Ralph Waldo Emerson : Vision of Independence

There’s a treacherously placed bookstore in my neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden Pond Books, and it’s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn’t decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding Sweetgrass, Spell of the Sensuous, and The Genius of Birds. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.

This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a “mutable cloud, which is always and never the same,” and the task was to “[detect] through the fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species, through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.” There was an acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.

Reading Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.

I had been primed for Emerson’s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I’d taken my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating shorebirds—including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental—but it was also just to recover and hear myself think. I had never been much of a public person, and I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity.

After roaming the hills at Elkhorn Slough until the preserve closed at 5, I decided impulsively against going straight home. Instead I drove due east and, even though it was 100 degrees and I’d already been walking all day, started up a steep trail near Fremont Peak in San Juan Bautista. I was propelled by more than mere curiosity; I was trying to leave something behind. There was an unforgiving quality to the dry and tree-less hillside, with a hot wind that drew a rasping, rattling sound from the pods of alien-looking milk vetches. Both literally and figuratively, I felt I was gasping for air. When I reached the top of the trail, the sun was beginning to set on the Diablo Range across the valley, casting it in an otherworldly shade of purple. I was filled with a volatile mix of emotions. Sweat evaporating, I wrote in my notebook that “the pain I feel is the will trying to act” and that “the real self, let out of the cage, doesn’t want to go back in again.”

The “will” I wrote of was not exactly mine; it was an artist’s will, an out-of-range frequency to be listened for with great effort. Emerson’s Essays addressed and galvanized this self-as-listener, especially in “The Over-Soul.” I felt drawn to his theological model of self-abandonment and visitation, not unlike the way the writer Simone Weil described love and attention, or the way the painter Agnes Martin would wait, alone for days and weeks, for a vision of perfection. Emerson writes, “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it.” I recognized my own longing for absolute clarity, my own breathless hike, in Emerson’s description of an “ascension of state,” where “[w]ith each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspired and expires its air.”

“The Over-Soul” is my favorite essay, but Emerson is better known for “Self Reliance,” that famous paean to individualism. This is the one where Emerson declares that “[w]hoso would be a man must be nonconformist,” and disdains society as “a join-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” Again, the writing is seductive. For anyone adrift in the world, it is reassuring to hear that “[n]othing can bring you peace but yourself,” or that mental will can triumph over fate. It can really be this simple: “In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations.”

I was far from immune to this essay. I underlined “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” But the more I looked back on it, the more I began to wrestle with the essay’s blind spot. I didn’t immediately see it, because the blind spot was also my own.

The wrestling started when I went home for Thanksgiving. My family gatherings are small: my parents, my uncle, and I gather in my grandmother’s house, which is part of a community of small houses for the elderly. This year, as soon as we walked in the door, I was confronted with a dilemma. My mother immediately joined my grandma in the kitchen, whereas my dad went down the hall to a room where my uncle was sitting. When I asked my mom if they needed help in the kitchen, she shooed me away, so I headed down the narrow hallway to hover on the periphery of a conversation about the upcoming election primaries. This division will be all too familiar to many: women working in the kitchen, men talking politics in the next room.

As I leaned awkwardly against the wall because there wasn’t a third chair, the conversation continued as if I weren’t there. My gaze wandered over to an interesting tableau across the room. Resting on a shelf was something I’d never noticed: a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that favorite novel of libertarians. The main character is an uncompromising, iconoclastic, and self-made modernist architect who shared Emerson’s disdain for society and certainly followed his advice, to “suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon you and bereave you of your infinitude.”

Next to The Fountainhead was a careful pencil drawing of a black-headed gull in a frame. After staring at it for a few moments, I finally recognized this drawing as my own. I wondered why I would have drawn my grandmother a black-headed gull, an East Coast bird that I’d likely never seen, and then realized that I had drawn it years ago, before I had become a birder. I had likely been looking for a pleasant and generic subject for a drawing, googled “seagull,” and drawn one of the results, without distinguishing among them. (There’s technically no such thing as a “seagull,” only different kinds of gulls.)

Unexpectedly, everything congealed in that moment: the different rooms, the drawing, The Fountainhead, “Self Reliance,” and the critiques I had seen of How to Do Nothing. Just as I had studiously reproduced the form of the gull without knowing what it was, I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

Just the night before, I had watched Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, a series of interviews in different locations with contemporary philosophers. While the documentary’s other subjects appear alone, Judith Butler takes a walk around the Mission District of San Francisco with Sunaura Taylor, an activist for disability and animal rights. Taylor was born with arthrogryposis and uses a wheelchair. At one point, Butler says, “I’m just thinking that … nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.”

                                              Clip from Examined Life

Taylor, whose condition affects the use of her hands, tells Butler about the time she lived in Brooklyn and would have to sit in a park for hours psyching herself up to get coffee alone. “In a way it’s a political protest for me to go in and order a coffee and demand help,” she says, “simply because, in my opinion, help is something that we all need.” After they stop into a vintage store to get Taylor a sweater because it’s gotten chilly, Butler revisits this story:

       My sense is that what’s at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency. And I think, you know, when you walk into the coffee shop … and you ask for the coffee, or you, indeed, even ask for assistance with the coffee, you’re basically posing the question, do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs? And are basic needs there to be decided on as a social issue and not just my personal, individual issue or your personal, individual issue? So there’s a challenge to individualism that happens at the moment in which you ask for some assistance with the coffee cup. And hopefully, people will take it up and say, yes, I, too, live in that world … in which I understand that we need each other in order to address our basic needs. And I want to organize a social, political world on the basis of that recognition.

This conversation came back to me in that little house at Thanksgiving. My grandmother, otherwise healthy, had been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. After we all assembled in the living room, she showed me the medical alert device (also known as a “panic button”) hanging around her neck, and pointed to a small console in the corner of the room that would contact my parents if she pressed the button. Weeks earlier, she had fallen in this same living room and, unable to move or reach the phone, lay on the floor for many hours until my dad came by for his regular visit.

    

My immediate reaction to her story and to the button was one of terror at the contingency of the whole thing. It made my grandma seem uniquely dependent. But as I reflected on the panic button in the context of Butler’s “challenge to individualism,” it began to look more like an advanced, concrete version of an interdependence that we each bear in some form from the moment we are born. If my grandma was now hanging on by this particular thread, it simply highlighted the many other threads that keep us all aloft. It was also an intense physical illustration of the way that freedom is constrained by factors outside of one’s control—the very “wheel of Chance” Emerson thought we could afford to ignore.

In 1930, James Truslow Adams, the writer who coined the term “American dream,” wrote an essay called “Emerson Re-read,” in which he tried to account for why Emerson’s essays enchanted him as a youth but felt hollow for him as an adult. This image of independence just feels too easy, he says, noting that “economic evils trouble our sage not at all.” Adams suggests that Emerson’s self-reliance was part of an optimistic current in American thought that went hand in hand with material abundance and westward expansion. Indeed, “Self Reliance” was written five years before the term “manifest destiny” was coined, an era that celebrated the lone, able explorer setting out to tame a (supposed) wilderness. The contemplative tradition has often been supported from the outside, a hallmark of the affordances of leisure—the way that philosophy in ancient Greece was dependent on a servant class. The concept of self-reliance has always relied on something else.

