How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  It was not only despair but hope and inspiration—the Hauptstrom—that had gotten people out to the communes, and it was the same Hauptstrom that left behind the stories, the architecture, the art, and the ideas. This electrical current, which Szeemann once described as a “joyfully grasped, albeit pre-Freudian energy unit that doesn’t give a damn whether it is expressed or can be applied in a socially negative, positive, harmful or useful way,”52 runs throughout history, throwing off new forms each time.

  When we look at those forms now, we can still see evidence of the spark. Interspersed throughout Houriet’s Getting Back Together are some glorious and fantastical scenes: small moments of utopia where you can see what they were aiming for, even if they couldn’t hold on to it for long. At Michael Weiss’s communal house, things sound rather hopeful by the end of his book. He describes a scene that sounds positively Epicurean, with commune members growing food in and around the house, making beer, sprouting seeds from the “glorious grass” they’d smoked the summer before, and just watching the flowers grow. At least in that moment, it seems to be working:

  All these makings and growings were giving me the feeling that we were healthy and sufficient, that we were learning a little bit at a time how to escape the poisons which sometimes seemed to seep through every pore in the avaricious face of our society, in its polluted environment, its adulterated food, its distortion of language, its discriminatory laws, its brutal pursuit of war abroad.53

  The Hauptstrom that occurs in the space between art and life is helpful for understanding the most important and obvious legacy of the communes: even if only briefly, they opened up new perspectives on the society they had left. Some commune members were activists and teachers, and they traveled not only to marches and protests but to schools where they gave lectures. Though heavily visited communes like Drop City suffered from the publicity, they did show visitors a different way of life, an option where there hadn’t been one before. The communes continue to be important touchstones of dissent for those of us despairing fifty years later. In 2017, at the Berkeley Art Museum, I saw an amazing spinning painting from Drop City that looked completely different based on the rate of a strobe light that the viewer could control. It was just as beautiful as ever, just as earnest a question about what art could be, what life could be.

  Even the crowd-shunning Epicurus, who taught that one shouldn’t speak in public unless requested to do so, showed some orientation toward the outside world by using his house as a base for publishing the writings of the school. It’s only for this reason that in 2018, someone (me) is reading them in another garden. It’s in this exchange that such experiments become valuable for the world, as points in a dialogue between inside and outside, real and unrealized. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in The Dispossessed, a novel in which a man returns to Earth for the first time from an anarchist colony: “The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer.”54

  Indeed, so instinctively do we understand the value of an outsider’s perspective that history is full of people seeking remote hermits and sages, desperate for knowledge from a mind unconcerned with familiar comforts. Just as I need someone to observe things about myself or my writing that I can’t see, mainstream society needs the perspective of its outsiders and recluses to illuminate problems and alternatives that aren’t visible from the inside. That same journey that takes the seeker toward the sage takes him out of the world as he knows it.

  In Athanasius’s biography of St. Anthony, a hermit who lived in the Egyptian desert, there is a story of two managerial employees of the Roman emperor going for a walk while the emperor is transfixed by a circus. Wandering in the gardens outside the palace walls, the men come across the cottage of some poor hermits and discover a book on St. Anthony’s self-exile in the desert. Reading this, one of the emperor’s employees, “his mind stripped of the world,” turns to the other and says:

  Tell me, prithee, with all these labours of ours, wither are we trying to get? What are we seeking? For what are we soldiering? Can we have a higher hope in the palace, than to become friends of the emperor? And when there, what is not frail and full of danger?…And how long will that last?55

  These despairing questions might sound familiar to anyone who has force-ejected themselves from an absorbing situation only to find its pretenses are totally, frighteningly questionable. Indeed, Levi Felix might have been asking himself these questions on the plane to Cambodia after quitting his ruthless job. At least in this story, the two men decide to abandon their entire lives (including their fiancées!) and become hermits like St. Anthony. No going back to work on Monday for them. In any narrative of escape, this is a pivotal point. Do you pack all your things in a van, say, “Fuck it,” and never look back? What responsibility do you have to the world you left behind, if any? And what are you going to do out there? The experiences of the 1960s communes suggest that these are not easy questions to answer.

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS ANOTHER story of a hermit that starts the same but ends differently. Some of those who split for the communes may have known the writings of the anarchist Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who died in 1968. (Houriet reports seeing a passage of Merton’s taped to the wall in the kitchen at High Ridge Farm.) Merton was an unlikely candidate for the Catholic order: he worked on the college humor magazine at Columbia in the 1930s and hung around with an irreverent and hard-drinking group of proto-Beatniks. In The Man in the Sycamore Tree: The Good Times and Hard Life of Thomas Merton, Merton’s friend Edward Rice recalls the mood in the 1930s: “[T]he world is crazy, war threatens, one has lost a sense of identity…People are dropping out…The rest of us are lost. We read Look Homeward, Angel and send each other postcards saying, ‘O lost!’”56

  But while the others were despairing and drinking themselves into a stupor, Merton was zeroing in on spirituality and the idea of renouncing the world. “I am not physically tired, just filled with a deep, vague, undefined sense of spiritual distress, as if I had a deep wound running inside me and it had to be stanched.” He became fixated on the idea of joining the Trappists, a Catholic order of monks who, although they don’t take a strict vow of silence, are generally resigned to a silent and ascetic life. “It fills me with awe and desire,” Merton wrote in a letter. “I return to the idea again and again: ‘Give up everything, give up everything!’” 57

