Leisure and alienation in Houellebecq’s fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Willging
Keyword(s):  
Physical Exercise ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Television Watching ◽  
Family And Work ◽  
Human Need

This article examines representations of leisure in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction. Theorised as a new human need that arose from the alienating nature of work in industrial society, leisure is one of three sectors of everyday life explored by modern sociologists. Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre saw in leisure a domain in which human beings could experience moments of freedom and fulfilment, but which was becoming increasingly controlled and commercialised and therefore as potentially alienating as work. This article argues that Houellebecq’s fiction portrays contemporary leisure activities, such as shopping, tourism, physical exercise, smoking, and television-watching, as manifestations of this latter kind of leisure, which has proliferated under neoliberalism. His protagonists attempt, if often half-heartedly, to compensate for neoliberalism’s erosion of family and work as stabilising forces to find identity and fulfilment in leisure. If their efforts inevitably fail, Houellebecq’s attention to everyday leisure at least confirms Lefebvre’s contention that a critical evaluation of leisure was increasingly urgent.

scholarly journals The vision and interiorization of leisure and free time of post-degree students

2019 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Sara Margarita Yañez-Flores ◽  
Jaquelina Lizet Hernández-Cueto ◽  
María del Consuelo Salinas-Aguirre ◽  
Alma Verena Solís-Solís
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Free Time ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Way

Leisure and free time are a part of human beings’ life, and perhaps neither how nor why is thought of. In leisure, activities are individual and obligation free; free time activities, although can be chosen whether to do them or not, are linked to social pressures and included in the legislation and as universal human rights: Recreation, amusement and rest. The objective of the article is to analyze the way in which the post-degree students visualize and incorporate the leisure and free time in their everyday life. The used method is quantitative, explorational-descriptive, and transversal. The article contributes demonstrating the subjective wealth that impregnates the leisure forms and free time activities into the way each of the individuals do things, think, say, and spend time in their educational, social, and work related relationships and interrelationships. The questionnaire was answered by 70 post-degree students ―53 women and 17 men― most of them working. Some female students spend 15% of their week in free time activities and 27.5% to leisure; in both activities men said to spend 27% of their week. Only 16 women and six men consider free time as a fundamental human right.

Events of the Future

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Lade ◽  
Paul Strickland ◽  
Elspeth Frew ◽  
Paul Willard ◽  
Sandra Cherro Osorio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Future ◽  
Human Need ◽  
Face Time ◽  
The Way

Events in their simplest form can be viewed as gatherings of people. Events have always existed as they allow people to gather for one or more of the following reasons: To solve problems individuals are not able to solve on their own; To celebrate; To mourn; To mark transitions; To make decisions because we need one another; To show strength; To honour and acknowledge; To build companies and schools and neighbourhoods; To welcome; To say goodbye (Parker, 2018). Thus, a gathering can be described as the ‘conscious bringing together of people for a reason’ and it ‘shapes the way we think, feel and make sense of our world’ (Parker, 2018: i). This highlights the importance of events in society and confirms that the motivation to attend an event in the future is likely to remain the same because we are likely to continue to have the basic human need for inclusivity and contact (Hari et al., 2015). As human beings, the importance of social interaction is evident in our everyday life, we are shaped by other people and we crave social contact to the extent that ‘isolation is used as punishment and even as torture’ (Hari et al., 2015). Such face-to-face engagement may become more prevalent in the future because we spend ‘more and more time in front of a screen each year’ and so are spending less time engaging in face-to-face contact. As a result, ‘face-to-face time has become a more treasured commodity in our modern world’ (Social Tables, 2019).