None of this is to say that “Self Reliance” isn’t useful as a model of refusal and commitment. In his own time, Emerson was an outspoken opponent of slavery, the Mexican-American War, and the removal of Native Americans from their land. In our time, we could surely use the reminders to examine our relationship with public opinion and to maintain a sense of principled intuition. The best version of Emerson’s individualism is bracing, like a splash of cold water to the face, or a friend shaking you by the shoulders in order to snap you out of a daze. But for me, as for many others, everything outside the self fades away too quickly in “Self Reliance”: all of the people and circumstances that have influenced my experience of independence, my conception of my self, and even the very terms with which I think. It hides the losses that appear as my gains. And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried harder.

The tensions between agency and situation, between the individual and the collective, have never been easy to resolve. I’m trying to learn to live in the messy space between. Here, you can be both your own and not your own, responsible to communities without exhibiting the dreaded groupthink, and bound by one commitment: to examine your commitments, forever. Sometimes—many times—I’m wrong. And when I am, that is a time for listening to others, not for “keep[ing] with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I’m reminded of an archaic form of the noun “reliance,” where it means the opposite of a dependent; a reliance was someone on whom you depended. When I examine my identity, I do see an inalienable spirit grasping for infinity. But in the very same place, I also see an intersection of historical and cultural vectors, held up by a web of countless reliances.

 Emerson’s writing contains a version of the self-not-self paradox, even if it’s with eyes directed upward and inward, not outward. After all, besides “Self Reliance,” the other thing he’s most associated with is the philosophy of transcendentalism, which can entail a transcending of the self as much as it does transcending society. This is the stuff that made me feel drunk, where the boundaries of the self are breached in a meeting with something else. In “The Over-Soul,” “[o]ur being is descending into us from we know not whence … I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” In “Circles,” the universe is “fluid and volatile”; the soul “bursts over that boundary on all sides”; and the heart “refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.” In “History,” an individual is not a single entity but “a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”

When Emerson writes that “[t]houghts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and … go out of minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened,” it almost sounds like he’s describing that day at Walden Pond Books, when the Essays found their way into my unsuspecting hands. I think of my book-mushroom growing there, the “flower and fruitage” of my encounters so far. It’s a story that belongs both to me and to my reliances. I will keep coming back to the store, retreating to the mountain, having conversations, sitting alone, tracing a path that is more a spiral than a straight line. And hard as I might work, I will be anything but self-made.

The Myth of Self-Reliance. By Jenny Odell. The Paris Review, January 15, 2020

During Harvard University’s commencement week in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the podium at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa society. The group, composed of the top students in the graduating class, was gathered in the First Parish Church in Cambridge. Emerson, the class poet of his own Harvard class a decade before, and a writer and philosopher of growing stature, had been chosen as the honored guest to address the future intellectual elite of New England. 

The event was a capstone in a week of ceremony and tradition. That changed when Emerson began to speak.

In his speech, titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson called for the young country to develop a national intellectual life distinct from lingering colonial influences. He also delivered an incisive critique of his audience, condemning academic scholarship for its reliance on historical and institutional wisdom. The eponymous scholar, he argued, had become “decent, indolent, complaisant.” To become more than “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking,” a scholar must begin to engage with the world for oneself.

Emerson was an unlikely critic of the country’s intellectual establishment. The son of a Unitarian minister, he had attended Harvard Divinity School and taken a position after graduation as a junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church. But the loss of his young wife to tuberculosis shortly after his ordination—just 16 months into their marriage—had shaken the foundation of his faith, and he had begun to chafe against the restrictions of institutionalized knowledge.

A similar frustration with New England’s dominant religious and academic culture was growing among many of the region’s other young intellectuals. In 1836, Emerson had joined a handful of them in founding the Transcendental Club. As Emerson laid out in his essay “Nature,” published the same year the club began, the transcendentalists sought freedom from the “poetry and philosophy of … tradition” and “religion by … history.” They believed that moral truth should be sought not in accepted wisdom, but through individual thought and experience.

With “The American Scholar,” Emerson gave voice to the movement’s individualism: envisioning an independent American intellectual culture premised not on any kind of nationalist pride—nor on any particular doctrine or political system—but on a dedication to independence itself. He would later define the “American idea” he sought to promote through his work simply as “Emancipation.”

The speech elicited praise from many of Emerson’s fellow transcendentalists and anger from the Harvard administration; after giving a similarly critical address at the divinity school the following year, he was banned from speaking on campus for three decades.

But “The American Scholar” had made its mark. Emerson’s speech left a particular impression on two members of the Harvard community, a troublemaking undergraduate named James Russell Lowell and a recent alumnus named Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought,” Lowell later wrote, “till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water.”

Holmes called the speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson’s appeal for cultural independence coincided with the nationwide struggle toward another kind of emancipation. As transcendentalism began to take root in New England, abolitionism was gaining fervor across the Northern states. The debate over slavery seeped into churches, literature, and colleges, dominating conversations about America’s future.

Though he was initially hesitant to speak publicly about slavery, by the 1840s Emerson came to believe that American culture could be used to advance the cause of emancipation. He wasn’t alone: His view was shared by many other transcendentalists and prominent New England abolitionists. In May 1857, he convened at the Parker House Hotel in Boston with several of them, including Lowell, Holmes, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Together they founded a magazine dedicated to advocating abolitionism and promoting American voices: The Atlantic Monthly.

The mission statement printed in the first issue of The Atlantic that November echoed Emerson’s expansive philosophy. The founders disavowed prejudice and promised to “be the organ of no party or clique,” and to pursue morality and truth no matter where they stemmed from or led to. They sought too to advance American writing and the “American idea” “wherever the English tongue is spoken or read”—a reflection of Emerson’s desire for a national intellectual identity that could transcend the country’s institutions and borders.

In his earlier work, Emerson had emphasized the importance of great American writers who could offer insight into national life and introduce readers to new moral truths. “We love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a new thought,” he wrote in 1844. “He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.” He saw the same potential in The Atlantic. He backed Lowell for the role of founding editor, believing that he would act as an effective guide for the publication rather than pander to its readers.

He also supported the choice to exclude bylines from early issues of The Atlantic, explaining, “The names of contributors will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles.” In fact, the magazine included the work of some of the nation’s most notable literary figures, many of them connected to Emerson through his work and his carefully cultivated intellectual circles.

As his influence had grown as a writer and lecturer, Emerson had helped inspire and support some of the 19th century’s best-known American writers. Primary among these young protégés was Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson befriended in the late 1830s. He introduced Thoreau to transcendentalist ideas, encouraged him to begin writing journal entries and essays, and provided him land with which to conduct his experiment in simple living. In 1840, Emerson urged another friend and protégé, the journalist and women’s-rights activist Margaret Fuller, to publish Thoreau’s first essay in the Transcendental Club’s magazine, The Dial (a publication that Emerson also helped establish). Following Thoreau’s early death, in 1862, Emerson helped champion Walden and secure the book and its author vaunted positions in the pantheon of American literature.

In 1842, Emerson gave a lecture appealing for a distinctly American writer who could give voice to the yet “unsung” nation. In attendance was a 22-year-old Walt Whitman, who was determined to answer his call. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

In 1855, Whitman paid for his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, to be printed at a local shop, and sent one of the first copies to Emerson. Emerson responded soon after with a laudatory letter. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he wrote.

