How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  The Trainee epitomized Takala’s method. As observed by a writer at Pumphouse Gallery, which showed her work in 2017, there is nothing inherently unusual about the notion of not working while at work; people commonly look at Facebook on their phones or seek other distractions during work hours. It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.”4

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  LOOKING AT THE TRAINEE, it’s clear that the reactions of others are what make such acts humorous and often legendary. Stopping or refusing to do something only gains this status if everyone else is doing what is expected of them, and have never allowed that anyone would ever deviate. A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.5

  As alarmed as the sidewalk crowd might have been, the TV audience delights more and more in Green’s performance the longer it goes on. Likewise, Takala might be bemusedly remembered by even those who sent the frantic emails, as the one employee who did the (very) unexpected. At their loftiest, such refusals can signify the individual capacity for self-directed action against the abiding flow; at the very least, they interrupt the monotony of the everyday. From within unquestioned cycles of behavior, such refusals produce bizarre offshoots that are not soon forgotten. Indeed, some refusals are so remarkable that we remember them many centuries later.

  That seems to be the case with Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher who lived in fourth-century Athens and later Corinth. Many people are familiar with “the man who lived in a tub,” scorning all material possessions except for a stick and a ragged cloak. Diogenes’s most notorious act was to roam through the city streets with a lantern, looking for an honest man; in paintings, he’s often shown with the lantern by his side, sulking inside a round terracotta tub while the life of the city goes on around him. There are also paintings of the time he dissed Alexander the Great, who had made it a point to visit this famous philosopher. Finding Diogenes lazing in the sun, Alexander expressed his admiration and asked if there was anything Diogenes needed. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand out of my light.”6

  Plato’s designation of Diogenes as “Socrates gone mad” wasn’t far off the mark. While he was in Athens, Diogenes had come under the influence of Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates. He was thus heir to a development in Greek thought that prized the capacity for individual reason over the hypocrisy of traditions and customs, even and especially if they were commonplace. But one of the differences between Socrates and Diogenes was that, while Socrates famously favored conversation, Diogenes practiced something closer to performance art. He lived his convictions out in the open and went to great lengths to shock people out of their habitual stupor, using a form of philosophy that was almost slapstick.

  This meant consistently doing the opposite of what people expected. Like Zhuang Zhou before him, Diogenes thought every “sane” person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance. Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving. Asked how he wanted to be buried, he answered: “Upside down. For soon down will be up.”7 In the meantime, he would roll over hot sand in the summer, and hug statues covered with snow.8 Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life, he was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon.9 While many philosophers were ascetic, Diogenes made a show of even that. Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living.” Another time, he loudly admired a mouse for its economy of living.10

  When Diogenes did conform, he did it ironically, employing what the twentieth-century conceptual artists the Yes Men have called “overidentification.” In this case, refusal is (thinly) masked as disingenuous compliance:

  When news came to the Corinthians that Philip and the Macedonians were approaching the city, the entire population became immersed in a flurry of activity, some making their weapons ready, or wheeling stones, or patching the fortifications, or strengthening a battlement, everyone making himself useful for the protection of the city. Diogenes, who had nothing to do and from whom no one was willing to ask anything, as soon as he noticed the bustle of those surrounding him, began at once to roll his tub up and down the Craneum with great energy. When asked why he did so, his answer was, “Just to make myself look as busy as the rest of you.”11

  That Diogenes’s actions in some ways prefigured performance art has not gone unnoticed by the contemporary art world. In a 1984 issue of Artforum, Thomas McEvilley presented some of Diogenes’s best “works” in “Diogenes of Sinope (c. 410–c. 320 BC): Selected Performance Pieces.” Arranged in this context, his acts indeed sound like the cousins of the works from the twentieth-century antics of Dada and Fluxus.

  McEvilley, as so many others throughout history have, admires Diogenes’s courage when it came to flouting customs so customary that they were not even spoken about. He writes, “[Diogenes’s] general theme was the complete and immediate reversal of all familiar values, on the ground that they are automatizing forces which cloud more of life than they reveal.”12 When McEvilley says that Diogenes’s actions “[thrust] at the cracks of communal psychology” and “laid bare a dimension of hiding possibilities he thought might constitute personal freedom,” it’s easy to think not only of how easily Pilvi Takala unsettled her coworkers at Deloitte, but every person who, by refusing or subverting an unspoken custom, revealed its often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives.

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  THERE ARE MANY stories about Diogenes that may be apocryphal. As Luis E. Navia writes in Diogenes of Sinope: The Man in the Tub, his status as an uncompromising “dog” who “stood proudly as the living refutation of his world” must have inspired a huge number of stories with varying degrees of embellishment. To this day, although he has his critics, Diogenes is often hailed as a hero. For Foucault, he was the model of the philosopher who tells it like it is;13 for Nietzsche, he was the originator of the Cynic approach behind any genuine philosophy.14

  In the eighteenth century, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert wrote that “[e]very age…needs a Diogenes.”15 I would agree. We need a Diogenes not just for entertainment, nor just to show that there are alternatives, but because stories like his contribute to our vocabulary of refusal even centuries later. When we hear about Diogenes blowing off Alexander the Great, it’s hard not to laugh and think, “Fuck yeah!” Although most people aren’t likely to do something so extreme, the story provides a locus for our wish to do so.

  But beyond showing that refusal is possible—highlighting the “cracks” in the crushingly habitual—Diogenes also has much to teach us about how to refuse. It’s important to note that, faced with the unrelenting hypocrisy of society, Diogenes did not flee to the mountains (like some philosophers) or kill himself (like still other philosophers). In other words, he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal. As Navia describes it, he felt it was his duty to stand as a living refusal in a backward world:

  [Diogenes] opted for remaining in the world for the express purpose of challenging its customs and practices, its laws
and conventions, by his worlds and, more so, by his action. Practicing his extreme brand of Cynicism, then, he stood as a veritable refutation of the world and, as the Gospel would say of Saint John the Baptist, as “a voice crying in the wilderness” (Matt. 3:3).16

  So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor.

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  DELEUZE ONCE FOUND a handy formula for finding this space in one of our most famous tales of refusal: Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.

  The fact that the story of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is so widely known speaks to its importance in the cultural imagination. The narrator, a comfortable Wall Street lawyer, hires a copyist named Bartleby, a mild man who performs his duties well enough until asked to check his own writing against an original. Without agitation, Bartleby says he would prefer not to, and from that point on continues to give the same answer when asked to perform a task. He eventually stops working, and then even moving; the lawyer finds that he’s taken up residence in his workspace. At a loss for what to do, the lawyer changes offices, but the next occupant is not so accommodating—he has Bartleby taken to jail.

  Just as the best part of The Trainee is the stunned Deloitte workers, my favorite parts of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are the lawyer’s reactions, which so quickly progress from disbelief to despair. Not just that, but each subsequent refusal produces more and more extreme variations of the same phenomenon: the lawyer, who is often in a rush going about his business, is stopped dead in his tracks, grasping for sense and meaning like Wile E. Coyote having run off a cliff. For example, the first time he asks Bartleby to review a piece of writing, the lawyer is so absorbed and hurried that he simply hands the paper to Bartleby without looking at him, with the “haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance.” When Bartleby says he “would prefer not to,” the lawyer is so surprised, he is rendered speechless: “I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties.” After a second refusal the lawyer is “turned into a pillar of salt,” needing a few moments to “recover [himself].” Best of all, when the lawyer is on his way into work only to find the door locked from within by Bartleby (who politely refuses to open the door because he is “occupied”), the lawyer is thunderstruck:

  For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by a summer lightning; at his own warm window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell.17

  At one point the lawyer is so unsettled by Bartleby’s ongoing refusals that he feels compelled to read Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will and Joseph Priestley’s The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, both treatises on the possibility of free will. The former holds that man has the free will to pursue what is good, but what is good is foreordained by God (this might remind us of Frazier’s description of “freedom” from Walden Two); the latter claims that all of our decisions follow from predetermined dispositions, in a somewhat mechanistic fashion (another good description of Walden Two). In other words, everything happens for a reason, and people can’t help the way they act. “Under those circumstances,” says the lawyer, “those books induced a salutary feeling.”18

  Those “circumstances,” of course, are Bartleby’s abiding inscrutability. When the lawyer asks Bartleby if he’ll tell him where he was born, Bartleby answers, “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer asks desperately: “Will you tell me any thing about yourself?” “I would prefer not to.” But why? “At present I prefer to give no answer.” There is no reason given, no reason given as to why no reason is given, and so on.