SELF-PRESERVATION OF THE PHYSICAL HEALTH OF STUDENTS IN THE VIEW OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL AND LABOR COMPETENCIES

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Pavlov B.S. ◽  
Sentyurina L.B. ◽  
Pronina E.I. ◽  
Pavlov D.B. ◽  
Saraikin D.A.
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Healthy Lifestyle ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Federal Districts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Labor Potential

The state policy of health preservation of Russians and the process of introducing a healthy lifestyle into their everyday life is hampered by the lack of sufficient self-activity and purposefulness of the individual ecological and valeological behavior of representatives of various population groups. According to the authors of the article, one of the important indicators of the maturity of professional and labor competencies of school and student youth is their readiness and desire for permanent self-preserving behavior. “With numbers in hand,” the authors show the scale of deviant deviations and the phenomena of spontaneous irresponsibility in the educational and leisure activities of students, hindering the preservation and development of physical culture, the accumulation and effective use of their psychophysiological and labor potential. The conclusions of the proposal of the authors of the article are based on the results of a number of sociological surveys conducted in 2000-2020. at the Institute of Economics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in a number of secondary schools and universities of the Ural and Volga Federal Districts.

Naturalism and Skepticism in the Philosophy of Hume

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Naturalistic Study ◽  
Human Beings

Hume takes his “naturalistic” study of human nature to show that certain general “principles of the imagination” can explain how human beings come to think, feel, believe, and act in all the ways they do independently of the truth or reasonableness of those responses. This appears to leave the reflective philosopher with no reason for assenting to what he has discovered he cannot help believing anyway. Relief from this unacceptably extreme skepticism is found in acknowledging and acquiescing in those forces of “nature” that inevitably overcome the apparent dictates of “reason” and return the philosopher to the responses and beliefs of everyday life. Living in full recognition of these forces and limitations is what Hume means by the “mitigated scepticism” he accepts.

scholarly journals The Role of Values in Social Change: An Analysis from The Qur’ānic Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anis Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Set Up ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Means Of Production

In the post-industrial revolution world, social change is often studied and understood in the context of change in means of production, mobility, urbanization and change in the constitution of workforce. Role of ethical values is generally confined to personal conduct and manners. Industrial society is supposed to have its own work ethics which may or may not agree with personal ethics and morality. Ethics and morality are generally considered, in the Western thought, as a social construct. Therefore, with the change in means of production or political system, values and morality are also expected to be re-adjusted in order to cope with the changed environment. Sometimes a totally new set of values emerges as a consequence of the change in economic, political, or legal set up. The present research tries to understand the meaning and place of these values in a global socio-cultural framework. Relying essentially on the divine principles of the Qur'ān it makes an effort to understand relevance of these universal and ultimate principles with human conduct and behavior in society.  It indicates that essentially it is the core values, principles, or norms which guide human beings in their interpersonal, social, economic and political matters. Islam being a major civilizing force, culture, and the way of life, provides values which guide both in individual and social matters. The values given by the Qur’ān and the Sunnah are not monopoly of the Muslim. These values are universal and are relevant in a technological society.

scholarly journals Towards a spatialized utopia: romanticism and everyday life in the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
César Simoni Santos
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Revolutionary Romanticism ◽  
Practical Program ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
Spatial Element

The presence of the spatial element in the reflections of Henri Lefebvre does not merely result from work involving the translation and adaptation of critical thinking developed up until his time. The realization that not even the highest expression of the critical tradition had sufficiently noticed this crucial dimension of life was one of the connecting points between theoretical advance, represented by the spatial orientation of critique, and the effort to renew the utopian horizon. A very distinct assimilation of the early work of Marx and the proximity to revolutionary romanticism, particularly of Nietzschean extraction, rendered a decisive impact on Lefebvrian conception. Practice, body, pleasure and instincts, recovering their place in the critical social imagination, went on to become the basis for the re-foundation of a theoretical-practical program that involved the formulation of the notion of the right to the city. The perspective of appropriation thus replaced the vague emancipatory statements of the subject's philosophies.

scholarly journals CHARACTER BUILDING BASED ON LOCAL WISDOM IN THE FILM TITLED TANDA TANYA “?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 327
Author(s):  
Nur Alfi Farikhah ◽  
Ratna Handayani Pramukti ◽  
Vena Nur Litasari ◽  
Ratna Hidayah
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Educational Purpose ◽  
Global Era ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Cultural Communities ◽  
Character Building

<p><em>Character is very important in an effort to reflect cultural values that are applied through a culture of positive habits in everyday life such as honesty, trust, tolerance and caring for fellow human beings in the community. The value of local wisdom is not a barrier to progress in the global era, but still maintains cultural values that have been embedded in the surrounding community. Therefore, fostering the values of local wisdom is a strategic step in the effort to build the character of the nation. This article proposes to discuss the cultivation of cultural values through a tolerance attitude based on local wisdom in the surrounding environment as a community character reinforcement being appropriate to the cultural values which are inspired by the film titled Tanda Tanya “?”. The film describes the life that has been acculturated, then shows the assimilation and pluralism that exist in the lives of people in Indonesia. This film has educational purpose containing knowledge and learning that occur around the lives of diverse cultural communities.</em></p>

scholarly journals An Approach to the Analysis of Religious Reality in the Social Phenomenology of Alfred Schütz

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-327
Author(s):  
Alexey Sitnikov
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Multiple Realities ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Social Phenomenology

The article deals with the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz. Proceeding from the concept of multiple realities, the author describes religious reality, analyses its relationship with everyday, theoretical, and mythological realities, and identifies the areas where they overlap and their specifics. According to Schütz’s concept, reality is understood as something that has a meaning for a human being, and is also consistent and certain for those who are ‘inside’ of it. Realities are structurally similar to one another as they are similar to the reality that is most obvious for all human beings, i.e., the world of everyday life. Religious reality has one of the main signs of genuine reality, that of internal consistency. Religious reality has its own epoché (special ascetic practices) which has similarities with the epoché of the theoretical sphere since neither serve practical objectives, and imply freedom from the transitory issues of everyday life. Just as the theoretical sphere exists independently of the life of a scientist in the physical world and is needed to transfer results to other people, so the religious reality depends on ritual actions and material objects in its striving for the transcendent. Individual, and especially collective, religious practices are performed physically and are inextricably linked with the bodily ritual. The article notes that although Schütz’s phenomenological concept of multiple realities has repeatedly served as a starting point for the development of various social theories, its heuristic potential has not been exhausted. This allows for the further analyzing and development of topical issues such as national identity and its ties with religious tradition in the modern era, when religious reality loses credibility and has many competitors, one of which is the modern myth of the nation. Intersubjective ideas of the nation that are socially confirmed as the self-evident reality of everyday life cause complex emotions and fill human lives, thus displacing religious reality or forcing the latter to come into complex interactions with the national narrative.

scholarly journals Hand Gesture Recognition Using Different Algorithms Based on Artificial Neural Network

2011 ◽  
pp. 128-133
Author(s):  
Shweta K. Yewale ◽  
Pankaj. K. Bharne
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Artificial Neural Network ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Gesture Recognition ◽  
Hand Gesture Recognition ◽  
Hand Gesture ◽  
Skin Detection ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Detection Algorithms ◽  
Machine Interface

Gesture is one of the most natural and expressive ways of communications between human and computer in a real system. We naturally use various gestures to express our own intentions in everyday life. Hand gesture is one of the important methods of non-verbal communication for human beings. Hand gesture recognition based man-machine interface is being developed vigorously in recent years. This paper gives an overview of different methods for recognizing the hand gestures using MATLAB. It also gives the working details of recognition process using Edge detection and Skin detection algorithms.

scholarly journals Intimité de Jean-Victor Pellerin, ou à la recherche du « théâtre du silence »

2017 ◽  
pp. 114-122
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Sexual Motives ◽  
Avant Garde

Jean-Victor Pellerin was a representative author of the „school of silence” or, as some called it, „art of unexpressed”, in which emotions are implied in gestures, fragments of speach, and silence. In his first drama Intimacy (1922) the French playwrighter presents a bourgeois marriage living a monotonous life. The characters discuss trivial things of everyday life, they talk to each other, but there is no communication between them, because each of them is closed in their own world. Nobody is listening one another and words are spoken only in order to fill their existential emptiness. The writer is focused on the dialogue between the characters in the context of what they hide and what they do not want to tell themselves. People who appear to them are not flesh and blood human beings but they are the reflection of their own disturbed personality only. In this manner the writer focuses on the inner life of his solitary, their nostalgia for youth or even their hidden sexual motives. This is why the silence grows into the main element of the drama. Intimacy is one of the finest examples of „intimist aesthectic” developed by the avant-garde theater creator Gaston Baty who rejected the predominance of the word for discovering the mysterious world of the spiritual man.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document