Book Report: How to Do Nothing

25. Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) (11/28/19)

This stimulating book is part political manifesto, part how-to guide, and part philosophical treatise, with a good dose of natural history thrown in.

Odell is a Stanford University lecturer in art, as well as a practicing artist—her subject is "context" (see my post from a month ago featuring some of her work)—and, it seems, judging from the various videos I find of her discussing the thesis of this book, an ambassador of the art of "doing nothing."

By which she of course doesn't mean doing nothing. Rather, she means resisting the simplistic idea of "productivity" (a.k.a. the "logic of use"),  paying better attention, being present, and noticing the connectivities in which we all live. She finds her own deep meaning in natural spaces around her, many of which I know well myself (Elkhorn Slough, the Forest of Nisene Marks, Henry Cowell Redwoods), which only added to the book's allure for me. (And now I need to make a field trip to the Oakland Rose Garden, which is her go-to place for wisdom and solace—and birds. She's also an avid birder.)

The book consists of six chapters, plus introduction and conclusion. In the intro, "Surviving Usefulness," Odell discusses two "lessons" offered by a five-hundred-year-old redwood—the last and only old-growth redwood in Oakland, nicknamed Old Survivor. The first is about resistance: Old Survivor, twisted and stunted because of its location on a steep rocky slope, survived only because it appeared useless to loggers as a timber tree. The other lesson has to do with Old Survivor's function as witness and memorial over time, as life (and arguable progress) have continued to swirl around it.

These two lessons should give you a sense of where I'm headed in this book. The first half of "doing nothing" is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That "something else" is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new "placefulness" that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).

The ensuing chapters are titled "The Case for Nothing," "The Impossibility of Retreat," "Anatomy of a Refusal," "Exercises in Attention," "Ecology of Strangers," and "Restoring the Grounds for Thought," with "Manifest Dismantling" forming the conclusion. In these discussions Odell invokes David Hockney, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, musician and composer Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening, the Epicureans, B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, Martin Buber's I-Thou encounters, the dismantling of a dam in my local area . . . and oh, the list goes on. The thinking is rich and far-flung. This is a book I could easily read again (perhaps again and again) and continue to benefit from.

In chapter 6, she describes a visit to Elkhorn Slough, a tidal estuary near and dear to me. She describes "hundreds, maybe thousands of birds, congregating in the shallows and rising into the sky in giant glittering flocks that turned from black to silver as they changed direction."

Unexpectedly, I started crying. Although this site would certainly be classified as "natural," it appeared to me like nothing short of a miracle, one I felt I or this world somehow didn't deserve. In its unlikely splendor, the slough seemed to represent all of the threatened spaces, all that stood to be lost, that was already being lost. But I also realized for the first time that my wish to preserve this place was also a self-preservation instinct, insofar as I needed spaces like this too. . . .
 It's a bit like falling in love—that terrifying realizing that your fate is linked to someone else's, that you are no longer your own. But isn't that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these "strangers," not just now, but for life.
 It's scary, but I wouldn't have it any other way. That same relationship to the richness of place lets me partake of it too, allowing me to shape-shift like the flocks of birds, to flow inland and out to sea, to rise and fall, to breathe. It's a vital reminder that as a human, I am heir to this complexity—that I was born, not engineered. That's why, when I worry about the estuary's diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity—about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.

Here's a YouTube video of the author addressing the employees of Google (ironically enough) about the book. It's a good synopsis, and good food for thought.