Jenny Odell: Making Sense of Time
The brilliant Jenny Odell is the now two-time New York Times Bestselling author. In 2019, she came out with How to Do Nothing, a treatise on the attention economy. Her book landed right before COVID, offering wise and trenchant insight into what happened to all. This book captured my heart. And her follow-up—Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock continues the conversation, exploring the way we use our hours, whose hours count more, and what this looks like in the context of our ancient universe where time has a different measure.
MORE FROM JENNY ODELL:
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
The Bureau of Suspended Objects
Jenny Odell’s Website
Follow her On Instagram and Twitter
TRANSCRIPT
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I loved obviously How To Do Nothing along with the rest of the world, and I'm very excited for Saving Time. Congrats. I feel like it's an amazing accomplishment. They’re beautiful books and they're hard. They’re not the most accessible books. So congratulations on getting so many people to engage in this conversation.
JENNY ODELL: Yeah, thanks.
ELISE: Let's start where you began with Saving Time with this distinction between Kronos and Cairos and this juxtaposition, or paradox, I guess, that you're holding throughout the book of the tiny blimp that we are in this spectrum of this planet and the existence. All of these things with very consciousnesses, and we can talk about the consciousness of rocks at some point. I loved that part. But juxtaposed against this, like maximizing this culture that extols us to maximize every minute and manage our time. And this really odd moment that we find ourselves in where it feels like we're watching our lives and the planet expire in front of us right after an amount of time that's unimaginable to us. So should we start with that? The central thesis?
JENNY: Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, the distinction between Kronos and Cairos, as you know, basically Greek terms for different kinds of time, that's been I think useful for a lot of people before me who were thinking about history and social change and your place in history and also climate, because they, you know, they give you a way or a vocabulary for talking about how there is a sense in which time feels abstract and like stuff, right, like time is money is like the obvious example of that. But like, I have my time, you have your time, we sell our time on the market. If I give some time to you, I have less, like it's very transactional and the time is thought of is just kind of being, you know, it's just time sort of passing over everything or it's, you know, quantifiable versus the kairos kind of sense of time, which is more like, I think like "seize the time” is kind of a good way of understanding that sense. Like the idea that actually no moment is the same, that every moment is changing everything that happened before, you know, moments are not equal. They have different opportunities inherent in them. And that's like a time that we all inhabit together with things that we don't even consider living, traditionally. So, it was interesting writing this during the pandemic because I wrote the proposal before it started. And I was already interested in that sort of distinction, Kronos and Cairos, but then it became very real because I think, you know, obviously depended on your life circumstances during the pandemic, but there was a risk, I think, for a lot of people at all times started to seem the same. And so something like Kairos really, really became useful to me. I mean, more so than I expected, and I'm kind of like hoping maybe that distinction is even sort of easier to grasp onto for a reader, you know, post the beginning of the pandemic.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and, and this idea that time is not fundamental, I think, is not a fundamental law in some ways, as laid throughout the book that it's immutable. It's stretchy, I think you used that word. It moves at different paces. I mean, we're all familiar with this as much as we're convinced that the clock just ticks forward. There are those days that last forever, and then the moments that fly by, like we're aware of it, right? As much as we're always constantly trying to hammer it down and calendarize our days and make lists of our productivity. And yes, I agree, the pandemic was such a strange screeching of the clock, but also at the same time felt like it moved fast and slow.
And, it’s a subtle backdrop too, but you opened the book talking about, Robin Wall Kimmer. I also had like a Robin Wall Kimmer moment during Covid, where I was like reading Moss and Braiding Sweet Grass. It's interesting that, I feel like moss, and you come back to it at various points throughout the book, is also a really beautiful metaphor for what you're trying to pin down.
