Laziness in American Literature: The Inaugural Moment

The chapter serves as a historical prelude to chapters on modernism and postmodernism, by providing a historical context for how the trope of laziness evolved in American literature prior to the 20th century. First, it looks at how the motif of laziness functioned in early Puritan literature, how this function was broadened in 18th-century secular and religious didactic literature, and how it eventually developed into an aesthetic device in the Early Republic, when the new trope of laziness combined high Romantic aesthetics of the pastoral with unrefined motifs of vagabondage and delinquency, and in this way addresses the culture’s desire for freedom from the norm of collective labour and from patterns of inclusion and exclusion within the consensual networks of social participation. Second, the chapter explores the difference between the familiar Romantic topos of idleness, which has no subversive potential with respect to ethical normativity and the topos of laziness, which does. Walt Whitman’s trope of loafing is reread here via the Cynical tradition of performative indomitability as parrhēsia, or speaking truth to power. Herman Melville’s experiments with haptic poetics of laziness in Typee are interpreted as a critique of Romantic moralism and the emerging ethico-aesthetic norm of productivity.

Acedia and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011) employs the trope of acedia as the mode of its literary subjectivity. The analysis in this chapter focuses on Wallace’s detailed study of psychosomatic and bodily disorders by means of which his characters (IRS officers) manifest their resistance to their Bartlebesque lives. Given the consistency with which the bodies of the novel’s characters are exposed to hypertension, both from without and from within, it is clear that the object of The Pale King’s ideological critique is not capitalism in general, but its intervention into our biological life. In this way, the haptic serves as a poetic means in Wallace’s critique of biopower, the extent of whose intrusion into the intimate sphere of his characters’ lives is laid bare in the disorderly ways their bodies’ muscular, digestive and neurological systems respond to external and internalized discipline. The result of this poetic strategy is that the novel creates a series of micro events of what Lauren Berlant calls “self-interruption” which guard the agency of the subject and the author against interpellative calls of the book industry for self-exploitation and productivity

Cessation and inaction externe: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp

The chapter focuses on modernist fascination with vitality and movement to show how this “vitalocentric” tendency is matched by a cultural countercurrent of the aesthetics of cessation. The chapter uses Raymond Williams’s concept of emergent cultural value, the chapter examines modernist art and literary manifestos and essays, their deep-seated distrust towards all signs of what Filippo Marinetti called lethargy, a distrust coupled with a special privileging of vitality-as-animation. As far as the classical interpretations of modernism go, it was this valorization of vibrant vitality over lethargic inactivity that provided necessary fuel for the modernist rebellious claims to uniqueness. The chapter challenges the vitalocentric interpretation of modernism and focuses on previously unacknowledged counter-vitalist impulses within the modernist project. Such impulses can be traced in Gertrude Stein’s philosophy of art, generally considered as one of the pillars of early 20th century vitalocentrism. While apparently consistent with vitalist sensibility, Stein’s ideas -- when read through the lens of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of inaction externe and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of impotency and inoperativity-- go beyond the modernist sensibility and capture in an embryonic form the structures of feeling traditionally associated with modernism’s successor, postmodernism.

Exhaustion of Possibilities: Harold Rosenberg, John Barth and Susan Sontag

The chapter examines dominant postmodernist structures of feeling with respect to their internal contradiction. If its declared assent to the mode of exhaustion of aesthetic possibilities, articulated in its penchant for self-referentiality, intertextuality, and metafiction, gives an impression of a full-fledged embracement of doing nothing, this insight might actually be misleading. A careful look at postmodern manifestos – by Harold Rosenberg, John Barth and Susan Sontag – suggests that the appropriation of the limit-trope of doing nothing as postmodernism’s very own is in fact artificial. Rather than realizing the counter-normative potential of the trope of doing nothing, The chapter argues that the dominant postmodern rhetoric nullifies it by rephrasing productivity in terms of hyper-productivity and hyper-engagement. In Harold Rosenberg’s theory of Action Painting and John Barth’s notion of ultra-productive weariness with tradition, for example, modes of inactivity such as passivity or disinterest are revitalized as modes of heightened cognition. Thus, rather than inaugurating a “new” representational and ethical regime, postmodern manifestos are quite reactionary in that reiterate the ideologically troublesome Romantic notion of the artist’s active role in the process of artistic production.

