READING
- Alice Bennett, Contemporary Fictions of Attention (2018)
- Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (1999)
- Amy Hungerford, “On Not Reading David Foster Wallace” in Making Literature Now (2016)
- William James, “Attention”, in The Principles of Psychology (1890)
- Jenny Oddell, How to Do Nothing (2019)
- Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking (2019)
Pre-Class Notes
— I was fascinated by the readings this week, particularly since I’m fairly unfamiliar with psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of attention. There were a number of interesting links in these texts to our class discussion last week. I noticed that a few authors, particularly James and Phillips, frequently used the figure of the child as an embodiment of underdeveloped or uncorrupted attention. James writes that “sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. In mature age we have generally selected those stimuli which are connected with one or more so-called permanent interests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest” (417). Phillips similarly spends a lengthy amount of his book analyzing the development (or more accurately, suppression) of the child’s initial, far-flung attentions. These arguments recalled moments from last week’s readings, in which authors described childhood as the period of our earliest, purest form of reading, free from interpretative strategies and paranoia. In some of the texts last week, the adult/child reading dichotomy seemed to in fact map onto established hierarchies of high/low culture. What was described as childlike reading practices frequently sounded much like notions of “low-brow” cultural consumption: passive absorption, pleasure-seeking, immediately gratifying, largely surface-level.
This week, then, I wondered if a similar dichotomy was present in some of the arguments about attention and attentive reading. When James writes that, “men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern…. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspects we may single out, and what effects we may admire, before our aesthetic nature can ‘dilate’ to its full extent and never ‘with the wrong emotion’” (443), is he in fact exclusively talking about a certain type of “high-brow” reading, one motivated by an academic or intellectual impulse? Could the descriptions of “childlike” readings and attentions described by James and Phillips actually function as descriptions of perceived “low-brow” cultural consumption? I was reminded of Sontag’s mention of cinema as an art form that largely escapes over-interpretation, because of the necessarily fast pace of its consumption. The film genres that are often classified as low-brow, like thrillers or horror movies, also seem to be those to which we most readily cede our immediate, unfiltered attentions. [RD]
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Phillips’s Attention Seeking and James’s chapter, “Attention” continually reminded me of a point Mehvish made in our first class. As we were discussing the critical tendency to look or analyze for an already expected interpretation before letting a text “speak for itself,” Mehvish (if I’m remembering correctly – my apologies for putting you on the spot!) described the feeling of being surprised or proven wrong by a text. We can arrive at a piece of art with our own predispositions about its significance or central moves, but at times the text pulls the rug out from under us, leaving us to abandon our original interpretation. This comment continues to resonate with me, and I think it may prove particularly helpful in our conversations about attention.
Phillips, in discussing the challenges of psychoanalysis, seems to apply this idea quite directly. In the final chapter of Attention Seeking, Philips describes a central problem in psychoanalysis: that “is always to do with the sense in which he already knows what he is looking for” (98). How is a psychoanalyst such as Freud to “cure” a patient without some element of surprise? If he already knows what to look for, he finds himself, according to Phillips, trapped in a closed circuit.
This problem of an interpretive essentialism is also important for James, although he may not acknowledge it so directly. James describes an effect of “paying attention” as a “shortness of reaction time” due to the fact that when one pays attention, they are waiting for something to happen. James makes a series of comparisons across genre (listening for certain notes in a chord, seeing red in warm colors, etc.), generalizing that “Confident expectation of a certain intensity or quality of impression will often make us sensibly see or hear it in an object which really falls far short of it. In the face of such facts it is rash to say that attention cannot make a sense-impression more intense” (426). James does not apply this practice to the act of reading, but his chain of artistic comparisons might lead one in this direction. When a reader confidently approaches a text looking for a specific reading, like listening for a note in a chord, they, according to James, may find it, but in a place that will inevitably “fall short” of what they seek.