JENNY: Yeah, I mean, I like moss because it depends on the time of year and it depends on where you are. It's not that hard to find, right? Like you can find it between cracks and the sidewalk. There's something kind of pedestrian about it and yet, as you know, if you read Robin Wall Kim's book on Moss, there's something like, you know, when she talks about what's in there, right? Almost like talking about it as a forest with these different layers and what lives in the moss and all of that, and the fact that it's responding to water, like moment to moment. I begin the book talking about this moss that invaded my apartment. So as you can imagine, there's also a lot of moss outside, just outside my apartment. I pass it when I go out and we just had all that rain here in Northern California. So the moss is just like so happy right now. It's like going nuts, but I feel like as a way of thinking about time, it's a really beautiful illustration of just response.
There are things that are just responding to weather or they're responding to other things that are responding to other things, you know, and then these things are all sort of densely interwoven. And we're part of that, right? Even though it feels like it, like when the moss invaded my apartment, it was this kind of funny reminder that there is no inside civilized space, an outside uncivilized space to the moss. Like, it does not make that distinction. And like time out there is actually the same as timing here. It just doesn't feel that way to me. I don't mention it in the book, but someone who I cite in the book, Barbara Adams, who's a sociologist who's written a lot about time, one of her books at the beginning, she has this really beautiful description of like, I think it's that she's on a plane and she's just describing all of the different kinds of forms of time that are happening. Like, she is you know, she is closing her eyes and remembering something about her family and then like, but the plane is going right. And then there's an ETA and there's like all these different kinds of ways of thinking about time that are present in everyday moments. And I think that's actually a really beautiful exercise for anybody to do, right?
It's like if you're like waiting for the bus or something and you just think about how your experience of the present is so informed by your memory, like your familiarity with that place, maybe something that happened in that place but also the fact that you're living in the century, like what that means versus, you know, thinking about how that street must have looked a hundred years ago and like how you might be in a hurry because you are trying to get somewhere by a specific time, and impatient for the bus. Like all of these things are kind of happening in the same moment.
ELISE: Yeah, absolutely. And it is the way that the world, nature marches on and the pacing of something like moss, right? That can desiccate, dry out, seemingly be dead for what? Decades? Centuries? I can't remember. It's something staggering and then be reanimated, that grows so slowly, but yet is everywhere. And then meanwhile, we’re similarly, you know, organic creatures who wanna mechanize ourselves, right? Like, we're so obsessed with this idea of optimizing and producing and quote unquote making the most of every moment that we're missing our lives. Or at least that's how I often feel that in all the doing, we're missing the being.
And you talk a bit about, you know, this difference between vertical and horizontal time, but I think we live in a culture, right, that's very attached to the horizontal, very fixated on this linear progression of our days. And can we talk a little bit about that, I can't get the, a sense of whether you have spiritual life or not? I mean, I know you have a deeply natural life, which I would say is the same thing, but can you talk a bit about the difference between vertical and horizontal and how you imagine that?
JENNY: Yeah. So that's actually something that I am speaking of spirituality, I borrowed that from Joseph Peeper, who was a German Catholic philosopher. So he is using it in a spiritual context. I wasn't necessarily, but I do think it's a little bit implied, right? But he is using it to make a contrast between horizontal time, where would be you work and then even your leisure is refreshment for work. So like work is the center of that and so there could be leisure, like little gaps, right? But they exist in order for you to like go back to work and be like more productive. And then for him, vertical time would be something that just completely interrupts that and gestures or opens onto something that, you know, I think in my experience is like those moments where you feel that your whole self is being addressed like yourself as a child yourself and as adult, like your cumulative self is having an experience, like something really speaks to you. And I think it can be very different, right? Like, what causes that, but I always think of it as it's usually something unexpected and it's like an encounter, right?
