These two articles by Lefebvre and Berger deal with two sides of a connected topic- the loss of community-centered recreation(Lefebvre), and the class division of meals (Berger). Whether it is through leisure activity, or meals gathered from your locale, and/or bought and paid with your labor, it is necessary for individuals to have a "break" from labor and be freed from the barriers imposed by capitalism on collective life. In our current wage labor system, the ideal of normal everyday life where we are free to grow our relationships within our families and community and to develop our creativity, will be like a gold mine of leisure capital in which only the bourgeois will have the luxury to enjoy. The limited hours spent at home create a pressure to enjoy the little time one has away from the workplace, leading to isolating activities in which the only energy they have to expend is spent alone. This fragmentation of work life from personal life is unnatural in human history, only in post-industrial society is a person's life divided between productive time in the workplace/and "free" time outside of the space of production. This fragmentation extends to the dinner table, now, aside from very rural locations outside developed countries, do people know where their meals come from. Everything we eat is from elsewhere, often hundreds of miles a way, and packaged in plastic in a way that separates the food from its source. There's little in common in the eyes of an average worker from a wrapped steak in a grocery store and a cow in a field. Knowing where one's food originates from, and being able to prepare this food at home in a social event that incorporates the family, and the community of which it originates. We are now all more like the bourgious at the dinner table, separated from their natural environment of Berger's text, eating out of pleasure, and not appreciative the labor put in by the farmer who grew the food required for each meal. This is an incentive for me to try to shop as local as I can, and when I return to Alaska, to fish as much as possible. Eating something you procure with your own hands, and even shaking the hand of the farmer that grew it is much more satisfying and even meditative about the origins of our calories, then ordering a pizza from your cellphone, or buying a frozen pre-made meal from a supermarket.
Sunday, November 1, 2020
seperation of the self from one's surroundings
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Dylan, great summary here of Lefebvre's desire to reconnect those spheres of life that are kept spatially, politically, and socially separate by the division of labor and increasing fragmentation of society. The necessity for a "break" becomes vital in environments where isolation and alienation defines one's existence. Lefebvre suggests that that necessary break also reveals something important about those who chose it, and there is indeed a potential politics at work in the form of leisure as well. It is in fact the seed of a politics of socialization hidden within an alienated society. While reverting to older practices of finding one's own locally sourced food can strengthen one's understanding of one's relationship to one's environment, Lefebvre is also interested in developing such awareness and such relations to environment even on the scale of global production processes. As Massey writes, one or the other is not inherently bad or good, it is rather their connection that is important to understand. Lefebvre's later concept of "social space" aims to deliver on that suggestion.
ReplyDelete