Just read Jenny Odell’s 2017 essay “How to Do Nothing.” I almost wrote “How to Waste Time” – and that is precisely her point: our time is so commodified that we have no time to formulate a critique of the commodification of time. You’re either “doing something with it” or “wasting it.” We are victims of “a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” She quotes Gilles Deleuze and Bifo Berardi, who assert that doing nothing – and saying nothing – is essential to formulating something to do or to say. And why do we have to do or say anything? Observation can make one’s life worthwhile in a way that publications, say, may not. Moreover:
“I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of others, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.” Productivity is all about individuation, excel-lence, linear movement (away from the earth and the body, ultimately). “Maintenance,” by contrast, is a respect for cyclicality, repetition, bodily needs and processes. Perhaps most importantly, instrumental reason and productivist ideology render impossible any contact with the natural world: bodily, sensory, phenomenological proximity, sensitivity, and communication are replaced by mediation, representation, cognition. Like all binaries, this one is easy to deconstruct. But there is more than a little usefulness in it, particularly for writers – or visual artists like Odell. She doesn’t mention climate chaos, but it seems to me her assertions are especially important against that background. The equation time = money (+ engines) got us into this mess, for one thing. For another, nobody knows what to do about it; and nobody can figure it out, because they don’t give themselves time to figure it out. (It’s worth noting that Jem Bendell, Dr. “Deep Adaptation,” whom I’ve quoted before, had to take an unpaid leave from his academic post to explore the issue and couldn’t get the results placed in a peer-reviewed journal.) Odell acknowledges that “[t]here’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege.” But as she points out, it’s only privilege because the eight-hour day is a thing of the past for most – like the labor movement that secured it. People have to work more hours for less money – which doesn’t leave much time and energy for organizing. She’s not, she says, urging us to do nothing in the sense of (for instance) doing nothing to reduce the number of hours people have to work. Rather: “. . . I believe that having recourse to periods of and spaces for ‘doing nothing’ are [sic] even more important, because those are times and places that we think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves. It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something.” Perhaps poetry is a kind of doing-nothing, in this creative sense of the word. An inquiry. Loafing as spiritual invitation. Perhaps it will lead to ideas about what to do when one is doing something.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |