free time is at best hardly better than the ominous hobby*: the imitation of poems or pictures that, under the all but irrevocable division of labor, others can produce better than the leisure time enthusiasts. What they create has something superfluous about it. This superfluousness is imparted to the inferior quality of the product, which in turn spoils any pleasure it might give.
Even the superfluous and senseless activity undertaken in free time is integrated into society. Once more a societal need plays a part. Certain forms of service, especially of domestic service, are dying out, demand is disproportionate to supply. In America only the truly wealthy can maintain domestics, and Europe is following closely behind. This causes many people to practice subaltern activities that formerly were delegated to others. The slogan “Do it yourself”* [tue es selbst] takes this up as practical advice, though it also takes up the weary exasperation people feel toward mechanization, which unburdens them—and this fact cannot be disputed, rather only its usual interpretation—without their knowing how to utilize their newly acquired time. Thus, once again in the interests of specialized industries, people are encouraged to do themselves what others could do better and more effectively for them and what, for this reason, they must in turn despise deep down. Moreover, the belief that one might save the money spent for services in a society defined by the division of labor belongs to a very old stratum of bourgeois consciousness; the belief is founded on stubborn self-interest blind to the fact that the whole mechanism maintains itself solely by the exchange of specialized skills. Wilhelm Tell, the heinous prototype of rugged individuality, proclaims that an axe at home spares the carpenter, and one could compile from the maxims of Schiller an entire ontology of bourgeois consciousness.10
The Do it yourself*, a contemporary type of leisure time behavior, occurs within a much more extensive context. More than thirty years ago, I described such behavior as ‘pseudo-activity.’11 Since then pseudo-activity has expanded to an alarming degree, even, and especially, among those people who believe that they are protesting against society. In general one may suppose that this pseudo-activity corresponds to a pent-up need to transform the petrified relations of society. Pseudo-activity is misguided spontaneity. Misguided, but not by chance; rather people dimly sense how difficult it would be for them to change the burden that weighs upon them. They prefer to let themselves be distracted by spurious, illusory activities, by institutionalized vicarious satisfactions rather than to face the realization of just how much the possibilities for change are blocked today. The pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the productivity society on the one hand incessantly demands and on the other hand confines and in fact does not really desire in individuals at all. Only people who have become responsible for themselves would be capable of utilizing their free time productively, not those who, under the sway of heteronomy, have become heteronomous to themselves.
Free time does not, however, stand in opposition only to labor. In a system where full employment in itself has become the ideal, free time is the unmediated continuation of labor as its shadow. We still lack an incisive sociology of sport and especially of the sports spectator. Some insight nevertheless is furnished by the hypothesis that the physical exertion required by sports, the functionalization of the body within the team*, that occurs precisely in the most popular sports, trains people, in ways unknown to them, in the behavioral techniques that, sublimated to a greater or lesser degree, are expected from them in the labor process. The old argument that one does sports in order to stay fit* is untrue only because it pretends that fitness* is an independent goal; fitness* for labor, however, is one of the clandestine purposes of sport. In sport frequently people first inflict on themselves, and savor as a triumph of their own freedom, exactly what they then must both inflict on and make palatable to themselves under societal pressure.
Let me say a few words about the relationship between free time and the culture industry. Since Horkheimer and I introduced the concept more than twenty years ago, so much has been written about the culture industry as the means of domination and integration that I would like to single out a specific problem we could not get an overall view of at the time. The critic of ideology who turns his attention to the culture industry, if he assumes that the standards of the culture industry are the encrusted ones of old-time entertainment and low art, will tend toward the view that the culture industry concretely and utterly dominates and controls both the conscious and the unconscious of the people at whom it is directed and whose taste during the liberal era first gave rise to the culture industry. And there is reason to speculate that production regulates consumption in the process of mental life just as much as it does in the process of material life, especially where the former has so closely approximated the latter as it has in the culture industry. Thus one might want to claim that the culture industry and its consumers are perfectly matched to each other. But since in the meantime the culture industry has become total, a phenomenon of the eternal sameness from which it promises to distract people temporarily, it is doubtful that the culture industry and the consciousness of its consumers make an absolutely symmetric equation. A few years ago at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research we conducted a study devoted to this problem. Unfortunately, because of more pressing tasks it was necessary to postpone a full evaluation of the material. Even so, a provisional examination of it reveals some things that might be relevant to the so-called problem of free time. The study followed the wedding of Princess Beatrix of Holland and the junior German diplomat, Claus von Amsberg. The study’s aim was to determine how the German population reacted to the wedding, which was broadcast by all the mass media and endlessly recounted in the illustrated papers.12 Since the mode of presentation as well as the articles written about the event lent it an unusual importance, we expected that viewers and readers would likewise take it seriously. In particular, we expected to see the current characteristic ideology of personalization come into play, through which—apparently as compensation for the functionalization of reality—individuals and private relations are endlessly overvalued in contrast to their actual societal determinants. With all caution, I would like to say that those sorts of expectations were too simplistic. The study offers a virtual textbook case of what critical-theoretical thinking can still learn from and how it can be corrected by empirical social research. It was possible to perceive symptoms of a double consciousness. On the one hand, the event was enjoyed as a hic et nunc, what life otherwise withholds from people; it was supposed to be, to use one of the favorite clichés of modern German, “unique.” To this extent the reaction of the spectators conformed to the well-known pattern that transforms even the topical and possibly political novelty into a consumer good by the way the information is conveyed. But our interview format was such that the questions seeking to elicit immediate reactions were supplemented, as a control, with questions focusing on the political significance the respondents gave to this highly touted event. The results revealed that many of those interviewed—we shall leave aside the question as to how representative they were—suddenly behaved completely realistically and criticized the political and social importance of the same event that in its much-publicized uniqueness they had gazed at in breathless wonder on their television screens. Thus, if my conclusions are not premature, whatever the culture industry sets before people in their free time is indeed consumed and accepted but with a kind of reservation, similar to how even ingenuous people do not simply take events in theater or cinema to be real. Perhaps even more: such things are not completely believed. Apparently the integration of consciousness and free time has not yet wholly succeeded. The real interests of individuals are still strong enough to resist, up to a point, their total appropriation. This would accord with the societal prognosis that a society whose fundamental contradictions persist undiminished also cannot be totally integrated into consciousness. It doesn’t happen smoothly, especially not in free time, which surely appropriates people but, according to its own concept, cannot do so completely without overwhelming them. I’ll forego a description of the consequences, but I think that there is a chance here for political maturity that ultimately could do its part to help free time turn into freedom.