How to Do Nothing

I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that ‘doing nothing’ – in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen – entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider ‘doing nothing’ both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.

[...] 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. In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials, in which Malcolm Harris takes us through the ruthless professionalisation of childhood and education, Harris writes that ‘[i]f enough of us start living this way, then staying up late isn’t just about pursuing an advantage, it’s about not being made vulnerable.’⁵⁹ A Millenial himself, he describes the shifting of risk onto students as potential employees, who must fashion themselves to be always one readily available, and highly productive ‘entrepreneurs’ finding ‘innovative’ ways to forego sleep and other needs. Students duly and expertly carry out complicated manoeuvres in which one misstep – whether that’s getting a B or getting arrested for attending a protest – might have untenable lifelong consequences.

Even though I know I am getting an insufficient English (and written) version of them, I have long appreciated the way that indigenous stories animate the world. They are not only repositories of observations and analyses made over millennia, but also models of gratitude and stewardship. As it turns out, these stories kept their nonhuman actors alive not only in the human imagination, but literally in physical reality. Kimmerer writes about overseeing a study by her graduate student on the decline of sweetgrass, a plat traditionally harvested by Kimmerer’s ancestors and which figures in the Anishinaabe creation story. The study revealed that the sweetgrass was suffering not from over-harvesting but from under-harvesting. The species had co-evolved with specific indigenous harvesting practices, which in turn had specifically evolved to increase the success of the plant. A specific type of human attention, use, and stewardship had become environmental factors on which the plants depended on, and without these things, they’ve begun to disappear.¹⁵

The sweetgrass study suggests that the plants were dying from none other than a lack of attention. And in a world where our survival is absolutely bound up with the survival of the ecologies in which we are embedded, it becomes clear that reciprocal attention is what ensures our survival as well. While this kind of attention to the living world certainly involves reverence, it’s something very different from fawning over cuteness or beauty or appreciating nonhuman entities as intelligent or even sentient. (What’s less cute or sentient than intestinal bacteria? And yet we rely on it.) In Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, Chris J. Cuomo critiques the animal rights stance that proceeds solely from the logic that some animals are sentient and can feel pain, because it privileges sentience in an ecology that relies on both sentient and non-sentient beings. This privileging, she writes, ‘comes out of the assumption that human beings are paradigmatic ethical objects, and that other life-forms are valuable only in so far as they are seen as similar to humans.’¹⁶