How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  In a 2012 interview, Hsieh says that he is not an endurance artist, yet he also says that the most important word to him is “will.”26 This makes sense if we accept that Cage Piece is less a feat of endurance than an experiment. In the interview, Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an attempt to fill their lives with meaning. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out? His search for this answer occasioned the experiment’s many harsh “controls”—for it to work, it needed to be pure. “I brought my isolation to the public while still preserving the quality of it,” he said.27

  The formulation of this project as an experiment in subtraction reminds many people of another well-known refusenik. Explaining his need to live sparely in a cabin away from the customs and comforts of society, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote:

  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.28

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  THOREAU, TOO, SOUGHT a third space outside of a question that otherwise seemed given. Disillusioned by the country’s treatment of slavery and its openly imperialist war with Mexico, the question for Thoreau was not which way to vote but whether to vote—or to do something else entirely. In “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” that “something else” is refusing to pay taxes to a system that Thoreau could no longer abide. While he understood that technically this meant breaking the law, Thoreau stood outside the question and judged the law itself: “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” he wrote. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”29

  Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective. “Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution never distinctly and nakedly behold it,” he says. One must ascend to higher ground to see reality: the government is admirable in many respects, “but seen from a point of view a little higher they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?” As for Plato, for whom the escapee from the cave suffers and must be “dragged” into the light, Thoreau’s ascent is no Sunday stroll in the park. Instead it is a long hike to the top of a mountain when most would prefer to stay in the hills:

  They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage to its fountain-head.30

  Things look different from up there, which explains why Thoreau’s world, like that of Diogenes and Zhuang Zhou, is full of reversals. In a society where men have become law-abiding machines, the worst men are the best, and the best men are the worst. The soldiers going to fight the war in Mexico “command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt”; the government would “crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels,” and the only place in town where Thoreau feels truly free is prison. For him, to be alive is to exercise moral judgment, but by those standards, almost everyone around him is already dead. In their place he sees man-machines that are not unlike the programmed and free-within-bounds members of Walden Two or Westworld.

  Thoreau’s title, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” is a riposte to another piece he mentions, William Paley’s “Duty of Submission to Civil Government.” For Thoreau, Paley is one such basically dead man, since Paley views the occasion for resistance as “a computation of the quantity of danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.”31 Moral judgment is replaced by cost-benefit analysis; Paley’s idea sounds like the way an AI would decide when and whether resistance was necessary. But from Thoreau’s perch atop the mountain of reason, Paley looks trapped in the flatlands, where he “never appears to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.”

  This means, however, that even when he’s let out of jail, Thoreau’s perspective confines him to a life of permanent refusal. He “quietly declare[s] war on the state” and must live as an exile in a world that shares none of his values. Thoreau’s own “state” is in fact what I described previously as “standing apart.” Viewing the present from the future, or injustice from the perspective of justice, Thoreau must live in the uncomfortable space of the unrealized. But hope and discipline keep him there, oriented toward “a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”

  Like any expression of discontent, “Civil Disobedience” is already an attempt to seek out those who might harbor the same feelings. Thoreau’s ultimate hope was that if enough individual people decided at once to exercise their moral judgment instead of continuing to play the game, then the game might actually change for once. This jump from the individual to the collective entails another version of what I’ve so far been describing as voluntate, studio, disciplina. In Diogenes, Bartleby, and Thoreau, we see how discipline involves strict alignment with one’s own “laws” over and against prevailing laws or habits. But successful collective refusals enact a second-order level of discipline and training, in which individuals align with each other to form flexible structures of agreement that can hold open the space of refusal. This collective alignment emerges as a product of intense individual self-discipline—like a crowd of Thoreaus refusing in tandem. In so doing, the “third space”—not of retreat, but of refusal, boycott, and sabotage—can become a spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public.

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  WHEN I WAS working at my corporate marketing job in San Francisco, I used to take long lunch breaks as a small, selfish act of resistance. I’d sit on the Embarcadero waterfront, looking plaintively out at the Bay Bridge and the diving ducks. I didn’t yet know they were actually double-crested cormorants. The other thing I didn’t know yet was that I was sitting at the site of an unprecedented and awe-inspiring coordination of resistance that had happened in 1934.

  Before shipping shifted mostly to the Oakland port, longshoremen worked the bustling piers near my future lunch spot. Mostly living on subsistence wages, they endured ever-shifting combinations of working too hard and lining up to get hired again—a demoralizing process known as the “shape-up.” Their hours were subject not only to the whims of the nepotistic gang bosses who would or would not hire them, but to the unpredictable rhythms of the shipping economy. Once on the job, they encountered the “speed-up,” being expected to work faster and faster and facing increasing rates of injury and risk. But in their atomized state, the longshoremen had not been able to refuse these terms; there was always someone who’d happily take their place, abuses and all. A former longshoreman who recalled working anywhere from two to thirty hours in a single shift said that complaint was not an option: “If you would say anything of that kind you would just simply be fired.”32

  In 1932, an anonymous group began producing and distributing a paper called The Waterfront Worker from an unknown location. Self-described “rank-and-file journalist” Mi
ke Quin writes that “it merely said what every longshoreman had long known to be a fact, and put into frank language the resentment that was smoldering in every dock worker’s heart.”33 A scrappy publication, it was soon circulating a few thousand copies. Then, in 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act guaranteed the right to join a trade union and engage in collective bargaining, and many of the longshoremen left their largely useless company-run unions to join the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). They began organizing a new political body consisting of actual dockworkers instead of salaried union officials.

