ABOUT THIS BOOK

Doing Nothing is a book about doing nothing in a system where there is always something pressing that ought to be done. Not the productive unstructured time of self-help books, but the aimless and ineffective doing nothing of procrastination, resignation, and melancholia. James Currie pursues these themes across a wide terrain of experiences, materials, and examples from the personal, local, and anecdotal, through to the existential, cosmological, and apocalyptic—reflecting, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing offers a lived-in embrace of queer states of being that stand against liveliness and the mournful feelings of entrapment and shame that exist alongside the unexpected opportunities such situations afford.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

James Currie is a multi-arts practitioner and Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Music and the Politics of Negation.

REVIEWS

“To show us the view from doing nothing, while Currie is, of course, doing many things, is a wonderful paradox from which to begin. Especially in a moment where depression and dissociation are being theorized anew, Doing Nothing is provocative and against the grain of how-tos and wellness culture.”
-- Hannah Zeavin, author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy

“Identifying a paradox of late capitalism whereby ‘doing nothing’ has become the new accomplishment to be striven for, Currie confronts aspects of our lives about which nothing ultimately can be done. Doing Nothing offers an aesthetically heightened meditation—at once wry and melancholic—on the hard limits of human agency.”
-- Tim Dean, Frank Hodgins Chair in American Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Doing Nothing unfolds expression as vast as the subject it takes on. In Currie’s words, inactivity becomes expansive and exuberantly still. This is not the stillness of peace or balance but the stillness of a subject bound to non-action, breathing through the very language of that binding. Currie writes from within a space of refusal, where nothing is done and everything is felt. His stillness, so far from the polished calm of pop-Zen, is a heavier, truer and stranger vitality of giving up. Doing Nothing speaks non-action that doesn’t shrink; it spreads, resonates, haunts and lingers.”
-- Ania Malinowska, author of Love in Contemporary Technoculture

TABLE OF CONTENTS