As a bit of a follow up to my post about hegemonic struggles for time and leisure last week, I’ve been inspired by an extremely interesting reflection on tv and the cultural politics of relationships by Mel Gregg to write a (no doubt overly long) comment in response. I think Mel has raised some very interesting issues about the way relationships interact with time pressures, though I differ from her on whether neo-liberalism is to blame (or at least in the way I think that it’s to blame).
It’s very interesting, and I think laudable, to see the sorts of thinking about how productivist crusades impact on the time to be with others in communal, friendly or intimate settings, that are now emerging as an unintended consequence of the Howardian WorkChoices regime, now incidentally (going back to Mel’s tv hook) crowding out anything worth watching on the teev.
To what degree is the expression of private freedom through the creation of relational space constrained by allegedly liberal drives for the centrality of work to life? That seems to me to be an extremely important question.
Just on that, Mark -
In the thread at Mel’s you mentioned in a casual way something about workchoice infecting SBS - do you mean in terms of the broadcast content, or is there something going on with the organisation (something more / worse than what’s going on all over the place)? My partner’s negotiating for a job with SBS right now, so if you know something he ought to know…please spill.
Laura - no it was just a snarky reference to the fact that sometimes three WorkChoices ads are shown between sbs programmes. I don’t have any info about employment relations at sbs!
Ah, thanks, I thought that might be it.