From “Against productivity during quarantine”, The New Republic. 2020. ...[I]n a literal pandemic, as millions of us are trying to practice home isolation while also attending to the needs of our families and communities, the obscenity of pretending that work and “the self” are the only things that matter—or even exist—becomes harder to ignore. You can see this happening in all kinds of contexts, some of it in the form of smiling mandates from employers about “business as usual” while working from home. Managers at The Wall Street Journal instructed newly remote workers to answer work chat messages “within just a few minutes” and to leave cameras on during videoconference meetings, as if there’s some productivity or accountability benefit to letting your boss see what the shitty couch in your apartment looks like. The “good worker” during a pandemic is the good worker during any other time: always available to management. (“Now is not the time to screen calls.”) The crux of these kinds of posts and newsletters and articles and mandates from work is rooted in the same misguided mindset: Yes, this pandemic is bad, but how can you improve yourself with all this solitude? And more to the point, how can you continue to prove your worth as a hard worker? This isn’t a normal time, from the spread of the virus itself to the pathetic response from Congress to the quarantine and long-term economic peril staring down millions of people. Not much of what preceded it was really normal, either, but it’s fair to say that when the world is slowly descending into the unknown, any semblance of familiar routine can be a welcome reprieve: Staying in phone contact with loved ones and friends. Finding time to go for a (socially distant) run. But more work, maybe the single most constant feature of American adulthood, is not the answer. Neither is more needless productivity. This is not a time to optimize or stoically pretend nothing has changed. As Jenny Odell wrote of the drive toward growth in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, “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.” This is a time to sustain. To find ease where we can in a world rapidly placing us into chaos. “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” Odell wrote. But we should. [...] That is normal, now. That is the experience I am sharing with my friends and cousins and family and neighbors. While I’m still reading emails and scanning my drafts for revisions, my mind is miles away with the people that matter most to me. For those with the privilege and ability to conduct their work from home, the coming weeks should be a time to focus on ourselves, our communities, and our loved ones. It should be a time to do nothing and produce little without the accompanying feeling of guilt or panic caused by a ping from a higher-up that you should be doing more as the rest of your world slowly cranks to a halt. The work of care, of real meaning, is what we should be concerning ourselves with now. It is not optimized, or “disrupting,” or any of that. It is just essential. Reaching out to offer support to the soon-to-be overworked nurses in our communities, contributing to local funds and efforts to feed and adequately compensate grocery workers, restaurant workers, and others who are working at great risk and may be struggling to put food on the table. We should be offering to make shopping runs for our elders and other at-risk neighbors. This is the essential work that demands our attention now, too. For all the other stuff? The nonessentials? It will not vanquish your fears and stressors to churn out a spreadsheet any faster than usual. Some of us, the fortunate among us, have a kind of time now that may feel new. It can allow us a second to be true to ourselves and our emotions, or to turn away from ourselves and toward care for others, or both at the same time. You don’t have to write your novel. You don’t have to reorganize your closet. Burying yourself in mindless busywork is not the solution. So, go ahead, turn the video function off when your boss calls. from How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell. 2019. Part I - the case for nothing (intro & ch1) Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate. On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other. [...] The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. My argument is obviously anticapitalist, especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self, and community. It is also environmental and historical: I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm. I am not anti-technology. After all, there are forms of technology—from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks—that might situate us more fully in the present. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live. […] The Rose Garden is a public space. It is a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project from the 1930s, and like all WPA projects, was built by people put to work by the federal government during the Depression. I’m reminded of its beginnings every time I see its dignified architecture: that this rose garden, an incredible public good, came out of a program that itself was also a public good. Still, it wasn’t surprising to me to find out recently that the Rose Garden is in an area that almost got turned into condos in the seventies. I’m appalled, but not surprised. I’m also not surprised that it took a concerted effort by local residents to have the area rezoned to prevent that from happening. That’s because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides. Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to the rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”14 The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will to any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week: In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary.15(emphasis mine) The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles. In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from “what we will.” [...] 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. This is the place to mention a few regulars of the Rose Garden. Besides Rose the wild turkey and Grayson the cat (who will sit on your book if you’re trying to read), you are always likely to see a few of the park’s volunteers doing maintenance. Their presence is a reminder that the Rose Garden is beautiful in part because it is cared for, that effort must be put in, whether that’s saving it from becoming condos or just making sure the roses come back next year. The volunteers do such a good job that I often see park visitors walk up to them and thank them for what they’re doing. When I see them pulling weeds and arranging hoses, I often think of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her well-known pieces include Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, a performance in which she washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Touch Sanitation Performance, in which she spent eleven months shaking hands with and thanking New York City’s 8,500 sanitation men, in addition to interviewing and shadowing them. She has in fact been a permanent artist in residence with the New York City Sanitation Department since 1977. Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” In 1969, she wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and do what I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…My working will be the work.”25 Her manifesto opens with a distinction between what she calls the death force and the life force: I. IDEAS A. The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct: The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change. The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.26 The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.” That brings me to one last surprising aspect of the Rose Garden, which I first noticed on the central promenade. Set into the concrete on either side are a series of numbers in the tens, each signifying a decade, and within each decade are ten plaques with the names of various women. As it turns out, the names are of women who were voted Mother of the Year by Oakland residents. To be Mother of the Year, you must have “contributed to improving the quality of life for the people of Oakland—through home, work, community service, volunteer efforts or combination thereof.”27 In an old industry film about Oakland, I found footage of a Mother of the Year ceremony from the 1950s. After a series of close-ups on different roses, someone hands a bouquet to an elderly woman and kisses her on the forehead. And for a few days this last May, I noticed an unusual number of volunteers in the garden, sprucing everything up, repainting things. It took me a while to realize they were preparing for Mother of the Year 2017, Malia Luisa Latu Saulala, a local church volunteer. I’m mentioning this celebration of mothers in the context of work that sustains and maintains—but I don’t think that one needs to be a mother to experience a maternal impulse. At the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the stunning 2018 documentary on Fred Rogers (aka Mister Rogers), we learn that in his commencement speeches, Rogers would ask the audience to sit and think about someone who had helped them, believed in them, and wanted the best for them. The filmmakers then ask the interviewees to do this. For the first time, the voices we’ve been hearing for the past hour or so fall silent; the film cuts between different interviewees, each thinking, looking slightly off camera. Judging from the amount of sniffling in the theater where I saw this film, many in the audience were also thinking of their own mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Rogers’s point in the commencement speeches was made anew: we are all familiar with the phenomenon of selfless care from at least some part of our lives. This phenomenon is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience. Thinking about maintenance and care for one’s kin also brings me back to a favorite book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses with the myth that people become desperate and selfish after disasters. From the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, she gives detailed accounts of the surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances. Several of her interviewees report feeling a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and the connection they felt with their neighbors immediately following a disaster. Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor. And as my familiarity with and love for the crows grows over the years, I’m reminded that we don’t even need to limit this sense of kinship to the human realm. In her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna J. Haraway reminds us that relatives in British English meant “logical relations” until the seventeenth century, when they became “family members.” Haraway is less interested in individuals and genealogical families than in symbiotic configurations of different kinds of beings maintained through the practice of care—asking us to “make kin, not babies!” Citing Shakespeare’s punning between “kin” and “kind,” she writes, “I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word.”28 Gathering all this together, what I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit. In Becoming Animal, Abram writes that “all our technological utopias and dreams of machine-mediated immortality may fire our minds but they cannot feed our bodies. Indeed, most of this era’s transcendent technological visions remain motivated by a fright of the body and its myriad susceptibilities, by a fear of our carnal embedment in a world ultimately beyond our control—by our terror of the very wildness that nourishes and sustains us.”29 Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” Of course, such a solution isn’t good for business, nor can it be considered particularly innovative. But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and nonhuman bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real. from How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell. 2019. Part II - the impossibility of retreat (ch2) A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment…So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life. –AGNES