I talk about at the end of the book about being super exhausted after pulling an all-nighter in 2013, on an art project and being like motionless on my couch, just like completely flattened by my own tiredness. And in that state, I thought that I was hallucinating a bunch of like pears growing at the top of this redwood tree. And then I realized that it was like 40 birds and they were all sitting. Clustered together and facing the sunset. So they were very yellow and it was just like this, like sight, you know? And like that was actually my gateway birding experience was like, I didn't know what I was looking at. And I was like, that is so strange and incredible. And it kind of, you know, for a moment that then collapsed back into, towards the whole time. It had nothing to do with anything else that was going on in my life that day. Like it was just, all of that went away for minute and then it came back.
So that would be like kind of this gap that has vertical time in it. I think, you know, I bring that up, the horizontal and the vertical time in a chapter on leisure, that was very difficult for me to write and think through because I think you can describe that kind of encounter, but I feel like I also have to acknowledge it can be hard to distinguish when someone is living, let's say, fully on the horizontal plane because they have to versus because they think they have to, you know? As you said, we live in the society that is very much geared towards the horizontal, like work and refreshment for work, and that affects different people to a different degree. It could be very hard to access these like little moments, right? Like I describe, you know, being in line for the grocery store during the pandemic and having this kind of like weird vertical time moment where I sort of realized that all of these people in line in front of me are like fellow travelers in this strange moment.
And, and it's this like oddly kind of spiritual moment, but it's like I'm also not worried about paying for my groceried, it has to be a part of that. Right? So it's I think it can be complicated in that way, but I guess what I find most interesting about that book, which is called Leisure: The Basis of Culture by the German Catholic philosopher, is that it's sort of describing something that is more a state of mind than anything else.
ELISE: Let's talk about leisure and social justice and the fact that time and leisure are certainly not available to everyone. They're most available, in our patriarchal culture, to wealthy white men. Right? And I thought that was really interesting because I think we're starting to have a lot of these conversations, right, of time management and optimization and all of these ways that were extolled installed to maximize. And for a lot of, certainly women alone, just women, it's like in some ways such a middle finger women certainly are understand this intimately, that if you work and you have children, you typically have two jobs, if not three jobs, whereas men have one. You know, even dads, maybe one and a half if you have a really engaged partner. And so I certainly chafe, you know, in a way that I think I was oblivious to all of this programming, even though it was running in my mind. But it wasn't until recent years that I started to really have like a visceral reaction to being told how to optimize and I have help, right? Like I also have a lot of privilege in my life. So I have childcare, I have resources, I have help. And I loved this moment, you’re talking to May, the administrator of the working mom's Facebook group, and can you talk about how she talks about car crash dummies designed for men and this beautiful metaphor, chilling metaphor that you use throughout the book.
JENNY: Oh yeah. So that was an amazing conversation that I had with her. Very wide ranging and yeah, one of the things that we talked about, which came up because she said, she's like, you know, in the Facebook group, basically she was saying that she had seen women basically taking on these values that we would think of as masculine, like being really aggressive and, and like playing down emotion or intuition, like things like this, being really sharky, and getting ahead in their careers.
And she said, you know, I've seen some other women criticize those women for acting that way, but at the same time I understand there's a system and it works a certain way and they're just trying to get ahead. And then in that context she brought up it's like how car crash dummies are generally male. I think the female version is like a smaller male, you know, it's that basically cars are designed for men. It's, you know, safety, the safety of cars is designed for men. And then I said something about what she had been saying about acting certain ways, becoming more man shaped in order to not die in the car and I just think that was a helpful image that she gave me because it addresses that complicated reality of wanting to hold out hope for a completely different value system while having to live your daily life in the one that exists. That's hard.
ELISE: Yeah. You write: “Becoming more man shaped in order not to die in the car was my unwitting description of a lean in type of feminism and of time management aimed specifically at women.” I think that's so well put, right? Like watching so many women necessarily have to contort themselves. You know, I think we have this idea that all of our problems and social ills will be solved when women have sanitized patriarchy and corporate culture with their femininity, in a way, and I think what we're seeing is actually like, you kind of have to be more masculine and sometimes toxically masculine in order to not die in the car. And so we're just seeing the same values expressed regardless of gender. And I think we need a more nuanced approach. We need men to be in their feminine and we just need more things that we would qualify as feminine, not necessarily female. As you also write, and this is where this is such a tough quandary. You write: “It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question who will do the low wage work is that it doesn't matter as long as it's not you. That answer doesn't feel so good.” And then you talk about Angela Davis, and I think that that book, for people who haven't read Women, Race, and Class, she says: “Childcare should be socialized, meal preparations should be socialized, housework should be industrialized, and all these services should be readily accessible to working class people.” I think it's such an essential point because we're not supposed to do this alone. Right. And the onus of all of these things typically falls on women. And then you have this splitting, this class splitting amongst women where everyone feels terrible. I think you know Angela Davis is right. It's like these services, these essential services of care need to be available to everyone. And otherwise you have women tearing themselves apart while men keep driving our economy in the direction it's going.
JENNY: Yeah, it was actually a book that just came out, I think somewhat recently, called Permission to Speak. I don't know if you've come across it, but it's about what you're talking about, but applied to public speaking. And it’s pointing out that the way that we think authority sounds, is very culturally specific, right? It's like an older white man speaking slow dispassionately and slowly, and so that book is doing something really interesting, like addressing a reader who is not that, who like, doesn't really like fit into that and instead of trying to get you to fit into that, it's just talking about, about that, about the fact that you don't fit into it. Like, isn't that interesting? What is the history of this? And could power sound different? So I'm in the middle of reading that and I really love things that do that, that take something that you maybe experience as like an individual pathology or a shortcoming, and sort of don't have a broader context for it.
ELISE: I need to read it. I mean, my book that's coming is about women in the patriarchy and the seven deadly sins. And, the sins, regardless of whether you're raised in any faith or belong to any denomination being this essentially painful web of programming that we've all imbibed without conscious awareness. And so sloth, for example, is so much of what you're writing about is contained in that chapter, which is about specifically how women are not allowed to rest, right? Like there's this idea of busyness or this idea of endless productivity or you're never doing enough for everyone in your life. Someone's getting the short shrift particularly for parents, and then permission to speak. And this idea of power, which is I think what men are trained for, whereas women are more trained for goodness. Women, you know, this shows up in the anger chapter, it shows up in the pride chapter, this idea of like, who's allowed to have passion, who's allowed to be seen, I think is so insidiously baked into our culture. And yes, the dispassionate older man is typically who we wanna listen to. Like that's who we venerate culturally. Right? Whereas, what did Don Lemon say, that Nikki Haley was past her prime? Did you see this on CNN? It was like a big recent kerfuffle where he said, you know, don't blame me, but Nikki Haley is past her prime. And Poppy was like, what? What are you talking about? You mean because she just like passed her child rearing age. Anyway, it was a really interesting like, who gets to have power, right? Like Biden is ancient and Nikki Haley is past her prime. I'm not, I'm not like standing for Nikki Haley either.
JENNY:Yeah, no, right. It's very telling. And I think that's, you know, something that was very clarifying for me when I was researching that chapter in which I talked to May from the working Moms group was, you know, a lot of work that's been done again in sociology around just the actual experience of time as an expression of power, like where you sit in relationship to relationships with other relationships with power. So I just think it's one of those things that once you read about it and kind of think about it for a minute, it's very intuitive and it's like, we've been living it our whole lives. But it requires you to let go of this idea. That, you know, everyone has 24 hours in a day. The best person uses their 24 hours in the best way and that those hours are decontextualized, like those hours are not taking place in a particular location or with any kind of interaction with other people who are doing things for you or, you know, it's still a very pervasive concept of the 24 fungible hours. But when you let go of that, then you can kind of see that there are many shades of power in many different situations within the workplace and outside of the workplace. And then within what is even considered work in the first place. And I think like it, you know, you start to see things like you just who is expected to rush or slow down for whom?
ELISE: Yes. And you know, the other part besides the grind of busyness, that is often a class problem, right? And a gender problem, is that, going back to this idea of vertical time or what I would call these downloads or these moments of like awe, wonder or beauty that people are tapping into and bringing into the world or witnessing or experiencing. But so many of our greatest inventions, I mean, you can think about Einstein, right? You can think about so many white men typically, and the huge insights that they had in moments of leisure, right? Moments of downtime. It’s not that they're necessarily like toiling at a workbench and they have a big insight or a big breakthrough. I mean, I'm sure that happens as well, but the story, the grand story that we're told is that they're on a walk or they see a bird and they get an insight about gravity or whatever it is. And so who even has access right to those moments of vertical time? Typically people who can afford it.
JENNY: Yeah. I like try to keep in my mind this like utopian ideal of an egalitarian situation in which there is just like a constant give and take in terms of time, where, you know, because it is something that Ashley Angela Garbes talks about in her book, Essential Labor, like there is joy and creativity in something like caretaking when it is like freely given and supported, right? Like if you have a situation in which like you can, you can give when you have something to give and then you can take when you need, right? Like that kind of relationship to time to me is like this beautiful ideal that I hold. And even May, who I talked to, you know, for that chapter, she had had the insight that it would make a lot more sense for her to get six other mothers and you know, each one of them would make dinner for the others each night of the week. That makes more sense to her than individualistic time management that she equates with like the advice to not just don't buy that latte.
ELISE: Yes, exactly.
JENNY: Yeah.
ELISE: The world's most annoying financial advice. Can you tell us a bit about the live flat movement and its implications?
JENNY: Yeah. I mean that's something that, you know, it's been around for a while. I don't remember the exact year that that happened, but that involved someone in China who had been, you know, working very hard, was burned out and then basically, you know, saved up a little bit of money and then I think was just on a bike, right?
ELISE: He was biking or hiking.
JENNY: But yeah, he was just kind of taking on odd jobs here and there, and he wrote this kind of manifesto type document that is amazing. And it's just like, I have been chilling. Like, I cannot be bothered to work. And it's just reminded me a lot of Dogineese who I talked about and How To Do Nothing. The Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel and was just like very similar in spirit, just completely flaunting the values of a work-oriented society. And I think one of the reasons those things are always funny, like the lying flat thing kind of became like a meme in part because it was compelling, but it's also kind of funny because in the same way that like any joke where you just say something that is so completely at odds with like what you were supposed to say, that just like gets a laugh out of people and so I think the sort of reaction to, or the gravitation towards this image of this person, his manifesto just speaks to how entrenched these values are, like in the society that in this case, like the Chinese society that people are living in. And then that hopped over here, the lie flat like movement or like idea, obviously it translates differently here, but it found fertile ground. This idea of just like I just don't care anymore. I cannot care anymore about this, like in this way, you know?
ELISE: Yeah. And the disenchantment, I mean, you write about how you know, I think these are all primarily gen Y people, are liike why work hard? I don't own my work. And these are all like incredibly sound questions, right? Questioning our market, looking at what's happening to the environment, not wanting to participate in that drive towards potential extinction. And I loved throughout the book how you juxtapose quote unquote great advice with like this other reality, this other backdrop, you write like Vander Cam, you're writing about Shrager: “Shrager offers great career advice pointing out that most pay increases happen before the age of 45. Given that all the important stuff, skill development, and networking happens in your twenties and thirties, this is a ‘terrible time to have a midlife crisis.’” I loved that the fact that like you're putting these two countervailing theories together.
