The Secret World of Doing Nothing

By Orvar Löfgren and Billy Ehn

In this insightful and pathbreaking reflection on "doing nothing," Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren take us on a fascinating tour of what is happening when, to all appearances, absolutely nothing is happening. Sifting through a wide range of examples drawn from literature, published ethnographies, and firsthand research, they probe the unobserved moments in our daily lives—waiting for a bus, daydreaming by the window, performing a routine task—and illuminate these "empty" times as full of significance. Creative, insightful, and profound, The Secret World of Doing Nothing leads us to rethink the ordinary and find meaning in today’s hypermodern reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780520945708

Orvar Löfgren

Orvar Löfgren, Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Lund, Sweden, has written a dozen books. His best-known work is also in English: Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life (with Jonas Frykman, 1987).

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Introduction

It is 4:45 P.M. on an ordinary Thursday afternoon at the supermarket. In the long checkout lines people are standing patiently, staring into the air or making small talk. Some of them seem to be daydreaming, while others look around curiously. An everyday scene, trivial and unexciting. It isn’t easy to know whether people are present or not. In their minds they may have traveled to a totally different place. They have shopped at this supermarket so many times that they could almost do it in their sleep. They know how to navigate their shopping cart down the aisles without bumping into others, and they know exactly where to find the nonfat milk, the detergent, and the virgin olive oil. Their routines draw invisible maps and create manuals that make the everyday work.

A man arriving with a well-filled cart needs to select a lane. Which is the fastest one today? With an experienced glance he scans the people in the different queues and the contents of their carts. A senior citizen who will probably want to change one or two articles, several students in a hurry, parents with small children who are toddling up with new items they want to add to the cart. There is much to consider.

Our man chooses checkout number five and notes those who have that moment joined the queues to his left and right. The competition has started. He gets annoyed at some dawdlers he sees ahead, and he looks anxiously at the people on either side. Momentarily he moves ahead of his serenely unaware competitors, but suddenly his line slows: a woman has started arguing about payment, and he is losing ground.

His excitement grows with every inch he gains. When he is finally able to place his purchases on the belt he gives the young couple ahead of him, who are fiddling with their credit card, an angry glance. This time it looks as if he will have to resign himself to a second-place finish. He had overestimated the time it took the family in the queue to his left.

Unexpectedly he gets a second chance. The young assistant packing bags for the winning family is hampered by the help she is getting from the three-year-old boy. With a little luck our man can still be the first one out of the checkout. I won, he exults silently, and he casts the family a triumphant glance. The mother, catching his expression, looks surprised.

A scene such as this on an ordinary day at an ordinary supermarket started us wondering about what is actually happening when nothing special seems to be going on. What are the hidden significances of people’s routine lives? Our supermarket man transformed standing in line into a little adventure, if only in imagination. Is he exceptional, or is his behavior common practice?¹

When we started asking people about their experiences of mundane tasks we collected a wealth of material. Many men and women told us that they fabricated all kinds of secret competitions. In an informal inquiry among five hundred male and female students, one student sent us a detailed description of just such a competition:

I am out biking in the city. I hear a car somewhere behind me and see a lamppost some fifty meters ahead and Bang! With that the competition begins. Sure, it must look pretty ridiculous when I pedal like a maniac on my one-speed bike. But when I get there first I am very happy.… After such a victory I walk on air for the rest of the day.

Among this group of students, all in their twenties and thirties, secret competition turned out to be an important pastime. Many of them were a little embarrassed to reveal their competitive mentality in activities that might be considered silly. As one of them wrote, it is rather childish always wanting to win. But when they understood that their mates were doing similar things they opened up, and quite a few of them admitted that I compete in everything I do!

In their imagination any everyday situation could become a game; any public space—street, pavement, escalator—could turn into the arena of a heated contest. Thus commonplace urban landscapes become racetracks. Every green light can serve as a starting signal, every lamppost as a finishing line. Every day people are quietly beating their own personal records on the way to work.

The inventiveness in this secret world is impressive. Will I manage to get upstairs and into the apartment before the front door closes? Can I bike all the way to school before the tune in my iPod has finished (the shorter the tune the more exciting the competition)? How far can I drive on one tank of gas; how many steps do I need to take to reach upstairs; how long can I walk without stepping on a pavement crack? For some people life seems to be permeated by competitions, both against themselves and against unaware cocompetitors.