Inspired by the positive response, Whitman passed Emerson’s letter on to an editor at the New York Tribune and quickly paid to produce a second edition of Leaves of Grass. He printed a phrase from Emerson’s letter on the book’s spine: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

Early issues of The Atlantic featured Whitman’s poetry and Thoreau’s essays, along with short stories from Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Emerson’s close friend Bronson Alcott; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson’s neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts; and Henry James, a friend of Emerson’s by way of his father. The community he had created would help establish the new magazine, and further his vision for a generation of American writers who could put the spirit of the young country into words.

Emerson’s vision of emancipation shone through in the magazine’s approach to slavery, women’s rights, and labor rights, among other topics, in the years that he served as a regular contributor. He himself became a leading voice for abolitionism in The Atlantic as the country entered the Civil War, making a passionate moral case that the nation could not survive unless slavery was extinguished.

In one of his most famous lectures, “American Civilization,” published in the magazine’s April 1862 issue, he reiterated his call for independence from the past. “America is another word for Opportunity,” he observed. “Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people.”

He beseeched the government to abolish slavery immediately and permanently. After Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation six months later, Emerson hailed the measure as a “heroic” and “genius” step forward in the long fight for moral governance—a fight that would not end when slavery did, but that would continue to march toward ever greater political liberty.

In other essays for the magazine, he urged readers to seek their own freedom outside the bounds of politics. A measure of individual solitude, he wrote, was necessary for the endurance of society. He argued that power was derived from wisdom, and wisdom from the accumulation of personal experience. And the best personal experience was to be found walking in nature alone: nature that “kills egotism and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity.” Out of nature, he believed, could grow good and wise men; out of good and wise men, perhaps, a good and wise nation.

Published over the course of 50 years, his dozens of essays, poems, and lectures in The Atlantic were an encapsulation of the same vision of independence that he’d outlined in “The American Scholar” and that had, by the time he co-founded the magazine, earned him international recognition.

But while Emerson’s work was widely read in his time, none of his writing for The Atlantic—nor the hundreds of other essays, lectures, poems, and books he produced over the course of his career—has endured as popular reading in the way of contemporaneous works like Alcott’s Little Women or Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The selections from Emerson’s expansive body of work that have found places on modern syllabi or in anthologies are, in the way of most literary classics, more often referenced than read. He remains perhaps one of the most cited American authors, but his words surface now mainly in the form of decontextualized aphorisms and inspirational quotes: “To be great is to be misunderstood,” or “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Reading Emerson’s essays, it’s not hard to understand why his words have found their most enduring currency in this form. As the literary critic Alfred Kazin observed in a July 1957 Atlantic article, “Emerson’s genius is in the sudden flash rather than in the suavely connected paragraph and page.”

His writing, on the scale of pithy phrases—or even of paragraphs or brief sections—can be eloquent, clear, moving. On the scale of whole works, however, he charts convoluted, snaking routes toward his point. He overuses rhetorical questions; he tends toward rambling tangents; he dwells overlong on obscure concepts and metaphors; he becomes mired in dense, verbose passages that are at best tangential to his core ideas.

And his ideas were often as convoluted as his writing. He enshrined individualism, urging readers to “trust thyself” rather than being drawn in by “the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages” or relying “on Property, or the … governments which protect it.” But he dismissed the idea of deep or lasting individuality, insisting that truth was ultimately universal and “within man is the soul of the whole … the eternal ONE.” He argued that society suppressed liberty and that “the less government we have, the better.” But he also asserted that “government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party,” and called for the state to promote virtue and to protect and secure individual rights. He spoke out against the immorality of slavery and the forced removal of Native Americans. But he also espoused a belief in absolute racial hierarchy even decades after he became a vocal abolitionist.

Yet even these inconsistencies were consistent, in the broadest sense, with Emerson’s American idea. For him, emancipation was an eternal work in progress—dependent on an unlimited openness to change, and an endless accrual of new insights and observations. Over the course of a lifetime, he noted, any single person accumulates knowledge through successive years of education, experience, and imagination; over the course of many lifetimes, society en masse incorporates the knowledge of individuals into a broader understanding of the world. He regarded perfect understanding as unachievable, so to him, virtue lay not in achieving it but rather in trying to move closer to it—imperfectly, inconsistently, humanly, the only way it could be done.

In this way, his ideas persist at the very heart of American culture, largely decontextualized from any particular piece of his work.

“Emerson, by no means the greatest American writer .... is the inescapable theorist of virtually all subsequent American writing,” the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in a 1984 article for The New York Review of Books. “From his moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a countertradition originating in opposition to him.”

Even if Emerson’s most influential lectures and essays are no longer universally read, the works he helped bring to life—such as Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—endure as cornerstones of the nation’s literature. His essays shaped a tradition of American essay-writing. His poetry gave rise to some of the country’s greatest poets: Emily Dickinson treasured a book of his verse; Robert Frost called him his favorite American poet. Even Hawthorne and Herman Melville, co-signers of The Atlantic’s founding manifesto who expressed reservations about the transcendentalist movement—what Melville once, after attending one of Emerson’s lectures, referred to as “myths and oracular gibberish”—committed a distinctly Emersonian individualism to the page with characters such as Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab.

Transcendentalism went on to inform subsequent generations of philosophical and religious thought, including the existential musings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the civil disobedience of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Though Emerson never ventured into the visual arts, he influenced the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Great men,” Emerson wrote, “exist that there may be greater men.” So he set out to build a culture that could evolve beyond any one moment or person, even himself.

Emerson’s house in Concord is surrounded by more famous historical sites. About a mile to the north lies the reconstructed bridge where one of the first battles of the American Revolution was fought in 1775. To the south stretches the northern shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau retreated to “live deliberately” for two years, beginning in the summer of 1845.

Between them, the boxy white house rises up from the edge of the Cambridge Turnpike like an afterthought, an unremarkable Federal-style structure distinguished from its neighbors only by two neat signs proclaiming it to be “The Home of RALPH WALDO EMERSON.” Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who traveled to the town in 2018 seeking some insight into the nation’s history—and some resplendent fall foliage—just 3,000 stopped by to see the home.

Emerson purchased the house in 1835, in the early stages of his new career as a writer and lecturer. When he first moved in, he set out to cultivate a garden. He planted hemlocks when his oldest son was born; pine trees after delivering “The American Scholar”; a fruit orchard as his first collection of essays launched him into international fame.

“I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world,” he wrote in 1841. More than a century and a half later, by the side of the Cambridge Turnpike, some of the things he planted still grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s American Idea. By  Annika Neklason. The Atlantic, November 28, 2019.

“Listen to me!  . . . Do not, above all confound me with what I am not.”  Friedrich Nietzsche’s plea, of course, was in vain. Even while alive but in a state of complete mental collapse, his sister began an egregious misappropriation of his writings.  She cultivated and perpetrated readings of Nietzsche sympathetic to German nationalism and anti-Semitism. This “German Nietzsche” as the avatar of the Aryan superman has generally collapsed, and after the fall of the Third Reich a reassessment of Nietzsche began.

In the latter part of the 20th century a wholly new interpretation has emerged. Nietzsche has become the avatar of a world without God and the prophet of postmodern relativism. In a great feat of intellectual alchemy, Nietzschean skepticism has been fused with Marxist social consciousness to produce Progressive gold.  What Harold Bloom calls “French Nietzsche” has swept through Academia and is now in its latter orthodoxical iterations.

Nietzsche has been described as a philosopher who is easy to read but difficult to understand. This is, at least in part, because of his seemingly fragmented and provocative aphoristic style and his disinclination to articulate any kind of philosophical system. He often appears to contradict himself, and he makes no attempt to reconcile his seemingly disparate views. Nietzsche as philosopher is, therefore, difficult to place into any kind of historical continuity and, in fact, he himself is often critical if not dismissive of the great philosophers of his age:  Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, and so on. At some point, many end up on the barb of his ruthless wit. And Nietzsche never even mentions Karl Marx by name, while routinely denouncing the emergent socialistic movements as resentful secular Christian heresies. Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Nietzsche loved Emerson from first to last. Nietzsche’s interest in and admiration of Emerson began when he was still a schoolboy and continued throughout his productive life. He studiously annotated and copied whole passages from German translations of Emerson’s essays. In 1884, Nietzsche described Emerson as, “a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit” and pronounced Emerson to be, “the author who has been the richest in ideas in this century.”And commenting on a collection of Emerson’s essays, Nietzsche wrote: “Never have I felt so at home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me.” 

Nietzsche’s admiration of Emerson has been largely ignored by modern scholars, at least until quite recently. My own contention is simply this: understanding Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is not only essential in understanding Nietzsche, but it is a way of confronting our current psychological fragmentation and ideological isolationism.

Nietzsche’s identification with Emerson is elemental. Both Emerson and Nietzsche subscribe to a unified Heraclitan universe of perpetual change and conflict, what Nietzsche describes as a, “monster of energy  . . . eternally self-creating . . . eternally self-destroying,” a vast “play of contradictions” in what Emerson describes as a “series of balanced antagonisms.” This is Emerson’s “power and form,” Nietzsche’s “Dionysian and Apollonian,” or what he would eventually call “will to power.” A human being is then a force of nature, what Emerson calls, “a piece of the universe made alive” and human thinking, human consciousness itself is a natural phenomenon. All human ideas are expressions of various human life forms, and philosophy is essentially what Nietzsche calls, “a kind of atavism of the highest order.”And like all forms, human cultures and civilizations are sublimations of this paradoxical play of contrary and conflicting powers.

Both Nietzsche and Emerson emphasize the importance and integrity of the individual. This is not for some ideological or romantic reason but because it is only as individuals that we can know who we are and how reality works. “Nothing,” says Emerson, “is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind.” The individual is the locus of experience, and Nietzsche and Emerson are, above all, the most empirical of philosophers. What we can elementally know of reality we know firsthand as individuals, not as members of some group, nor by some explanation of reality received from others. What we can most importantly receive from others is not “instruction,” says Emerson, but “provocation”—and provocation is precisely what Nietzsche receives from Emerson.

Emerson, not unlike Nietzsche, articulates no systematic philosophy; he has no particular theory of history or of social or economic relations.  “Life,” for Emerson “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy.” Emerson understands human thinking as the absorption of sense experience and its transformation by individual human consciousness, by what he calls “the fire of his mind.” Ideas are not merely human projections but experience transformed by the fire of thought; thinking is not so much the generation of ideas as it is the combustion of experience.

Nietzsche and Emerson are minds on fire; both inhabit a world of what Emerson calls “perpetual revelation.” “We stand before the secret of the world,” writes Emerson, “where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” In such a dynamic understanding of reality, truth cannot so much be known, as it can be experienced or embodied. It is the scholar’s conceit to think of Nietzsche and Emerson as simply generating ideas and concepts to be analyzed by others.

We are, as Vedic thinkers have long affirmed, simultaneously observers and participants in reality; “We animate what we can,” says the “Hindoo of Concord,” “and we see only what we animate.” The nature of the reality we experience reflects the nature of who we are. This understanding of ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants is a key to understanding Nietzsche’s affinity with Emerson and key to understanding subsequent misreadings of both. Existence is neither a purely objective phenomenon nor a purely subjective one—but a dynamic of inner and outer forces. Existence is a poetic phenomenon.   

As powerful and helpful as human concepts are, we always risk being seduced by our own “ideals” (or, for Nietzsche, “idols”) and drawn away from what Nietzsche calls “reality as it is.” Emerson, from his seminal essay “Experience”:

  “The great gifts are not got by analysis . . .  We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation.  Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, – a narrow belt.”

Living on the equator of life is dealing with Nietzsche’s reality as it is, and it is the poet who best understands that we are creative beings in a creative universe. The poet, Emerson asserts, “stands among partial men for the complete man.” It is the poet who has the greatest power to “name” the world and who articulates and affirms the unity of seemingly antagonistic aspects. Fully understanding the limits of skepticism and analysis and the necessity of creativity is why Nietzsche refers to himself as, “an artistic Socrates.” Philosophizing itself is a creative act.

Understanding and accepting the poetic nature of existence requires accepting and confronting the limited nature of human knowledge. This is Nietzsche’s “tragic insight” or “tragic wisdom,” which is the most elemental truth of our existence. Tragic insight acknowledges ourselves as simultaneously observers and participants in reality. Simply analyzing or observing nature no matter how closely will not relieve us of our responsibility to confront paradoxical reality. We may break down reality into its pieces, but ultimately we live by wholes not parts; it is we who generate order and meaning from our experience.

It is precisely this human tendency to shrink from the poetic and tragic nature of existence and to confuse our ideas or interpretations of reality with reality, which informs both Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity.  But even before Emerson’s controversial “Divinity School Address” at Harvard in 1838, Christianity as a whole comprehensive system, especially in Europe, was in decline. It would be Nietzsche, almost a half century later, who would best articulate the nature and consequences of this world historical event. Nietzsche would become the prophet of the death of God and the emergence of a kind of human being new to human history: the shallow, nihilistic last man.

When Emerson died in 1882, America was still somewhat of a frontier society, in Walt Whitman’s words, “a great poem” yet in the process of writing itself. Well into the twentieth century Emerson would come to seen as the philosopher of sunny optimism and individual self-realization, ultimately ignored or dismissed in the world of academic philosophy. 

Nietzsche’s Europe of this time was still an expanding imperial power, but it was also experiencing the beginnings of what would become its own civilizational disintegration. Nietzsche would become famous for his insights into the great transformations, which have come to define the modern world. He is, to this day, the “bad boy” of European philosophy, variously condemned by some as the prophet of decay and nihilism, while praised by others as the avatar of ferment and liberation. All the while, Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson has largely been forgotten. 

Understanding the nature of Nietzsche’s affinity for Emerson is to return to the powerful and persistent relevance of both. It is precisely the neglected Emersonian aspect of Nietzsche which signifies a return to observing and contemplating the spectacle of reality as a whole, as a vast unified play of forces of which we are always participants. A return to Emerson is a return to the integrity of the individual as the locus of experience and a turn away from our narrow, fragmented and increasingly dysfunctional ideologies and abstractions. A return to Emerson is a return to philosophy, a return to faith in our ability, not only to contemplate antagonistic forces, but to articulate how antagonistic forces interconnect and how we fit into the whole tragic spectacle. 