JENNY: Yeah. That's another sort of tricky thing too, right? It's like I don’t disrespect that advice and I don't disrespect the Vander Cam book, like they are addressed to a certain type of reader and they, and they do what they say they're gonna do. And that's fine. It's like, it's just from this other perspective that there's someone that I quote saying that like, clocks, clocks and calendars reproduce the system of time that they, that they sort of speak. Right? They keep it going or they entrench it. And so again, I just wanna say that like, I respect the difficulty of this, but it's hard to know when something is helping someone in the moment versus making that value system even harder to think, you know, around or find an alternative too. It's like the more you get used to something and the more that becomes like the dominant way that we do things, like, you know, the harder it is to imagine an alternative to that.
ELISE: Yeah. I grew up in Montana and I was home skiing. And we had this kid with us who was skiing with my kids who we've hired a couple of years in a row and 25 year old, master's in science. Snow scientist, wants to potentially get a job at the Forest Service projecting avalanches and doing that sort of mitigation. And, you know, he's 25 and every year I'm like, are you gonna, how are you feeling? Like, do you wanna get a job? Essentially his point was I would rather be poor and live so radically within my means than give up my freedom and or participate, like start chain myself to something from which I can't escape, right? Because that's what happens to us is we invariably get older and have more responsibilities. And it was an interesting to feel it in myself both as like a mom being like, oh, but how is this gonna work out for you?
JENNY: Exactly. That's what I mean. Right. And that’s coming from a really good place, right? You want, it's like you want someone to be comfortable and successful.
ELISE: Yes. And I completely appreciate his point of view and like this bid to not participate.
JENNY: Yeah. Yeah. Like you're describing your reaction to someone else, but I think we like kind of have that within ourselves too, right? There's like that ongoing calculation. I guess for me, like the real tragedy is this idea of a life where you're getting like further and further away from something meaningful or what you want and then just like watching the time, like having to sell your time in which you do something meaningless. That's like deeply horrifying to me. I mean, I know that is describing a lot of jobs and work, but I think a lot of this book is me kind of poking someone and being like, hey, don't you hate that? Like we shouldn't be okay with this. You know, because I think to some degree if you're in a situation like that, there are coping strategies, or you know, you're just kind of like, well, I can't really think about that because I just need to get through another day.
ELISE: Totally. And at the end of the day, it's like we all need to survive, right? Like you need to sell books, all need to sell books like we're all participating in this economy. We're in it as much as we don't want to be in it. And it's such a bind in the same way that it's like, I wanna pay well for support so that I can work. And yes, I also feel guilty that I can afford to pay for support so I can work and it's these major conundrums and binds that I think that we find ourselves in and I loved when you wrote about the slow movement and this slow watch and you write that “the watch is an object lesson in how products and services become, ‘paradoxically, integral parts of fast capitalism.’ In this world, slowness is not so much enacted as consumed, ‘slow living is now for sale and approaches a consumerist lifestyle, mostly for middle class metropolitan dwellers.’” But this idea that like we can take anything, right? Even this idea of like dropping out or slowing down or not participating in this sort of fervor state and sell it. It's like we're so bound by capitalism and, you know, it's like, look at the litany of apps teaching people how to breathe, right?Like all these things that presumably are available to us and are free. It's like our instinct to turn them into something that's part of the market.
JENNY: Yeah. I think in that same chapter I say that in seeking new ways of being, I just find new ways of spending. I always think about the end of the Truman show, you know, when he hits the wall, like he thinks it's this endless horizon and then boat like hits this artificial wall, right? Like this desperate desire to imagine something outside of the world that you're in and then you just find out that it's just more of the same, you know? And I have a morbid fascination with how fast that happens now, right? I don't know. I find it so gross, we all want meaningful connection. That is like a very basic human thing, right? And a lot of us aren't getting it, or we're not getting enough. And so as soon as like anything crops up that people find meaningful, you just wait five seconds, somehow that thing is gonna get turned into a product, you know? That's especially a problem if part of the reason it was meaningful was that it wasn't transactional. Like it was trying to model some other way of being or doing.