Laziness as Concept-Metaphor

The chapter explores what laziness has meant for philosophers, especially those few who chose to address it directly, and provides a conceptual frame for the laziness metaphor. Philosophical inquiries into unproductive idling are rare, but in each instance they center around the issues of the body and resistance. That is the case with Martin Heidegger’s notion of Lässigkeit as the basic existential sensibility, Emmanuel Levinas’s paresse as a position of refusal towards life, and Giorgio Agamben’s inoperativity. But it is also the case when Roland Barthes and Theodor Adorno define idleness in terms of insubordination to pedagogical rituals or as a position of ethical neutrality, when Sandor Ferenczi discovers the principle of neocatharsis in relaxation, or when Donald Winnicott dwells on the benefits of laziness as a psychosomatic symptom. When those ideas are juxtaposed against the political models of passive dissent (such as the parrhēsia model of Diogenes the Cynic, or the strike model proposed by Paul Lafargue), laziness emerges as a valuable signifier for the complex haptic-affective mechanism of counter-normativity. The discourse of laziness lays bare and unmasks the hidden conflation of the biological, the symbolic, and the political.

Epilogue

Writing The Labour of Laziness was my response to a cultural tendency to overvalue productivity in every area of human life at the cost of private freedom. I was troubled by the cross-dressing of this biopolitical, economy-based norm in ethical frills of self-improvement, self-management or political quasi-activism. And I saw this drag everywhere. I saw it in the Fitbit fad and Quantitative Movement’s encouragement to monitor my sleep-patterns and step ratio, so that I become the healthiest and most productive version of myself. I saw it in the organised leisure activities in the lives of my children’s friends, whose birthday parties would be orchestrated by skilled animators, and whose summer camps offered so many fun games that there would be no free time to do nothing. Finally, I saw it in my work place, academia. And I am not just talking about the injunction to publish more and more – the dreadful ‘publish or perish’ doctrine – or to translate individual, free thoughts into grant parlance. After all, it is not breaking news that the neoliberal academic system treats intellectual effort as a commodity....

Introduction: Doing Nothing in America

The introduction outlines a theoretical approach to the theme of laziness in literature and provides a historical genealogy of the term. It argues the pertinence of laziness as a concept-metaphor that maps an ethically problematic aspect of Western culture, namely its inability to think of “withdrawal from taking an action” outside of the morally stigmatizing categories of right or wrong. The interpretative claim is that laziness lends itself to such analysis due to its unique history as one of Western culture’s most notorious stigmas. In order to give readers the idea of the scope of the metaphorical potential of laziness, the second part of the introduction delivers a genealogy of the term, including an account of its role in religious and philosophical discourse from antiquity until today. This genealogical analysis suggests that laziness has always maintained a relation to the vocabularies of biopower, and thus laziness – as a theme, as a metaphor – marks the horizon of dissent to biopolitical norms, as well as the horizon of thinking about the sense of agency, self-affirmation and self-preservation. The aesthetics of laziness provides writers and philosophers with means to critique the Western norm of productivity and invent models of its evasion

Inertia and Not-Knowing in the Fiction of Donald Barthelme

The chapter looks at Barthelme’s literary work through the prism of sloth/laziness variants such as inertia, nausea, and most importantly, Anton Ehrenzweig’s rendition of inoperativity via the concept of unconscious scanning. From Barthelme’s early renditions of the figure of the artist such as the Pollockian Paul in Snow White (1967), through avatars of passive artists in his short stories, to the half-dead-half-alive carcass of D.F. in The Dead Father (1975), there emerges a radical counter-Rosenbergian philosophy of action/inaction. No author of American postmodernism has done more to counteract the Rosenbergian post-Romantic idea of heightened sensibility of passive repose than did Barthelme. The purpose of this chapter is to bring the themes of inertia and sterēsis, understood by Barthelme as Ehrenzweig’s unconscious scanning, as unique insights into creative processes, insights which exceed the classical postmodern ethical and aesthetic regime

Laziness and Tactility in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden

This chapter focuses on Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden as an example of how modernist inoperativity has been wrestled from its embryonic state and given a literary form. Hemingway’s novel captures the tension between creative potency and impotency by dramatizing it as a conflict of two characters Catherine and David Bourne, each haunted by their individual, internal conflict between creative vigor and creative resistance. Hemingway builds his haptic aesthetics around the theme of laziness to speculate about the bodily, sensuous dimension of all creative endeavours. This manipulation of the theme of laziness is a radical attempt at articulating by literary means the sensibility of exhaustion that underlies the modernist love of action. More importantly, however, it is an attempt to comment on the loss of artistic freedoms that the 20th century capitalist biopower has taken away from writers by forcing them to accept and internalize the rules and values of the book market.