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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jenny Odell
Read between
December 3 - December 18, 2024
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[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.
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,”
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.
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.
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.
It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable.
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.
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.
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Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective.
In a society where men have become law-abiding machines, the worst men are the best, and the best men are the worst.
For him, to be alive is to exercise moral judgment, but by those standards, almost everyone around him is already dead.
judgment is replaced by cost-benefit analysis; Paley’s idea sounds like the way an AI would decide when and whether resistance was necessary.
Viewing the present from the future, or injustice from the perspective of justice, Thoreau must live in the uncomfortable space of the unrealized.
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.
In Diogenes, Bartleby, and Thoreau, we see how discipline involves strict alignment with one’s own “laws” over and against prevailing laws or habits.
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.”
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” Mike 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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.
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).
Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students.
FOR THOSE WHO have ever enjoyed any kind of margin, it seems to have been shrinking for a long time now. Although they might have little else in common with a longshoreman in the 1930s, many modern workers might relate to the longshoremen’s schedule,
Before the unions, the longshoremen’s experience of time was completely beholden to the ups and downs of capital. While the 1932 law enabled union organizing, the tides had already begun to turn against organized labor with the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, which among other things prohibited the coordination of strike efforts among different unions.
Today, subjection to a ruthless capitalist framework seems almost natural.
In the global “spot market,” companies are driven only by the need to remain competitive, passing the task on to individuals to remain competitive as producing bodies.
This “new contract,” alongside other missing forms of government protection, closes the margin for refusal and leads to a life lived in economic fear.
When almost everything and every kind of service can be outsourced, white-collar workers find themselves toeing the line, too.
Blowing off steam by commenting “legit me” on a meme about sleep deprivation, or even allowing oneself a day off to catch up on sleep (!), can’t help with the overarching issue of economic precarity that awaits the student—and indeed has already reached less privileged students who must work in addition to studying. It does nothing about the specter of student debt, nor about the fear of ending up outside a shrinking pool of security.
On UC Berkeley’s meme page, someone has posted the “sold pupper dance video,” in which a small dog in a pet store paws adorably at a glass cage labeled “I am sold.” The caption: “when you get your summer internship and celebrate committing yourself to being yet another cog in the vast capitalist machine.”
Knowing this, I can forgive my students for getting frustrated that my art classes aren’t “practical” in any easily demonstrable sense. I’ve come to suspect that it’s not a lack of imagination on their parts. Rather, I’d venture that it’s an awareness of the cold hard truth that every minute counts toward the project of gainful employment.
Students duly and expertly carry out complicated maneuvers in which one misstep—whether that’s getting a B or getting arrested for attending a protest—might have untenable lifelong consequences.
In the context of attention, I’d further venture that this fear renders young people less able to concentrate individually or collectively. An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability. It obstructs collective attention because students are either locked in isolated struggles with their own limits, or worse, actively pitted against each other.
THERE ARE MANY “systemic abuses” to be refused at the moment, but I propose that one great place to start is the abuse of our attention. That’s because attention undergirds every other kind of meaningful refusal: it allows us to reach Thoreau’s higher perspective, and forms the basis of a disciplined collective attention that we see in successful strikes and boycotts whose laser-like focus withstood all the attempts to disassemble them.
In her 2012 paper, “Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention,” Laura Portwood-Stacer interviews people who quit Facebook for political reasons and finds that the meaning of these isolated actions is often lost on the Facebook friends left behind.
Grafton Tanner makes a similar point in “Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience,” a short piece on the repentant tech entrepreneurs who have realized just how addictive their technology is.
In sharp contrast to the modern meaning of the word cynicism, the Greek Cynics were earnestly invested in waking up the populace from a general stupor.
