metropolis m

In a world that is obsessed with activity, with being occupied, the idea of doing nothing is absolutely terrifying. That is a tragic misconception. Leisure brings us life at its best.

1. In praise of leisure

Leisure is absolutely fundamental to Western philosophy, and, one could add, to Western civilization itself. The Greek word for leisure is schol?, from which is derived the Latin scola, or the Dutch or English school. Leisure for the ancient Greeks was not a matter of indolence, but rather meant intellectual cultivation outside of productive labour. This is also where we get the idea of ‘liberal arts’, studies that have intrinsic value, as opposed to ‘servile arts’, those dealing with practical skills. In Aristotle’s ethics, the first great systematic account of ethics in the Western tradition, contemplation is the highest form of human achievement. It is precisely this longstanding heritage that is being dismantled today. Neoliberalism is responsible not only for the current Greek crisis, but an ancient Greek crisis as well. Public support for the arts and liberal education (anything other than business and technologically oriented science) is being eroded more and more. Anything that is not economically profitable is automatically devalued, and leisure in the original broad sense of the term is made into a strictly private affair rather than a public good. Maybe the harsh austerity measures are punishment for this ancient philosophical sin against the gods of economic rationality, the sin of leisure.In modernity, with the rise of the Worker as the predominant figure of subjectivity, the whole problem changes. Instead of leisure being the highest realization of life and desire, what fascinates philosophers is the seemingly boundless power of the will, on the one hand, and its radical negation on the other. The will’s creativity and productive force is haunted from within by the prospect of its total annihilation, by the uncanny power of inertia, or in a word, by laziness. The perfect modern ‘odd couple’ would be the meeting of two mythical Russian figures: Alexey Grigoryevich Stakhanov and Ilya Ilich Oblomov. The first is the Stalinist hero of productivity, the fabulously efficient miner who became the symbol of the superiority of socialist economy (of course, it was all a lie, and he was a hated figure: What is worse than a maniacally over-productive co-worker?). The second is a washed-up aristocrat who stays in bed all day long; a dreamer, an idler, a recluse from the constant demands and occupations of the world, Oblomov is a paradigmatic counter-figure of modern times.

2. Scientists say the future will be more futuristic than originally predicted

As the saying goes, time is money. That means that there is a convertibility of time into value, and this value is nothing other than its capacity to be redeemed for other time. That’s how the economy works. When I buy a commodity, I’m essentially buying the time it took for it to be produced; I’m consuming someone else’s time. Laziness or idleness falls out of this economy, and for that reason it is strictly worthless. But that also means it can have the highest, incomparable value: laziness is non-time but also time at its purest.Imagine a science-fiction film set in a world close to our own, yet where time is literally treated as a commodity. You have to pay for time in order to keep the clock running, just like you pay for gas and electricity. And if you don’t pay your time bill on time, the clock stops, you go into a kind of stasis or have weird temporal delusions, you become de-synchronized from the rest of humanity. Now let’s say the processing, distribution, and sale of time is controlled by one mega-corporation. The big question is: Where does this precious natural resource come from? Where does the time company get the time that it sells? After a big romantic adventure, at the end of the film it’s revealed, with a nod to Soylent Green (1973), that ‘It’s people!’ The evil company has been using a secret technology to directly suck time from the poor masses in order to keep civilization running. And nobody noticed. This wouldn’t be far from the reality we’re living in today.