  Leading up to the strike, the longshoremen organized a convention in San Francisco where the delegates—all of whom worked on the docks—represented fourteen thousand longshoremen up and down the coast. I consider the activities of the rank and file an instance of what I’ve been calling the “third space,” since it was a racially inclusive and distinctly democratic space that stood outside the usual lines of battle. “While employers and union officials engaged in totally unproductive negotiations,” writes Quin, “the men on the docks proceeded with arrangements for the strike.”34

  Things came to a head when the Industrial Association would not accept the demand for a union-run hiring hall for longshoremen. This was a sticking point, because hiring halls would determine who was hired, and if they weren’t run by the union, the political choke hold of the shape-up would go essentially unchanged and strikers would suffer retribution. The longshoremen voted, nearly unanimously, to call a strike. On May 9, longshoremen walked out in all West Coast ports, tying up almost two thousand miles of the waterfront.

  The daily reality of the strike required disciplined coordination both within and outside of the union. Networks of support formed as sympathizers from around the country sent in thousands of dollars. Soup kitchens, which served thousands of strikers daily, received truckloads of produce sent in from small farmers. Women organized a Ladies Auxiliary of the ILA and handled relief applications from strikers under financial duress and assisted in the ILA kitchens. Sensing that the police were in the palm of the city and the employers, strikers set up their own waterfront police to address disturbances along the docks, complete with an emergency number that led to a longshoreman-turned-dispatcher.35 All the while, the union continued having meetings and enlisting the votes of the rank and file.

  Much like a picket line itself, a strike is something whose strength lies in its continuity. Thus, as always, employers focused their efforts on breaking the line. Early on, they tried to get each port to negotiate its own separate agreement, thus preventing a coast-wide alliance. They hired strikebreakers—in some cases college football players—offering them a police escort and housing aboard a moored ship with plush treatment: meals, laundry, entertainment, and banking facilities. The employers also attempted to foment racism among the longshoremen; Quin writes that “[b]osses who would never hire Negroes except for the most menial jobs now made special, and relatively unsuccessful, efforts to recruit Negroes as scabs.”36 As thousands of men picketed up and down the Embarcadero, a daily spectacle whose consistency impressed onlookers, the police decided to selectively apply a previously un-enforced ordinance against picketing, running the picketers off the sidewalk with horses. Meanwhile, employers ran cloying ads designed to break the will of the strikers, who waited for a free lunch in block-long, four-deep lines along the Embarcadero:

  We want to pay you as good wages as the industry can afford.

  We always have paid top wages—and hope to keep it up.

  Recovery is not yet here—it is only on the way. You’re hurting, not helping, to bring it back for yourselves, for us, and for San Francisco.

  It is an ill-advised strike.

  Be reasonable!37

  In fact, it was just such an effort to break the line that set off events that led to the General Strike of 1934. The Industrial Association, representing employers, forcibly opened the port and maneuvered trucks through the picket lines. When they tried to open it farther, violence erupted and two men were killed by police—one a striking longshoreman and the other a volunteer at a strike kitchen. People immediately lined the site with flowers and wreaths. Police arrived to remove the flowers and the strikers, but strikers returned later, replaced the flowers, and stood guard.

  Friends and family held a small, somber memorial the next day. But as they proceeded down Market Street, they were unexpectedly joined by thousands of strikers, sympathizers, and spectators who silently marched alongside them. In his history of the strike, David Selvin writes that papers afterward struggled to describe the magnitude and silence of the event. “Here they came as far as you could see in a silent, orderly line of march,” wrote the Chronicle’s Royce Brier, “a mass demonstration of protest which transcended anything of the like San Francisco has ever seen.”38 Tillie Olsen imagined the shock the Industrial Association must be experiencing: “[W]here did the people come from, where was San Francisco hiding them, in what factories, what docks, what are they doing there, marching, or standing and watching, not saying anything, just watching.”39

  The haunting image proved to be a turning point. Selvin writes that while talk had circulated about a general strike, “this grim, silent parade made it inevitable.” In the coming days, one hundred and fifty thousand people around the Bay walked off the job.

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  IF WE THINK about what it means to “concentrate” or “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a “movement” to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.

  I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention,” then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act. In Chapter 1, I mentioned Berardi’s distinction between connectivity and sensitivity in After the Future. It’s here that we see why this difference matters. For Berardi, the replacement of sensitivity with connectivity leads to a “social brain” that “appears unable to recompose, to find common strategies of behavior, incapable of common narration and of solidarity.”

  This “schizoid” collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That’s bad news for sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse—not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed—means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. In the history of activism, even things that seemed like reactions were often planned actions. For example, as William T. Martin Riches reminds us in his accounting of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was “acting, not reacting” when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist organizations, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement.40 The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fe
ar, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.

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  THE PROBLEM IS that many people have a lot to fear, and for good reason. The relationship between fear and the ability to refuse is clear when we consider that historically, some can more easily afford to refuse than others. Refusal requires a degree of latitude—a margin—enjoyed at the level of the individual (being able to personally afford the consequences) and at the level of society (whose legal attitude toward noncompliance may vary). For her part, Parks and her family were nearly ruined by her arrest. She was unable to find full employment for ten years after the boycott, lost weight and had to be hospitalized for ulcers, and experienced “acute financial hardships” that went unaddressed until the militant trade unionists of a small branch of the NAACP forced the national organization to help her out.41

  Even Diogenes, who would seem to have nothing to lose, existed in a kind of margin. Navia quotes Farrand Sayre, a critic of Diogenes, who suggests that Greek cities were friendly to him in their laws and weather: