The Concept of Concepts

This is a guest post by Tony Blackshaw, author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at Leisure

As concepts in the history of thought go, leisure has over the last twenty years or so proved susceptible to intellectual assumption and critical contraction. I don’t mean that interpretations of leisure are never made anymore: they are made all the time, but invariably in a limited way and on a small scale. The aim of Thirteen Ways of Looking at Leisure is a bold one: to put its subject in perspective and put it firmly in its place as a concept that deserves to be received in capital-letter terms.

The book takes its title and intellectual impetus from Wallace Stevens’ famous poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In so doing, it invites its readers to reimagine leisure by recovering its ancient, transcendent essence to reveal that it is the basis of all eventful creative action: interpretation, culture, social life and politics. A case study in identifying what matters most in those realms of humanity where everything becomes more fully alive with their own ‘seemings’, leisure in this book means something different from what it means in most other studies. By leisure it means something actual that has been turned into something necessary and vital. It also means a fundamental critique of what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once said about the twin constraints of freedom and security, recognising the power of an impossibility in this combination that inspires us because we find there another kind of existence, a truly modern one, which is, quite otherwise, aloud with creativity and reinvention.

When fragments are brought together in the way they are in this book, they usually change from a compilation of ideas into some kind of thesis; their peculiarities and partialities are no longer left to others to navigate in their own way, but focused on the perspective of the author. Differently, this one makes no attempt to invent its own story of leisure. It seeks instead to maintain the critical tradition found in the best ‘indisciplinary’ scholarship by making its topic new and invigorating. Explicit in its approach is the idea that the research process is itself a radical act. This blurs and disturbs the distinction between ‘compilation’ and ‘thesis’, allowing readers to combine two planes of subject matter and expression into a mosaic of fragments, a meeting place of multiplicity, which marks an important threshold moment in the development of study of leisure.

The book defies easy categorisation: it drifts across categories, now sociology, now philosophy, now social history, now cultural studies, now politics, now biography, too fleet of foot to be pinned down. Nevertheless, each of the fragments contained within its pages is complete in itself; they can be read singly or in any order. But there is something to be said for reading Fragments 1 and 2 first, as they not only provide the frame of leisure’s modernity, but begin to reveal what places it in a category apart from all other concepts.

The scope of the book is wide ranging, and the topics it addresses are uniformly important. It takes his readers on a fascinating journey, incorporating poetry, literary works, the arts, music, dance, slacklining, association football, motor car cruising, the seaside, surfing and amateur sleuthing, while grappling with important questions of the politics of everyday life, for which leisure provides the key to understanding.

The book ends with a dialogue between a madman sic and a scholar in which everything that has been said previously is seemingly recalled. In the largest sense, this final fragment is about the way leisure permits interpenetrations and boundary crossing of all kinds and journeys into the recesses of other minds, which enables us to make new identities for ourselves that come without any of the past’s burdens. With all fixity of meaning and every antimony having disappeared, it becomes possible to experience the world with the breathless excitement of wanderers crossing borderlines between here and there – the freedom beyond all distinctions and striving we never want to leave – where Homo ludens resides, and it is always time to play.

As Thirteen Ways of Looking at Leisure moves towards its radical incompleteness, there emerges, not just a new perspective on leisure, but hopefully, for its readers, a much clearer sense of the great scheme of things and their own sense of place in it. In writing this book, my understanding of this modern miracle radically changed. It is my wish that it changes for everyone who reads it. That wish I hope is not in vain, for I believe that the book offers its readers grounds for asserting that leisure is perfectly normal and necessary to how the immense majority of human beings wish to conduct their everyday lives and that it is correctly identified with those two complimentary contrarities essential to successful human life: freedom and security.