How to escape attention fracking A little irony would help

Is there any more unhelpful term in popular use today than “attention”? Experts have been telling us for some time that we live in something called The Attention Economy. Daily, we’re accosted with statistics about students unable to read entire books, children (and their parents) spending a third of their lives online. Our attention, we’re told, has been “monopolised”, “hacked” and “monetised”. So every moment of procrastination, each distracted hour spent scrolling, is cast in this story as a failure to resist the all-out technocorporate assault on that nebulous thing we call our attention. This cycle of anxious guilt goes on. It becomes harder to think, the more we think about ourselves. Finally we collapse in exhaustion, burnt out, unable to work, unable to attend.

We quit our jobs (if we can afford to). Perhaps we take a sabbatical. When we do, we discover a whole other economy designed to help us properly pay attention (note the metaphor): fancy mindfulness retreats, self-help literature, a cottage industry of “brain hacking” tips, apps designed to keep us off other apps, and influencers on those apps promoting their chosen method for digital detoxing. “I’m worried about my child — should I limit their screen time?” a parent types into Chat-GPT, and spends two hours refining the responses. Somewhere a Zen master laughs and claps his one hand together.

But what is being lost in this collective hysteria around the loss of our attention, and our frantic attempts to preserve it? For one thing, our extremely narrow definition of it. Even a brief look at scientific attempts to study and measure attention will reveal this. The term “attention span” is the limited product of countless 20th-century laboratory experiments — often funded by advertisers or through military research grants — which studied not the human experience, but very specific forms of response to stimulus. They often focused on simple screen-based tasks, like seeing how quickly a person can push a button on an aural cue, or watch a radar without distraction. Much of this research was done directly with marketing in mind.

Even today, you can look at an institution like the London Centre for Attention Studies, and find among its staff computer scientists, professors of marketing and entrepreneurship, software analysts, neuroscientists, and media studies experts. But not one historian, religious scholar, philosopher, or artist of any kind — no matter what these people might be able to teach us about different modes and practices of attention.

Today, then, when we worry about our inability to pay attention, when we lament the damage being done to our “attention spans”, we are doing so within a very specific context. The joint project of behavioural science and market research defines our attention in an extremely narrow way, as watching a single thing over a particular duration — life reduced to a mere stimulus response. Ironically, our attentions have been trained and focused upon a very specific idea of attention, and the entire realm of our embodied experience confined to what can be measured of our lives onscreen.

It’s this apparent trap which the collective calling itself the Friends of Attention has set about attempting to address. Associated with the Strother School for Radical Attention in New York City — and guided by the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, the filmmaker Alyssa Loh, and Strother School Director Peter Schmidt — the Friends have published an official written salvo for the public, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. Their stated mission: “…to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies”. It’s a good metaphor — “attention fracking” — and it appears often throughout the manifesto.

On the one hand, the Friends are concerned with how to get people together to practise what they call “radical”, or un-fracked, attention. Most of which they maintain is already being done every day, by religion practitioners, artists, hobbyists, or craftspeople. They also preach the clear value of places like museums and libraries as “sanctuaries of attention”, and within the manifesto’s self-identified aspiration to become “a kind of Silent Spring for our era”, it is in fact quite good at painting a damning portrait of those technological and corporate ventures, the advertising-and-cybernetics blitz which the Friends aptly call a “demented behaviorist arms race”, which has invaded our sensual lives for decades.

Attensity! lays out two particular definitions of attention, which the Friends intend to harmonise. The first — that narrow technology-dependent idea which gave us the “attention span” — is exemplified by the 2001 book by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy. The influence of Beck and Davenport’s work on our limited popular idea of attention heavily reinforced the old instrumental concept of attention as a tool to be used towards discrete tasks. However, the second kind of attention has much more to do with the larger picture of human consciousness left out from the first, exemplified by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s 2008 book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. As Stiegler points out, this deeper, more static kind of attention is contained in the French root of our English word: attendre (“to wait”). This is the kind of practice at the heart of most religious, mystical, and meditative traditions, which often strives to prolong held attention into a sense of infinity.

The proposed alternative to these two extremes, the Friends’ “radical” attention, comes from — of all places — literature. In their attempt to define it, they turn to a poetic phrase from the American novelist Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: “an empty cup of attention.” In the context of the Friends’ manifesto, this phrase remains unfortunately vague, a half-baked Koan never really suggesting anything concrete. For the Friends, “radical” attention is something both full and almost nonexistent. But how this differs from the kind of mystical, held attention (attendre) available to the contemplative traditions they mention, is difficult to discern. The manifesto frequently suggests that what is going on already in many artistic, religious, and scholarly practices, if wedded with their version of attention activism (which seems to consist of collective study, meditation, and other communal activities of the Strother School), would produce this third more ambitious kind of attention.