Both Phillips and James’s examples suggest that this experience of paying attention by looking for something (I’m also reminded of Sedgwick’s Paranoid Reading here), we are, in a sense, doomed to find exactly what we’re looking for. This feeling of surprise that Mehvish pointed out, according to Phillips and James, is enabled by a view wide enough to invite distraction from our preconceptions. As Phillips puts it, the shock or surprise is a necessary part of experiences “indescribable because new, and not previously formulated (not yet in language)” (103). I am inspired to curb my predispositions as I read and honor the shock of the new, but also eager to discuss as a group how one can most effectively do this. [CA]
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While I thought this week’s readings were riveting for a number of reasons, in this post I’ll choose to elucidate some connections I made between attention and two of the main industrial complexes in the United States – the military and prison-industrial complexes. Both Suspensions of Perception (Crary) and Contemporary Fictions of Attention (Bennett) cite wartime as a causal factor in the uptick and increased necessity of research on attention. Crary notes that it has been “argued that problems related to the efficient human use of new technology during World War II were in part responsible for a new wave of research into attention” (34), arguments which cite issues of “vigilance” in the execution of tasks by human operators. Bennett, too, notes that “[i]mpulse-control and self-control… became the qualities that the American education system desired to foster” as a response to Cold War tensions and related pressure to improve American school curricula. In these examples of increased research into attention and a reconfiguration and amplified application of the ideal nature of attention, wartime directly impacted American education and youth – impacts which I can’t help but relate to the concept of total war. War became more comprehensive as potential national defence resources expanded through the shift into modernity, and I think it would be interesting to conceive attention studies in terms of the trope of the American “home front,” and generally as a manifestation of modern total war. Further, I think the notion of government intervention in the educational system to support and implement a reconfiguration of ideally efficient behavioural patterns, specifically for the purposes of creating a citizenry that could be more proficiently mobilized in wartime, ambivalently relates to the contemporary zeitgeist of late-capitalism. While understandings of top-down public manipulation are now mainstream, as Bennett points out, I’d like to know to what extent sedentariness and a certain degree of docility (necessary for the ideal attention style of the Cold War-era) now exist as a security issue. Further, I think it would be fascinating to trace government campaigns to examine and improve attention over the past few decades in terms of their effectiveness and potential counterproductivity.
Thinking a bit about attention studies in terms of the military-industrial complex led me to consider how attention plays a role in the prison-industrial complex. Crary claims that attention “has remained more or less within the center of institutional empirical research and at the heart of the functioning of a capitalist consumer economy” since the 1800s, and I can imagine how it has been an integral supporter of the prison-industrial complex. While corporations producing common goods have been proven to utilize prison labour, and institutions including public universities can often be found to hold shares in PIC-related enterprises, the sheer lack of attention that these operations tend to garner likely allowed the PIC to flourish. Perhaps this lack of attention is related to general dehumanization of incarcerated populations, or to the rapidly evolving digital marketing industry which can effectively convey brands like Victoria’s Secret as “fun” and “sexy” while intentionally leaving product manufacture unacknowledged. I think the intersection between digital marketing, attention, and the PIC, both in empirical and affective terms, would be fertile ground for further study. [TB]
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I was struck by the idea that there exists two seemingly opposing types of attention: authentic, innate attention and culturally or institutionally programmed attention. While none of the authors use these terms per se, most of them seem to be trying to grapple with this dichotomy between genuine and inauthentic forms of attention. For example, in the very first paragraph of Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips states, “Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting – on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested despite of ourselves” (3). As he continues his introduction, Phillips gives greater validity to those interests that people find themselves naturally attracted to rather than the things they were taught to find interesting and pay attention to. Crary poses a similar duality to attention when he states that “attention is the means by which an individual observer” can “make perceptions its own” while attention is also how a person can be vulnerable “to control and annexation by external agencies” (5). Again, we see natural proclivities opposed to external control and influence.
While these distinctions in theory made sense to me, I found them difficult to apply. Many of the interests that I have, I found within and because of an institution. (I’m thinking specifically of university but there are other institutions at play.) Does that mean that it was something that I was taught to like? That these interests that I’ve been attending are not where I should be directing my attention because they aren’t authentic enough for my natural proclivities? Have I been programmed to like certain theories and disdain others, to direct my attention to some over others, not through internal discernment but through the teachers that taught me the theories and through what theories are currently in vogue? How do we distinguish between these things that we were taught to value and those that we value innately? Can something that we were educated to like ever be something worthy of our attention or is it always, as Phillips and Crary seem to imply, less than the authentic? How can we tell where external influence ends and our own interests begin?
Something that helped me navigate these questions (although I’d love to discuss them more in class) was Jenny Odell’s story of her growing interest and knowledge of birdwatching. When she first started birdwatching, she started to notice the unique songs of each type of bird more than she did before. She states that these songs “had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time.” As her knowledge continued to grow, she “started learning each song and associating it with a bird” and can now recognize the birds around her by their sounds even when she cannot see them. While Odell does not give you a history of how this interest began and what or any influences may have led to this new hobby, it did help me understand the role of education in interests better. Essentially, people pay more attention to the things that they have studied. If you are someone who has studied and internalized queer theory, then you are going to see homosexual undertones more readily than someone else who may be more familiar with postcolonial theories. If I had been in the Rose Garden with Odell, the bird songs would have faded into the background rather than became the focus of my attention because our knowledge of those songs are different (mine is literally nil). We notice and pay attention to what interests us, in part, because we have more knowledge about the things that interest us. [MD]
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In this week’s reading, Jonathan Crary’s ‘Suspension of Perception’ and William James’ ‘Principles of Psychology’ seem to offer quite different models for attention. Where Crary illuminates the historical specificity of both how we pay attention, and the social significance of that engagement, James makes a more universalist claim when he says that ‘[e]very one knows what attention is.’ Attention, he continues, ‘is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.’
For Crary, attention presents a double bind. Modernity and industrial capitalism produce certain possibilities for attention, but thereby also inaugurate systems for managing distraction or inattention. Put differently, modern subjectivity is fundamentally paradoxical, in that attention is a condition of creativity and freedom, but also bound up with disciplinary systems and the imperative for productivity in modern institutions. It’s this idea of the mandate for attention which strikes me as interesting. Crary’s reading reminds me that attention is very much imbricated in systems of control, that modern distraction ought not be read as a disruption of our natural and sustained powers of perception, but an effect of ongoing attempts to produce attentiveness. Contrary to this, James’ analysis understands attention as our capacity to ‘tak[e] possession’ of external objects. In this reading, we attend to objects in making sense of the world, and attention connotes our control of these objects rather than our own subjection to external powers.
In this, I’m curious about James’ explication of ‘anticipatory imagination.’ Calling on an example from Helmholtz, James writes of our anticipation of certain sounds when listening to music; he notes, ‘so completely does the expectant attention consist in premonitory imagination that, as we have seen, it may mimic the intensity of reality, or at any rate produce reality’s motor effects.’ Further, ‘an imagined visual object may, if attention be concentrated upon it long enough, acquire before the mind’s eye almost the brilliancy of reality, and (in the case of certain exceptionally gifted observers) leave a negative after-image of itself when it passes away.’ Faculties of observation are equated with the creative powers of the mind: for James, the power of imagination is able to transform our perception of that which we attend to. I like this postulation that through our attentions we can somehow imagine something into being.
