HANGING OUT

A glancing meditation on the value of spending idle time with friends, family, and strangers.

“Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others,” writes Liming, a professor of literature, media, and writing. The “daring” bit seems a little overstated. Most people, apart from those in isolation and agoraphobes, seem not to have trouble finding ways to lounge around with a clutch of fellow lollygaggers watching a ball game or arguing over the ways of the world. Liming means something more rarefied, with hanging out—not doing much—as an act of resistance against a late-stage capitalist regime that demands that we all be available to work all the time. Hanging out, she writes, “marks the boundaries of a sanctuary space that exists at a remove from the pressures of market-driven competition.” That’s all well and good, and capable of being said without much buttressing. Still, the author consistently calls in the cavalry, from Emerson to Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin. Where the appeal to authority is apposite, it’s often qualified: “[M.F.K.] Fisher is, so far as I am concerned, one of the preeminent twentieth-century voices not just on the subject of eating but on eating socially.” The hedging clause is no more necessary than Liming’s rendering of a hiking trip as “the work of collective arrival,” a formulation both arid and abstract. The author deserves praise for honesty, however, in admitting that the conferences so beloved of academics are really “fundamentally about seizing the opportunity to hang out.” Liming is at her best when she considers in-person lounging against the online hanging out that younger people seem increasingly to prefer and which will change the face of socializing: After all, you can’t catch pandemic diseases over the internet, and gathering in groups is a prerequisite condition for mass shootings.

A hit-or-miss ramble in praise of giving time to wasting time.