Nietzsche’s respect and admiration for Emerson persisted throughout his entire life because Nietzsche’s fundamental understanding of reality persisted: we are tragic beings in tragic universe. Commenting on the passing of Emerson, Nietzsche wrote: “In Emerson, we have lost a philosopher”

Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Chris Augusta.  Merion West ,  May 21, 2019.

The Attention Economy

From: X

 Sent: February 27 2008 00:16

 To: Z, Y

 Subject: marketing-trainee

 Importance: High

Hi,

As I already mentioned to Z, there has been a person sitting

 in the Tax library space and staring out of the window with a

 glazed look in her eyes . . .

Female, very short hair, she said when asked that she’s a

 trainee in Marketing.

She sat in front of an empty desk from 10:30am, went for

 lunch . . .

In 2008, employees at an office for the accounting firm Deloitte were troubled by the behavior of a new recruit. In the midst of a bustling work environment, she didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. Whenever someone would ask what she was doing, she would reply that she was “doing thought work” or “working on [her] thesis.” Then there was the day that she spent riding the elevators up and down repeatedly. When a coworker saw this and asked if she was “thinking again,” she replied: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.” The employees became uneasy. Urgent inter-office emails were sent.

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. In a piece called Bag Lady, for instance, she spent days roaming a mall in Berlin while carrying a clear plastic bag full of euro bills. Christy Lange describes the piece in Frieze: “While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer,’ she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.”

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.”

*

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.

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 terra cotta 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.”

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.” In the meantime, he would roll over hot sand in the summer, and hug statues covered with snow. 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. 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.

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.”

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.”

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.

From How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

How to Unsettle People by  Doing Nothing. By Jenny Odell. LitHub , April 11, 2019.

This is the transcript of a keynote talk I gave at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis. An adapted version appears in my book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

I’d like to start off by saying that this talk is grounded in a particular location, and that is the Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses in Oakland, California, otherwise known simply as “the rose garden.”

In the most basic sense, that’s because I largely wrote this talk in the rose garden. But it’s also because as I wrote it, I realized that the garden encompassed everything that I’m going to talk to you about, which is the practice of doing nothing, but also the architecture of nothing, the importance of public space, and an ethics of care and maintenance. And: birds.

What was I doing in the rose garden in the first place? I live five minutes away, and ever since I’ve lived in Oakland the garden has been my default place to go to get away from my computer, where I make much of my art and also do most of my work related to teaching. But after the 2016 election, I started going to the rose garden almost every day. This wasn’t exactly a conscious decision; I needed to go — like a deer going to a salt lick or a goat going to the top of a hill. It was innate.

What I would do there is nothing. I’d just sit there. And although I felt a bit guilty about how incongruous it seemed — beautiful garden versus terrifying world — it really did feel necessary, like a survival tactic. I found this necessity of doing nothing so perfectly articulated in a passage from Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations:

…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. (emphasis mine)

….. continue reading >>>  How to do nothing. By Jenny Odell.  Medium, June 29,   2017.

“Doing nothing is not a luxury, it’s a ground for meaningful thoughts."

Digital artist and collector Jenny Odell talks about how work life shifted from an 8 hour workday into an always on approach. In this opening keynote, visual artist Jenny Odell will explore the architecture, politics, and rewards of nothing, arguing that the cultivation of nothing has new salience in the age of everything.

She wants us to reclaim the public spaces such as parks and libraries for personal reflection and restoration. Jenny believes time and places for the practice and art of doing nothing are crucial to uncover underlying problems and to understand yourself. She regularly spends time in a nearby rose garden for observational activities such as bird watching and doing nothing to discover what unfolds from her inner journey and peace in mind.

Jenny Odell – How to do nothing | The Conference 2017.  The Conference / Media Evolution

Published on September 11, 2017.

“For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience,” writes Jenny Odell. “And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.”

Odell is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. And she’s a visual artist who has taught digital and physical design at Stanford since 2013, as well as done residencies at Facebook, San Francisco Recology, and the Internet Archive.

All of which is to say she’s the perfect person to talk to about creativity and attention in a world designed to flatten both. In this conversation, Jenny and I discuss the difference between productivity and creativity, how artists orchestrate attention, the ideologies we use to value our time, what it means to do nothing, restoring context to our lives and words, why “groundedness requires actual ground,” lucid dreaming, the joys of bird watching, my difficulty appreciating conceptual art, her difficulty with meditation, and much more.

The artist and author talks to Ezra Klein about overstimulation and the difference between productivity and creativity.  

Jenny Odell and the art of attention.  Vox  ,  May 23 , 2019.

In 2015, Jenny Odell started an organization she called The Bureau of Suspended Objects. Odell was then an artist-in-residence at a waste operating station in San Francisco. As the sole employee of her bureau, she photographed things that had been thrown out and learned about their histories. (A bird-watcher, Odell is friendly with a pair of crows that sit outside her apartment window; given her talent for scavenging, you wonder whether they’ve shared tips.)

Odell’s first book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” echoes the approach she took with her bureau, creating a collage (or maybe it’s a compost heap) of ideas about detaching from life online, built out of scraps collected from artists, writers, critics and philosophers. In the book’s first chapter, she remarks that she finds things that already exist “infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.” Then, summoning the ideas of others, she goes on to construct a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto.

Though trained as an artist, Odell has gradually become known for her writing. Her consistent theme is the invasion of the wider world by internet grotesqueries grown in the toxic slime of Amazon, Instagram and other social media platforms. She has a knack for evoking the malaise that comes from feeling surrounded by online things. Like many of us, she would like to get away from that feeling.

Odell suggests that she has done this, semi-successfully, by striking a stance of public refusal and by retraining her attention to focus on her surroundings. She argues that because the internet strips us of our sense of place and time, we can counter its force by resituating ourselves within our physical environment, by becoming closer to the natural world.

Many of the chapters in “How to Do Nothing” consist of Odell methodically setting out an idea that’s key to her philosophy. Among the most important is refusal, which she vividly illustrates through a variety of disciplines. Refusal, she writes, was exemplified by the Greek philosopher Diogenes, whose life’s work was to point out the absurdity of conformity. Refusal was also the staple act of Melville’s Bartleby, one of Odell’s favorite refuseniks (she admires the brilliance of his stock phrase: “I would prefer not to”). And refusal was the fundamental act undertaken in 1934 by a longshoremen’s union that led to a strike that spread from the Bay Area to ports throughout the West Coast.

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 that’s available to everyone. But her book is least convincing when she suggests that meaningful political change would follow if the strategies she has adopted were taken up en masse. Though she acknowledges that she’s lucky to be able to exercise the freedom to while away the hours in her favorite rose garden or to go bird-watching, Odell seems to disregard just how individualistic her strategies are. She lives an artistic life, one that lends itself wonderfully to aesthetic expression but is less useful in the political realm.

And yet Odell’s book, which complements other recent nonfiction, including Shoshanna Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” and Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind,” has the potential to improve a reader’s behavior. Recently, on a short vacation in Miami, I caught myself putting on my headphones as I set out to explore the city on foot. I left them behind and discovered something lovely: Birdsong was everywhere.

A Manifesto for Opting Out of an Internet-Dominated World.  By Jonah Engel Bromwich. The New York Times  , April 30, 2019. 

Artist and writer Jenny Odell  is justifiably beloved for her pieces and installations that make us consider the economics and meanings of garbage, weird markets, and other 21st century plagues; in her first book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Odell draws on art criticism, indigenous practices, "Deep Listening," anti-capitalist theory, and psychology to make the case that the internal chaos we feel is no accident: it's the result of someone's business-model, and until we reject "productivity" in favor of contemplation and deliberation, it will only get worse.