At this point we might return to that paradox illuminated by Crary. Thinking about attention as both a disciplinary tool and constitutive aspect of free subjectivity, we can consider how our imaginative capacities might allow us to break with the status quo. If, in the case of overtones and clock chimes and incomplete pictures, we can think something into existence, might we conceive of this as an alternative kind of productivity? In doing so, we ask what determines the acceptable objects of our concentration. What kinds of attention are counterproductive, and thus anti-capitalist, and can a such a departure represent a genuine break with the injunctions of modernity? [TG]
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I am particularly interested in the tension between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ (or ‘learned’) reading, something which a lot of this week’s texts addressed, and which many people have already commented on. Bennett’s text introduces us to ‘an ideal form of reading’, in which you ‘might allow the world around you to fade as you relax and concentrate’. I found it interesting that she begins with this scene of ‘natural’ reading (almost like the one we discussed last week: lying in the sofa, feet up, enjoying a book) – because she uses it to show how the practice of reading itself is an unnatural one.
Bennett argues that our contemporary culture is characterised by a ‘growing anxiety’ about the fact that our ‘absorbed attention’ in books is now ‘only possible through a labour of disciplined focus’ (Bennett, p. 2; emphasis mine). However, she observes that, from an evolutionary perspective, ‘the linear attention [deep attention] we privilege today is, in many ways, an aberration: “to read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object”’ (Bennett quoting Nicholas Carr, p. 8).
However, in critical reading, we encounter a paradox, in that it ‘assigns all value to the act of reading and none to the objects read’ (Bennett quoting Rita Felski, p. 11). I was interested in the way Bennett placed emphasis on ‘the objects read’ and the material aspect of books. In fact, to make her argument that the book is ‘a constantly interrupted object’, she cleverly invokes ‘traditional book paraphernalia’ as proof of the commonality of interrupted reading: ‘footnotes, cross-references, indexes, margins, chapter breaks, subheadings, page numbers, bookmarks’ – according to Bennett, all these material objects can be read as ‘mechanisms for managing books’ requirements for attention’. And what they show us is that ‘reading is never undividedly attentive and always somewhat shifting, disrupted and unfocused.’ (Bennett, p. 18; emphasis mine)
Like Bennett, Crary also seems to focus on the effort of paying attention, and the unnatural process of doing so: ‘The roots of the wordattentionin fact resonate with a sense of “tension,” of being “stretched,” and also of “waiting”’ he writes (Crary, p. 10).
In Attention Seeking, Phillips, too, argues that some reading is easier than others. As Michael noted in his pre-class note, the first paragraph is a good example: ‘Everything depends on what, if anything we find interesting – on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves’ (Philips, p. 3). Interestingly, Philips goes on to distinguish between our ‘official curiosity’ and ‘our unofficial curiosity’: ‘our official curiosity is a form of obedience, an indebtedness to the authorities’ (Phillips, p. 3).
In mentioning this ‘indebtedness to the authorities’ which is present in certain kinds of reading, it seems that Phillips agrees with Crary that there is a link between attentionand institutional power. Crary’s book explores ‘the paradoxical intersection […] between an imperative of a concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption’ (Crary, p. 1-2). In his view, ‘[t]he realization that attention had limits beyond and below which productivity and social cohesion were threatened created a volatile indistinction between newly designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming’ (Crary, p. 4). In other words, because ‘deep absorption and daydreaming’, or ‘our unofficial curiosity’ are not productive within a system of labour and consumption, they are not seen as useful. As Tallulah just remarked in her pre-class note: ‘modern subjectivity is fundamentally paradoxical, in that attention is a condition of creativity and freedom, but also bound up with disciplinary systems and the imperative for productivity in modern institutions.’
In Bennett, we see how this dichotomy between ‘natural’ reading (the type that comes easy) and ‘useful’ reading (the type that requires critical effort) plays out within the academy: by institutionalizing close reading, the academy ‘takes a student’s capacity for concentration and instrumentalizes it by turning it into a transferable skill that justifies the discipline of literary studies’ existence’ (Bennett, p. 11). It seems that, while last week, the authors suggested that ‘symptomatic’ or ‘paranoid’ reading was problematic, Bennett suggests that reading itself is unnatural – and critical reading comes out, yet again, as the villain.
