Attention Spans

Our twitchy digital age wants attention. Interrupted and diverted, we have lost the ability to focus, suspended between the FOMO and the questionable pleasures delivered by emails, tweets, alerts, notifications, and achievements unlocked. These emails, tweets, and alerts clamor for attention, deploying every possible lure to capture, keep, and monetize our interest. Remove the colors from a smartphone and the efficacy of these snares pops into view. No longer engineered for the visual pleasure of the average user, the device to which we are addicted becomes heavier in the hand, an almost repulsive dead thing. Perhaps contemporary worries about the decline of attention, approached variously through multitasking, distraction, and hyperconnectivity, may eventually seem as fabulous as eighteenth-century claims about the dangers of the novel, but they are at present the stuff of which screeds are made, many of which foretell the death of reading. Couple such concerns with attacks on the humanities from a wide range of sources, both in and out of the academy, and the situation may seem, in part because it is, dire.

On these worried accounts, attention is finite and fractured, ever-diminishing and nearly impotent. That we are too regularly rendered captive to forces beyond our control is implicit in this representation of attention, one that William James had already captured in The Principles of Psychology (1890). We "all know," James feelingly opined, that sometimes our

attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start. … Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

(404)

Clearly, James would have struggled with device addiction. Figuring attention as a battle already lost, and anchoring it in the body, James designates ways in which both focus and its antithesis surpass our intention and will, subjecting us to chances and forces beyond "reason." Once this "confused, dazed, scatterbrained state" finally "break[s]," James wheels around to his stated interest: the "varieties" of attention of which humans are capable (404).

Like James, and in the midst of modern modes of distraction, literary critics have found themselves drawn to questions of engagement, intentionality, and intensity—in short, attention—in recent years, particularly to the extent that these issues build from or operate in tandem with insights accessible through phenomenology and its core concerns: affect, body, gesture, experience, consciousness. The glue that fastens us to the world and the fragile thread of connection always fraying further, attention offers a way of thinking about the relation between the individual and the (beeping or dinging) world, one that is not immediately or obviously dependent on ideology. At the same time, attention has a pragmatic dimension: it is something we can cultivate and do, a practice or a discipline. Attention understood in this latter way is not necessarily charted along psychological axes (desire/lack; compulsion/will) but, instead, is oriented by communality and respect. As Simone Weil wrote in a 1942 letter, "Láttention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité" ("Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity"; my trans.; 18), a practice she associated with both political change and spirituality.

Something like Weil's sense of attention, difficult to...