Odell's central thesis is hard to pin down; part of her subject-matter here is that really important ideas don't neatly distill down to short, punchy summaries or slogans -- instead, they occupy a kind of irreducible, liminal complexity that has to be lived as much as discussed.

With that in mind, the broad strokes of her book are that:

* The rise of "productivity" as a measure of the quality of life is incredibly destructive, and it obliterates everything inside and outside of us that make us happy, because sleep and love and laughter and beauty are not "productive."

Odell links this to neoliberal capitalism, and the requirement that each of us be a hustling entrepreneur, which, in turn, is a way for capital to shift risk onto labor. It's a scam that moves both wealth and joy off of our balance sheets and onto the balance sheets of the super-rich.

 This is very strong material, and it reminds me of the one conversation I had with David Allen, author of "Getting Things Done." Allen lamented that everyone pays close attention to the first two parts of his book (which focus on making sure that the stuff you decide to do get done) and skip over the third part (which focuses on deciding what to do).

* That doing "nothing" doesn't mean becoming a hermit: it requires more social engagement, not less

Odell builds on the idea that capitalism atomizes us and makes us stand alone and think about our relations to others in instrumental, individualistic terms; the reason social media is toxic isn't that it connects us with others, it's how it connects us with others. Doing "nothing" (that is, spending your time doing "meaningful," rather than "productive" things) requires that we find ways to genuinely interact with others.

This reminded me strongly of Patrick Ball's incredible essay on depression and suicide, and the reason that affluent white dudes are the most suicidal people in America today. Ball's thesis is that people who lack privilege must forge social relations with the people around them just to survive. If you have no money for a babysitter, you can substitute favors from friends.

"Favors from friends" are unreliable and nondeterministic, while spending cash with a sitter (or better, a service that has many interchangeable sitters) is extremely reliable. But if you keep substituting transactions for social networks, you'll eventually end up lonely and outside of any kind of social group that can form a resilient mesh for your inevitable problems: there's no one to put a hand on your shoulder, look you in the eyes, and say, "Are you all right? You seem to be in trouble."

Reading Ball's essay made me realize how much of a hermit I'd become, substituting work and transactions and "productivity" for friendship and connection, and how much of the anxiety and depression I was experiencing was the result of this isolation.

Social media is a great way to stay in touch with the people who matter to me, so that we can have offline, longer-form, important and meaningful interactions. But the commercial imperatives of social media work against that kind of socializing, because once you get together and start to have those contemplative and meaningful interactions, your social telephone starts ringing, because the algorithms that govern it notice that you're not paying attention to it anymore.

* That refusing to pay attention is an act with a long and honorable history

Odell traces the traditions of refusal from the ancient Greeks to avant-garde artists, and connects these to feminism and liberation struggles. This was fascinating context, and often very funny, and felt like something of a masterclass in understanding abstract art as well

* That cities have unique properties that make them hubs of resistance

The struggle against our reduction into productive workforce units, as opposed to thriving, contemplating, loving humans is the struggle against monoculture. Cities, with their diversity of people, backgrounds, incomes, social situations, and so on are the perfect place to resist monoculture. Places where strangers mix, like public transit, are hotbeds of resistance.

Odell also lauds "third places" here, the places that are outside the market, like libraries and parks, where your welcome is not dependent on your productive contributions, which ask nothing of you except that you be there.

And even as Odell is praising cities here, she's also working in a strong environmental message, connecting refusal to indigenous practices of attentive co-existence with the natural world, and connecting that to the complex idea of "bioregionalism," which involves identifying as a person whose place matters, whose views on the world and daily activities are influenced by the things that grow and thrive around you.

I've been around "bioregionalism" advocates for much of my life, and I admit I still struggle with some of the nuance of this idea, but Odell's connection feels right, and I really enjoyed the way she connected the beauty of cities -- which I love -- with an appreciation of, and connection to, the natural world.

* That technology isn't the problem, but rather, its economic and political context are what get us in trouble

This is the argument that puts Odell in the same group as some of my other favorite thinkers, like Leigh Phillips, Paul Mason, and Peter Frase.

Like the others, Odell doesn't argue the simple position that technology is neutral, but rather takes the position that technology's current decidedly partisan configuration is the result (and not the cause) of market ideology that demands growth, consumption and "engagement" instead of joy, meaning and peace.

It's an important point: Odell isn't telling us to stop using technology, but to use different technology in different ways.

There is so much to love about this book: Odell's discursive, interdisciplinary critique approaches an important and difficult question from many different angles, making it a chewy, provocative pleasure of a book.

But all that said, I'm looking forward to her next book. I know from my own work that what feels like irreducible complexity is often a lack of clarity. That is, just because you think you've made something as clear and simple as it can be, it doesn't mean you're right, it might just mean that you don't understand your own material well enough, and have not spent enough time trying to explain it to other people in order to learn what parts of it are important and which parts can be left to one side.

As much as I love this book, I also think that there is room to make it crisper, and some of that room will come from Odell gaining clarity as she tours with and discusses these ideas, and some of it will come from the rest of the world catching up with her -- when we started talking about online privacy, there was a lot of getting-up-to-speed that had to happen before the discussion could start. Today, the baseline of familiarity that others have with the ideas is much farther along, and so the discourse is more substantial and less about getting on the same page (this is also true of other complicated debates, including the contemporary critique of capitalism and concerns over climate change).

That's not to say that Odell has fallen into the trap of the masochistic longread ("because paying close attention to complicated ideas is a virtue, I will simply write this idea out in sprawling and undisciplined form, because the longer it is, the more virtue it has"). This book never bores. However, it does leave the reader with more feelings (which are good and important!) than clear articulation (also good and important!), and I think that Odell's continuing trailblazing will find a place where these two virtues are more in balance.

How to Do Nothing: Jenny Odell's case for resisting "The Attention Economy". By Cory Doctorow. Boing Boing ,  April 9 , 2019.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the artist, writer and Stanford professor Jenny Odell questions “what we currently perceive as productive”. She wants to give readers permission to be a human, in a body, in a place.

Redirecting our attention towards our natural surroundings is Odell’s strategy for resisting a profit-driven tech landscape that, in separating our bodies and co-opting our attention, is possibly torching our ability to live meaningful lives, and preventing us from noticing. (Odell herself uses birdwatching as an antidote.)

Odell acknowledges that participating in this system is, for most people, not optional, and the book is dotted with examples of standing against the tide while remaining more-or-less in it – artists, labor movements, Oakland’s last old-growth redwood tree. The stakes, she argues, are high: “In a time that demands action, distraction appears to be a life-and-death matter.”

Your book encourages a broad shift in perspective. Where is our perspective stuck right now? What is the attention economy?

It’s this perspective in which time is money, and you should have something to show for your time – either getting work done, or self-improvement, which I would still count as work. Anything that detracts from that is too expensive, from the time-is-money perspective. And it ties into this idea that everything is a machine, and it just needs to be fixed, or made more efficient. It’s also a very present perspective – the bad kind of presence, being very wrapped up in whatever is happening right now, or what everyone is talking about on Twitter.

What does birdwatching do for you?