  This gets at Bartleby’s next-level refusal: he not only will not do what he is asked, he answers in a way that negates the terms of the question. Alexander Cooke summarizes Deleuze’s reading of the story:

  Bartleby does not refuse to do anything. If Bartleby had said, “I will not,” his act of resistance would have merely negated the law. Having negated in relation to the law, this transgression would have perfectly fulfilled the law’s function.19

  Indeed, this explains why the lawyer wishes that Bartleby would just outright refuse so that they could at least do battle on the same plane: “I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposite, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap.” Bartleby, who remains maddeningly placid throughout the story, exposes and inhabits a space around the original question, undermining its authority. For Deleuze, by its very linguistic structure, Bartleby’s response “carve[s] out a kind of foreign language within language, to make the whole confront silence, make it topple into silence.”20

  The lawyer tells us that a refusal from anyone else would have been grounds for banishment, but with Bartleby, “I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors.”21 I find the mention of Cicero significant. In a partially lost work called De Fato, the first-century BC statesman and philosopher comes to a very different conclusion about free will than Edwards or Priestley, and his writings would decidedly not “induce a salutary feeling” in the lawyer. For Cicero, there can be no ethics without free will, and that is enough to put an end to the question. In “Cicero’s Treatment of the Free Will Problem,” Margaret Y. Henry writes:

  Cicero is far from denying the law of causality. He freely admits that antecedent and natural causes give men a tendency in one direction or another. But he insists that men are nevertheless free to perform specific acts independent of such tendencies and even in defiance of them…Thus a man may build a character quite at variance with his natural disposition.22

  Cicero cites the examples of Stilpo and Socrates: “It was said that Stilpo was drunken and Socrates was dull, and that both were given to sensual indulgence. But these natural faults they uprooted and wholly overcame by will, desire, and training (voluntate, studio, disciplina).”23

  If we believed that everything were merely a product of fate or disposition, Cicero reasons, no one would be accountable for anything and therefore there could be no justice. In today’s terms, we’d all just be algorithms. Furthermore, we’d have no reason to try to make ourselves better or different from our natural inclinations.

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  VOLUNTATE, STUDIO, DISCIPLINA–IT is through these things that we find and inhabit the third space, and more important, how we stay there. In a situation that would have us answer yes or no (on its terms), it takes work, and will, to keep answering something else. This perhaps explains why Diogenes’s hero was Hercules, a man whose accomplishments were largely tests of his own will. For example, one of Diogenes’s favorite stories about Hercules was the time he decided to clean the excrement of thousands of oxen from a king’s stable, which hadn’t been cleaned in at least thirty years. (Telling this story on a stage at the Isthmian Games, Diogenes had his own little test of will. As a punch line to this tale of shit, he lifted his cloak, squatted, and did “something vulgar” on the stage.24)

  Discipline and sheer force of will explain much of why we valorize our culture’s refuseniks. Imagine how disappointed we would be, for instance, if we found out that later in life Diogenes got a taste for comfort and took up residence in the suburbs, or if Bartleby had either complied or looked the
lawyer in the eye and said loudly, “Fine!” or “No!” It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable. The longer Tom Green lies on the sidewalk, the more awkward (both physically and socially) it is for him to stay there, yet he remains. It was probably this kind of social stamina that Diogenes had in mind when he said he would only accept disciples who were willing to carry a large fish or piece of cheese in public.

  The performance artist Tehching Hsieh would have likely been accepted as a disciple of Diogenes. In 1978, he built a roughly nine-foot-square cage in his studio for Cage Piece, a performance in which he would remain inside the cage for exactly a year. Every day, a friend would visit to bring food and remove waste. Beyond that, Hsieh drew up some draconian terms for himself: He was not allowed to talk, read, or write (except for marking each day on the wall); no television or radio was allowed. In fact, the only other thing in the cell besides the bed and the sink was a clock. The performance was open to the public once or twice a month; otherwise, he was alone. Asked later how he spent his time, Hsieh said that he had kept himself alive and thought about his art.

  At the start of Cage Piece, Hsieh had a lawyer visit the cage at the beginning to witness it being sealed shut and return at the end to confirm that the seal had not been broken. In an essay on Hsieh, arts writer Carol Becker notes the irony of appealing to the law “even though the law that governs Hsieh’s work is a rigorous system of his own invention.”25 She compares him to an athlete—a high jumper or a pole-vaulter who impresses the viewer with his training and “mastery of self.” Indeed, Hsieh is an artist known for his discipline. After Cage Piece, he continued making pieces that each lasted a year: Time Clock Piece, in which he punched a time clock every hour on the hour; Outdoor Piece, in which he wouldn’t allow himself to go inside (including cars and trains); Rope Piece, in which he was tied to the artist Linda Montano (they had to stay in the same room but could not touch each other); and No Art Piece, in which he didn’t make, look at, read about, or talk about art.