Refusal means stepping outside a given question and judging its terms

Evidence

THOREAU, TOO, SOUGHT a third space outside of a question that otherwise seemed given. Disillusioned by the country’s treatment of slavery and its openly imperialist war with Mexico, the question for Thoreau was not which way to vote but whether to vote—or to do something else entirely. In “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” that “something else” is refusing to pay taxes to a system that Thoreau could no longer abide. While he understood that technically this meant breaking the law, Thoreau stood outside the question and judged the law itself: “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” he wrote. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 276

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core to defending Odell against the withdrawal misreading: refusal here is not retreat but repositioning outside a false binary.
• XREF: The ‘third space outside a given question’ echoes Odell’s own thesis in earlier chapters about attention as world-constitution; also maps to the reader’s frame about manifest dismantling.