“Leisure” spaces within work environments in the “Performance society”

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the increasing trend of integrating leisure spaces into work environments. It begins with the hypothesis that such spaces constitute a form of appropriation, by employers, of their employees' non-working time. The conceptual references primarily stem from the notions of Disciplinary Society (Foucault), involving the idea of docile bodies shaped by surveillance, and Performance Society (Han), demonstrating how the experience within these spaces that exploit employees' free time can easily be mistaken for a sense of freedom. The article concludes by highlighting the worker’s active participation in their own exploitation and pointing out the need to discuss the psychosocial implications arising from this rapidly expanding practice within contemporary capitalism.

architecture and urbanism; leisure; work; surveillance; performance

Resumo

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre a crescente inserção de espaços de lazer em ambientes de trabalho. Parte-se da hipótese de que esses espaços constituem uma forma de apropriação, por parte do empregador, do tempo de não trabalho de seus empregados. As referências conceituais vêm, principalmente, das noções de “Sociedade disciplinar” (Foucault), com a ideia de corpos dóceis conformados pela vigilância, e de “Sociedade de desempenho” (Han), mostrando como a vivência nesses espaços de exploração do tempo livre dos empregados pode ser facilmente confundida com uma experiência de liberdade. Conclui-se assinalando a participação ativa do trabalhador na sua própria exploração e apontando a necessidade de discutir as implicações psicossociais advindas dessa prática em franca expansão no capitalismo contemporâneo.

arquitetura e urbanismo; lazer; trabalho; vigilância; desempenho

Introduction

Richard Sennett, in Building and dwelling: Ethics for the city (2018), recounts his experience of visiting the Googleplex, in New York, remarking that the Googleplex is "in the city but not of it" ( Sennett, 2018, p , p. 170). It is a space “meant to be self-contained” (ibid., p. 171), in such a way that staff do not need to leave the workplace in order to engage in a wide range of activities, such as attending a medical consultation or even sleeping to relax after the extended working day.

In addition to all the arguments in favor of the provision of such spaces for leisure, socializing and even sleeping,¹such facilities have resulted in the Google complex becoming the inspiration for the emergence of so-called "creative class"²offices around the world. In Brazil, the offices of major companies, such as Walmart ( Figure 1 ), Unilever, Vivo ( Figures 2 and 3 ), Serasa, OLX ( Figure 4 ) and Locaweb, and those of smaller companies, such as OutPromo, SolveSystem, Arizona and the like, are also incorporating spaces designed for leisure and relaxation into the working environment.

Figura 1

Figura 2

Figura 3

Figura 4

What, however, are the implications, of the inclusion of leisure spaces in the workplace?³And why, generally speaking, do the production, proliferation and adoption of such spaces tend not make workers feel that their non-work time is being appropriated by employers but are instead perceived as motivational factors and benefits?⁴The main aim of the present study is to reflect on these questions and to propose the hypothesis that such environments constitute a subtle form of appropriation, by employers, of the non-work time of their employees. This hypothesis is explored here using Foucault’s concept of the “disciplinary society” (1995), and the notion of the “performance society” developed by Han (2015 and 2017).

In addition to this brief introduction, the text is divided into two parts. In the first, the concept of leisure is defined, and we present a brief historical overview of the incorporation of leisure spaces into the workplace. The second part then examines how the idea of surveillance in the “disciplinary society” developed by Michel Foucault can be seen to shape productivity, indicating the existence of an orchestrated division of the representations of power, in such a way that the surveillance and control of individuals is exercised and represented by a “social cell”. We then present Deleuze’s notion of the “control society” (1995), in which surveillance becomes virtual, and then move on to Han’s concept of the “performance society” (2015 and 2017), in which self-exploitation is associated with a sense of freedom. This discussion is essential for understanding the novel contours that surveillance has assumed in the contemporary world and the way in which workers play an active role in a phenomenon that appropriates their non-work time by providing spaces for leisure in the workplace.

Leisure

Corbin, in L’Avènement des Loisirs [The Advent of Free Time] (1995), remarks that, up to the 19th century, work time was discontinuous, in such a way that work was intertwined with other everyday activities, and often liberally interspersed with pauses and periods of free time. The seasons of the year and the life of the community determined the cycles of production. In other words, there was a direct relation between nature and community, not only influencing what communities produced and when, but also how they produced it. It was, therefore, with the emergence of industrial societies that a different way of ordering time and a new relation to it came into being. As a result,

[...] the modern problematization and ideology of free time appeared between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, alongside the phenomenon of mass urbanization, which was closely related to industrial mechanization. Likewise, the dramatic transformation effected by the separation of housing from the workplace – with the family ceasing to function as the physical center of the economy – played a significant role at this time. [...] It is thus fair to say that free time properly speaking, as opposed to work time, bears specific traces, characteristic of the civilization born of the industrial revolution. The evolution of free time has therefore reflected the ensuing social struggles concerning labor legislation, within capitalist society or with a view to surpassing it. ( Gaspar, 2003 , pp. 104-105)

It was thus in the context of the Industrial Revolution that the concept of leisure first began to emerge. The French sociologist Dumazedier, who is one of the foremost authorities and pioneers in the field of the sociology of leisure, has remarked that "leisure is not idleness, it does not supplant work; it presupposes it. It represents a periodic liberation from work at the end of the day, week, year, or working life" (1979, p. 28).

Dumazedier’s view of the nature of leisure derives from an understanding of the fact that, while work time and non-work time were, as Corbin and Gaspar both note, once intertwined, with the Industrial Revolution, work time came to hold sway over other kinds of time, in such a way that the exhausting day’s work to which men, women, the elderly and children were subjected ended up motivating the workers’ struggle for the eight-hour working day, with eight hours of leisure and eight hours of rest. The abuses perpetrated by employers necessitated the creation of guaranteed free time for all workers. Leisure, as we now know it, is therefore a right that has been won.

Dumazedier thus regards work as being in fact essential for the very existence of leisure as the result of a historical relationship between work time and non-work time. The present article adopts this reasoning, defining leisure as non-work time for the worker (that is nevertheless based in principle on the existence of work), and understanding it as an historical right to free time that has been won.

The present article also accepts one important criticism of Dumazedier’s position, concerning the adoption of a functionalist approach to leisure, seeing it as something that serves as compensation for work. We are interested principally here, however, in the way leisure is understood as something achieved, the fruit of a long process of workers’ struggles for better living and working conditions, without which employers would readily have allowed work to occupy all their workers’ waking hours.

The way in which work came to dominate every minute of every day is clearly described in a passage from Karl Marx’s Capital , first published in September 1867:

After capital had taken centuries to extend the working day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of 12 hours, there followed, with the birth of largescale industry in the last third of the eighteenth century, an avalanche of violent and unmeasured encroachments. Every boundary set by morality and nature, age and sex, day and night, was broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, which in the old statutes were of peasant simplicity, became so confused that an English judge, as late as 1860, needed the penetration of an interpreter of the Talmud to explain ‘judicially’ what was day and what was night. Capital was celebrating its orgies. ( Marx, 2017 , pp. 439-440)

The exploitation of the working classes culminated in a series of stand-offs and demands for improvements in working and living conditions and generated a series of responses on the part of society. Workers’ demands were subsequently examined in accordance with the prevailing system of rationality of the time, in order to provide legitimacy for any possible changes. This clearly shows how the special place that science had come to occupy, along with changes in architecture and urban planning, the value accorded to data and statistics, and other factors, all had a part to play in the rational system that was under development at the time, strengthening its position and causing it to gain acceptance throughout society. This would therefore be the prism through which the idea of time free of work would come to be examined and finally accepted over time.

The struggle for a day divided into three periods of eight hours – eight for work, eight for rest, and eight for leisure – was one of the demands that was especially carefully analyzed in the light of scientific studies of the time. Scholars pored over figures relating to the gains and losses expected to result from this model of the working day, in an attempt to justify the stern resistance of a significant sector of the economic elite to any reduction to the length of the working day.

