In Chapter 5, on the connection between leisure and ethics, we highlighted the idea that leisure has an important role to play in searching for the good life – the existential ideal encapsulated in several core leisure concepts, from Aristotle’s skholē that is meant to help achieve eudaimonia, to Blackshaw’s liquid leisure that holds the potential for leisure-based art of life. Any ethics of leisure worth its salt will strive for some personally and contextually appropriate form of self-care, self-development, self-perfection, self-realisation and self-responsibility.
In this chapter and the next, we will investigate the possible beneficial role of leisure in realising such positive effects in a postmodern (or, following Blackshaw (2010), a liquidly modern) context. This chapter will focus on the individual, in particular self-expression and self-construal, and the next chapter will expand this account, dealing with the role of leisure in increasing communal well-being.
Recall that in several previous chapters, particularly Intermezzo I, Chapter 3 and Intermezzo II, we introduced and discussed the idea of post-modernity, and the central role of experience in it. There are two main strands of our analysis that we wish to develop from that point, and they will intertwine. First, the underdetermination of values in postmodernity (as exemplified in Blackshaw’s IKEAization – see Intermezzo II) means that people are forced to accept responsibility for their own well-being, for finding meaning and turning into reality whatever they consider to be ‘the good life’. They cannot trust the government or the Church to tell them what to do – they need to find out for themselves what ‘well-being’ means for them. The next section of this chapter will discuss some ideas about well-being relevant to this obligation, as effective ‘leisure-as-art-of-life’-activities would generally need to try and realise (aspects of) well-being.
The second strand has to do with what a person can do, using leisure specifically, to strive for meaning and well-being. After all, the interesting thing about the experience economy is that it presents people – consumers – with many experiences, many different stories that can help fill the void left by the removal of that singular, dominant truth. People, being the creatures of habit that they are, will still look for meaningful content and experiences to replace the meaning that religion and cultural traditions used to provide. One of the main sources of new forms of this content is leisure. An important part of that leisure content, in a form that is particularly effective, can be found in popular culture. In the examples below, we will briefly look at special forms of art, music and sports.
If people wish to look for whatever constitutes ‘the good life’ for them, leisure as art of life is an important domain to, first of all, determine what the subjective standards of ‘good’ are in this sense, and, second, to try and achieve some of the goals defined by those standards. In other words, leisure as art of life, as a way to realise the good life, will at some level be focused on improving one’s well-being.
On an intuitive and conceptual level, there is a certain logic or obviousness to the idea that leisure can increase well-being, if we consider that leisure is a domain for personal choice, of deciding to engage in activities and relationships with the intent of having pleasant, valuable and/or meaningful experiences. If the quality criterion of leisure practices is to have a desired experience, the consequences of engaging in leisure experiences are likely to be positive, if people are sufficiently experienced and skilled to use leisure resources in an effective way.
The relationship between leisure participation and well-being is visible in psychological data, with well-being often operationalised as life satisfaction. On the whole, psychological studies tend to show small positive correlations between leisure participation and life satisfaction, particularly in leisure pursuits that are socially and/or psychologically more activating (such as sports, hobbies, volunteer work), but also that there are significant differences based on age, gender and socio-economic status. A more robust positive correlation appears to exist between leisure satisfaction and life satisfaction, but here too factors like age, gender, ethnicity and employment status have a moderating effect. In sum, most leisure scholars suggest that positive leisure experiences can have positive effects on life satisfaction, but these effects are likely to be limited if other (negative) forces are in play that are considered to be more important than leisure – job loss, health problems, etc. (Kleiber et al. 2011).
To the extent that leisure is effective in realising well-being/life satisfaction, what about leisure is it that helps make it so? An important contributing factor to subjective well-being, according to Suh et al. (2009), is the possibility for self-construal: evaluating the extent to which one’s personal goals have been realised in a social context. In this process, people try to find a balance between personal values, desires and needs on the one hand, versus the content of the social feedback they receive on the acceptability of their desired and executed actions. Some cultures are more individualistically oriented (in Suh et al.’s research, the United States), whereas others are more collectivistic (in Suh et al.’s research, South Korea), so these cultural tendencies influence the strength and perceived importance of that social normative feedback mechanism (i.e. whether individual emotions or social approval are dominant in determining the extent to which someone is satisfied when reviewing their life).
Leisure provides a psychologically salient context for seeking out the kinds of activities that would result in a positive evaluation in such a socially mediated self-construal process. Because of the dominance of the factor of ‘freedom’ in leisure (as explored in Chapter 2), it stands to reason that people tend to choose what they would consider to be positively charged activities to fill their leisure time with. Vice versa, that can also mean that leisure activities are generally activities that can contribute to positive outcomes (e.g. personal or communal well-being).