3. Bartleby as corporate manager

There is a Hollywood movie, Office Space (1999) that dramatizes the question of laziness in relation to the contemporary alienation of labour in a very funny way. The hero, Peter, has a crappy office job at a software company where he spends his days dreaming of doing nothing. One day, at the behest of his bitchy girlfriend, he goes for hypnotherapy, but before he is awakened from the trance state the hypnotist has a heart attack and dies. Left under the spell of a kind of perpetual hypnosis, Peter is finally liberated. He now has the courage to do what he truly wants, which is precisely: nothing. The great irony is that once the hero fulfils his dream of laziness (he skips meetings, spends his days fishing, plays video games at the office, etc.), he functions all the better at the company, and even gets a promotion.This is really a postmodern Bartleby! In Melville’s short story, Bartleby is a copyist at a Wall Street law office who one day mysteriously stops working. He doesn’t exactly refuse to work, but when asked to do things he just keeps repeating ‘I’d prefer not to.’ This creates total havoc at the office, and eventually, after the company moves out and Bartleby still doesn’t budge, he’s sent to prison where he stops eating and dies. Like Oblomov, Bartleby is another peculiar anti-hero of modernity. This strange and marvellous story has received a lot of philosophical attention in recent years, focused on the question of the negativity of the Will, or rather the bizarre suspension of willing signified by the ‘prefer not’. Some have seen in Melville’s tale a lesson about the subtle art of resistance and disengagement, and have even made Bartleby into a messianic saviour for alienated humanity. But in today’s corporate climate, Bartleby would probably prosper. There was a best-selling book a few years ago by the Lacanian psychoanalyst Corinne Maier, Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness, 2004), with the subtitle ‘The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace’. Much of the advice is bleakly funny, like when she says ‘What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you’re untouchable when the next restructuring comes around.’ Some people would say that Maier is a cynic, but I think what her manifesto does is expose the cynicism that already effectively reigns in the workplace. The postmodern, as opposed to Protestant, work ethic is a kind of tolerated managed laziness. The enigmatic and tragic figure of Bartleby has turned into a universal farce, the absurdity of contemporary corporate life.

4. Laziness and freedom

We tend to think of laziness as pure vegetable nihilism, but that is itself a symptom of our idealization of work. Laziness can be connected with freedom in an aristocratic way, as pure waste. Laziness in this sense is no longer a lack or deficiency of the will, but a form of extravagance. The real proof of sovereignty over time is the power to waste it. That is also the best way to cheat death. It is often said that life is short so you should not waste it – seize the day, make the most out of each moment. But to live like this is to live under a perpetual death sentence. If you want a taste of immortality you should do just the opposite: be unproductive, do nothing, exult in squandering your existence.But laziness can also be connected with freedom in a more positive and humanist sense, as the cultivation of life for its own sake outside the iron cage of economic calculation. One of the most beautiful defences of laziness as the highest expression of autonomy is Paul Lafargue’s 1880 pamphlet The Right to Laziness. It’s really a remarkable text. Lafargue attacks the hypocrisy of the compulsive work ethic and pleads for the revival of the Greek philosophical ideal of leisure. In refutation of the preachers of the moral virtue of work, he recalls that the Biblical God ‘gave his adorers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rested for eternity’.

5. Amaro far niente

The Mexican bandit in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) said it best: ‘If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?’ This reversal of life and labour was also thematized in a wonderfully ironic exchange from Boris Vian’s novel Froth on the Daydream (L’Écume des Jours, 1947):– But is it their fault if they think that it’s good to work?– No, said Colin, it’s not their fault. It’s because they’ve been told: work is sacred, it’s good, it’s nice, it’s what counts before anything, and only those who work have the right to anything. The only thing is, it’s been set up so that they work all the time so they can’t take advantage of it.– But then they’re stupid, said Chloe.– Yes, they’re stupid, said Colin. That’s why they agree with those that made them believe that work is the best thing there is. That saves them from thinking and finding a way to progress and to no longer work.– Let’s talk about something else, said Chloe. Those subjects are so tiring. Tell me if you like my hair.Often we think of laziness as a kind of normal state, and work as something we must be forced to do. We are lazy by nature, and only habituated to work by the imperatives of society. But what if this habit was so thoroughly ingrained that the opposite was now the case? What if being busy was our normal condition, and laziness something precious and difficult to achieve? It can actually be quite hard to do nothing, to turn off your merciless internal drive to work.