The roots of this intensive scientific activity are various. Research was spurred by a desire to use science to justify the demand for and the introduction of the ‘three eights’ – which even socialist theorists had proved incapable of bringing about [...] There was a widespread general impression that surmenage ⁹[overwork] was one of the many scourges that blighted the late 19th century. In that age of a veritable “medical coup d’état ,” facilitated by the success of Pasteur’s theories, physiologists and psychologists found, in the study of fatigue, a way of bolstering the authority of their message and extending their influence. (Corbin et al., 2001, p. 336)

Corbin notes that, in the late 19^thcentury and early 20^thcentury, a series of studies of fatigue demonstrated that “it is a chemical process that affects the body as a whole and not just the organ that appears to affected” (ibid.). The researchers of the time believed that any prolonged period of intensive muscular effort would generate self-intoxication. This also led them to criticize excessive sporting activity (ibid.). Thus, according to Corbin, it was now understood to be wrong to see the body as a machine, since the body is subject to the laws of fatigue (ibid., p. 337).

This period also saw the appearance of studies of the capacity to resist fatigue and the factors influencing this. The bad habits studied included lack of sleep, a poor diet, and being overweight, and it was understood, while excessive physical exercise caused fatigue, “training – which was the subject of numerous experiments – tended to increase the resistance of the muscles and of the brain” (ibid., p. 338). New connections between work, rest and fatigue were therefore identified, with thresholds established for each, taking into consideration that fact that each kind of activity has the capacity to become harmful in certain contexts. “As a whole, this research activity provided a scientific basis for the need for a periodic restoration of strength” (ibid.) and consequently justified examination of specific studies of industrial fatigue. This led to the emergence of what Corbin calls (ibid.), “a period of rational management of human effort” (p. 339), based on studies of fatigue.

Corbin also notes that the First World War sparked numerous studies of industrial fatigue, principally among the Allies. He goes on to remark that it would be fair to describe the post-World War I period as “the golden age of this new branch of knowledge, especially on the North American side of the Atlantic” (ibid., p. 341). It should be borne in mind, however, that all of this activity and interest surrounding fatigue aimed to provide improved understanding of the mechanisms of the human body in relation to its limits as a way of augmenting the productivity of workers. Fatigue researchers thus became involved in a wide range of fields, including studies of sensory fatigue, such as that produced by noise, studies of the need for sleep (generating greater appreciation for this, since tiredness can affect sleeping and reduce productivity on the following day), and studies devoted to the psychological and physiological effects of work.

The scientific debate and discussion explicitly referred to the process of legitimation of practices, narratives, and consensuses. It is therefore fair to say that between 1870 and 1914, the issue of fatigue featured widely in scientific studies, paving the way for acceptance within society of the right to time free of work and setting in motion processes that would result in the creation of periods of time that we now call leisure time (ibid., p. 345), such as the weekends, paid holidays, and other benefits.

Leisure at work

Awareness that the body is not a machine and that lack of rest may harm productivity and hence reduce profits led to the development of a series of scientific studies within the workplace, principally in the fields of psychology, ergonomics, and sociology, that indicated the benefits of leisure time for productivity and staff motivation.

Ensuring that there is time for meals and breaks at work led to the creation within factories of leisure spaces such as cafeterias, refectories, canteens, and restrooms. This preceded the creation of such spaces in the offices of white-collar workers. However, according to a study conducted by Resende (2018) , it was in the latter that leisure spaces would eventually develop at a much rapider pace.

Resende notes that leisure spaces were already being incorporated into workplaces in the late 19th century, in office blocks and company campuses. These included skyscrapers, such as the Pullman Building in Chicago, designed in 1883 by Solon S. Beman, for the Pullman Palace Car Company, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1904 Larkin Building, in New York, along with company campuses, such those of AT&T (built in 1941, with additional buildings constructed in 1974), in Murray Hills, New Jersey, and Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (1954), in Bloomfield, Connecticut, designed by S.O.M. under the influence of Mies Van der Rohe.

These spaces contained a leisure infrastructure designed for workers and their families, with facilities such as libraries, restaurants, bowling alleys, and, in some cases, housing.