There have been attempts to define what, in general, would count as ‘positive outcomes’, e.g. what kinds of psychological states would promote well-being and life satisfaction. There is a sub-discipline, or perhaps we should call it an approach, within psychology that concerns itself with these matters called positive psychology. ‘Regular’ psychology is often either neutral, or focused on pathology, i.e. what could go wrong with people, the afflictions people can suffer from, and what to do about them. In contrast, positive psychology studies those processes that tend to help individuals, social groups and institutions to flourish. Key figures in positive psychology are, among others, Ed Diener (referenced above), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman. The psychological processes that they focus their studies on include attachment, optimism, love, emotional intelligence, intrinsic motivation, gratitude, forgiveness, awe, inspiration, hope, curiosity, laughter, and flow (Gable and Haidt 2005).
More specifically focusing on well-being rather than positive psychological processes in general, we can note that in psychological research, the measurement of subjective well-being tends to focus on three components: a cognition-based judgement of life satisfaction, and two emotion-based evaluations – high positive affect, and low negative affect (Larsen and Prizmic 2008). The ‘life satisfaction’-dimension in this operationalisation has already been referenced above. In the sections below, we will make more explicit links to features of leisure practices and the positive affect/negative affect sub-factors. For now, we will conclude this very brief and cursory primer on (leisure-related) well-being by adding one additional element relevant to leisure: there are two kinds of well-being/happiness.
Throughout earlier chapters, we have been mentioning eudaimonia and hedonism. These are in fact two different kinds of happiness, and this distinction was first made by Aristotle. Eudaimonia is most obviously connected to the good life, since it refers to the kind of fulfilment that can result from engaging in meaningful activities; hedonism, by contrast, is about pleasure and momentary satisfaction (King 2008).
If we correlate these two kinds of happiness with leisure, we are treated to a form of the classical distinction between serious leisure and entertainment (as referenced in earlier chapters, e.g. as drawn by Stebbins 2007). In such a view, realising a state of eudaimonia would tend to be facilitated by serious leisure, working on self-development and personal projects with clearly defined goals. Hedonism would then be allied most smoothly with ‘fluff leisure’, lowbrow entertainment and popular culture, the consumption of which mostly serves to enhance positive effect, but like fast food, with rather limited and temporary nourishing effects.
An interesting suggestion to afford both kinds of happiness a role comes from King (2008), when she says that the most robust happiness comes from a process that we can, in some sense, understand as partaking in both kinds of activities. That is, she says that more important than striving for happiness as such is to develop a rich emotional life, and maturity. We do this not just via happy and fun experiences, but also by dealing with difficult episodes in our lives. Now, the modulation of the fallout of negative experiences can very well take the form of hedonistic pursuits. There is nothing inherently wrong with that: a well-chosen balance between simple fun and lofty self-development goals, i.e. a healthy combination of hedonism- and eudaimonia-related leisure activities, can help facilitate emotional resilience. And this state, of being at peace with oneself, is a strong predictor of life satisfaction.
In the remainder of this chapter, we will investigate the confluence of these factors. Recall that in Chapter 2, we suggested that leisure can be part of a kind of existential adolescence, a context in life where people learn about themselves and others by exploring boundaries. As we noted above, it is well documented in leisure literature that looking for pleasant experiences can help improve happiness and well-being. However, our point below will expand on that insight by exploring the idea that even edgy, hedonistic, perhaps even immature (in the eyes of some) and ‘lowbrow’ leisure consumption practices can actually help individuals achieve these ‘loftier’ self-balance and self-construal goals.
In his study of experience in postmodern society, Boomkens (1994: 202) claims that leisure recognises the void left by retreating rituals, traditions and meanings associated with premodern culture and religion, and fills it – mostly with conceptually light diversions in the form of entertainment. Divorced from their traditional meanings, the rites and icons of ancient festivals, artistic forms of expression and religious ritual are appropriated into a new, postmodern and post-capitalist industry which commodifies experiences, as we have already seen earlier (in Intermezzo II). In that sense, leisure diverts our attention away from rational analysis of our condition and (self-)consciousness, and towards indulging in momentary experiences and bodily sensations. The idea of these indulgences, this apparently hedonistic practice, is to help us find rest, distraction, relaxation and recreation. However, as an important insertion of nuance, Boomkens then takes care to note that this ‘dispersed attention’ does not mean that leisure is a blind and mindless celebration of base, animalistic desires. It can be, of course – sex, drug use, pure nihilistic hedonism and simple, meaningless fun all have their place in the leisure spectrum, and activities that fall into these categories can indeed, under some circumstances, be nothing more than the body doing what it wants.
