[Odell. 2019. *How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy*](zotero://select/items/1_FNJGHU2G) # Progressive Summary The first thing I notice (in a book that's all about noticing) is that Odell has a wicked sense of humour. There are quite a lot of LOL moments, like when she compares Seneca's musings on a wasted life to "someone waking from the stupor of an hour on Facebook." She mixes the idioms of high and low culture with a Danta-esque facility. And that makes her an astounding guide in these wicked times. She advocates for a form of resistance that is "resistance in place", that is about making "oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system." She calls this "standing apart". In one chapter, she surveys the history of people who have retreated from the ills of their age, whether its Epicurus in 4th century B.C., with this Garden community, or the communes of the US in the 1960s. She concludes that retreat is simply not sustainable, even if these experiments have something worthwhile to say to us. In the same chapter, she talks about Thomas Merton, who disavowed his book Seven Story Mountain for being too isolationist. He went on to pursue a form of spirituality that was consistent with remaining in the world. The whole book is an exercise in developing a "vocabulary of refusal": - "cracks in the crushingly habitual" - "financially incentived proliferation of chatter" # Key Points ## Silence Great quote from Gilles Deleuze's Negotiations: > "We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." Also, Berardi, observing that the modern-day regime: > "relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous." Odell: > "It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time." Gordon Hempton, accoustic ecologist: > “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” ## Listening ## Care and Maintenance > BUT BEYOND SELF-CARE and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way. ## Third Space She compares B.F. Skinner's Walden Two to Westworld. The hosts are not really free, because they follow algorithms. Her heroes: Diogenes, Bartleby the Scrivener, Tehching Hsieh, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Merton, Epicurius, Odell has some interesting vocabulary to describe her heroes: refuseniks. And their stance: "third space" - an almost magical exit to another frame of reference Diogenes was the first performance artist. He was famous for carrying a bathtub around Athens. Tehching Hiseh is an American performance artist whose most important word is "will". In 1978, he performed Cage Piece, where he spent a year in a nine-foot-square cage, not allowing himself to talk, read or write. Each of his subsequent works lasted a year. Time Clock Piece involved him punching a time clock every hour on the hour. Outdoor Piece saw him not entering indoors at all, not even cars or trains. Rope Piece had him tied to artist Linda Montano in the same room, but not touching at all. # Resonances [[Subtract]] - subtraction as an act of resistance to the logic of capitalist productivity [[Readwise/Books/Changing the Subject]] - Freedom is the ability to change the frame. # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ![[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/How to Do Nothing#Highlights]]