According to Resende, some offices moved from the city to out-of-town campuses and business parks because cities to some extent no longer catered for the new spatial needs of businesses. Nor, in the post-World War II period, were they able to cope with the increased road traffic and overpopulation in city centers, with all the disadvantages these bring, leading companies to move to out-of-town green areas and suburbs, as a way of finding peace and quiet and encouraging greater interaction among employees of the same company.

Alongside this movement to the periphery, there was also rapid development of information and communications technologies, establishing new paradigms in society and the world of work, some of which had already been included in the functioning of such buildings. This was, as Peter Drucker (2002) called it, for the first time, in 1959, the beginning of the Knowledge Society, which would have organizational and spatial implications for workplaces, in particular office spaces. (Ibid., p. 73)

Drucker’s belief that "the real and controlling resource and the absolutely decisive 'factor of production' is now neither capital, nor land, nor labor…[but]… knowledge" (Drucker, 1993, p. 15) reveals this new paradigm of work, as reflected in the production of spaces based on new production processes.

New working practices were also established. In the 1960s, there was an increasing emphasis on “organizational culture,” which systematized rewards and shaped the spirit, the environment, and values of an organization ( Resende, 2018 , p. 77). This “organizational culture” aimed to encourage employees to develop as sense of belonging to and feeling at home in the company as if it were a family. In addition to the provision of physical leisure infrastructure, systematic efforts were undertaken to create an equally conducive emotional environment.

Examination of the history of workplaces and the leisure spaces contained within them reveals that, although such spaces were intended to enhance the well-being and the social integration of workers and to provide breaks for rest, the true purpose was to create a healthy workforce even more willing to work.

In the 1980s, however, new smaller business campuses surrounding universities began to appear in the United States. At this time, most office work now involved working in “cubicles”, since these constituted the least expensive, most accessible, most flexible, and most easily reproduceable option. Most workplaces thus still depended heavily on organizational culture for the provision of leisure. The idea of the campus, however, combined with the experience of young researchers and workers—many of them still at college or recently graduated—provided this class of workers with workplaces that were replete with the leisure and recreational facilities typical of a university, including sofas, games rooms, gymnasia and so forth. Other smaller companies and laboratories were connected to this ecosystem and there was a climate of constant interchange. Workers in the emerging society of knowledge tended, at that time, to hail from a privileged background, and the much-vaunted idea that a multi-million-dollar business could start out in a garage is largely a myth ( Avendaño, 2014 ).

When Internet companies began to emerge, open-plan offices became more popular. These were open indoor areas, with no fixed predefined workstations, that encouraged a constant exchange of ideas. According to Resende (2018 , p. 87):

Companies once again started to value the possibility of chance meetings of different people to exchange ideas. This spontaneity was associated with diversion, as a social factor, and companies thus began to break down the boundaries between work and leisure in the workplace. The spaces provided by such firms were far superior to those of other companies or even of universities, and it was not unusual to find foosball tables, basketball, volleyball, tennis and racquetball courts, football pitches, swimming pools and recreation centers. Social activities similar to those at universities, such as picnics, barbecues, and afternoon teas, were also introduced.

It is interesting to note that, little by little, the spaces dedicated to leisure within workspaces came to be absorbed more by way of entropy, in so far as they broke down the boundaries between the two categories of space. It thus became increasingly common for workspaces to contain not only areas set aside for leisure but also leisure activities installed within workspaces, with computers and workstations interspersed with pool tables, foosball tables, pinball machines, and other leisure facilities.

The tone of informality that came to imbue workspaces, flexible working hours, and the possibility of remote working from a ‘home office,’ with "leisure as much a cause as a consequence of longer hours being spent at the office" (ibid.) reveals a clear tendency for the worlds of work and leisure to overlap. Things were no longer the way they were prior to the Industrial Revolution, when work time and non-work time intertwined in accordance with the cycle of the seasons. Now, the intertwining of work and leisure is governed by the need for speed and efficiency. Work and leisure are merged together for the purpose, ultimately, of ensuring that work can be accomplished and goals achieved. The success that has been experienced and the profits made by companies in Silicon Valley from the 1990s onwards has inspired other employers to do their best to replicate the same spatial formula.

