Jenny Odell

WHEN I WAS working at my corporate marketing job in San Francisco, I used to take long lunch breaks as a small, selfish act of resistance.

But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important.

The kid in front looked up from his clipboard, scrutinizing me. “So would you say…care?” he asked.

I suggested “communication,” but days later, his clarification stayed with me. After all, communication requires us to care enough to make the effort. I thought about how it’s possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there

I suggest that we withdraw our attention and use it instead to restore the biological and cultural ecosystems where we forge meaningful identities, both individual and collective.

It would not have been the same if I had gone to Calabazas Creek alone. The moment that Josh and I combined the fragments in our memories into the same body of water, the creek came not just to individual attention but to collective attention. It became part of a shared reality, a reference point outside of each of us.

“Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

“To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”

As it turns out, my dad went through his own period of removal when he was my age and working as a technician in the Bay Area. He’d gotten fed up with his job and figured he had enough saved up to quit and live extremely cheaply for a while. That ended up being two years. When I asked him how he spent those years, he said he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math and electronics, went fishing, had long chats with his friend and roommate, and sat in the hills, where he taught himself the flute. After a while, he says, he realized that a lot of his anger about his job and outside circumstances had more to do with him than he realized. As he put it, “It’s just you with yourself and your own crap, so you have to deal with it.” But that time also taught my dad about creativity, and the state of openness, and maybe even the boredom or nothingness, that it requires.

True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for—and thus the spatial underpinnings of—“what we will.” A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.