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SFB 1015:  Muße (Leisure/Otium). Concepts, Spaces, Figures

Subject Area Humanities
Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine
Geosciences
Medicine
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term from 2013 to 2021
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 197396619
 
Final Report Year 2022

Final Report Abstract

Muße – variously translated with leisure or otium – designates bounded periods of time in which actors no longer focus on the productivity and the assigned purpose of their actions. In otium, the manifold demands on human beings’ time are relegated into the background of their attention, and possibilities, freedom and aimless engagement with the situation come into the foreground. Otium creates a temporary feeling of freedom from internal and external claims on us. This freedom, which results from an easement of the need for productivity, can create new and unforeseen productivity. Times of otium are thus simultaneously freed from productivity and shaped by the expectation of new productivity. By creating an experiential space in which people realize that it is possible to temporarily escape from societal claims, times of otium often become the basis for counter-images of a freer and more autonomous life. Concepts of otium are linked to normative ideas about the good life, and often to a critique of the social order in the name of individual freedom. Today, discourses on otium have once again become a counterimage to a society shaped by acceleration and capitalist norms of continuous productivity. Against this background, the CRG 1015 has, from 2013 to 2022, analyzed ideas and practices of otium in an interdisciplinary perspective. The disciplinary focus of the first phase was on the humanities, its analytical focus on the conceptual clarification and historical differentiation of the concept of otium. In the second phase, the weight shifted towards the social sciences and the social relevance of practices and discourses of otium. The CRG has focused on the specific quality of experience during times of otium, on the discursive practices attached to these experiences and on the societal consequences of bot experiences and discourses of otium. Otium changes one’s relation to the world, and it often changes one’s bodily experience. Our relations to the passing of time and to our spatial embeddedness change: consecutive time applied to the fulfilling of tasks recedes into the background, while the duration and abidance of time come into the foreground of our attention. Space, as well, rather becomes a possibility of free appropriation than a constriction of our actions. This specific quality differentiates the experience of otium from other parts of our everyday life. Times of otium take on a special quality. This often turns them into the seed for reflection about otium and about our normal everyday, and lays the ground for a semantic and conceptual differentiation between them. If otium emerges as a semantic concept, it typically is filled with normative evaluations and linked to social roles. Not everybody can and should have otium, and not every way of passing times of otium is seen as equally dignified. Otium’s openness creates the social need to domesticate it and defuse its explosive force. Be it the philosopher’s cognation, the work of the artist or the religious experience of the mystic: the right to escape from the need for productivity is linked to the duty to fill the resulting time with valuable pursuits. Such discursive framings immunize specific kinds of otium against social criticism while turning other kinds of otium into unjustified sloth, idleness of purposelessness. They link otium to a specific content and to specific social roles – to images of gender, class and race, ethnic and religious identities and so on. As long as otium makes openness and freedom from social constraints possible, however, its experience can also run counter to its own discursive preconditions. This possibility of transgressivity is the root for otium’s continuing disruptive power, which time and again has turned it into the experiential basis for an inner-societal critique of norms of productivity.

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