Review: Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Artist Jenny Odell joins a growing conversation about art and social reproduction with her widely circulated (2019) book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. This text offers an exciting popular effort to articulate the politics of non-instrumental aesthetics as a kind of critical revitalization. As she writes it, there is ‘revolutionary potential’ in ‘taking back our attention’ and ‘protect[ing] our spaces and our time for noninstrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality’ (pp. xxiii, 28). The primary wager of Odell’s book is that ‘doing nothing [is] an act of political resistance to the attention economy’ (p. xi). ‘Doing nothing’ is the name Odell gives to the practice of ‘disengaging’ from those frenetic, instrumental, or self-branding styles of attention that are encouraged by social media and our late capitalist world. Odell’s interest in the anxious and overstimulated subject that is produced by such dominant modes of attention may thus be contextualized within a larger body of critical writing on neoliberal affect and human capital subject formation. Read this way, How to Do Nothing issues a timely call for the cultivation of non-instrumental aesthetic practices that might enable us to build ourselves into different subjects (and subsequently also, create different shared lifeworlds) than those disciplined by our competitive, algorithmic work society.