Welcome to The Problem Of Leisure. This site takes its name from the song "Natural's Not In It," from the seminal 1979 Gang of Four album Entertainment.



The problem of leisure

What to do for pleasure

Ideal love a new purchase

A market of the senses

Dream of the perfect life

Economic circumstances

The body is good business

Sell out maintain the interest

Remember Lot's wife

Renounce all sin and vice

Dream of the perfect life

This heaven gives me migraines

This heaven gives me migraines

This heaven gives me migraines



To obscure and omit the dramatic shifts in the spatial and social terrain of the capitalist ordering of difference between its present configuration and the moment when Jon King, Andy Gill et al. wrote these lyrics for their post-situationist post-punk band's masterpiece would be to ignore the seismic disruptions and dislocations of these decades. Yet the relationship between the body and the commodity in cultural production, of reified love and familiality, economic circumstances and heavens which give migraines remain relevant to the project of deconstructing cultural production and tracing the contours of the better world which emerging social movements against empire and for a new imagination of global connectedness are building this minute. This site looks at the contradictory possibilities which emerge in cultural and academic production and at struggles to constitute global justice. If "Guerilla War Struggle is a new entertainment," as Gang Of Four contend in "5:45," a critique against the spectacular representation of postmodern neocolonial warfare, "entertainment" (and knowledge) are themselves guerilla war struggles.