I apportion points to almost everything I do—cleaning up, cooking, working, earning money, picking an apartment for the best view, keeping my photo albums in good order, traveling to other countries, and working out.

This kind of imaginative ingenuity ritualizes and dramatizes daily life. Informal competitions, usually experienced only by one person, who may even think of them as an embarrassing whim, are actually part of a broad movement. Events we believe we have invented, rules we believe we have created, and the imaginary winners’ stands we triumphantly climb, all turn out to be shared with others—but in secret.²

In sifting through the answers from those we have interviewed, several themes surfaced again and again. Asking people about secret competitions turned into a good starting point for exploring other activities that are usually not considered important or even noticed. These themes had not caught our attention earlier, probably because we had thought of them as non-events, and thus as rather boring moments. Like many other cultural researchers we had been preoccupied with the explicit, eventful, and dramatic. Then we decided to focus on the many parts of everyday life when nothing seems to happen—the world of transit spaces, in-between times, pauses, moments of waiting or indecision. When nothing seems to happen, a lot is nevertheless going on—but what?

One of the themes we selected was the activity of waiting for something or somebody. Another theme was routine, the performance of mundane or repetitive tasks to which one doesn’t give much thought. Both waiting and routine are conducive to a third activity, daydreaming fantasizing while physically doing other things.

There are many other types of activities we could have included, but we decided to stay with these three because we saw them as the most promising ways to explore what people actually do when they are doing nothing. To examine the infra-ordinary, as the French author Georges Perec (1997) has called it, the part of our lives that is so familiar that it has become almost invisible to us, we had to develop special techniques; we had to unlearn the obvious, look again at what we thought we had already noticed or had previously taken for granted. Joe Moran (2007) has likened this to that of a quotidian detective who sifts through bits and pieces of the mundane.³

Our interest in the secret world of the infra-ordinary is rooted in a branch of anthropology called European ethnology, a discipline focusing on everyday life in Western societies, past and present. Unlike scholars who travel to exotic cultural settings, our job usually takes us into the realm of the familiar everyday that surrounds us all. We do our fieldwork in both rural and urban settings, and in domestic and public arenas.⁴

Over the years we have increasingly come to feel that there are many phenomena and activities that we hadn’t noticed, or had failed to grasp, because they were either too ordinary or too insignificant. Instead we looked for where the action is, and in doing so we often mistook the visible for the important.

In this book we try to redress the imbalance by focusing on a cultural analysis of the uneventful, ephemeral, and elusive.⁵ In ethnographic descriptions of non-events we will talk less about firm identities and structures and more about the subtle knowledge of everyday skills and shared competences and understandings. We ask to what extent trivial, everyday pursuits provoke thoughts about what people take for granted and consider to be normal and natural.

The concept of non-events usually stands for anticipated events that either do not materialize or turn into anticlimax. They thus become pseudo-events that do not live up to expectations. In this book, however, we use the term non-event in a slightly narrower sense to capture mundane activities that are generally considered inconspicuous and unimportant—not worth paying attention to—or pursuits that remain unnoticed by others.⁶ Taking an ethnographic approach, we started by trying to capture such non-events, describing them in detail and using different kinds of empirical materials.⁷

To tackle the often secret worlds of waiting, routine, and daydreaming we have had to develop more unconventional methods. The invisible adventure at the supermarket was eye-opening and produced two questions we have returned to again and again: How can we understand what is really going on when nothing important seems to be happening? And where are people mentally when they are physically present?

Doing nothing is a concept that has interested scholars as well as debaters. Discussing the topic has repeatedly turned into an ideological battle about where society is headed. Controversial because it is morally charged, the concept tends to evoke heated reactions. Doing nothing can be equated either with laziness or with a protest against the busyness of contemporary society—with, that is, a political and philosophical project, a noble art.⁸ Followers of Tao and Zen believe that doing nothing may be a sign of wisdom, the highest good, its aim that of being in the here and now, fully aware of the present and not planning or striving for the future.

This approach to the subject is often tied to a critique of what is seen as a contemporary Western obsession with productivity, the cult of speed, and a fear of wasting time.⁹ In the United States, it has been argued, multitasking is not an option; where hyperactivity is the norm, multitasking is a lifestyle. For people who equate losing time with inefficiency, the notion of free time, of simply letting the days pass, is uncomfortable. These people consider an active life to be morally superior, the tradition of being busy to be a necessary part of the moral fabric.

