Dwelling and Commodity Perspectives on Time, Activity, Production, and Exchange
- Title
- Dwelling and Commodity Perspectives on Time, Activity, Production, and Exchange
- Description
- The individual, in this discourse, is supposedly caught in a perpetual oscillation between work in the public domain of production and leisure in the private domain of consumption. Regulated by clock time in the former, he or she retreats into the sanctuary of free time in the latter. In a society dominated by the impersonal structures of the machine and the market, the sphere of leisure seems to offer a residual space for the spontaneous and purely individual expression of selfhood. Moreover the oppositions between work and leisure, and between clock time and free time, have exact homologues in other fields. There is a close connection, for example, between the ideally spontaneous expression of selfhood and the modern Western notion of artistic creativity, which is likewise opposed to the industrial technology of mass production as novelty is opposed to replication. And in the field of exchange, the privacy and spontaneity of the self is closely linked to the ideology of the ‘pure gift’, as an expression of individual feeling, by contrast to the impersonal ‘market mechanism’ regulating the exchange of commodities. Thus gifts are to commodities as art is to technology, as leisure is to work, as free time is to clock time.
- Designer
- Ingold, Tim
- Date
- 2000
- Bibliographic Citation
- Ingold, Tim. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
- is depiction of attribute
- Square
- use feature
- Brace
Part of Dwelling and Commodity Perspectives on Time, Activity, Production, and Exchange