From How to Do Nothing to Saving Time and back

I’ve recently listened to Jenny Odell’s talk on her artwork, namely on her best-selling book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy — an articulation of the right to do nothing in the age of everything, in her own words.

Though teaching digital art at Stanford University, Jenny Odell’s approach to the global Web is critical. She basically says that cyber societies have been captured by Capitalism and, for this reason, its exploitation drive has captured in a more insidious way the bodies and souls of growing numbers of humans. What seemed to be another liberation utopia became a new and deeper, though apparently sexier than ever, domination of the masses to its inner core. Capitalism is now a total system of exploitation and domination, generating what Antonio Negri calls a biopolitical entity subordinated to productivity, surveillance, and diminishing returns for anyone but those very few on the top of the money and political piles. What remedy to this social and cultural entropy that is feeding new deep social and political division across the so-called wealthy societies does Jenny Odell suggest? Literally, she says that we need a brake. A doing nothing pause, a split from online addiction, a renewed dive into real things, a humble step back to Nature. Being totally post-modern, what humanity needs is to embrace the world of art — the art of seeing anew, the art of (deep) listening, the art of empathy, and the art of dialogue. We need to go back to the files and bones of reality. Without technology? No. With technology, but a technology not subordinated to business as usual.

As I understand, this is the cognitive background of Odell’s conceptual art endeavour, very much in line with the American artistic avant-garde of the second half of the last century. For instance, following the creative strategies of the likes of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Pauline Oliveros, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

As Jonah Engel Bromwich highlights (The New York Times, April 30, 2019) about How to Do Nothing, “Odell understands and acknowledges that doing nothing — by which she means taking time out of one’s day to engage in an activity without considering whether it’s productive — isn’t something available to everyone.” We know that time is money and that free time is a luxury. No one hopes for a quick fix to a choking world (Franco “Bifo” Berardi) where technology cannot do much. What Odell has been vocalizing since 2017 and is now reverberating like a bang is nothing but what European philosophers like Jean-François Lyotard, or more recently, Timothy Morton and Graham Harman, are opposing to usual politics: art!