ELISE: Yeah, it's such a rub, and yet at the same time, what's the alternative? Like I recognize there are alternatives and I'm with you. There are things that should be absolutely free and not productized being turned into that and sold to us. But it's hard to imagine it. I mean, it gets to what we were just talking about. It's hard to imagine how we could collectively do something different and it requires a lot of imagination, I guess. I don't know how what it would look like if it weren't this.
JENNY: Yeah, I mean, someone that's been really inspiring to me on this front is Mia Birdsong because she writes a lot about culture shift. I quote her saying that we need a new model of an American dream, basically like a new working model. And it needs to be something demonstrable, like something that people can see and it needs to be thought through enough that someone can kind of like look at as a guiding light. I think part of a culture shift is how people talk about things with each other. I mean, that's why I put so much emphasis in my book on speaking different languages of time or trying with other people. Not just in your own head or as you're reading the book, but like in your conversations with others about time. I think that is a very creative practice cause you're coming up with and building like a new small community, or even just you and a friend, right? Like you're trying to build the lattice for this other way of thinking in this case about time.
JENNY: I think like one of the advantages of doing that is that because. because it's requiring you, it's requiring so much imagination of you, um, to think of something that, you know, doesn't current currently exist. Thinking about like, you know, even again, to go back to May, like just having that idea, right? What if I get six other moms together and like already starting to like, think about that. That wasn’t a menu option that was offered to her, that was her thinking like, well if I wanna have more time, how is that actually gonna happen, like logistically here? Like I'm not in a position of power. So like I need to somehow find the others basically. And we need to work on this together. I think that there's something really nefarious about, there are a lot of things that are nefarious about everything being offered as a product, but one of them is that I think you could just get used to like selecting from the given options, right? Like that's what shopping is, like I sort of have an idea of what I want and then I will just go see what's out there and then I will select something, you know? And then if you apply that to sort of all of life, it becomes really hard to imagine something that is not being offered.
ELISE: Yeah. I know you talked about Angela and essential labor and, and you certainly talk about this and the joy of being with children or the possibility of joy in childcare. And you certainly talk about it in your reverence for nature and bird watching, my brother and my parents are hardcore bird watchers, so it makes me laugh. I’ve resisted only to just be different, but my parents and brother are intense about their birding. But this idea of, and you tease this out at various points in the book, but like letting those vertical moments, finding ways to co-create that joy or like letting it happen, which in instances that aren't joyful, but that feels like a different paradigm shift. And part of the book seems to be pushing people to remember the greater context of our lives, which is that we are tiny blips amongst a much more complex ecosystem as much as we put ourselves at the center of it.
Can talk a little bit about the consciousness of rocks, because that seemed to me like a turning point of. Giving consciousness to all of different depths, to all of these things around us in some ways backdrops, or gives us a new understanding of time. Can you talk a little bit about why you're so fixated on the consciousness of rocks? I think they're conscious too.
JENNY: Oh, well that's a surprise. Yeah, for any skeptics out there, I relied a lot on a paper by the indigenous scholar, George Tinker, who I think the title of the paper is like, The Stones Shall Cry Out, and it's his argument for why rocks have consciousness and why it represents intellectual hubris to assume that rocks don’t have consciousness. I'm imagining a lot of people that have a lot of resistance to this idea. And I think maybe an easier way in is to just think about what you afford experience to. So for something to exist in time, the way that we imagine ourselves inhabiting historical time, right? Like as western humans, like having been actors on the historical stage of like civilizational progress, let's say. There's typically something that's like left out of that, right? And so the things that we don't see as inhabiting that time with us are considered, even if we would call them alive, it's like an automaton, right? That's how a lot of people see animals, right? It's like, well, that animal is just behaving deterministically, and it's just kind of living out its cyclical life. And that doesn't have really anything to do with my time. My time is different than that time. And so you would someone seeing it that way wouldn't necessarily say that, like maybe that animal has experience because with experience comes this idea of being responsive to things that are happening in the moment and being a co-creator of that or being an agent in that situation or environment.