Years ago at Stanford, I would notice that if I was walking to class, no matter how stressed I was, birds were the one thing that could cut through that no matter what. Which is pretty amazing. A really nice flower, maybe. But birds – there’s something about them that’s always surprising. They’re so unpredictable, and there’s something about that that gets around anything that I might be thinking about.

And this feeds into something you write in the book – that part of being human is being surprised by everything around you, and shifting accordingly.

Yeah. Surprise is a way of being reminded that there’s something outside of you.

You write about how social media erodes our “right to not express oneself”. How do we demand that right?

That might be an interesting thing to try to do, but it shouldn’t be our responsibility – we didn’t create this problem. It’s not a solution, but that professional need to express oneself all the time, to have a take about everything, it’s not going to go away as long as a certain economic reality exists and the platform is designed a certain way. I don’t blame anyone for doing that, because you kind of have to. The change would have to come from the platform.

What is the benefit of not saying things all the time?

I think interiority is really underrated right now. That could just be my own bias. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to get away from other people. [Laughs] I think that there is a lot to be said for being alone with your thoughts for an extended period of time. Yesterday I spent all day by myself walking around thinking about stuff, and then I had drinks with a friend and we talked about the stuff that I was thinking about. But I didn’t tweet about it. I just don’t think that a bunch of strangers belong in that thought process, and I don’t want to apply the metrics of success to a budding idea.

How do you re-engage with the physical or natural world if your job or life circumstances require otherwise?

It’s a really big issue, and it makes the politics of land use and urban planning even more important than they already are. I think that’s what’s helpful about some of the art pieces that I mention. Anything that can help you practice shifting your attention.

For me, being outside makes that very easy, but in situations where I didn’t have that access, it ended up meaning just trying to shift my perspective a little bit to where things around me start to appear as odd as they really are. Because everything’s weird, I really believe that. Accessing that can be hard, but I think you can make a small decision to just notice things that you haven’t noticed before. You can always do that, no matter where you are, even if they’re not pretty.

You have a good line in the book about natural disasters – that the planet is making a more credible demand on our attention. That’s always been an issue with climate change; it’s the most dramatic thing, but people don’t want to look at it.

When you start paying attention to a population of a certain type of bird in your neighborhood, you will notice when it’s gone one year. And there’s a difference between that and reading about climate change. They’re both important, but I think if you begin to recognize things that live around you as agents in their own right – for me, they almost seem like people – then the effects on them will be felt in a different way, and it does feel real.

It’s painful, but one can imagine that if more people identified with non-human communities around them in that way, then climate change might be felt and talked about in a different way.

What can activists and organizers learn from this book?

Obviously “doing nothing” is not activism, but I hope the book helps clear the ground for activism. I looked at the formal quality of how people have organized [in the past] – these closed spaces where people come together and encounter one another in a fuller sense than one does online, and then strategizing in slightly larger meetings, and larger meetings. It wasn’t until I came across that pattern, as I was researching these movements, that I realized how much was at stake with the attention economy.

In a way it’s destroying the frameworks that we have traditionally used for organizing, and it’s destroying the contexts that allowed people to encounter ideas in a way that’s productive. In the Veronica Barassi essay that I cite, the activists she interviewed complained about the effects of social media on time. Like, not having the time to have conversations about ideas, and that anything you say online is immediately buried.

Activism takes time, and that time is getting taken away from us.

How to do nothing: the new guide to refocusing on the real world.  By Ellie Shechet.  The Guardian, April 2, 2019. 

What can you do? To hear most people tell it, you can either succumb to using Facebook and Instagram for hours a day, every single day, or you can delete the apps and throw your phone into the ocean.

Artist and writer Jenny Odell proposes a third choice: to “participate, but not as asked.” Her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is out April 9 through Melville House; it’s adapted from a talk she gave in 2017 at the Minneapolis art and technology conference Eyeo. It’s not exactly a guide to doing nothing; more like a suggestion that you could refuse to do some of the things that fracture your attention — reading every push notification that crosses your phone screen, watching 500 Instagram stories between every basic task — and protect your mind from becoming slippery and splintered.

Odell’s proposed course of action doesn’t have much use for the now-trendy “Time Well Spent” movement (which relies on more tech to solve the problem of too much tech) or apps that inform you when you’ve wasted too much of your day on social media, or any solution proposed by the same Silicon Valley wunderkinds who profited from getting us into this mess. The goal of those projects, she argues, is to guide you into repurposing your time in a way that’s productive. They’re purportedly about wellness, but they’re tinged with the stink of capitalist always-on hustle culture. She doesn’t even want to get rid of social media, just redo it. Just get us all some peace.

“The villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media,” she writes. “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.” The business model of platforms like this — which rely on advertising and clicks and “engagement” as defined by simple data points, not by genuine feeling or the messy work of thought — has created what she calls an “arms race of urgency,” which “abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.” What if social media were a public utility — one you used for your own purposes and left alone otherwise? What if there were no profit incentive to trap you in a loop of seductive, brightly colored apps?

It’s, oddly, an extremely romantic book, regardless of the number of times the author is obligated to mention Mark Zuckerberg. The “terrifying realization” that all of our fates are linked together is described as “a bit like falling in love.” And How to Do Nothing is concerned not just with the effect that Facebook notifications and “inbox zero” culture have on individuals — “It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought is an impoverished one,” Odell explains — but the consequences it has for our politics, environment, and collective well-being.

All public parks, she argues, were an act of resistance taken on by coordinated groups of individuals — and building them required attention. All social progress required attention. All survival in crisis. All revising of unjust systems, such as the American legal code, and all purposeful redirects of sinking ships, such as the Earth.

“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,” she argues as the crux of the book.

How to Do Nothing contains some mourning over the crimes of giant tech companies that you’ve likely heard before, and ends up on long tangents about 1960s counterculture communes, as well as bird-watching. Odell spends much of her time lying on the ground, or examining the Bay Area’s uncomfortable hodgepodge of protected wilderness and ruthless development. There are patches that get boring, which is maybe, at least a little bit, part of the point. She politely refuses to make every page productive.

Recently, I spoke to her about Facebook, and what any one of us can reasonably be expected to do about it, as well as the common feeling of getting less smart and less capable of coherent thought every single day. Luckily, she had some useful advice (and a bird-watching story).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To start, I think it would be useful to have you explain what the attention economy is, as simply or as broadly as you can.

For my purposes, the attention economy is as simple as the buying and selling of attention. There’s the micro, literal version of that, which is “engagement,” a measure of how much time someone spends in an app and how much they engage with it. But I think a broader definition of the attention economy is kind of like — as I personally experience it — I exist in space with a heightened anxiety and sensitivity all the time, even when I’m not literally engaging with any of these apps. And that then contributes to the way I am using them and how often I’m using them. 

Why is it profitable for Facebook — or any other social media platform — for our attention to be broken into little tiny pieces and for us to feel so fractured?

I think about this a lot when I find myself going through and checking everything, and just going through a loop of all the things. If you’re measuring how much and how often someone uses something, it’s better if they’re on a short attention loop where they’re constantly checking back in. Where they’re invested in this idea that something might have just happened five minutes ago, so they need to check it again. I think that’s a phenomenon that has led to attention fragmentation, because to have a train of thought, it has to be continuous and relatively uninterrupted. But it’s constantly being interrupted by this idea that there might be something new you need to know.