However, there can be more to leisure, even if we take the role of the body (and body-based experience) this seriously. Boomkens says, in line with his analysis of the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, that he considers dispersed attention an important existential attitude towards our constructed, built environment, an almost casual way of understanding and inhabiting our cities and houses which allows us to call them ‘home’. Boomkens then extends this concept to the ideas of Wittgenstein, for whom this kind of dispersed, casual attention embodies a form of knowing that is fundamental to us as embedded creatures, which allows us to be somewhere, to accept and (at some level) understand how things are in our life and our surroundings.
Leisure can play a key role in that dynamic. Leisure allows us to lose ourselves – also to lose time, to lose worries, etc. – and find ourselves again – discover who we are or who we want to be – not despite but partly because it is connected to our base bodily desires. In each of the examples of leisure as a tool for self-determination that is mentioned below, the body and its associated sensations play a decisive role.
These examples, as we will see, are all also forms of edgework. Blackshaw (2010) describes edgework as leisure activities that people engage in to explore ‘the edge’, that domain of risqué or outright risky behaviour where boundaries – of ethics, aesthetics and/or safety – can be crossed and balances can be disturbed, all with the intent of experiencing something real and authentic. We will recognise the context within which this behaviour can emerge to be appealing to people from the description of the experience economy when we referenced Schulze (in Intermezzo II). In the experience economy, in which experiences are commodified and commercially exploited, most momentary experiences are too explicitly prepackaged, predictable and generic to be particularly appealing to those who are more adventurous. They will look for more extreme leisure pursuits to fill the void of absent authenticity.
This is how, then, we can see the value of edgework, i.e. extreme and ‘edgy’ leisure: when people go looking for something to compensate for the loss of authentic, deep and meaningful experiences that they (apparently) still need, many turn to leisure.
In this section, we will explore shock art, black metal and an extreme sport called murderball as examples of edgework. We will start with shock art.
Art production and art consumption are two very important and widespread leisure pursuits. Almost everybody listens to music, watches movies or reads books, and many people also produce such works in the context of a hobby. However, for such a common practice, art as a concept is notoriously slippery (Gardner 1996). Throughout the history of aesthetics, definitions of art have been characteristically divisive, and as diverse as the many forms of artistic expression itself. Art can exist in different forms – paintings, sculptures, buildings, books, music, movies, photographs, live or recorded performances – and have different objectives. That is, if a work of art has an objective at all, it could be imitation of the beauty of nature, expression of emotions, an attempt to convey a particular insight or feeling, or it could be designed to be something for the spectator to co-construct her own experience with.
Generally, though, we can say that at the core of an artistic project of creation lies the artist’s drive to make something that has an effect, intended or intrinsically emergent, and spectators will see or hear or experience this artistic work and make something out of it. Art, in that sense, invites the spectator to engage with the work, to participate, and thus the participant is affected: making a work of art means that ‘an inner life is put into an object and thereby clarified…. Others who understand that object will grasp what is articulated in it and how its components have been arranged to express precisely that’ (Lyas 1997: 218).
Just as not all feelings and emotions that people can have are nice and pleasant, will we see that apart from art that is intended to be beautiful, i.e. aesthetically pleasing, there is art that attempts to convey darker and nastier meanings. If Benjamin’s intuition about the aura of authentic art of the past being replaced by the shocks of (post)modern experience (see Chapter 6) is correct, then the domain of shock art might be particularly interesting to investigate.
Shock art, also known as transgressive art or subversive art, is art that intentionally crosses boundaries of ethics and/or aesthetics. There are many famous – and infamous – examples; here are a few of them. Yves Klein’s Anthropométrie de l’époque bleue (1960) possibly seems almost tame today: a large sheet being painted on by the artist, using naked women slathered in paint instead of paint brushes to make impressions of bodies and body parts. Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed (1974) featured the artist nailed through his hands (evoking the idea of stigmata) to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle, its engine being revved, depicting a clash of technology and religious iconography. Orlan’s Omnipresence (1993) featured the artist rather explicitly documenting herself undergoing excessive plastic surgery, to demonstrate society’s obsession with outward appearance. Ron Athey’s Self Obliterations (2008–2011) was a series of performance pieces in which the artist, being HIV-positive, conducted a series of bloody, sadomasochistic rituals on stage, including blood-letting and self-flagellation.
