“Planless Life”: Leisure Studies in the Context of Melvillean Paradigmatic Figure of Bartleby

Considered differently at different historical times, leisure as a particular lifestyle is quite a common research topic. Today, at times of war, we tend to compensate for its horrors and nonsense with something remote, and this can be leisure, either in the form of what the global culture industry recommends to a mass consumer (Netflix, crime fiction reads, computer games), or as moments of personal development and education. Both, however, seem to transform us into cogs in the machine of culture industry.Is there any possibility of leisure without any project, leisure which would not comply with any functional imperatives, whether they be economic survival or practices of the self?I study here several versions of so-called “serious leisure” for people who hardly have the resources, material as well as financial. I understand serious leisure as a way of life of its adepts or as a most significant part of their life. Such leisure requires being tuned in to absence of plan, although it cannot be realized without all the necessary logistics and infrastructure. Planlessness is comparable to a particular perception of time, when one is totally present in the moment, and to attunement to space, which makes leisure corporeal as the body is perceived as a harmonic particle of what we call nature.A special leisure type represented by Hermann Melville’s Bartleby is thought of as non-activity, which is the basis of the American / Occidental life system.I conclude that there are differences between people dedicating only a part of their life to leisure, and those who make it sort of lifestyle. If the serious leisure adepts keep staying in the system and their leisure becomes a kind of pillar for their functioning in it, the disciples of leisure as lifestyle are mostly on its margins. They are excessive for the system, and, while apparently staying within it, still exceed its bounds.