6. The best government for the crisis

The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, were already demanding a 16-hour work week, four hours per day for four days, back in the 1920s. It is sometimes forgotten, but our current 40-hour work week was only won due to intense labour struggles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, against working conditions that we would now consider tantamount to slavery. Of course, it will sound ridiculous to advocate a shorter work week today, when the economic system is teetering on collapse. How could we possibly afford it? What would ‘the markets’ think?As has been noted by a number of commentators, the European and American response to the financial crisis over the past few years has taught us what neoliberalism really means: socialism for bankers, capitalism for everyone else. In an essay from the September 2011 issue of the London Review of Books, John Lanchester, author of one of the best books on the financial crisis, observed that the Euro zone country with the highest growth that quarter was actually Belgium, a nation that, because of political in-fighting, had had no federal government for well over a year. That meant that its budget basically remained the same, since no one had the political authority to impose austerity measures. As Lanchester concludes, in the current crisis it’s best not to have a government; at the very least, it saves you from making stupid cuts.

7. Toward a history of idleness

A history of idleness as an artistic and philosophical ideal would make an interesting study, starting from the joyful contemplation of the philosopher Aristotle to the supremely lazy Duchamp, the artist who invented the most radically labour-free creative practice in the history of aesthetics, the readymade. Hegel and Marx would be important chapters, and I would also include Heidegger in this history – what is Heideggerian philosophy, with its love of the slow life of the provinces, if not a grand philosophy of leisure, an attempt to reactivate the Greek vita contemplativa in the context of the modern world dominated by technology and productionist metaphysics, rethinking leisure as a ‘letting-be’ that releases Being from the grip of subjectivity and its aggressive will? This shows that leisure can also be a reactionary theme. But it’s a vast topic, and would take a lot of work to sort out. I shall just make a small suggestion here. Wouldn’t the term ‘talented idler’ be a good definition of the human being in general? Combining both lack and skill, it recalls Plato’s myth of Love from the Symposium: the god Eros was born from the union of Penia and Poros, poverty and resourcefulness, and joins together their seemingly opposite natures. The human being would be that animal that does nothing, but extremely well.

8. Laziness as ideology

Laziness is obviously a key ideological category. It’s usually southerners who are lazy, freeloading off the hard work of others. According to a pop anthropology that dates back to Montesquieu, this has to do with climate. Note, however, that the ‘south’ is a relative category. We have the industrious Northern Europe economies versus the lazy, debt-ridden Southern ones, but the south of practically every country is by definition lazy: the Flemish vs. the Walloons, North Italy vs. South Italy, the English vs. the Irish, Germany vs. everyone else. If the North Pole were colonized, there’d be people on top of the glacier complaining about the no-good moss-picking southerners a little further down the tundra.The accusation of laziness in political discourse reveals only one thing: theintellectual laziness of those doing the accusing. By moralizing and psychologizing socioeconomic problems, it relieves us of the burden of actually trying to understand the complex structures and dynamics of the world we live in. Indeed, if there is one class that really deserves to be called ‘lazy’, it’s not workers, or immigrants, or the unemployed, but financial capitalists. They are objectively lazy, the luxury rabble freeloading off the productive forces of society. Of course they are busy all the time, but all this hyper-frenetic activity is at bottom a refusal to participate in the production of social life and instead live off speculation, i.e. gambling. Perhaps the strangest political spectacle today is the vast power wielded by credit rating agencies, companies with no public accountability that with a wave of their downgrading wand can seriously impact the fate of entire national economies. After the financial crisis in the US, these companies were called before Congress to account for their wildly mistaken, not to say fraudulent, evaluations, and they defended themselves by saying that their ratings were ‘mere opinions’. These are the new lazy masters of the planet.Aaron Schuster is a philosopher, Berlin/BrusselsAn earlier version of this article was published in Slovenian as an interview with Maša Ogrizek, ‘Zelo težko je po?eti ni?’ in Dnevnik/Objektiv, October 1, 2011.