Rather far removed from what most art spectators would consider (aesthetically) ‘beautiful’ or even (ethically) acceptable, why would artists do this? What is the intention here? One suggestion would be to claim, mindful of Benjamin’s purported aura-to-shock transition, and the edgework concept discussed earlier in this chapter, that these forms of transgressive artistic expression are attempts to transcend the mundane, to capture or find or experience something that is somehow important. That does not necessarily sit well with more conservative ideas about aesthetics, in which there is or has been a transition of the meaning of ‘sacred experience’ from religion to aesthetics. That is, beauty in art expresses humanity’s loftiest ideals, and people use art to try and compensate for the absence of the traditional transcendent ideal, which was the religious drive towards something higher. Art which embraces ugliness as readily as shock art appears to be doing something different.
Roger Scruton, a philosopher specialised in aesthetics, is not very forgiving of these transgressive artistic endeavours. Scruton (2009) argues that in the past few decades, there has been a flight from beauty, or perhaps even a ‘cult of ugliness’ in modern art. He understands this as a symptom of postmodern stimulus addiction, a hunger for shocks, which he sees as pathologically similar to sex addiction, in the sense that it disassociates the physical satisfaction of base animalistic needs from the higher purpose and beauty that sex can have. By making this distinction, Scruton of course subscribes to a familiar normative assumption, which we will remember from the distinction between serious, meaningful leisure versus leisure as ‘mere’ entertainment, or in the culturally ubiquitous Platonic/Christian ideal of ‘mind over matter’.
Scruton sees this cult of ugliness leading to a paradoxical cult of nihilism:
The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty.
(Scruton 2009: 160)
Here we see the ‘mind over matter’ theme extended to a normative distinction between high art and low art, where defining some art as ‘high’ opens it up to iconoclasm. That is, in this conception, beautiful, good, technically and conceptually accomplished art then becomes a target for nihilistic ridicule, just as religion, or politicians, or celebrities, or anything else that appropriates for itself a particular status, authority and/or sacredness, can be a target of derision in the postmodern context where any and all norms can be claimed to be contingent.
Scruton has a point, but there is a more subtle point to be made. Certainly, in the hunger to create something new or exciting, especially in a world where social media creates new fads every day which drive out the fads of yesterday in the public’s increasingly brief attention span, a lot of very poor, very ugly and sometimes even harmful ‘art’ is created in the hasty hustle to be or stay relevant. However, transgressive art, or forms of popular art which utilise some of the same kinds of imagery, content and concepts, can have aesthetical or philosophical merit. We will make this point using the example of black metal momentarily.
Even art theorists who are more sympathetic to the merits of ‘low’ art sometimes remain trapped in the classical conceptual and normative schemata. About horror movies, Cokal (2010), for instance, claims that a confrontation with something grotesque, monstrous or shocking (as is customarily the point of horror movies) can elicit revulsion, exactly because it takes us beyond the safety of our everyday routine, and in doing so this material offers the spectator glimpses of the sublime. If we consider that ‘the sublime’ means something noble and majestic, impressive and awe-inspiring, we can see that once more what artistic expressions help the spectator achieve is defined in concepts customarily associated with sacred transcendence, and the implication is that their value depends on this connection to a ‘higher’ level.
However, one of the main points of the black metal example below is that many extreme leisure pursuits are situated explicitly at the ‘low’ end of the aesthetic and perhaps also ethical spectrum, meaning they involve chiefly visceral, bodily, gut-based sensations. This embodied character is, however, exactly the source of their power.
Black metal emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an (even more) extreme version of thrash and death metal. The characteristics of this music include extremely fast drums and guitars, harsh and anguished vocals and often dystopic and/or satanic lyrical content. The stage act of many black metal bands features black costumes, corpse paint, anti-Christian or explicit satanic imagery and elements of Nordic pagan rituals. Some of the early recordings of early black metal bands like Darkthrone and Mayhem feature rather poor production values, in some cases because of a lack of recording budget, but also because in the ‘real’ black metal underground, a raw and harsh sound is a mark of true anti-establishment spirit – similar to the attitude of punk bands in the late 1970s.
The Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s became infamous due to a strong anti-Christian attitude and several high-profile crimes, including church burnings and murders. Some of these involved members of the band Mayhem. Mayhem vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin (stage name ‘Dead’) committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. His bandmate Øystein Aarseth (‘Euronymous’) photographed the body, and this photograph was used as the cover of the Mayhem album Dawn of the Black Hearts. Burzum and Mayhem guitarist Varg Vikernes was suspected to have committed the arson that destroyed the Fantoft Stave church in Fortun, Norway, as well as making a photograph of the burned remains to feature as the cover image of the Burzum album Aske (‘Ashes’). In 1994, he was sentenced to a twenty-one-year prison sentence for various church burnings and the murder of Euronymous.