History shows that the production of leisure spaces within workplaces has shifted from a more formal, hierarchical, corporative mentality to one that is more informal, horizontal and focused on the needs of individuals. Gradual appropriation of the world of leisure by the world of work has occurred in tandem with technological and economic transformations, and this has led to the emergence of new kinds of workplaces that incorporate leisure spaces, indicating the emergence of a new stage of capitalism. Apart from increased productivity, employee motivation is a common argument advanced by employers to justify the adoption of such measures. In a study conducted by Resende (2018) , employees testified that the existence of leisure spaces in the workplace

helped to consolidate interpersonal relations [...], to enhance physical and mental well-being, to develop cognitive and creative abilities, and to increase productivity, [...] in addition to improving the quality of life both at work and outside of the workplace. (ibid., p. 167)

How then did it come about that the appropriation of leisure time by work is seen as a cause of satisfaction by some employees?

Productivity through surveillance

One key to a fuller understanding of why workers submit voluntarily to the encroachment of work time on their non-work time in the contemporary world and react positively to the phenomenon of leisure spaces located within the workplace may be found in the work of Michel Foucault. In particular in Vigiar e punir (2018), Foucault identified the methods used to subjugate, coerce and punish the human body throughout history, describing the system of power relations that prevailed each period, the ramifications of the discourse used, and the development of mechanisms to achieve their objectives. For Foucault, a study of the control of human bodies in western countries reveals clearly discriminable periods during which certain discourses of power hold sway. These discourses are, in turn, reflected in the institutions, politics and forms of policing established, and also in architecture and urban planning

Discipline and Punish first presents the history of the body subjected to torture in “sovereign societies” (these being societies that go back deep into human history and are centered on the figure of a single sovereign). Such societies prevailed up until the Industrial Revolution, when there was a transition to ‘disciplinary societies’ based on a system intended to make human bodies docile. While, in sovereign societies, punishment and control of bodies involved subjecting them to torture in public squares so as to provide visibility for the prevailing power structure, in disciplinary societies, there is an orchestrated division of representations of power, resulting in control being more evenly distributed – and exercised and represented by ‘social cells’.

The image of the panopticon proposed by Jeremy Bentham perfectly sums up the idea of surveillance in a disciplinary society. This led Foucault to conclude that "visibility is a trap". Its architectural composition involves,

at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower [...]. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy... so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. (ibid., p. 194).

In the transition from sovereign to disciplinary societies, different forms of organization of power coexisted, from the still prevalent "ancient rights of the monarchy" to others that had a "preventive, utilitarian, corrective conception of a right to punish that belongs to society as a whole". One of these forms of organization of power involved the establishment of a "punitive city,"

[...] a functioning of penal power, distributed throughout the social space; present everywhere as scene, spectacle, sign, discourse; legible like an open book; operating by a permanent recodification of the mind of the citizens; eliminating crime by those obstacles placed before the idea of crime; acting invisibly and uselessly on the ‘soft fibres of the brain’, as Servan put it. A power to punish that ran the whole length of the social network would act at each of its points, and in the end would no longer be perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual. (Ibid., p. 129)

The kind of surveillance involved in the idea of the panopticon and punitive power shared by the whole social fabric molded the thinking and institutions of the time. Foucault argues that surveillance for the purpose of creating docile bodies¹⁰came to pervade the whole social fabric and all social activities, taking concrete form in ‘apparatuses’.¹¹Architecture and urban planning themselves should thus be seen as tools of surveillance in the disciplinary society,¹²molding localities in conformity with the interests of governmentality and ensuring that bodies are made docile. According to Foucault, we thus live in a “carceral continuum” (ibid., p. 298), in which we are led from one prison to another.

Bodies can supposedly be made docile in this way at an early age in school, in communal spaces, in college, in institutions, or at work in a factory or an office. The production of space as a whole in a disciplinary society aims to control the bodies of individuals in such a way that spaces are readapted in accordance with the precepts of the disciplinary system. Hospitals are thus divided into wings, schools have rows of desks, factories have workstations. And it because of this need for discipline that spaces in school, at work, in hospitals, in army barracks and so forth come to resemble one another.

