Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses

I am sitting in the Parisian RER B train during the Olympic summer of 2024. The heat is scorching; there's no air conditioning. Some of my neighbors doze off. Most of the others have their heads bent toward their smartphone screens. Absorbed. Like two other passengers, I am reading a book. Equally absorbed. Scenes of Attention is a collection of fourteen chapters, edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith, animators of Cabinet Magazine, of the ESTAR SER collective and of the Friends of Attention movement. Each chapter begins with a “scene of attention”—as I do in this review by paying attention to what my neighbors and I are paying attention to in the Express Regional Train from Gif-sur-Yvette to the Paris center, on a hot August day.It is easy to be absorbed by such a ravishing volume. In each chapter, the opening scene elegantly asserts a singular perspective on a fascinating attentional issue. Historians (part 1), philosophers (part 2), and cultural critics (parts 3 and 4) encapsulate a question in a punctual situation, before unfolding its context, meanings, and stakes, in an erudite yet accessible analysis.When and how was attention “discovered”? Richard J. Spiegel analyzes how Edward Titchener, in a strange mixture of histrionics and scholastic sobriety, could pretend to have made this discovery in 1908, despite centuries of reflections and publications on the topic. At what cost was the study of attention quantified and made scientific? Henry M. Cowles discusses the hopeless struggles of experimental psychologists to isolate attention in laboratory conditions, making their science dry, boring, and claustrophobic along the way. How did ornithologists transcribe birdsongs in the first half of the twentieth century? Alexandra Hui explains how focusing on a melodic figure and writing it down in a standardized mode of notation recomposes the sensitivity of both listeners and readers. How did early psychoanalysts learn not to pay attention to the (intentional) meaning of their patient's statements? Julian Chehirian dissects the highly specific technique of distraction involved in the gleichschwebend (free-floating) mode of attention devised by Sigmund Freud and Theodor Reik—showing how a certain wandering out of focus is the condition for “discovering” something else than what can be “re-cognized” because it is already known.So I let my attention wander in the RER . . . Are my neighbors really more “alienated” by their (distractive) smartphone screen than I am by my (passionate) reading of this joyful book? To help me respond, Carlos Montemayor questions the epistemic agency of attention; Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Shadab Tabatabaeian assess the impact of digital technologies on human creativity; Yael Geller contrasts the distraction of attention deficit hyperactive disorder patients with the obsession-possession of obsessive-compulsive disorder patients.The better question, however, may be not if, but how our attention is alienated by the devices we connect to our senses (books, screens, headphones). John Tresch relates his experience with a twelve-day silent jhȃna meditation online retreat, mapping the debates about modern appropriations of Eastern attentional techniques; Brian Yuan questions “attention ownership” by investigating the deployment of online education through the Summit Learning platform, both a technofix for broken school systems and an occasion for students to experiment with new modes of distraction online; Nick Seaver shows how attention recently became a buzzword in research on artificial intelligence, allowing “transformers” (the T in GPT) to simulate the type of selective processes powering human cognition; Natasha Dow Schüll contrasts three wearable devices recently marketed to monitor, correct, and enhance the user's attention. The lesson she draws from this comparison is one of much broader significance: “Each device we have examined in its own way short-circuits the very premise of attentional sovereignty by promising consumers that they can attain it by outsourcing it to digital functions” (207).In these four cases, but also in many pages of the book, a detour through some form of an alien (histrionics, laboratory cats, birdsongs, Buddhist mediation, capitalist platforms, computational science, wearable prostheses) helps debunk individualistic pretentions to possess oneself by an inner mastery of one's attention. The “attention liberation movement,” within which Burnett and Smith situate the volume in their introductory remarks, is made particularly complex, paradoxically emancipative—and, I would add, politically emblematic—by the fact that attentional liberation does not consist in (masterfully) “freeing” oneself from alienation, but in (intersubjectively) embracing certain forms of alienation (rather than others).Back in my RER wagon, three passengers on distant seats scream in uncanny synchronicity. It's one more gold medal for France, I assume. Are they alienated by Apple/Samsung? By France Television? By nationalism? Are they just having a good time, along with millions of other French people—just as I am having a good time immersing myself in this book, along with a few thousand other readers?Three other chapters provide original insights into the richness of attentional experiences. Joanna Fiduccia mobilizes art history and feminism to promote a “medium focus,” a species of attention focusing on the textured material (the medium) offered to the senses, which is also a medium attention insofar as it is situated somewhere in the middle between the extremes of detachment and absorption. Jonardon Ganeri, for his part, draws from the Bengali philosopher Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya's inspiring definition of negative attention, that is, a mode of perception focusing on something that is absent from our immediate surroundings. Lucy Alford also reflects on the paradoxical practice of attending to an absence, through her own experience of watching her mother experience several weeks of a coma in an intensive care unit.While it may be tempting to contrast my reading of Scenes of Attention with my neighbors watching the Olympic competitions on their smartphones, there is no need to oppose them, and even less so to judge one as essentially superior to the other. Encounters with curious aliens, moments of medium focus and of negative attention, can trigger poetic experiences on both sides. All in all, however, Scenes of Attention clearly deserves a gold medal in this most precious (though painfully undervalued) athletic discipline of multi-perspectivism: it is emancipatory—and powerfully illustrative of what the humanities have best to offer—because it addresses the conundrums of our attentional alienations from a broad multiplicity of contrasting perspectives, which can sometimes be contradictory without being less true and valuable for it.