Free Time

Conceptual Agony and Epistemic Impossibility

Abstract

In this essay we revisit and discuss a basic problem at the confluence between the sociologies of leisure and the sociologies of work, that is, that the free time would be chained to the work time. We recall that are known the conceptual distinctions about the activities released from the time of work and the activities exercised for pleasure in the free time. Thus, in this writing we start from the critical premise that in the current global capitalism we cannot isolate the spheres of everyday social time from the social time of work. We highlight the transition from free time of a Fordist character to free time of a Toyotist character, whose neoliberal face has assumed an extremely perverse form, combining a systematic agenda of privatization of the instances of socialization of the tensions and contingencies of collective life, of flexibilization of the constraints to the exploitation of Labor by Capital and of generalized deregulation of the Market. Lost labor rights, structural unemployment, biographical instability, and narcissistic consumerism pair the trajectory of the atomized masses of multi-tasking, proactive workers, eternally occupied and engaged in full-time mode. We conclude, therefore, that free time, always inscribed in ideological coercion, is now shattered before a society of performance and fatigue, which does not sleep and is eternally occupied.