The control and discipline imposed on bodies led Foucault to develop the notion of biopower. In his course at the Collège de France in 1978, titled Sécurité, territoire, population ( Security, territory, population) , Foucault defines biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, 2008, p. 3). Biopower generates biopolitics, which, Foucault argues is “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault, 1988, p. 134). Revel further clarifies the concept of biopolitics to the effect that “while discipline takes the form of a political anatomy applied to bodies and is applied essentially to individuals, biopolitics represents social medicine on a large scale applied to the population as a way of governing life: life thus forms part of the field of power” (2005, p. 27).

The concepts of biopolitics and biopower together help shed light on how the disciplinary society has been modified and perfected in relation to its mission of producing docile bodies, coming eventually to focus on the individual and a form of surveillance that is increasingly diffused throughout society, but also increasingly heavier and more insistently present. Thus, through a kind of refinement of the disciplinary society, surveillance would appear already to be rooted in the subject –, and, at this point, it can already be seen that entrenched surveillance is one of the root causes of the appropriation of non-work time by work.

The control society

The technological (r)evolution following the Second World War and the wave of revolutions that came in its wake exercised a decisive influence on the way western societies are organized. As well as providing new forms of entertainment, the broad dissemination of video technology and easier access to it have expanded the scope of the panopticon. The disciplinary society now has information and communications technologies at its disposal and can use mass communications to make bodies docile, helping to effect radical changes in the way urban spaces are occupied, causing some parts to fall into decline, while others become more densely populated. The advent of the Internet simultaneously created a new and radical network of invisible ties within the city; the panopticon could now be installed in the virtual world, and individuals induced voluntarily to provide the tracks through which they can be surveilled.

In 1990, Gilles Deleuze suggested that a shift was underway from a disciplinary society to one of control. As he put it, “we're moving away from disciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication" (2008, p. 216). Deleuze argues that “disciplinary societies have two poles: signatures standing for individuals, and numbers or places in a register standing for their position in a mass" while, in "control societies",

[...] the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a code: codes are passwords , whereas disciplinary societies are ruled (when it comes to integration or resistance) […] Individuals become ‘ dividuals ’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘ banks .’ Money, perhaps, best expresses the difference between the two kinds of society, since discipline was always related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies. (ibid., p. 222)

The overlapping discourses in control societies address new relations and practices regarding space and time, and the virtualization, which began in disciplinary societies, reaches new levels. People no longer need to go to the bank or the post office to make payments, videogames can now be played by multiple players at the same time in various places around the world, political propaganda is relayed by social networks, security cameras observe and record the private lives of individuals and track their movements and behavior.

It is in this control society that we have come to be monitored by surveillance cameras at work and in which virtual environments are extensively used. De Masi expresses a certain optimism regarding the new urban order effected by a shift from metropolis to ‘telepolis’ and he sees the virtualization of processes as something fresh and new. "Built entirely on the concept of living and working at a distance, the more the inhabitants of Telepolis stay at home working and consuming remotely, blurring the boundaries between work, home, social life, production, reproduction, and entertainment, the more the city bustles with activity" (1999, p. 216)

In the shift from the disciplinary society to the society of control, old disciplinary structures are being rapidly transformed, making way for

[...] a system governed by excess production and exaggerated consumption, by marketing and publicity, flows of capital in real time, interconnectivity, and global communications networks. Above all, it is marked by the decline of some of the basic institutions of modern society – such as the school, the factory, the prison, and the hospital, including the home designed to accommodate a nuclear family on the bourgeois model. On the other hand, complementary to this, the private company has become a kind of primary inspiration and example for all other institutions, including, and perhaps fundamentally, the most up-to-date versions of these modern fossils. By infecting them with an omnipresent "entrepreneurial spirit", they have forever transformed these organizations so as to make them increasingly compatible with the pace and demands of contemporary society". ( Bruno et al., 2018 , pp. 208-209)

