Odell conceptualizes “nothingness” from different perspectives, including its antithesis to “busyness” in present times. She defines busyness as what Robert Louis Stevenson called a “symptom of deficient vitality” and “a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.” (qtd. on pdf, p. 8). To achieve this “nothingness,” Odell recommends “an act of political resistance to the attention economy” (p. 9), which could be achieved through taking a break from digital exposure and consumption, a shift from materialism to soulful self-care, and embracing the usefulness of uselessness to aid what Abraham Maslow (1943) theorized as the ultimate level of man’s needs—”self-actualization”—and not a capitalist-driven definition of productivity. One way Odell believes uselessness could be achieved is through deep listening as a rhetorical act of slow pacing, solitude, and removal from the maddening crowd (p. 30).
For me, I agree more with Odell’s conceptualization of nothingness as a hybrid reaction that involves leaving and returning (p. 75). She describes leaving as a break-taking act that enables us to contemplate, and returning as a way of participating in the world we belong to. To navigate this space, she succinctly captures it as not fleeing your “enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day” (p. 75). In other words, one could be in the world but not be of the world. One could navigate the capitalist and fast-paced world on one’s own terms by creating a space of refusal and strategic navigation. (270) [TO-13]
[Blige, 2009; Maslow, 1943; Odell, 2019]