One thing you said in the book that really stood out to me was, “Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies.” You’re kind of arguing that to social platforms, it’s beneficial for people to be anxious and upset, right?

Yeah, so the commodity of social media is expression, and content from other people that you know. Things like really long screeds about something you feel really passionate about [are] obviously going to get other people’s attention. And I’m not at all saying that’s why people write them. Their emotions are very genuine. And they want to express them; they want to feel heard and have conversations with other people. But I’ve been reflecting on the fact that my posts on Facebook that fell into that category were getting way, way more engagement than anything else I posted.

I saw it as part of this upswell of really similar posts from other people, getting louder and louder, and longer, and more emotional, and you feel some sort of catharsis by making a post or by liking someone else’s post. But two things: It maintains that emotional state, and I think it sort of siphons off energy from doing something a little more targeted or intentional, or just processing that emotion or talking about it with your friends, with more context, where it’s not just material keeping everyone else on a platform.

There have been a lot of former technologists coming out and being like, oh, actually a lot of these things we’ve made are bad, red bubbles are bad, all these things were designed in a really addictive and seductive way and we should undo it, but all their solutions are like, just delete Facebook, or just use a time-well-spent app. Your book didn’t really seem to see those as the most viable solutions for resisting the attention economy, so I was hoping you could lay out a few things you think actually help.

Anything that gives you perspective is hugely helpful to have. Stepping away can be anything; it’s just whatever you can get away with and whatever works for you. For me, I had to give a lecture up at Humboldt State, so I drove up there for two days and it wasn’t really a vacation but I was just amazed at how pulling away for two days jostled my mind a little bit. And from that perspective, I was able to look back at my everyday self, and I felt like a crazy person.

Do anything that can help you stand outside of yourself. And see what you’re doing. I feel like that’s common knowledge in therapy and a lot of addiction therapy, right? Seeing what you’re doing is the first step. It’s this process that detaches you a little bit. It’s from that perspective that you’re able to remember what is actually important to you. Or realize that you don’t know what’s important to you, which is an important thing to know about, if that’s true. But otherwise, you’re stuck in this tiny loop, and getting out of it, even if it’s really brief, that’s still way better than nothing, I think. Realizing that life goes on, away from this stuff.

That’s so hard! I went to New Mexico by myself recently and I felt sick in the head because I’d be walking around in the mountains thinking, like, how much time do I have to spend not thinking about Instagram before I can put this on Instagram?

Yeah, it’s funny you mention that, because, as you know, I’m really into birds, and recently I went to this marsh that’s a really great bird-watching spot. I’m also really into the restoring of habitats and landscapes. This place used to be a traditional water treatment plant, but now they’ve turned it into this marsh that filters wastewater using the structure of the land. Birds love it there. And I was walking around — sometimes it takes a while, it was maybe an hour — and I was like man, I feel like I need wastewater treatment for my brain. There’s so much debris and noise and worry, and nowhere in there a real thought. Not what I would count as a critical thought or deep thought.

But at least when I was there, I could see that. I think it’s important to make it a practice. A lot of self-help books have this rhetoric of “do this one thing and your life will change forever,” you’ll never have to read this book again, and you’ll just be fine. I think this is very different; you have to know that you’re going to keep getting sucked back in and be realistic about that.

I’m interested in how the threads of the attention economy and the gig economy come together. Is that something you could unpack? What does the attention economy have to do with optimization and “the hustle” and productivity?

It’s just an extreme version of the idea that time is money. That idea has been around for a long time, but this is taking it to the absolute extreme. It’s not that some time is money, it’s that all time is money. The time you’re sleeping could be money.

And I think it partially comes from the phenomenon of context collapse, which I talked about at the end of the book. If you no longer have a work self and a friend self and a family self, it stands to reason that you don’t have work time and friend time and family time. You have time. And work is metastasized into all of it. It’s all potentially monetizable, and if it’s all potentially monetizable, then you’ve attached a value to it, and there’s a cost to keeping some of it for yourself. Even if you decide, “I’m not going to do anything today,” you feel the cost of that. You already see time as money.

There’s a piece at the end of the book where you bring up the fact that all these Silicon Valley people don’t let their kids use their products, or they put strict limits on their screen time. You express some concern about how privilege will play into who ... gets to have a whole brain, basically.

It’s something I think is already happening. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen or been to the roof of Facebook. The roof is amazingly landscaped — it has native species of plants and these meandering walking paths — and in a way, it’s exactly what I’m talking about in the book. It’s the architecture of thinking, it’s put there to encourage innovation and conversation, but just for employees. To me, that’s so emblematic, that this exists in the very center of a place that’s focused on making that sort of impossible for everyone else.

I think I’m a very privileged person. I feel highly aware of the fact that my opportunities for writing this book or even thinking about any of this at all is kind of underwritten by that. So I’m really concerned with how these things are intertwined and driving each other. When one loses attention, you sort of become less able to resist things. It goes back and forth until you have these walking technology-less gardens for some people and the opposite for everyone else.

You’re on Facebook, currently.

Yeah, I am.

Have you changed the way you use it, throughout writing the book?

I got a Chrome extension called Facebook News Feed Eradicator. I highly recommend it, not only because it eradicates your News Feed but because it replaces your feed with a quote and it’s a different quote every time. And they’re really good quotes.

Just having that is huge. One of the things I talk about in the last chapter is this idea of a social network that’s actually a utility, where you go to it to do the thing you wanted to do and then you leave. It’s just sort of there for you to use, like a landline. Certainly, it’s nowhere close to a landline, but having the News Feed Eradicator does take out that really major part of it that makes a lot of users fall down the rabbit hole. A lot of times you’re going to a site because you have some idea of something you needed to do or see, and then 20 minutes later, you have no idea why you’re there. I think that’s a pretty common experience. This, to me, prevents that. I now only go to it for information.

Do you use Instagram? For me, Instagram is a way bigger problem, because I really do like looking at my friends’ faces, but then I’m watching an ad for an underwear startup.

My Instagram is private, and there was a weird moment where I did an Instagram takeover for a photography gallery with a huge following and all these people tried to follow me on my personal account. It was a question for me, because I’m an artist, and common knowledge is that I should accept all of these followers. But then the minute I do that, I’ve accepted that it’s a branding tool for me now. Not a place where I see my friend’s faces and only that.

This whole “cult of followers” phenomenon on Instagram is very troubling to me. Waves of followers and engagement. Instagram celebrities. It’s all kind of repugnant to me, in general. But I’ve had the same thought you describe, looking through Instagram and feeling gross about it, but simultaneously really enjoying seeing all of my friends.

The common response is, “It’s terrible, I should get off it altogether,” and it doesn’t recognize that we actually really need something like social media. Especially in a time when a lot of people live far away from family, it’s actually really important, I think, to stay connected to other people.

It’s helpful. There’s a human need, and so just recognizing that in yourself as you’re using it, even if you’re watching it be appropriated by the corporate platforms, to not lose sight of that ... there’s nothing wrong with that part. That’s a really natural and human and beautiful thing, that you would want to see images of your friends. I think in a way that being able to be aware of that as a feeling will make you realize even more how wrong it is to have that be what’s driving the machine.

How to quit Facebook without quitting Facebook. By  Kaitlyn Tiffany. Vox  , April 9, 2019.