"Capitalism has two ways of dealing with leisure, stigmatizing it within an ideology of unemployment, or taking it up into itself to make it profitable. The dividing line cuts between prosperity and suffering, and it makes a great deal of difference on which side one falls.
"The flaneur is the prototype of a new form of salaried employee who produces news/literature/advertisements for the purpose of information/entertainment/persuasion (the forms of both product and purpose are not clearly distinguished). These products fill the "empty" hours which time-off from work has become in the modern city. Writers, now dependent on the market, scan the street scene for material, keeping themselves in the public eye and wearing their own identity like a sandwich board." -- Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering"
People sometimes ask me why I adopted the name, "Sandwichman." Those two paragraphs explain it. As a self-employed writer producing research and advertisements for my research/writing services, I became acutely aware of the need for "wearing [my] identity like a sandwich board."
My precarious career as researcher-for-hire was part of the long-term transition from salaried employees to large language models. The commodity produced by artificial intelligence is information, entertainment, and persuasion, just as by the flâneur, but with even less distinction between purposes.
After 40 years of thinking about those two ways of dealing with leisure, it occurs to me that Marx overlooked the second way and thus overestimated the revolutionary potential of disposable time. In his discussion of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Marx highlighted two things "Our pamphleteer overlooks:
As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the absolute working-time.
Marx thus saw unemployment functioning as a kind of stabilizing mechanism for capital, providing cheap labour to fuel recoveries from the periodic crises -- "...the disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost." He made a few scattered observations about capital's second way for dealing with leisure but those remained undeveloped. Consequently, the reduction of the working day could be unambiguously proposed as the basic prerequisite for achieving the "realm of freedom."
Marx's Fetters and the Ambivalence of Disposable Time
When I gave the title to my 2021 essay on The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, "ambivalence" referred to the intertextual tension between Marx's use of the term disposable time and Dilke's in the pamphlet. Julia Kristeva introduced the term ambivalence to describe Mikhail Bakhtin's insight that "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." Ambivalence "implies the insertion of history (society) into the text and of this text into history." Thus the text represents a dialogue between the author and the quotation in which there is both negation and affirmation: "negation as affirmation." What "our pamphleteer overlooks" creates the occasion for Marx's reply that nevertheless relies on what our pamphleteer didn't overlook.
But there is another sense of the ambivalence of disposable time that I only realized afterwards. Disposable time itself is ambivalent in that it could be enjoyed as free time by the worker or appropriated as surplus labour time by capital depending on the political economic circumstances. Or it could be suffered as empty time by the unemployed. Those were the three possibilities Marx addressed. The fourth was turning leisure time into a marketplace for new commodities aimed at filling the "empty" time off from work.
Marx's Fetters, the title of my pop-up book and book proposal, was polysemous from the beginning -- referring both to his emphatic use of the bondage metaphor and to his being constrained by censorship and exile. But there are two other possibilites. One is Marx being constrained by anxiety about reception and his reputation -- what Blake called "mind-forg'd manacles." The other is Marx's epigones acting as if bound by the master's words.
This brings us to another aspects of Bakhtin's analysis. In an 1934-35 essay, "Discourse and the Novel," he contrasted inernally-persuasive discourse with authoritative discourse, the latter "demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally." Note that authoritative discourse binds us! Here we encounter the paradox of the promiscuous dialogism of Marx's writing coming to be regarded and represented as authoritative.
I am intrigued that both the disposal of disposable time and the chain of fetters produced fourfold structures. That might be a habit of my mind. My masters thesis from nearly 40 years ago relied heavily on fourfold analysis of emplotments, arguments, and ideologies.