The debate about busyness has a long history. There is also a polar view, which argues that the cult of speed creates secret fantasies about not working. These are dreams of leisure, imaginings of an idle, pleasant life, and they incorporate the longing to be purposely inactive. There are several books on the market that try to teach this art, and, like many of the contributions to this field—including those of scholars—they often drift into moralizing.¹⁰ We have used this debate as one of our starting points but want to avoid getting trapped in questions of evaluation—good or bad, too little or too much; that is too slippery a moral terrain.¹¹

Rather, we want to comprehend what is going on when people feel attracted to or repelled by the prospect of doing nothing, waiting patiently or furiously, performing routines absentmindedly, and escaping reality in more or less fanciful daydreams. We are also interested in how these activities may be interconnected and how they have evolved and changed in different cultural contexts.

By making a cultural analysis of these three themes we may approach the question the sociologist Georg Simmel (1910) asked a century ago: How is society possible? In what ways do such mundane activities as waiting, following routines, and daydreaming—which are often solitary—organize and support everyday life? How can they tell us something about larger social and existential issues?

To get at questions like these we have combined different kinds of research strategies, as well as drawn inspiration from a diverse set of scholars that includes Walter Benjamin, Christina Nippert-Eng, Gaston Bachelard, and Elisabeth Shove, to mention just a few. So as not to burden the text with too many references or digressions, much of the academic discussion has been restricted to the notes.¹²

Our three themes mirror different entries into the world of the uneventful. By studying waiting we focus on how people spend their time, whiling it away by occupying themselves with other things, or being totally absorbed by the slow clock. Routines illustrate how one can make the body accomplish things without needing consciously to think about them, thus saving time or creating opportunities for more important matters. While waiting and routines may be possible to observe in others, daydreaming is a more hidden activity, during which people are mentally absent, away from the here and now, and yet interacting in their imagination with the environment around them.

The choice of issues called for experimenting with new approaches to cultural analysis.¹³ Why not begin by questioning your teaspoons? Georges Perec (1997: 206) suggested; from there one can then move on to the mundane world of objects and routines that surround us, bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. We followed his suggestion and used a close scrutiny of everyday materialities and movements as one entrance to the field. Another concern of ours was how body and mind interact, for example in the ways people mentally move in and out of a situation.

Our methods have thus been based on a bricolage of materials. We started with informal surveys among students, then continued with interviews and observations, and also looked for examples and ideas in novels and poetry, films and art projects. We surfed the Web for ongoing debates on our subjects and moved back in time for historical perspectives. We have explained this way of doing ethnography in the appendix to this book.

In the following chapters we shall explore how seemingly marginal activities may be all the more influential because they are usually neglected or go unnoticed. We shall investigate how individual habits, thoughts, and feelings are culturally shaped; how uneventful moments of waiting camouflage vivid parallel activities; and how daydreaming changes physical presence into mental absence. While people are occupied with something easily observed and understood, they may well be doing things that are hidden from those around them—and sometimes those things are hidden even from themselves. What can such oblivious activities tell us about how people make sense of their everyday lives? We shall conclude with a discussion of how the location of these phenomena in the backyards of modernity allows them to influence social life in surprisingly powerful ways.

CHAPTER ONE

Waiting

In the early 1980s the Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson and Prime Minister Olof Palme had an appointment with Saddam Hussein in one of his Baghdad palaces. They had to wait at their hotel for a few days before, late one night, a limousine with black windows arrived to pick them up. They were driven around in the city for an hour so as to make them lose their bearings.

Next they had to pass a security control and were led into a waiting room decorated with gold and oak paneling. After being left for a long time in this luxurious setting they were taken to yet another waiting room, where a chief of staff received them. Ten minutes later a door was thrown open and they were led to a third room, and there he stood: Saddam. With his staff huddled behind him, and holding a hand out stiffly, the dictator greeted the two Swedes.

It was insulting but also somewhat ridiculous, Eliasson remembers, and he pointed out that Saddam was using an age-old trick to diminish one’s opponent and enlarge one’s own importance (Kantor and Keller 2008: 42).

An Elusive Microdrama

Our interest in waiting as a mode of doing nothing started with less dramatic situations, among them the mundane scene in the supermarket described earlier. We began by looking for examples of inconspicuous non-events in unglamorous activities such as waiting for a bus and standing in line.