This would then be a step towards unfracking our attention, the Friends say, if we could only get together more often to practise less constricted attention on things we find important — whether that’s making art, visiting museums, staging Happenings, or engaging in intense academic study. This makes sense, insofar as the manifesto calls for more places like the Strother School, places with the explicit mission of providing “sanctuary” for attention, perhaps even training us to deal better with all the attention-fracking we face in our day-to-day lives. Yet this last idea leads to one of the manifesto’s more inadvertently disturbing ideas, in what the Friends imagine as a kind of “gym for the mind”. Just as the fitness revolution over the last few decades has led to the ubiquity of gymnasiums to counter our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, so the Friends imagine there might eventually be an analogous place for people to go to work out their sedentary brains.

To be clear, Attensity! has several valuable, noble things on its mind. Just like the Strother School itself, its mission is genuinely important and good — yet that’s why it is only right to quibble with certain particulars. Being presumably fit middle-class people, the Friends don’t seem to notice the darker picture their metaphor suggests. Tellingly, they do not suggest a “church for the mind” or a “school for the mind,” nor do they even consider something like “a swimming pool for the mind”. No — they go immediately to the gym, one of the least natural places possible. Though I doubt they intended it, the metaphor immediately conjures up pictures not of free bodies in movement in the real world, but a wholly artificial indoors, itself dedicated to dissociated, repetitive physical tasks which have little to do with the way human bodies evolved to live in the world.

This is to say nothing about the reality of today’s quasi-fascist gym culture, or the ways many men and women distort and chemically abuse their bodies in pursuit of physical perfection. Nor even to mention the clear class dynamics at work, where the replacement of aristocratic leisure with bourgeois athletics has become one of the most plainly middle-class ways of signalling one’s alignment. This is then almost always contrasted against those poor, stereotypically obese lower classes, who can’t afford good food, and who actually have to use their bodies at work. Is there anything really “radical”, then, about ideals of mystical awareness being yoked to this idea of a secular practice of repetitive attentional fitness?

One may well ask: how exactly are we going to get beyond our current prison-language of attention? There is one alternative considered in a very different book, Attention! A (short) History by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, first published in 2013. In fact, many of the points Cohen makes about the creation of modern attention theory, through that unholy conjunction of information theory and advertising, seem to have covertly or overtly influenced the Attensity! manifesto. There are many other reasons to suspect the debt, and not just the title, since Cohen himself also buttresses his opening chapter with examples from Henry James. Cohen’s version of Attention! is exhausting and exhaustive, yet as literature it has the virtue of communicating more naturally through story and history. Essentially, it’s a long, sustained meta-joke on the absurdity of such an idea as attention itself, unfurled in the form of a hyper-detailed and deliberately overwritten book, covering everything from the Phoenician alphabet to the pharmaceutical industry’s involvement in ADHD as a nebulous modern diagnosis.

Cohen also has the immense advantage of not having to preach: since his concern is literature, he can embody the paradoxes he’s examining, taking the reader through ancient Sumerian scripts, the development of typewriters, or the complex philosophy of time in St. Augustine’s theology — all for Cohen to admit in the end that the entire thing was written on speed, and so over-researched he can barely remember doing it. In the course of Attention! memory itself becomes a joke, attention itself a droll riff on the simultaneous nonexistence of past, present, and future. In the characteristic Cohenite non-formation, such a thing as “radical” attention could only mean an impossibility, an absurdity. As Cohen states, finally: “Wondering why fictionalists and poets didn’t write much about attention at the turn of the twentieth century is to wonder why they didn’t write much about climate change, or Islamo-theoterrorism—the topic hadn’t yet occurred to them, or hadn’t yet occurred. They didn’t feel their attention had been threatened, perhaps, because they hadn’t been conditioned to regard their attention resourcefully.”

That is, Cohen suggests that simply having written an exhausting, overpacked history of Attention is a dramatic exercise in attention, and in the futility of trying to define attention. Since we’ve been conditioned to consider our attention as a conditionable thing, now we pay more attention to attention than anything else. The trap reproduces itself, in an infinite regress. As the Friends of Attention make clear, and argue passionately, the real issue at stake is freedom — the freedom to treat our attention as something that truly belongs to us. Cohen suggests that the greatest freedom doesn’t lie in simply rejecting what society has to sell and signing up for a movement rebelling against it. This freedom isn’t going to be gained by turning to some “gym of the mind” or to any specific communal exercises. Rather, it may be that the most subversive thing one could be doing today is cultivating an irony which goes to the real heart of the situation.

Because Cohen’s deeply literary irony (embodied in a book that disavows its own subject) is something like the insights of Zen, Christian contemplative prayer, Sufism, and any number of mystical traditions. It is an irony which recognises that freedom is not part of a dialectic with unfreedom — that a “liberated” or “radical” attention is not the opposite of a “hacked” or “fracked” one. Instead, within the purview of the mystic, at least, freedom consists in the recognition that one is already free. One cannot “have” attention to begin with — the idea itself was created precisely to confine us within the idea. The real lesson of something like Cohen’s Attention! is that, once we’re done with the book, we ought to go find some real literature to read and stop paying so much attention to ourselves. It’s a recognition of an essential paradox of human life: it’s only once we recognise something doesn’t truly exist that we can start to understand why we need it.

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