ABSTRACT
Spaces of freedom Civil society is typically understood to consist in a diverse variety of associational practices such as churches, clubs, community groups, voluntary organisations and leisure activities, ranging from the highly organised to the local and informal. Whilst many examples of associational activity long pre-existed modern civil societies, the link between such practices and the aspiration to personal freedom gives civil society a distinctly modern character. Joining clubs and associations became part of a ‘bourgeois’ notion of individual self-fulfilment and autonomy in which citizens, escaping from the immediate restrictions of church or family, and released momentarily from the obligations of work, make spontaneous decisions, uncoerced by social and political power. With the ideological and institutional separation of the formal ‘public’ from the familial ‘private’ realms from the late eighteenth century onwards, the civil realm became identified with the spaces of freedom provided, for example, by salons or parks (see Habermas, 1989; Tester, 1992). Of course, to accept this characterisation of civil society in its own terms – that is, as self-evident spaces of freedom – is, as Marx and Engels argued, to misunderstand the very power relations that gave rise to that realm and which conditioned its experience (see Marx and Engels, 1994: 134-5). Yet if Marx and Engels’ critique exposed ‘bourgeois society’ as part of a self-serving class ideol-
ogy, it is by no means obvious that actual civil societies consist purely and simply in liberal idealisations. Modern civil societies have often been sites of persistent anxiety for authorities (both conservative and radical), especially when spontaneous self-recreation threatens to undermine the aspiration to an orderly freedom. We often forget that the emergence of bourgeois society was accompanied by powerful tendencies to manage and regulate public behaviour by moralising civil association and shaping interpersonal conduct to fit the new hierarchy of work and leisure. From the regulation of blood sports to controls on pubs and music halls, popular recreations in the late eighteenth century became objects of focused moral concern. The mass pleasures of the labour force were to be domesticated into private, individualised activities as much as possible in order to reduce their potential to subversion (see Mercer, 1983: 88-95). In this respect, then, civil society should be understood not as a domain in which the parameters of freedom are fundamentally set around the self-image of the bourgeoisie, but rather as a problematic site in which associational activity constantly threatens to exceed itself and disrupt the balance of public and private life. Modern public spaces (parks, leisure centres, city streets, etc.) have certainly been imagined as neutral sites of freedom, but these spaces have also been policed and regulated extensively to contain the activities that occur there within specified moral and cultural parameters. Modern spaces of association, particularly the urban centres of the modern city, might better be characterised as sites of contest in which efforts are made to spatialise freedom in an orderly way in the face of a perceived potential for excess that threatens to subvert the hierarchies that permeate it. Nowhere has this awkward balance between freedom and order been more focused than in the realm of popular leisure activities (see Rojek, 2005). The social pursuit of leisure and recreation – from drinking, gambling, taking drugs and seeking out sexual pleasures to organised sports and social gatherings such as fairs and circuses – has been a source of anxiety for the guardians of moral authority in most societies in history. Playing outdoor games and associating for purposes of exercise and/or pleasure usually means bringing human bodies out into the open where they may be viewed by others. Self-organised public leisure makes possible pleasures that disrupt the formal grammars of ‘proper conduct’ common to structured institutions. Enjoying private pursuits in public potentially weakens the boundaries that separate these realms, bringing libidinal investments into the open, often through forms of spectacle in which ‘players’ and ‘audiences’ intermingle ambiguously. In such contexts, social and cultural hierarchies (of gender and class in particular), and the obligations and exchanges that accompany them, loosen their grip. In modern, secular capitalism, particularly, where private consumption and choice are valued as the primary experiences of citizenship, the opportunities for leisure are massively expanded, and so, too, is the concern leisure brings to those who seek to protect social hierarchies; hence the desire to shape and regulate popular pleasures to avoid ‘oppositional’ forces from emerging (Rojek, 2005: 136-7). Gatherings of young people undertaking shared (sometimes illicit)
pleasures have persistently worried authorities and set off ‘moral panics’ amongst opinion formers (see Cohen, 2002). Those parts of civil association dedicated to play and leisure can be seen to stage contradictory concerns about social and moral order, where the values of freedom and order regularly run into each other. It is not surprising, for example, to find that social recreation is riven with hierarchies of ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviour concerning physical contact, violence or the use of ‘bad’ language, with accentuated gender roles (for instance, the separation of ‘male’ from ‘female’ sports and teams) and with different levels of prestige that reflect class divisions (formal ‘balls’ and ‘dances’ are prized over informal dancing, for instance). In such circumstances, the spaces of recreation are charged with a kind of cultural-political significance in which public values are exposed to varying degrees of reinforcement and subversion. Yet it is precisely the presence of class or racial hierarchy and the possibilities of their subversion in sports such as cricket and football that makes such games attractive to many participants (see, for example, James, 2005). Social recreation can be said to articulate a complex, multi-layered politics of identity and difference that evades the traditional classifications of formal politics. Nor can these experiences of leisure be separated from the contradictory emergence of urban public space. Modern cities are widely regarded as spatial settings for a peculiarly modern quest for individual freedom, the ability to exercise choice outside of ascribed moral and familial parameters. Baudelaire’s urban flâneur, for example, symbolised precisely the bourgeois self-image of the unencumbered subject moving freely and anonymously through the city (Baudelaire, 1964). However, the spaces of the city were as much sites of regulation and boundary-making as they were of free movement. Foucauldian scholars have shown, for example, how freedom and power are not necessarily antonyms but, rather, often mutually interdependent. Liberal societies, Rose (1999) argues, involve efforts to generate self-governing subjects, that is, subjects who are disciplined to govern themselves ‘at a distance’ from the direct regulation of the state. Civil society, particularly the public spaces of the modern city, can be viewed not as a neutral domain with settled boundaries but as a dynamic field of power relations through which the understanding and practice of freedom is constantly shaped and ordered, negotiated and imposed. Patrick Joyce (2003), for example, draws attention to the success of public institutions in Victorian Britain in actively moulding public space in London and Manchester. The introduction of sewerage systems, public toilets, street lights, the widening of streets and so forth were means of shaping the city for free subjects. Light, open and fully-visible streets, hygiene, etc., were essential to generating ‘neutral public space’ fit for liberal subjects. Similar aspirations were at work, too, in Baron Haussmann’s immense redesign of Paris. There a world of well-ordered freedom was imagined to issue from properly designed and regulated spaces (see Kunstler, 2001: 2-40). These historical examples of city spaces and efforts at urban design should remind us that civil societies, and the activities of leisure and recreation present
in them, are not so much neutral spaces as deliberate spatialisations of freedom. That is, they entail projects to represent and shape the urban landscape in ways that channel leisure and recreation so as to support a norm of orderly, regulated freedom. Staying with this historical perspective, let us briefly consider how social recreation in the city has been represented.