But we soon found that waiting covers a wide range of behaviors and emotional reactions. Refugees wait anxiously for asylum. Prisoners count the days until their discharge. Bored workers and schoolchildren look at their watches every five minutes toward the end of a day. Yet other variants include waiting for a plumber who never shows up, or for one’s beloved, who is late.

What kind of doing nothing constitutes waiting? What lies hidden behind this insignificant and seemingly inactive pursuit, when one has to simply wait, as Estragon expressed it in Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play, Waiting for Godot?¹ To explore these questions we started with the concrete infrastructure of waiting, the material locations where we observed the activity. From there we went on to look at the nature of waiting time. How do people experience and handle that kind of time in different situations? Next we turned our attention to how people learn to wait in different cultural settings. We investigated one of the most institutionalized forms of waiting—queuing or standing in line, a behavior that is permeated by rules, norms, rituals, and feelings. This theme took us further into the emotionality of waiting and how, as in our example from Baghdad, waiting links to power. Who waits for whom, who can make others wait, and what difference do gender and class make?

We have focused on waiting as a cultural practice, one shaped by shifting historical and social conditions and something that people learn to handle, a skill that must be trained and developed. The examples are collected from different situations and parts of the world, from hospitals, street corners, travel experiences, and the final weeks of pregnancy.

Waits can be short—as during the time it takes to ride with strangers in an elevator—but they can also feel interminable or fill an entire life. For some people waiting seems to be a full-time activity that takes up all their energy and being. This certainly applies to a Chinese physician named Lin Kong. In the mid-1960s he worked at an army hospital in a city somewhere in China. He was married to a peasant woman whom his parents had chosen for him and whom he did not love. He had left his wife in the village to take care of their little daughter and his old parents. In the city he fell in love with Manna Wu, a nurse at the hospital, and thereafter, every summer for seventeen years Lin returned to his village to ask his wife for a divorce. But in vain. Because the hospital authorities did not approve of a liaison between them, Lin Kong and Manna Wu refrained from a sexual relationship—day after day, year after year. Eighteen years passed before, in 1984, Lin Kong was allowed to divorce his wife and marry Manna Wu.

Ha Jin tells this story of extreme patience in his novel Waiting (2000). The reader might well wonder how it would feel to wait for a loved person for almost twenty years, seeing and talking to the beloved every day during that time. In Lin Kong’s case waiting became a way of life; we will return to Lin and Manna, for the novel opens up interesting perspectives.

When we considered more mundane situations of waiting we were struck by the ways in which they constantly alter shape, direction, and meaning. How to study such a multifaceted and elusive activity? At first we enthusiastically gathered ethnographic observations in train stations, doctors’ waiting rooms, and ticket lines. Quite often we returned with photos and descriptions of what on the surface seemed trivial non-events, over which we often pondered for hours, trying to see below the surface.

At 12:25 P.M., middle-aged woman in a blue gown arrives at the bus station in a Swedish town. She is looking around the waiting room with a gaze that finally stops for a few seconds at the electronic timetable high up on the wall. Then she walks resolutely toward one of the exits and takes a seat on an empty bench next to the door. She looks hesitant and a little nervous. Again and again she touches her hair, as if to check that it is in order.

After a little while the woman takes a cell phone and a magazine from her bag and holds them in her lap. She looks for the bus ticket in her purse and finds it. Then she sinks her chin in her hand and glances at a young couple in the corner of the waiting room.

Shortly before the bus is scheduled to arrive she joins other travelers in a short queue, everyone keeping approximately one meter’s distance from the others. The woman waits patiently in fifth position, holding her phone, magazine, and bus ticket, until the bus arrives and the front door opens. It is now 12:37 P.M., and the woman steps on board.

Returning home with this description of an everyday moment we had to think about what was actually going on during this fifteen-minute wait for a bus. Interestingly, while trying to observe people in such situations we found ourselves caught up in the boredom and restlessness that emanated from our subjects. We found ourselves losing our concentration, our thoughts began to wander, and we forgot what we were there for and started thinking of other things. After all, nothing seemed to be happening, unlike situations where others are doing something—as, for example, after the waiting is over.

Doing Something—but What?