However, drawing again from Rita Felski, Bennett does attempt to offer a different model of reading: one that ‘acknowledges both the critical and affective – the vigilant and the absorbed – expanding the discourse of literary interpretation to develop “a lexicon more attuned to the affective and absorbing aspects of reading” ([Felski], Uses of Literature 62)’ (Bennett, p. 12). Like Sontag, Bennett seems to privilege the affective response; however, much like Sedgwick’s mellifluous model of ‘reparative reading’, this isn’t much is the way of explanation.
I’d like to end by briefly introducing Bennett’s theory of ‘inward attention’, which I had a really hard time wrapping my head around. I’ll leave you with a final paragraph that we can discuss further in class, if you’re drawn to it: ‘If attention is a bubble or balloon, piercing its surface with critical focus will destroy it. Inward attention also, for me, invokes a glancing, light and fleeting recognition that cannot be held or fixed in place. Attention’s etymological root in the Latin attendere means a stretching towards or holding in tension, which fixes objects under its gaze and is therefore somewhat at odds with inward attention’s glancing, shifting form of unconcentrated noticing.’ (Bennett, p. 12-13) [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CK]
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My thoughts are jumbled and distracted with this week’s readings, so please forgive the chaotic response!
On attention and different modes of reading, I found Alice Bennett’s Contemporary Fictions of Attention provided a useful summary. We’ve discussed different modes we assume when we read, from symptomatic reading to surface reading, paranoid and hyper vigilant reading, reparative reading, and critical reading. I’m unsure what the verdict was on whether one type of reading should have more authority than others in relation to different texts, but I found the conventional and modern understanding of attention interesting. William James, in the Principles of Psychology, maintains that “the natural tendency of attention . . . is to waver to ever new things.” Hence,’voluntary attention’ cannot be retained for longer than a few seconds at a time, and what he ascribes to genius lies in ‘sustained attention’, that is, the ability to bring one’s focus back to the original subject repeatedly despite the wavering nature of attention. Such sustained attention may be the form of engagement used for close reading or deep reading, which then, in turn, would hone the reader’s ability to ‘perceive, conceive, distinguish, remember,”; and shorten the reaction-time to intellectual engagement.
On the other hand, Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, discusses the attention economy and how the value of attention is attached to productivity, with a culture that equates time with money. We are constantly asked to direct our time and attention to different things, both online and material, that are socially considered to be (in a capitalist sense), productive. She contextualizes with the modern distraction of social media and a need for online presence and constant self-expression, which in turn requires both constant attention and distraction. Her corrective is to resist the attention economy and the demands of technology, and to attempt to do nothing—redirect our attention to physical and natural surroundings instead (she cites birdwatching as an example). These texts approach attention differently, but both agree that fundamentally, out attention spans are short, constantly distracted, and not naturally engineered to constantly focus on ‘productive’ materials.
Bennett further purports the ‘book as a constantly interrupted object’— in material books, all the book paraphernalia & paratext provide constant distraction, and in electronic reading, with the plethora of options and digital distractions. It is then notable that the discussion on shifting modes of attention/reading affects contemporary writers as much as readers. When there are so many distractions, a social call for digital detox or an advocacy for ‘niksen’ (doing nothing), a criticism of didactic literature, and literary overproduction, how should writers then provide texts that retain, and remain worthy of, attention?
Bennett argues that the culture of self-diagnosis bleeds into literary production, citing Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Tao Lin’s Taipei. Contemporary literature seems to demonstrate an anxious self-awareness of surrounding distraction as well as different modes of attending to texts; contemporary writers face the struggle of producing texts that do not provide a prescriptive or pedagogical way of reading/approaching the text. If Tao Lin attempts to allow the reader an array of options of ‘paying attention to’ the book by providing a “mass of overlapping attentions,” Zadie Smith’s NW as a text wavers in its indecision in pace, techniques, and perspectives, perhaps in an attempt at variation, but to the effect of rather frustrating uncertainty. Katherine Fitzpatrick provides further context, writing that “The form is suffering from the ‘anxiety of obsolescence.’’ The long-held discussion of the death of the novel asks writers to rise to the challenge of writing texts that capture the reader’s attention, but avoiding the traps of obsolescence int he era of mass digitization. This self-awareness of modern literature is then understandable, in that it reflects societal phenomena of self-criticism and anxiety surrounding distraction; personally, though, I often found these unnaturally self-aware texts, (Tao Lin, Tan Lin, Zadie Smith) difficult to parse through, and less than effective as narrative fiction; they seemed more representations of the phenomena of modern anxiety, than ‘meaningful presentations of attention’ leading to subsequent refracted. ‘Inward attention.’
On Amy Hungerford’s “On Not reading DFW,” I have a lot of personal response, stemming from personal experience, on coming to terms with my choices as a reader engaging (or not engaging) with texts produced by problematic writers, especially when they are contemporary. I entirely agree: in the age of literary overproduction, the choice not to read writers such as DFW, is not radical, but “normal, and pragmatic.”
Hungerford posits the question of “how literature function in our social life,” asking “What do people want novels to do for them?” Perhaps the time for novels to act as moral arbiters has passed; but we cannot argue the cultural value and influence of literature without then questioning the cultural impact of, or values upheld by, the choices we make by paying attention to certain texts. I find this especially true for contemporary writers and artists: how do we feel about, for instance, the films produced by Harvey Weinstein? In circulating, discussing, and purchasing his works, do we not continue to socially, financially, and political endorse him and his actions to an extent?
What does it mean for institutions/academia/critics/or even the general audience to direct their attention to works produced by problematic artists, in an attention economy— when being discussed and listened to holds cultural and financial capital?
Considering the question of abandoning contextualizing, (Rita Felski, Context Stinks!) perhaps it seems impertinent to draw too much of a relationship between an artist and his/her work; but often our literary practice relies on following not only the literary, but personal/biographical trajectory of the writer, when we attempt to understand their works. And the practice does often yield insight into how a work is produced.
Hungerford further justifies her choice to avoid DFW by drawing parallels between his misogynistic relationship with women, and his text’s relationship with the reader. I don’t think modern readers need to provide such analytical justification with the choices they make regarding where they focus their attention. We have an abundance of rich texts to engage with, written by writers worth listening to; the standard to which we hold contemporary artists and writers reflects the standard we, as a society, tolerate/live by. If we have limited attention, we might as well resist endorsing problematic artists, as well as the stressful demands of an attention economy. [JK]
Jonathan Crary concludes in his introduction that he is concerned with how attention “can be both an absorption and an absence or deferral,” as well as how those elements of attention are not perceptive a priori attributes, but a production based on a “historical emergence.” This, I think, runs counter to William James’s approach as defining attention as such: “my experience is what I agree to attend to […] only those items which I notice shape my mind.” Crary’s move, as many critics work within during the age following post-structural critique, is to distance the role of subjectivity as a defining part of how experience is structured. Maybe I’m simplifying the Jamesian approach, but Crary is at least further problematizing how attentive gaze is shaped, and more so, moving beyond the mind itself as the only part of the puzzle, as Crary mentions “attention is at the same time a means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies”–Lending I think to our discussion last week between the problem of preconceived methodologies of suspicion vs. the possibility of an affective reading.
With the increasing overprescription of ADHD medications, one might ask the question about how we have come to see attention in the modern era, and how it has been intercepted as a device of capital production, but for our purposes, also within the ways we read literature. Crary is right to bring up this issue, especially since the modernist approach (Faulkner, Beckett, Joyce) has been to establish a climate of fragmentation, where as Crary sees the movement into the 20th century as an intensification and creation of a language in and around creating a particular type of attention. Which is not to run counter to Bennet’s critique that an “age with a deficit of attention […] must imagine an age of surplus attention elsewhere.” Instead, and I repeat the word, “intensification,” it’s a question of how in this particular and present moment, the power dynamics in structuring attention becomes front and center, a kind of “paradoxical intersection” with the more splintered modernist takes.