  Merton arrived and was accepted at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky in 1941. So much did he desire solitude that he spent years petitioning to become a hermit on the monastery grounds. In the meantime, between his duties, he found time to keep a journal that eventually grew into a book. In 1948, the same year he was ordained as a monk, he published the autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which besides chronicling his move to the monastery was an embodiment of contemptus mundi—a spiritual rejection of the world. It contained, as Rice describes it, the “evocation of a young man in an age when the soul of mankind had been laid open as never before, during world depression and unrest and the rise of both Communism and Fascism, when Europe and America seemed destined to war on a brutal and unimaginable scale.” The book sold tens of thousands of copies within a few months of publication and was only kept off The New York Times bestseller list on the grounds that it was considered a religious book. It went on to sell multiple millions of copies.58

  But only three years after its publication, Merton wrote to Rice, disowning the book: “I have become very different from what I used to be…The Steven Storey Mountain is the work of a man I never even heard of.” It had to do, he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville:

  In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from
a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.59

  From that point until the end of his life, Merton published a score of books, essays, and reviews that not only commented on social issues (particularly the Vietnam War, the effects of racism, and imperialist capitalism) but also lambasted the Catholic Church for giving up on the world and retreating into the abstract. In short, he participated.

  In one of those books, Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton reflects on the relationship between contemplation of the spiritual and participation in the worldly, two things the Church had long articulated as opposites. He found that they were far from mutually exclusive. Removal and contemplation were necessary to be able to see what was happening, but that same contemplation would always bring one back around to their responsibility to and in the world. For Merton, there was no question of whether or not to participate, only how:

  If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is…an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present.60

  This question—of how versus whether—has to do with the attention economy insofar as it offers a useful attitude toward despair, the very stuff the attention economy runs on. It also helps me distinguish what it is I really feel like running away from. I’ve already written that the “doing nothing” I propose is more than a weekend retreat. But that doesn’t mean I propose a permanent retreat either. Understanding the impossibility of a once-and-for-all exit—for most of us, anyway—sets the stage for a different kind of retreat, or refusal-in-place, that I will elaborate on in the next chapter.

  Here’s what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think. The result is something like the sleep-deprivation tactics the military uses on detainees, but on a larger scale. The years 2017 and 2018 were when I heard so many people say, “It’s just something new every day.”

  But the storm is co-created. After the election, I also saw many acquaintances jumping into the melee, pouring out long, emotional, and hastily written diatribes online that inevitably got a lot of attention. I’m no exception; my most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

  In such a context, the need to periodically step away is more obvious than ever. Like the managerial employees who wandered away from their jobs, we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to. More than that, as I’ve argued thus far, we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all. William Deresiewicz warns of this in “Solitude and Leadership,” a speech to an audience of college students in 2010. By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle, he says, “[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”61

  Given the current reality of my digital environment, distance for me usually means things like going on a walk or even a trip, staying off the Internet, or trying not to read the news for a while. But the problem is this: I can’t stay out there forever, neither physically nor mentally. As much as I might want to live in the woods where my phone doesn’t work, or shun newspapers with Michael Weiss at his cabin in the Catskills, or devote my life to contemplating potatoes in Epicurus’s garden, total renunciation would be a mistake. The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world (unless you’re Peter Thiel, in which case there’s always outer space). The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how.

  Thinking about this unavoidable responsibility, I’m reminded of a more recent stay in a mountain cabin. This time, it was in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I was specifically trying to focus on writing this book. But on my leisurely hikes through the redwoods, I noticed that the light filtering through the trees was red in the afternoon. That was because the up north mountains, like so many other mountains in California, were on fire—part of yet another devastating fire season exacerbated by climate change, drought, and ecological mismanagement. The day I left, fire broke out in the foothills near my parents’ house.

  Some hybrid reaction is needed. We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed. In Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton holds out the possibility that we might be capable of these movements entirely within our own minds. Following that lead, I will suggest something else in place of the language of retreat or exile. It is a simple disjuncture that I’ll call “standing apart.”

  To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.

  Both apart from and responsible to the present, we might allow ourselves to sense the faint outline of an Epicurean good life free from “myths and superstitions” like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, and other fears with no basis in reality. This is no idle exercise. As the attention economy works to keep us trapped in a frightful present, it only becomes more important not just to recognize past versions of our predicament but to retain the capacity for an imagination somehow untainted by disappointment.

  But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.


  Chapter 3

  Anatomy of a Refusal

  From: X

  Sent: February 27 2008 00:16

  To: Z, Y

  Subject: marketing-trainee

  Importance: High

  Hi,

  As I already mentioned to Z, there has been a person sitting in the Tax library space and staring out of the window with a glazed look in her eyes…

  Female, very short hair, she said when asked that she’s a trainee in Marketing.

  She sat in front of an empty desk from 10:30am, went for lunch…1

  In 2008, employees at an office for the accounting firm Deloitte were troubled by the behavior of a new recruit. In the midst of a bustling work environment, she didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. Whenever someone would ask what she was doing, she would reply that she was “doing thought work” or “working on [her] thesis.” Then there was the day that she spent riding the elevators up and down repeatedly. When a coworker saw this and asked if she was “thinking again,” she replied: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.”2 The employees became uneasy. Urgent inter-office emails were sent.

  It turned out that the staff had unwittingly taken part in a performance piece called The Trainee. The silent employee was Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist who is known for videos in which she quietly threatens social norms with simple actions. In a piece called Bag Lady, for instance, she spent days roaming a mall in Berlin while carrying a clear plastic bag full of euro bills. Christy Lange describes the piece in Frieze: “While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer,’ she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.”3