Meeting tomorrow with some colleagues to talk about 'place' - part of our reading is the introduction to Jenny Odell's
How to Do Nothing:
To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one's career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn't always stop at the boundary of the individual. (xvi)
Wondering about this idea of a 'frame of reference' - because of K., I've come to spend a lot more time thinking about the social work that clothes do (but also the environmental and economic inequalities woven into them). And this makes me think - what are the objects through which people come to communicate a sense of themselves to others?
 |
| Chickens among graves, Eyüp. Likely taken sometime during the 1950s or 1960s. Taha Toros Archive, Şehir University. |
But Odell's point isn't just about communication - it's also about resistance: What are the forms of social activity [both the practices that we engage in and the products we make] that fall outside of the attention economy? I wonder about this especially - and in light of what we'll be talking about tomorrow - in relation to questions of teaching. In what ways are we simply teaching students ways to optimize themselves into these new expectations? What would it look like to teach students - and ourselves! - to learn resistance-in-place as part of the work in the classroom itself?
Comments