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Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming
be associated with consumption choices, and with both the purchase and use of
commodities such as clothes, jewelry, furniture, cars, and food. There is much
evidence for this theme in the chapters of this volume, though the cumulative effect
of the book is also to push the discussion somewhat beyond what scholarship on
consumption has achieved to date. Conversely, there is little evidence in the
following chapters for the interpretation Horkheimer and Adorno would have
proposed, namely that individual choice was only the modus operandi of a
capitalist culture industry whose dominance was total.
The history of leisure has been inextricably intertwined with the history of work,
and it is primarily the social history of the manual laboring classes that has directed
attention to the way in which the advent of industrial capitalism created new
conflicts over the control of time. New forms of work discipline demanded new
apprehensions and disciplines of time, as E.P. Thompson once so elegantly
argued. 12 Manufacturers and workers debated the possibilities and effects of
shortened work time, the former fearing its consequences for the devotion to labor,
the latter divided both as to its place in the political struggle and to the way in
which working-class organizations could direct members’ lives when away from
work. 13 Such debates have continued throughout the history of industrial capitalism,
from the moment when “Taylorist” forms of labor discipline first made
inroads in the United States and later Europe, to the present, in which “instantaneous
time” and other concepts spark disagreement and confusion over the proper
relation between work and non-work. 14 The group of chapters assembled here do
not delve into issues of work time and short hours movements, partly because there
is already a developed scholarship on them, but partly also because our project
was to concentrate more on the experience and meaning of leisure itself.
If control over the length and quality of work time was one of the central
conflicts in the history of leisure, control over the content of time spent away from
work was equally as significant. The relationship between leisure and consumption
has been constitutive here. For many policy-makers and academics over the
twentieth century, to fill leisure intelligently was by definition to avoid or severely
control the blandishments of consumer society. To fill leisure intelligently,
moreover, was often something for which only the most demanding individual
could hope. Adorno and Horkheimer placed their belief in a complex practice of
“negation,” the requirements and procedures of which only the most disciplined
and ideologically correct intellectuals could fathom. Gary Cross’s history of the
making of consumer culture discusses debates over whether “time,” defined as
“duration from both income-producing work and from consumption,” or “money,”
discretionary income for non-essential goods, were to be preferred for wage
earners in Britain, the United States, and France in the twentieth century. 15 The
advocates of more “democratic” forms of leisure time set their sights somewhat
lower than the Frankfurt School philosophers did, but they were often no less
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