The performance society

More recent phenomena in the fields of communications, technology, market economics, and the financial market, suggest that discourses of power are increasingly being shaped differently. Such discourses are seen to pervade social and cultural relations, redirecting efforts and policy towards a new social logic, in which the "spirit of enterprise" holds sway and in which surveillance is finally inculcated in the very subjectivity of the individual. This is what Byung-Chul Han has called the performance society, arguing that such a society

[...] is wholly dominated by the modal verb ‘can’– in contrast to disciplinary society, which issues prohibitions and deploys ‘should’. After a certain point of productivity, ‘should’ reaches a limit. To increase productivity, it is replaced by ‘can’. The call for motivation, initiative, and projects exploits more effectively than whips and commands. As an entrepreneur of the self, the achievement-subject is free insofar as he or she is not subjugated to a commanding and exploiting Other. However, the subject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation— and does so of his or her own free will… Auto-exploitation proves much more efficient than allo-exploitation because it is accompanied by a feeling of liberty. This makes possible exploitation without domination. (Han, 2020a, p. 21)

The popular idea that being an entrepreneur is an easy solution or one associated with freedom aptly expresses the rationale underlying the performance society. The home office, coworking, hackathons, design sprints, and other fads of modern entrepreneurial culture reveal a pattern of self-exploitation. Modern offices contain pool tables, hammocks, and videogame machines. There is now a 24/7 regime, in which the individual can work at any time, on any day, as they see fit.

This apparently harks back to the time when free time and work were closely intertwined, in so far as they were intrinsically linked to everyday life and leisure spilt over into the working day. It can, however, be seen from the passage cited above that, in the performance society, leisure and liberty operate as work in disguise. The existence within the workplace of spaces and facilities designed for leisure and use during free time causes individuals to spend more time engaged in productive labor, motivated by the periods of time during which they believe that they are not working.

In this state of constant production and utilitarianism, what role does leisure play? Boundaries are frayed and begin to break down. Dividing lines are blurred. In the performance society, every space is a frontier. Everything begins to make itself present as a possibility.

Now that leisure is understood as a right that has already been won, it is worth asking whether time free of work can nowadays be rightly seen as leisure time. Leisure as a right won by the working class, as a time set aside during the day and in the calendar for rest and for their own private pastimes, no longer seems to serve the same function. The ideas of productivity and high performance that individuals have internalized and on which their salaries depend are so unrelenting that the right to time free of work seems no longer to be guaranteed.

Flexibility has become a byword within the logic of the performance society, in which “can” trumps “should”, and this leads to a blurring of the boundaries between work and non-work, to the effect that these two spheres are constantly intertwined and the right to leisure no longer exists. Although workers may have a formal contract, the logic of performance persists and pervades the culture of working life in the contemporary world, requiring, sometimes despite appearances, total dedication and the highest possible degree of productivity on the part of employees.

Spaces have come to reflect this new modus operandi , which goes beyond a conceptual hybrid and amounts to a loosening of boundaries. When one is not told what one “should” do, but only what one “can,” spaces hold the power to retain us for longer, with all the potentially negative or positive consequences this may entail.

The apparent freedom provided by new contemporary forms of work, characterized by informality and the blurring of the difference between times and spaces set aside for leisure and those intended for work, is worn as a badge of distinction by those classes of worker who have access to such spaces. It provides employees with an identity that associates both them and the company they work for with ideas of creativity and modernity.

The exploitation of labor develops a new facet, when, in addition to generating wealth through the productive force of labor, it also relates "its products" with the identity of the worker, including the dynamics of biopolitical exploitation of labor [...] This new process of determining value effects a shift from quantitative economic measurement to a more subjective approach, since the value of intangible factors is linked to factors related to the construction of ideologies among those operating within this new mode of exploitation. (Souza, Avelino, and Silveira, 2018, pp. 108-109)

The inclusion of leisure spaces in the workplace thus implies that

to heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement, or, in other words, by the positive scheme of ‘can’; after a certain level of productivity obtains, the negativity of prohibition impedes further expansion. The positivity of ‘can’ is much more efficient than the negativity of ‘should’ (Han, 2020b).

The discourse relating to flexibility, liberty, and informality thus masks continuous surveillance of the leisure time spent within the workplace, carried out with the full and unrestricted cooperation of the employee.

Conclusion

Spaces dedicated to leisure and free time exist because of the need for a break from the world of work, to move from the condition of an individual as a producer of labor to one of being a consumer, engaging in cultural activities or experiencing contact with nature – that non--built space that is a relic of times when there was greater symbiosis with the environment.

The appropriation of non-work time by work through the production of leisure spaces within areas designated for work is a dynamic that involves the participation and collaboration of the employee. The contemporary stage of capitalism has been established gradually over centuries of surveillance and control of bodies, spreading out slowly through the social fabric. It has thus increasingly come to overlap with everyday life in all spheres, including private life, shaping and regulating, through mass communications and consumerism (which exist in a feedback relation to one another), the desires and identities of individuals. The identification of workers with their jobs forms part of a sophisticated technology of power that has inculcated control by the employer, or, through self-employment, the very figure of the employer, into the unconscious of the employee.

This not only leads us to question the appropriation of non-work leisure time by work and the way individuals are trapped in the bubbles of mutual coexistence that offices have increasingly become, but also shows how the workers involved in this process of appropriation of free time are alienated from the city in which they live. This reinforces practices that distance people from social contact with a variety of different kinds of people in the public sphere and demobilizes individuals in relation to the occupation of urban space and the demand for the right to the city. It thereby also demobilizes them in relation to demands for more and better public leisure spaces, in which individuals (albeit still under surveillance) are truly in control of their own non-work time.

Figure 5
– Confederation Generale du Travail (C.G.T) poster advocating the eight-hour working day

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Notes

• 1
  The arguments used by employers to justify the adoption of such spaces include, according to newspaper articles on the phenomenon in Brazil ( Ferreira, 2014 ; Formiga, 2015 ; Grego, 2018 ; Melo, 2014 ; Pivetti, 2017 ), a desire to foster creativity and communication, and to enhance the well-being and productivity of employees.
• 2
  An expression coined by Florida (2011) for those who work in the field of software, games, audiovisual production, music, media, editing, fashion, publicity and so forth. Florida wrote about the growing role of the creative classes in the contemporary world, believing that cities could benefit from the promotion of cultural policy, without discussing the gentrification of these areas that may result.
• 3
  In academic work of a conceptual nature, Duerden, Courtright and Widmer (2017) have attempted to shed light on the phenomenon by understanding the incorporation of leisure into the workplace as providing a greater opportunity for individuals and groups to fully realize their potential in organizations.
• 4
  Resende (2018) presents the findings of a study of individuals working in companies that have incorporated leisure spaces into the workplace and shows that workers associate the existence of such spaces with heightened motivation and increased productivity, as well as a greater sense of attachment to the goals and values of the company for which they work.
• 5
  Retrieved from https://officesnapshots.com/2014/02/18/inside-walmart-coms-sao-paulo-offices/ . Access: July 9, 2019.
• 6
  Retrieved from https://exame.abril.com.br/negocios/por-dentro-do-arrojado-laboratorio-de-inovacao-da-vivo/ . Access: July 9, 2019.
• 7
  Retrieved from https://exame.abril.com.br/negocios/por-dentro-do-arrojado-laboratorio-de-inovacao-da-vivo/ . Access: July 9, 2019.
• 8
  Retrieved from https://www.galeriadaarquitetura.com.br/projetos/referencias-ambientes-c/132/salas-de-descompressao/ . Access: July 9, 2019.
• 9
  The Littré French dictionary defines the verb ‘surmener’ as ‘to cause excessive fatigue in a beast of burden by making it walk too far or for too long’. The word is also used figuratively refer to extreme exhaustion in humans. The English translation adopted here is ‘overwork’. ‘Burnout’ is another translation sometimes used.
• 10
  “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.” ( Foucault, 2018 , p. 134).
• 11
  For Foucault (1980), an apparatus (dispositif) is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions– in short, the said as much as the unsaid” (p. 364).
• 12
  See Lima (2017) .

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  Apr-Jun 2024

History

• Received
  1 Mar 2023
• Accepted
  24 Apr 2023