Paper Short Abstract:

Using fieldwork on everyday walking rituals as a base, this paper explores how experiences of nothingness relate to the (un)writing of dreams and narratives. Walking, sleeping, “doing nothing”: do these processes help enact new futures, or does their potentiality fade away once they are transcribed?

Paper Abstract:

Inspired by Orvar Löfgren and Billy Ehn’s work on “doing nothing”, as well as Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep, this paper explores the relationship between experiences of nothingness or absence and the (re)production of dreams, narratives and futures. Specifically, I present selections of ethnographic fieldwork on everyday walking rituals in contemporary Sweden, and explore the links between this material and processes of sleeping, dreaming and doing nothing. “Going for a walk” – a routine, seemingly ordinary activity – is often described by its enactors as a form of “doing nothing”, a contour to the everyday. But how does this “nothing” work, not least in a society that prioritizes endless thing-ification? When an engine of contingencies goes quiet, what else becomes audible?

The ambition here is not to arrive at *knowing* walking or doing nothing, but rather to, in the words of Kathleen Stewart, “fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form”. I see dreams as a tool to work toward such an address. Dreams are visions that come when nothing happens, but once apprehended, they are assigned authors and become stories, fetish objects. Therein lies both possibility and risk. Dreaming, walking, doing nothing: do these processes help us envision new futures, or does their potentiality fade away once they are touched, transcribed? By placing these processes in dialogue with one another, this paper explores not only how they overlap, but also how they might inform, write or unwrite larger narratives of past/future and self/world.