All the elements – the harsh style and intensity of the music, the lyrics, the imagery, the costumes and (implied or explicit) rituals during performances – of black metal are focused on creating a dark, evil atmosphere. For an outsider to this genre, a fair question could be: why is (the illusion of) evil such an interesting image to project for these artists, and so appealing to the fans? Disregarding those who are indeed criminal and/or psychologically disturbed, how is it possible for the many apparently normal people who are performers or fans of this genre to adhere so readily to what appears to be a rather deviant moral mindset?
The standard answer to questions involving evil behaviour often involves reference to the infamous ‘Stanford prison experiment’. In a basement on Stanford University campus in 1971, a group of student volunteers was assigned the role of either prisoner or prison guard. The idea of this project’s designer, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, was to investigate the social dynamics that would emerge from this random role assignment. Without interference by Zimbardo, the atmosphere during the experiment turned nasty within days, with ‘guards’ exerting their dominance in creatively immoral ways, for instance by mentally torturing ‘prisoners’. The experiment was stopped only after Zimbardo’s girlfriend visited the basement ‘prison’, and was appalled by what she found there.
In his analysis of the experiment, Zimbardo (2007) explains the excesses that were observed in terms of power relations. The self-governing agent people imagine themselves being can, once placed under duress while embedded in a social system with unjust incentives, act unethically if that behaviour affords them a sense of belonging, of conformity with the extant power structure. In the case of the experiment, the ‘guards’ performed the roles they imagined the context demanded of them, i.e. roles of power and dominance, and did not stop to think about the morality of their actions. Given the right (or wrong, rather, in this case) circumstances, very normal people can start to exhibit rather abnormal behaviour if they believe that this helps them fit in properly in the social context.
Something similar applies to another infamous example of highly immoral behaviour: Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was a key player in the Holocaust, having been responsible for designing the logistical plans of transporting the millions of Jews and others to the concentration camps. After the war, Eichmann fled to Argentina, where in 1960 Israeli secret service agents managed to find and kidnap him. They brought him to Israel, where in 1961 he was put on trial. During this trial, philosopher Hannah Arendt, who was present as a journalist, was struck by how average (in a psychological sense), even bland Eichmann was. He appeared to have been an unthinking cog in a terrible machine, carrying out his orders without stopping to consider the morality of what he was doing – even though he did visit Auschwitz and witnessed mass executions of Jews. Arendt (1994) referred to his attitude as the banality of evil: the fact that apparently normal people can do highly extreme things, if placed in the right conditions. Obviously, Eichmann and his fellow war criminals were exceedingly immoral cases. But the students participating in the Stanford prison experiment as ‘guards’ were rather normal people, smart and morally upstanding citizens in their regular lives. In the prison experiment context, the circumstances – i.e. a particular social power structure – invited them to perform roles, and apparently they were not critical enough to stop themselves from crossing moral boundaries.
However, these normal explanations of immoral, ‘evil’ behaviour do not apply to most black metal musicians and fans. For them, the need to conform, to fit into a social power structure, is not the driving factor; actually, often it is the opposite. Metal music, and especially black metal, is, rather, an expression of a defiant attitude towards society’s rules, but it is very much about power. More specifically, the kind of power is a visceral (i.e. bodily sensation-based) drive towards creative disobedience in order to find a fitting place in life, either to actively change the existing system (which, as insanely misguided as he was, was what Vikernes tried to do when he attempted to purge Norwegian society of Christianity through his actions), or to create a new, more acceptable system.
This latter dynamic, i.e. the use of music, fashion, social gatherings and ritualistic and fantasy-based elements to design and implement an alternative way of life, can also be seen in the related Goth scene. Spracklen and Spracklen (2012) show that through shared dark leisure practices, including in some cases an adhesion to paganism or satanism, participants in the Goth scene intend to resist the synchronising and homogenising forces in mainstream popular culture. In that sense, Goths and black metal fans use dark leisure practices to participate in a community that has as its main distinguishing characteristic that it intends to stand apart from mainstream civil society.
There are definite moral issues to be addressed here. Black metal in particular is, as we already hinted at above, a visceral form of expression, where ‘visceral’ refers to the way in which instinctive reactions involving strong bodily sensations (e.g. gut feelings) are dominant, as opposed to rational, cognition-based decisions. The sense of power encapsulated in the music stems from the fact it evokes very strong and very basic sensations that are real and feel true – anger, sadness, feelings of emptiness, but also the sense of being awestruck by the overwhelming harshness of nature.