Like many other examples of doing nothing, waiting turned out to be a phenomenon that is difficult to study head-on. Clearly we needed alternative ethnographic approaches to de-trivialize the mundane activity. We started by looking at artists who have explored waiting as a strange country, among them the Swedish artist Elin Wikström, who in 1994 molded the paradox of waiting as a passive activity in a performance titled Rebecka is waiting for Anna, Anna is waiting for Cecilia, Cecilia is waiting for Marie…

For the duration of a performance, female volunteers selected by the artist come to a café at the gallery at a scheduled time and wait for fifteen minutes. They sit at a table among other gallery visitors, as if they were the first to arrive for a rendezvous and wait for their date. Occasionally they look at their watches, rummage through a bag, and read a magazine. At a prearranged time they leave the gallery, one at a time, to be replaced by other women, who continue the everyday theater of waiting for someone who never arrives. In this exhibition waiting is presented as a meaningless effort. The women’s ostensible expectations are never fulfilled. Wikström puts it like this:

It’s like when you’re meeting somebody and you’re the first one there. You’re waiting for other persons and you go through a lot of emotions. You’re worried about what happened to them, angry they’re late, and it’s also a loss of prestige because people are thinking, Oh, she got stood up.

The performance wants to give an alternative view of women. In commercials and films, they are always depicted as waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting for Mr. Right, waiting to have kids and waiting for those grown kids to come visit them. Always this passive idea of waiting. So for once, I wanted the women to be waiting for each other.²

Even waiting in vain is at least doing something. Men and women resort to all kinds of mundane activities while waiting, as if to deny that they are waiting or to try to forget the fact: reading, talking, listening to music, watching television screens, making cell phone calls, or gaming, WAPing, and playing or working with their laptops. They also tend to be, to some degree, tense and irritated, as is obvious from their looking at clocks, wrist watches, timetables, graffiti, and litter on the floor, or staring absentmindedly into the distance with an inward look. In such situations there is always the question of how and where one should look when among strangers, or what strategies to develop for averting the gaze so as not to engage in interaction (Bissell 2007: 285). Some people watch eagerly for the bus or train they are waiting for, as if they could conjure it into existence. Or they may camouflage their pursuit by eating, drinking, or smoking, as if they were not waiting at all.

The choreography of waiting is rich. Depending on personality and circumstances, people stand or sit still, balance on their feet, lean against walls or pillars, squat, lie down, or walk to and fro; some people whistle, hum, sleep, or close their eyes. They wait alone or in a group, in an orderly line or randomly dispersed, with their arms folded or hanging loosely, hands in pockets or in their laps. For an ethnographer there is in fact much to observe. The dominant impression of passivity is contradicted by all the small movements and diversions.

Above all, however, waiting seems to be a state of mind, a psychological condition that is not directly observable. An observer can learn to see what is going on at bus stops, for example, or in the waiting room of a dental office. But no one can really know what others are up to, what they are feeling or daydreaming.

Instead of guessing at what people were thinking while waiting we decided to try a more physical approach. What could an ecology of waiting be? How is its infrastructure organized? What kinds of social interaction are involved?

VENUES OF WAITING

Any location can become a waiting area, but when asked to name the first places that came to mind people cited those traditionally associated with waiting: ticket offices, highway toll booths, department stores, and the places connected with waiting for transport—gates, lounges, platforms, benches, and shelters. Other oft-cited places included schools, prisons, business offices, hospitals, and dental offices. All these container spaces, as David Bissell (2007: 282) has called them, are designed to hold the body, where the body is prompted to remain inert in a form of temporary stasis.

Such places possess a character and traditions of their own. Lining up at the supermarket is not the same as standing in a theater queue. Waiting one’s turn at a golf course is surely different from waiting in a courthouse corridor. Both the physical context of the place and the cultural expectations of the individual affect the experience of waiting.

Some objects—the life vest under the seat, for example, or the emergency ladder on the wall—fall into the standby category. Other things inhabit a mode of alert passivity—the fire station, the rocket on the launch pad, the bottle of vintage wine being saved for a special occasion. Still others, among them certain electrical appliances, must never go out; they must rest with one eye open, watchful technological wild beasts.

And then there are settings and objects that rest in a kind of cultural latency. This condition has been discussed by Jonas Frykman (2005), who exemplifies his case with the many monuments left over from the Communist era in Eastern Europe, which people don’t know what to do with. For the time being, many statues and monuments have been left in parks and marketplaces awaiting whatever future use or destruction may lie ahead.

Ecological Supports

Above all, waiting transforms the location in which the waiting occurs. Back