DIY or die (of boredom)

This week was my first encounter with Adorno, and I have to say I found him quite unpleasant. In “Free Time” it felt as though he was deliberately constructing a theory that would justify his feelings of superiority over all manner of non-intellectual types, whom he refers to repeatedly and sweepingly as “people.” “People” encompasses sun-tanners, hobbyists, vacationers, amateur artists, and athletes, to name a few, and always implies the exemption of the author.

I was particularly struck by his discussion of the “do-it-yourself” ethic. Adorno associates this with “people’s” resentment at mechanization, a product of the industrial age that “unburdens people, without … their having any use for the newly acquired time” (193). According to Adorno, no one actually undertakes tasks that others could perform more efficiently for them out of sheer desire. Secretly, they despise these tasks, but take them on in a misguided attempt to express their individuality and throw off “the yoke that weighs upon them."

Adorno goes on to explicitly connect ‘do-it-yourself’ activity with “those people who regard themselves as anti-establishment” (194). I can’t help anachronistically thinking about this in terms of the DIY punk/grassroots ethic, a movement of the last 30 years that has been responsible for championing everything from self-publishing through zines, self-tutelage in music, and self-promotion through touring, all while assuming a counter-cultural attitude. Adorno would refer to these types of projects as “pseudo-activity,” activities designed to give the individual the illusion that s/he is challenging the status-quo, while simultaneously allowing them to ignore their “dim suspicion” of the actually miniscule possibility for change.

Adorno has a point when he states that pseudo-activities are “fictions and parodies” of the same productivity that society calls for. One of the contradictions in the DIY ethic is that it purports to challenge capitalist ideology by championing some of the very values that sustain it: for instance, productivity and individuality. In some ways DIY simply recreates the capitalist modes of production on a smaller scale, and it places a similar demand on the individual to be productive in their leisure time.

However, I think Adorno misjudges some of the motivations for doing things oneself. Doesn’t the will to write a zine, or form a band, or build your own bicycle stem from the desire to create personal meaning, even if it is within the constraints of a dominant system? I think the idea is that if we can reinvest both time and objects with meaning that isn't "predigested" we are subversively challenging a system that attempts to keep us complacent through boredom. Perhaps this sentiment takes us back to Svendsen’s claim that we are all hopeless Romantics, ever seeking self-actualization, but it also reminds me a little of something that came up in the Langbauer article: that is, that one can accomplish things by working within ideology rather attempting to escape it.

I have a feeling I am rambling and now it’s time for class. Next post should be more directly boredom-related!