The potential problem in this case is that, immersed as they are in this subculture with its extreme viewpoints and customs, dedicated black metal fans could fabricate a moral, normative framework that is based on basic, embodied sensations, and as such is strongly subjective, and explicitly designed in opposition to, i.e. in rejection of, extant sociocultural structures. In Berntzen (2003), black metal musician ‘Fenriz’ of the band Darkthrone appears to support this suggestion when he claims that black metal is empowering, but to the individual. In that sense, it differs from the punk movement of the 1970s, which was a collective youthful rebellion against society.
Most of the references to ethics throughout this book have been infused with optimism and an aesthetic sensibility, as an important point of ours is to analyse the idea of leisure as art of life. What we see with black metal-related ethics, it appears, is something darker and potentially more dangerous. Recall that in Chapter 6 we introduced ethical naturalism as a theory that is specifically focused on linking embodied sensations to social moral norms. Within that framework, Shaun Nichols’ (2008) affective resonance-hypothesis was defined as the idea that ‘norms that prohibit actions to which we are predisposed to be emotionally averse will enjoy enhanced cultural fitness over other norms’ (269).
If we follow this hypothesis, this is the key question that needs to be answered if we wish to explain a specific set of moral norms: within which bounds does a particular culture or subculture operate that, for someone, it defines the cultural evolutionary fitness of those norms?
One of the key factors to explain the moral deviations within black metal appears to be a fundamental mismatch of the engrained blandness of a highly organised society versus the rebellion of youth. In Berntzen (2003), ‘Ihsahn’ of the black metal band Emperor says that part of the inspiration for his band’s rebellious music was the extreme ‘ordinariness’ of the Norwegian countryside where he and the band members grew up – the perfect status quo to hate for young people with something to prove and a place to carve out in life.
Boomkens (1996) describes the phenomenon that societal blandness can elicit extreme ideas in art and entertainment as an ecology of fear, as he reaffirms some of the themes we have already addressed before: a combination of desensitisation due to media-overload and the soul-numbing and terminally empty ‘horror of suburbia’ can evoke unrest, particularly in young people. They start to pursue ever more extreme experiences through extreme art and entertainment, e.g. violence in movies, music and literature, in order to feel something. The old shocks no longer suffice – something we have also already seen when we made a similar remark about the relative tameness – from our twenty-first-century point of view – of Yves Klein’s 1960s shock art. This reaction/anti-reaction dynamic goes both ways, too: disenfranchised youths’ ethically adverse behaviour evokes reactions of fear and revulsion in the embedding social system (‘the establishment’, the older generation), and vice versa, hence resulting in this ecology of fear.
This youthful, brash attitude is quite Nietzschean in character. Nietzsche (1895, in §2) says: ‘What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness’. Nietzsche sees the morally ruinous doctrine that he claims Christianity to be, and claims that hope for improvement lies in free spirits, outliers, explorers – i.e. those people who express the Wille zur Macht most effectively. Wille zur Macht is an expression of power, an autonomous expression of freedom of choice, both mentally and physically, and doing so means to get ever closer to realising the Übermensch, who will reject the (Christian) morality of the weak.
Certainly, the satanism professed by some of the more extreme members of the black metal scene is in direct opposition to the Christian (or at least Christianity-inspired) values upheld by most European societies. Many lyrics are Nietzschean in the sense that they reject the blind following of Christian doctrine, and instead support rational, autonomous convictions (see e.g. claims to that effect by ‘Silenoz’ of the black metal band Dimmu Borgir in Berntzen (2003)). Many of the bands writing anti-Christian lyrics are well aware that their views and the ways in which they express them, in addition to the extreme nature of the music itself, cause pain in others – in the complete, brutal dismissal of dearly held (religious) convictions. However, there is also another, more cathartic dimension to the way in which pain features in black metal.
Both uses of pain are described by Colin McGinn (1997), as he explains the attraction of pain as a theme in art. The first dimension, causing pain through artistic expression, can be a means to gain notoriety. In that sense, shock artists and black metal musicians are clever marketeers, because they know the extreme nature of their work will attract attention.
The other dimension, one that is probably more interesting philosophically, is that experiencing (and resisting) pain can be a way to feel alive and strong. This is where the extreme nature of these art forms connects to the transcendental capacity that Roger Scruton attributed to high art. ‘Silenoz’ in Berntzen (2003) says: ‘Black metal is no doubt a religious feeling for me…. [We] react by feeling intense pain that you can endure with self-inflicted pain…. We’re making aggressive music – music to make aggression disappear’.