On a side note, in some ways, I think the founding of the discipline of English in the 20th century is (as we discussed last week), established very particular ways in which attention is oriented in regards to how one reads. I thought a lot while reading this material about how I read prose as opposed to poetry. Poetry, with a request of an acute attention to every particle of text; prose–especially long prose like Moby Dick or War and Peace–have fading degrees of attention, and I think the critical apparatus we have been educated in sequester large parts of texts: only the moments that beg attention appear, and I simplify, Gatsby’s green light across the bay, the A in the Scarlet Letter, or the gordian knot in Benito Cereno. But I don’t just mean symbols only, but I use these as examples to show how there is a methodology of attention at play that could defer other ways of seeing a text: ways in which certain writers have even mocked and played with as they have analyzed modern attention (according to Bennett). The most out-there examples for me, B.S. Johnson and Mark Z. Danielewski–and I’m particularly excited to see how what we discuss this week will engage with week 4 on digitization and the problems that provides literature moving further in the 21st Century. –[B.J.S]
Post-Class Notes
‘The picture makes you look at both – the close-up happenings and the bigger picture’
ALI SMITH, How to be Both, 2014
This moment in Smith’s novel, from the passage with which the class began and ended, could be thought of as the thread that ran through the wide-ranging discussions and debates in today’s seminar. It wants attention to hold two things at once—intricate detail and the ‘bigger picture’—and its own performance of this process, in George’s engagement with the fresco’s ‘separate details’ of duck and giant lobster as they are strung along amongst layered ‘continued happenings’ that stretch as if ‘for miles’ behind them, seems to allow it to crumble as it performs them. The frustrated possibilities of this simultaneous attention and its performance play up to the wider issues of the difficulty of sustaining nuance (and interest) in these debates around ‘attention’, from the canon and de-platforming to technology and control. Is there a possibility for both the wider picture and the minute detail? James’ funny figures would have us believe there is not.
Rachel’s brilliant presentation on Odell’s How to do Nothing laid bare the problems of attention’s slipperiness as it revealed the contradictions that deflate Odell’s jeremiad and her fears for the manipulations of our attentions. Her premise seems quite attractive and frames itself as such—who doesn’t want to do nothing and feel morally superior at the same time?—and it is more than the stuffiness of privilege that prove some of her fears as misdirected. Rachel’s observation, where Facebook is a symptom rather than a cause, that anxieties of attention have always existed to some degree in different societies, was not only a swift dispatch of Odell’s impossible self-removal from the technological economy of attention using the unique combination of her misappropriation of Seneca, a hypocritical twitter account, and a recent Dolly Parton meme, but also a testament to how different modes of attention—here, something like Hayle’s notions of ‘hyper-reading’ with its many open tabs—can totally frustrate other concept other rigid conceptions of it.
That doesn’t mean that many of Odell’s worries aren’t valid. Questions of the capitalist architectures that, in Crary’s words, constitute an ‘imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption’ which clashes paradoxically with the free-form slipperiness of the attention impart notes of unease to the entire discussion. From the problems of controlling the amount of video-games children guzzle and the hierarchies of attention to different art forms that result, to the difficulties of disengagement and investment of attention in literary figures with hurtful and problematic personal lives like DFW, attention never allows for simple discussions of itself. The ‘regimes of attention’ that Mehvish drew attention to in Phillips’ work are matched by his conceptions of individual ‘attention-seeking’ that these very regimes frustrate and necessitate. His idea of the ‘fear of our own minds’ captures this constant battle of the irreducible problems such ideas of attention provoke.
