Radical Attention
This post in an occasional series on Attention in the modern world (and in our schools), looks at a recent short book on challenges to attention in the contemporary world.
Julia Bell's pocket-sized essay, Radical Attention, from Peninsula Press, examines the ways our attention has become a commodity and how an industry has developed out of our distractions. It is written from the moment, too: the experience of recent months (the pandemic, Black Lives Matter) heightens her writing. The early pages voice a now-familiar anxiety - that the ‘black hole’ of online interactions has changed everything, that It never used to be like this when I sat down to write, and that previously Time was a continuum of attention. Now distraction is everywhere: increasingly there is little opportunity for us to be with ourselves, to sink back into that invisible ‘wedge-shaped’ core of self. She takes a month off social media, and her anxiety levels noticeably diminish … I simply experience the world. But the more regular condition is that underlying anxiety:
Our attention lies on a new frontier between the public and the private. Whereas before it might have been property that gave us privacy - a home, physical sanctuary - now it must almost be at the level of our consciousness that we decide whether we are in public or private.
I found the latter parts of the essay the most thought-provoking. There, Julia Bell calls for a more radical, active kind of attention (having scathingly dismissed the mindfulness industry (distraction is on the other side of that coin). She cites Keats’s famous negative capability, of being able to exist within conundrums, paradoxes, and to resist the temptation towards absolutes, to understand nuance. All that is of course the polar opposite of most online interactions now. Literature can do this: she quotes James Wood’s idea of its serious noticing:
The way in which both writer and reader are drawn to the telling details, the small transcendent moments that exist in literature and in life, when we are alive to our senses, to what happens around us.
This echoes Maryanne Wolf’s fears in Reader, Come Home: are our brains losing this capability? Are we not directing attention in a conscious, deliberate manner?
Sometimes the best way to glimpse meaning is to start small, to pay attention to detail, and give your deliberate attention to what is in front of you. To try and notice what happens. You make time. To choose to look.