I think like what I really took from the George Tinker paper and other indigenous scholars as well is like this view of a world with like everything in the world has experience. Like everything in the world is experiencing the rest of the world all the time. I also quote in that same chapter the author of Time Fullness, who is a geologist, and she talks about, you know, that term time, meaning that as a geologist, she looks around at the materialization of time, like these rocks that have gone through all these changes and have, you know, arguably experienced changes, and are still undergoing changes, that is actually what you're looking at. There is like nothing really inert about that. And so admitting it into time, like the same kind of time that you feel that you inhabit. And pointing to the importance of that, like Bill McKibben has also talked about how it's very dangerous to think about those two types of time as being separate in terms of the climate crisis. Because if we don't see them as being one, then, you know, you have human cultural time that appears to be going forward, and then you have ecological cyclical time, and there, and one is not able to respond to the other.
ELISE: And I think for some people too who, who've struggle with this, there's like depth of consciousness, right? A rock doesn't have as much consciousness, presumably as like a banana that doesn't have as much consciousness as a bird, but that there's an energetic matter to everything that surrounds us. To deny that is, I think, strange actually to assume that there's, well, I don't know. I think it's the problem with so much of our thinking, which is everything is matter to be controlled by us, right? Like it's our dominion and it's gotten us into a lot of trouble.
JENNY: Yeah. Right. When I was writing that chapter as well as the subsequent one about climate and where I'm like really going hard on the idea of the non-human experiencing subject, I remember thinking this could sound really abstract, but on the other hand I consider it practical, which sounds strange to say, but it’s like I feel like that is very necessary for addressing the climate crisis is like some very different way of thinking about interrelatedness. Again, this is not new. People have been making this point for a long time, but I think it really matters whether you see other parts of the world as having experience and inhabiting time with you, it has huge ramifications, you know? And I also think it's just really fascinating. I sometimes like to think about these thresholds, you know, where the roots of a tree are in the rock, right? And thinking about like the minerals that are entering, you know, and how that there's that kind of like interface and it's like from one point of view you say the rock's not alive and the tree is alive. But from this other point of view, which I describe in that chapter, from multiple angles and thinkers, if aliveness is simply responsiveness and the ability to affect other things in the world, then yes, everything is alive in a sense.
ELISE: Yes. No, absolutely. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and yet I know it breaks our brains.
JENNY: Yeah. Well, it's just like, again, that's why I really think language is an important kind of metaphor that runs throughout my book because it's something that we all, you know, we're familiar with. And you know that if you live somewhere where everyone speaks a certain language and you don't, you'll experience challenge, so it's like you better find someone else who speaks that language so you can at least keep it alive with them. And I feel like that's what we're dealing with here is like, I wanna acknowledge the challenge of the lingua franca that we all live within while trying to imagine something else or trying to speak something else.
ELISE: Beautiful. Well, thanks Jenny.
Jenny Odell has a beautiful brain, and it’s complex, you could spend a lot of time on every page that she’s written processing it. I am going to leave you with one moment I thought was really beautiful, and you’ll understand why because I love words. She writes: Observing that the Greek word apokalypsis meant “through the concealed,” Washuta writes that “apocalypse has very little to do with the end of the world and everything to do with vision that sees the hidden, that dismantles the screen.” Likewise, French feminist poet and philosopher Helene Cixous wrote that “we need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.” The current meaning of apocalypse is modern; in Middle English it simply meant “vision,” “insight,”or even “hallucination.” The world is ending—but which world? Consider that many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born. Consider that there is nothing a priori about any of them. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that you were not born at the end of time, but actually at the exact right time, that you might grow up to be, as the poet Chen Chen writes, “a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms.” Hallucinate a scenario, hallucinate yourself in it. Then tell me what you see. Thanks for joining us. I’ll see you next week.