I think that these discussions lead nicely onto next week’s concepts of scale—what ought we investour attention in, what are the implications of the inevitable hierarchies of attention that arise from its focalising nature?—but there is one aspect that keeps returning to me. The first springs from the ‘cruelty’ and its banal omnipresence, to return to the Smith, that George finds in her meditation on the fresco. It puts me in mind of what the word ‘attention’ brings instantly to my own mind—the concept in the work of Simone Weil. For her ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’, and although the theological and ethical contexts of her conceptions of attention are very different from those we discussed today, it is like what Bennett recognises in Steigler’s work as ‘his emphasis on attention as a form of caring is provocative and powerful.’ It is like what I find most powerful in reading, its generous almost-simultaneous (in)attention, that allows us, in oscillating moments of self-awareness and self-suspension, see us, as Bennett puts it at the beginning of her book, ‘ceding control of your own thoughts in order to replace them—just for a while—with mine.’ This reframing of attention as generosity, however facile and sappy, is what makes it, particularly in a literary context, able to almost grasp both detail and bigger picture in its sacrifice of parts of our subjectivity for another’s. This might be ‘reparative’ reading, attention. [SM]
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There was so much left to say at the end of the class. I wanted, for example, to extend our conversation about disciplinary forms of attention to include reference to Talulah’s s pre-class note about the military industrial complex, and about the kinds of vigilance demanded by the state. What am I supposed to do when I’m told to ‘remain vigilant’ after a terrorist attack (I live near London Bridge, so this question is quite fresh for me)? More often, I find that a terrorist ‘incident’ reminds me of how I generally distract myself from thinking about the reality of living in a city where the terror threat level no longer drop below ‘high’. What kinds of politics are produced by different kinds of attention (I’m thinking partly of Phillips’ lovely quip about the fascist and the anti-fascist alike both being overly attentive to fascism)? This question seems related to the many articles written in the last few months about political ‘fatigue’, especially in relation to Brexit (and Trump). Too much attention for too long and we exhaust our attention, we use it up, (James talks about this tipping point in attention). Our attention frustrates us. So attention has something to do with intensity, which may be finite, or have a time limit. Since the class, I’ve been connecting this vague set of ideas to something else that bothers me in Oddel’s book (which Rachel did such a good job critiquing), which is her example of birdwatching, especially in relation to Morgan’s pre-class note: ‘If I had been in the Rose Garden with Odell, the bird songs would have faded into the background rather than became the focus of my attention because our knowledge of those songs are different (mine is literally nil).’ So what’s the unacknowledged link here between paying attention and knowledge/ learning? For Oddell, understanding (and therefore appreciation) emerges over time, through acquiring a specialist knowledge from interactions with other more experienced bird watchers, but also, presumably, through repetition: I learn to recognise birds and birdcalls by seeing and hearing them again and again. So attention requires a kind of patience (again, it has a particular temporality). When children (and as Rebecca notes in her pre-class comment, these vaguely psychoanalytic accounts keep coming back to the figure of the child, in one way or another) get frustrated at not getting the hang of something first time round, we tell them to stick at it, to have a little patience (growing up as learning to pay attention, or learning to bear our frustration). The idea here is that practice makes perfect, or, to put it another way, something will change if we wait long enough. I think what the Crary illuminates is that this is a cultural rather than natural logic, that there’s a whole history – economic, technological, psychological – behind this ‘time of attention’.
Anyway. The other thing we talked about was not paying attention to DFW. This led to some really important contributions regarding Hungerford’s argument. But I’m equally interested (actually, for the purpose of the class, I’m more interested) in her methodology: what style of critique does she practice in the essay? We’ve been coming back to the question of what this work on attention and scale and critique really means, in practical terms, for when we sit down with a literary object. I think Hungerford gives a sense of some of the possibilities. [MK]
SCALES OF ATTENTION 