MARTIN If doing nothing requires space and time away from the unforgiving landscape of productivity, we might be tempted to conclude that the answer is to turn our backs to the world, temporarily or for good. But this response would be shortsighted. All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work. And the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason. One very early example of this approach was the garden school of Epicurus in the fourth century BC. Epicurus, the son of a schoolteacher, was a philosopher who held happiness and leisurely contemplation to be the loftiest goals in life. He also hated the city, seeing in it only opportunism, corruption, political machinations, and military bravado—the kind of place where Demetrius Poliorcetes, dictator of Athens, could tax the citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars ostensibly because his mistress needed soap. More generally, Epicurus observed that people in modern society ran in circles, unaware of the source of their unhappiness: Everywhere you can find men who live for empty desires and have no interest in the good life. Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.9 Epicurus decided to buy a garden on the rural outskirts of Athens and establish a school there. Like Felix, he wanted to create a space that functioned both as an escape and a curative for people who visited, although in Epicurus’s case, the visitors were students who lived there permanently. Articulating a form of happiness called ataraxia (loosely, “absence of trouble”), Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear. What he proposed in their absence was simple: relaxed contemplation in a community that was turned away from the city at large. “Live in anonymity,” Epicurus enjoined his students, who rather than engage in civic affairs, grew their own food within The Garden, chatting and theorizing among the lettuces. In fact, so much did Epicurus live by his own teachings that for most of his life he and his school remained relatively unknown within Athens. That was fine, since he believed that “[t]he purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many.”10 Quite contrary to the modern-day meaning of the word epicurean—often associated with decadent and plentiful food—what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires. It’s no accident that this sounds similar to ideas of non-attachment in eastern philosophy. Before founding the school, Epicurus had read Democritus and Pyrrho, both of whom are known to have had contact with the gymnosophists, or “naked wise men,” of India. One can certainly hear echoes of Buddhism in Epicurus’s prescription for the soul: “The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honour and respect in the eyes of the mob or by anything else that is associated with causes of unlimited desire.”11 The school of Epicurus sought to free its students not only from their own desires but from the fear associated with superstitions and myths. Teachings incorporated empirical science for the express purpose of dispelling anxieties about mythical gods and monsters who were thought to control things like the weather—or, for that matter, one’s fortune in life. In that sense, the school’s purpose might have been similar not only to Camp Grounded but to any addiction recovery center. At the school of Epicurus, students were being “treated” for runaway desire, needless worry, and irrational beliefs. Epicurus’s garden was different from other schools in important ways. Since only an individual could decide whether he had been “cured,” the atmosphere was noncompetitive, and students graded themselves. And while shunning one type of community, the school of Epicurus actively constructed another one: The Garden was the only school to admit non-Greeks, slaves, and women (including hetaera, or professional courtesans). Admission was free. Noting that, for most of human history, schooling has been a privilege restricted by class, Richard W. Hibler writes: Nothing was traditional about the Garden in comparison with most schools of the time. For instance, anyone with the zeal for learning how to live the life of refined pleasure was welcomed. The brotherhood was open to all sexes, nationalities, and races; the wealthy and the poor sat side by side next to “barbarians” such as slaves and non-Greeks. Women, who openly flaunted the fact that they were once prostitutes, assembled and joined men of all ages in the quest for Epicurean happiness.12 Epicurus was neither the first nor the last to seek a communal refuge in the countryside. Indeed, the Epicurean program—a group of people growing vegetables and focusing on chilling out, with vaguely Eastern influences—will sound familiar to a lot of us. Although similar experiments were repeated many times throughout history, the garden school reminds me the most of the commune movement of the 1960s, when thousands of people decided to drop out of modern life and try their hand at liberated country living. Of course, the flame of this movement burned brighter and shorter than the school of Epicurus. But in a time when I’m often seized by the urge to move to the Santa Cruz Mountains and throw my phone into the ocean at San Gregorio—without having really thought that through—I find the varying fates of the 1960s communes to be especially instructive…. First, as relatively recent versions of this experiment, the communes exemplify the problems with any imagined escape from the media and effects of capitalist society, including the role of privilege. Second, they show how easily an imagined apolitical “blank slate” leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics, ironically presaging the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley’s tech moguls. Lastly, their wish to break with society and the media—proceeding from feelings I can sympathize with—ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society. This reminder paves the way for a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Moderators & PrologueSara Mugridge and Daniel Neilson Links to Source Material
Categories |