Andrew Taggart on Total Work - Paul Millerd's newsletter == * ###### tags: `work` `philosophy` https://boundless.substack.com/p/88-dont-follow-this-advice-on-working?r=bfg7 12:00 - we start at exactly 202 the p.m. Mountain Standard time with 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time you can't actually get around to what EP Thompson called time discipline. until it's the case that you have the intervention of the clock and thereafter the dispersal of clocks clocks become centrally concerned in 19th century English factories. and what transpires is a kind of tense rigorous disciplining of factory workers so that they would be able to conform their actions and their conduct to the dictates of the clock now. that's just one simple thing that structures our way of being in the world today my second one is very interesting here namely that we have people from all over the world that's made possible by standardization of clock time so we now have time zones according to some scholars time zones are really the effect of trying to allow for railroads to sync up their time as they move across the vast American countryside it's not natural of course to have one 4:00 p.m. in Boston and 2:00 p.m. and Denver that is a proper sense of social construct it's not a bad thing per se but it does in fundamental ways structure the way we think and live job becomes a central concept only in the 19th century and following by the 20th century we begin to think that Universal employment or near Universal employment is the fundamental answer to the question of how we have livelihoods you think of your day in terms of schedules you think of perhaps being here in terms of the opportunity cost you could have been somewhere else doing something else once you begin to investigate the matter more you begin to see the work a work of centric understanding is very much you might say at work and what I'm also calling the work Society so it's just now I think that we may be in the midst of the possibility of a collective existential opening ---- Andrew you've written about leisure as something people have kind of lost the meaning to leisure today we think of throwing on our sweat pants and watching Netflix but for most of the time people thought of leisure as a way of contemplating the mystery of the universe you've said an openness to what there is in the world a disposition of being in the world open to apprehending reality what is the role of leisure amid this crisis and like how people can relate to what's going on and think about their role as human the coronavirus is I would call it a catalyst that's revealing to us the ways in which chained together fragile systems are beginning to be corroded the modern mistaken sense of leisure that is that it's tantamount to free time quantifiable time left over when it's the case that one is not working or at work working on oneself or working in some metaphysical or metaphorical way or another it's like it's like the remainder so leisure is basically a consumptive understanding or consumptive conception according to this modern or late modern view but that is not actually the essence of leisure according to much of the tradition instead leisure first of all is not quantifiable it's not understood in terms of chronological time or in terms of the space rather leisure is I may use a metaphor here it's the opening of one soul to the apprehending of what is ---- it is when when you read a book in a certain way and you're not reading it just to acquire theoretical knowledge and you're not reading a book simply to get through it to the end when you're reading it with a view to apprehending it to allowing it to seek end this is what medieval is called lectio divina, that's divvine reading when you read it in order to be transformed by what it has to say and not in a self-help sort of way but a deep transformation in your being then you're in leisure when you contemplate the nature of your being and in earnest sense, who am i, what am i, what is all this about then your in leisure so leisure is as I say that the enabling condition for the possibility of these wide-ranging beautiful necessary vital questions ---- (to continue at [25:59](https://youtu.be/sWBJuMD95nI?t=1559))