This is very much in line with Berger (1999: 270–271), who found that a similarly aggressive form of metal called death metal is also cathartic in this way, taking negative life events and transforming the resultant emotions at the angry and/or hopeless end of the spectrum into a proactive, invigorating energy – as opposed to country music, which also tends to deal with negative life events, but more often transforms it into sadness. Additional support for this effect of aggressive music can be found in Sharman and Dingle (2015), who found that listening to metal music helps fans to process feelings of anger. Similar uses of pain and pain experience can be found in sex (SM, bondage), and in extreme sports, which we will briefly address below.
To summarise, black metal, for fans and artists, is a way to engage in self-construal: to release tension, to transform anger into something more constructive, to feel something authentic, to establish a morality of power and artistic assertiveness that sets them apart from the aspects of society they feel ill at ease with – in general, an increase in personal well-being. So despite the dark themes and far-from-normal, boundary-crossing aesthetic sensibilities that are expressed in this music, the outcome for the fans and artists appears, in the vast majority of cases, to be something positive.
Another important category of edgework activities is extreme sports. Skydiving, bungee jumping, mountaineering, long-distance running and other sports where the limits of human ability are tested feature a central role for the body. Similar to the normalcy-defying attitude expressed by shock artists and black metal musicians, extreme athletes exhibit a visceral drive towards creative disobedience to find a fitting place in life, to create a new, more acceptable way of interaction with the environment. An important goal of these activities is to feel alive and strong by pushing oneself, redefining boundaries and limitations, and realising one’s fullest potential.
In several extreme sports, nature and wilderness are important factors. Brymer and Gray (2009), for instance, stress that people who practise adventure sports (rock climbing, kayaking, hang-gliding, etc.) see the encounter with nature as a way to gain a better understanding of themselves and their relationship to the environment. Here, we see the drive towards a kind of transcendence that is decidedly romanticist. Romanticism was a countermovement to, for example, the Industrial Revolution, and included the desire to reclaim real, true or authentic experience, often defined in terms of feeling a connectedness to nature. Interestingly (for the leisure scholar), this is also a historical source of (forms of ) modern tourism: escaping the city/everyday life, looking for different kinds of experiences that are stimulating in their otherness. The fragility of humans in general or the human body in particular (either in the context of experiencing the overwhelming power of nature/the world, or as a frail biological entity in a world dominated by factories, machines, in later years also computers) is a running theme in the philosophy of technology (see Chapter 6) as well. In this light, the attempts of extreme athletes to reconnect to nature and, in doing so, to themselves, is an unsurprising symptom also of the postmodern condition, in which moral and cultural truths tend to be seen as contingent, as we have seen (in Intermezzo II).
Adventure sports, or extreme sports more generally, can be seen as celebrations of physical ability: the most prestigious practitioners are especially strong, fast, agile, durable, skilled, and so forth. Positing this as an ideal would appear to exclude disabled people: if someone is unable to walk, however would she manage to live up to examples like that?
An intriguing and highly effective answer to that question is wheelchair rugby, also sometimes called murderball. The sport features physically disabled people in wheelchairs built like steel-plated tanks crashing into each other, and it is every bit as physical and violent as regular rugby (Shapiro and Rubin 2005). Tollestrup (2009: i) says that ‘murderball works exceptionally well to disrupt notions of people with disabilities as fragile and helpless, countering ableist assumptions about what persons with quadriplegia can accomplish’. An additional aspect of interest is that the sport mixes genders, hence it allows for the emancipation and empowerment not just of disabled people in general, but also of disabled women in a context – a high-intensity contact sport – where historically males tend to dominate.
As an interesting aside, and to connect this to the previous ‘black metal’ example, this overturning of prejudice is also seeping into the heavy metal community. The stereotypical image of heavy metal fans for many people who are not part of the scene is not very favourable. That is, the extreme nature of this form of artistic expression can be thought to be connected to closed-mindedness or moral depravity. However, there is an increasing acceptance of alternative lifestyles in the heavy metal community, with artists like Rob Halford of Judas Priest, Doug Pinnick of King’s X and vocalist Gaahl of black metal band Gorgoroth coming out – and being accepted – as gay. In addition, alternative metal band Life of Agony is fronted by openly transgender singer Mina Caputo. Friedman (2014) hypothesises that people who prefer the extreme, rebellious nature of heavy metal music also tend to exhibit openness to new experiences. Because many metal fans use this music as a way of coping with feelings of alienation, they tend to exhibit an above-average tolerance for alternative lifestyles – they are, after all, themselves different than the norm. We see a similar kind of inclusive empowerment in the murderball example above.
We suggest that these forms of leisure represent salient examples of leisure practices that are engaged in with the intent of becoming the governor of one’s own well-being: leisure offers the freedom and supportive context to explore activities not in terms of limitations (e.g. due to illness or injury), but in terms of the remaining (or new!) possibilities that one has for pleasure and well-being maximisation. In the case of murderball, the possibilities include intensely physical and high-energy confrontations that serve as a decisive disconfirmation of the prejudice that disabled people are less able, in-valid or otherwise to be pitied.
A potential problem lies hidden in our conceptualisation of edgework as a leisure-based resource for self-construal. This is it: if leisure is understood as a domain within which activities are chosen based on the quality of the experience that they generate, and this quality is at least partly dependent on emotion-based judgements, on ‘gut feelings’ (as the embodiment focus defended in Chapters 4 and 6, as well as in this chapter), leisure might intrinsically contain a perverse stimulus to continue climbing the hedonic treadmill – that is, striving for satisfying experiences again and again, returning to the baseline ever quicker as desensitisation to leisure’s (positive) effects sets in.
Larsen and Prizmic (2008) suggest several possible strategies to modulate (or, ideally, to break through) this self-perpetuating cycle. We suggest that in several key aspects of that approach, the uses of ‘edgy leisure’ as outlined in this chapter offer several promising resources. Recall that earlier in this chapter we stated that well-being is usually measured in terms of a cognition-based judgement of life satisfaction, and two emotion-based evaluations – high positive affect and low negative affect (Larsen and Prizmic 2008).
Larsen and Prizmic suggest several strategies that help with overcoming negative affect, and some that stimulate a healthy enjoyment of positive affect. If these processes are balanced properly, the restless, unsatisfactory fade-out effects of the hedonic treadmill should not occur. Some of the effective strategies in overcoming negative affect mentioned in Larsen and Prizmic (2008) are: (1) finding meaning; (2) looking for downward social comparison; (3) looking for self-reward and pleasant activities; (4) socialising; (5) venting; and (6) looking for distraction.
These are some examples of how leisure resources can help in implementing such strategies:
In addition to these strategies to use leisure in dealing with negative affect, leisure also provides resources to generate positive affect. There are specific attitudes, according to Larsen and Prizmic (2008) that will help in achieving a healthier way of enjoying the positive affect provided by certain activities. These attitudes are generally characteristic of a mature, emotionally balanced individual. For instance, social virtues such as gratitude and helping others are particularly important; leisure conceived as art of life, as a practice intended to achieve eudaimonia (as suggested in Chapter 5), should certainly fit in with such a strategy. Another important attitude is to possess humour; here too leisure is an important domain for levity, playfulness, optimism, creativity, fantasy and celebration, as we have already seen, and as we will explore more extensively in the next chapter.
The idea then is that the proliferation of diminished negative affects and a healthier adaptation to positive affects can stimulate improved scores on the cognitively appraised life satisfaction scale. Certainly, as we have seen throughout this chapter, for many black metal fans and extreme athletes, as well as for leisure practitioners in general, leisure behaviour appears to contribute to such positive results.
In this chapter, we have discussed the possible beneficial role of leisure in the self-construal of individuals living in a postmodern (or liquidly modern) society. Obviously, we have but scratched the surface of this topic, for there are many additional questions to ask and answer.
One important empirical, rather than philosophical, question, of course, is: which leisure-based activities actually have the desired well-being improvement effect? We have mentioned some data, and have tried to dig towards some of the underlying conceptual themes, but the compound question ‘which leisure pursuits work how, for whom, in which situation?’ contains many variables that allow for lots of important empirical research.
One of the issues we expect to arise in such empirical investigation is the subjective valuation of positive and negative affect, which we noted are important in defining subjective well-being. Although based on facts about the embodied basis of emotional judgements (with an evolutionary history shared across the human species), it should be possible to isolate regularities that hold true for the vast majority of the world’s population, there are also likely to be many idiosyncratic, geographic and/or cultural interpretational variations.
We also note that, with the approach we have taken so far, there might be a risk of a tension between leisure as ‘fun’ and choosing the right kind of leisure as a kind of existential responsibility. If we understand leisure as a component of art of life, as a means to the end of becoming happy or being a good person, does this perhaps make leisure too ‘serious’ and cerebral and loaded with responsibility? Part of the point of the current chapter has been to show that even in ‘low-level’ leisure activities that appear to be inspired by an intuitive and hedonistic focus on momentary satisfaction, there can still be quite significant well-being effects. How do we do justice to the fact that ‘good’ leisure is not always ‘serious’ leisure? Sometimes, the best leisure can be stupid, selfish, hedonistic and pure, simple fun.
And finally, this chapter has focused mainly on individualistic, self-construal leisure effects. Humans are intrinsically social animals, so what about the social, communal, co-creative aspect of leisure? This issue will be addressed in the next chapter.
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