I am not a super-user of social media or such. While I have done my share of posting and tweeting, unlike most of my colleagues until last month I had never done a conference video call, or anything involving “live” interaction with multiple interlocutors. In these past few months it so happened that I did my first Skype videoconference with a new “colleague” in Aberdeen, and soon after, was involved in a live chat with Cathy Davidson, Anne Balsamo, and Howard Rheingold. The latter was especially intimidating—a live chat with not only these three people but also with anyone who wanted to log on to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. People who are in the know know that Cathy, Anne, and Howard are real heavyweights in the field of social media, digital humanities, collaborative education. Howard, after all, invented the term “virtual community.” Not only was I unsure what I could possibly add, but, to my horror, only late in the game did I discover that the “chat” was going to be texted. Coming fresh from a rather seamless and entirely pleasant Skype—I was expecting something of that nature, audio, at least. I immediately emailed the producer and explained that I in fact do not know how to type. Well, that was the least of my troubles.
In what follows, I am offering some initial reflections on these two experiences, as “experiencing” a virtual community, but I want to link it to the keyword that both shared—“attention.”
First, the CHE thing.
We had read Cathy’s wonderful book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. She had provided the CHE with a very nice, elegant essay that distilled her main points:
http://chronicle.com/article/Collaborative-Learning-for-the/128789/
We opened the lines, and what followed was, well, mixed. Not in terms of the ideas, which were mostly pertinent, provocative, thoughtful, but in terms of process:
https://chronicle.com/article/Live-Chat-on-How-Brain-Science/128793/
The experience was sluggish, disconnected, frustrating. The software (which shall remain nameless) was so slow that even I, and hunt-and-peck kind of guy, was impatient for it to catch up to me. By the time a post was finally up, its neighbors in the stream very often were partnering with a post someplace way backstream.
I don’t intend to spend time pointing out the irony of the fact that the conversation was centered on the positives of agile, quick, attention-shifting, multitasking, fluent collaboration, when the technology that was to enable that connectedness and new social relation had, in this form, utterly failed. No, more interesting to me was how this failure pointed out, positively, just how right Davidson is when she says our assumptions about how we connect have shifted, are varied, multiformal, each with its own rhythm, syntax, rhetoric. We had gone into the live chat and settled comfortably into our seats with those expectations in mind. Were we able to switch out to improvise under a totally different set of circumstances? I suppose that the answer to that question would hinge on how readers (who were also caught up in a somewhat confusing stream of connectedness, disconnectedness) feel. In any case, it showed us how our expectations, assumptions, and attention has already been habituated to a new set of environments, and the fact that when the media fails, there is no resort to a “traditional” form of interacting at that moment—we are caught in a loop.
My other experience was quite different. A PhD student in comparative literature here at Stanford had completed her first doctorate in Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen, and had to take her viva exam. Aberdeen requires that one of the two examiners be “external,” and by that they mean not just external to the degree-granting department, but external to Aberdeen. However, I am not sure they meant extra-national. Nonetheless, bright one early morning, I was seated in the tech room in Pigott Hall with Lucy Alford, Skyping with Prof. Nadia Kiwan in Scotland. The ambiance of the room itself is probably not atypical of most computer labs at American universities—gloriously shining and “blazingly fast” (for the moment) Mac equipment, glossy screens, devices I have never seen, interspersed with Cheetos wrappers and spill-over, empty Coke cans, a stray bit of wire or cable, empty gutted out aluminum shells their innards harvested for other machines and uses, perhaps.
This was a dissertation defense, the thesis was entitled, “Problems in Post-Foundational Ethics: Contingency, Responsibility, Attention.” It is an altogether brilliant work--Alford notes how the phenomenon of mass-mediated witnessing is complemented by the rhetoric of urgency: people are asked not only to witness images of suffering, they also are asked to act immediately on such information and images. This, for Alford, bypasses and obscures the need for a more patient and, indeed, ethical tarrying with the basic questions of value and the actions required to acknowledge value and worth. The closing chapters of the dissertation are devoted to a radically-reimagined notion of “attention.” This, for her, is a way to draw out the most important implications of Heidegger's thought with regard to both ontology, and art. Here she turns to Simone Weil and Maurice Blanchot, as well as the works of Sven Arvidson, to flesh out and sustain a notion of attention that is particularly linked to lyric poetry. She makes a strong case that the language and structure of poetry comes closest to arresting the human subject and refocusing it on a truly attentive apprehension of the world.
In one of the finest passages of the dissertation, Alford writes:
“In the relational (and very much of-this-world) space of attention, others, systems of others, patterns of exchange and repetition, etc., are singled out, while at the same time observed as integrated within environments of change and interrelation. In intensive observation, in close reading, in attention, the singling out and parsing of information from the chaos of presence, a recognition of patterns, structures of occurrence, ecological processes and subtle marginal points (the nuanced hues across the throat of a bird, the seasonal changes in particulate matter in a region’s air currents, fine lines webbing the surface of a woman’s face, the spreading effect of a single event or product in a market or community) can be seen as a process of setting apart—the root meaning of making ‘sacred.’…In attention we set apart the object or objects of our attention as worthy of close reading, worthy of deep observation and concern.”
Put this side by side with what Davidson says about attention as something that can be collaborative: “I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.”
Once this juxtaposition is in place I sense two contradictory outcomes. The first, and obvious one, is to think that Alford and Davidson are talking about two diametrically opposed notions of attention—one taken in solitude, non-purposeful, attending rather than fashioning, poetic in an inward arc; the other dynamic, intentional, goal-oriented, engaged deeply and essentially with others, many others. I wonder, however, whether one might not imagine some other possibility that, while not adhering closely to either, might not be a third possibility. I am suggesting a powerful combination of social attention, one in which one’s attention leans on an Other’s, and one attends together, apprehending multiple facets, but not with a specific goal or outcome in mind—not even a synthesis. The collaborative dimension would involve, as Alford foregrounds, an ethical dimension, in which one’s attention neither attempts to dominate the object of the poetically-attending act, nor the attending to that object by an other. Like Davidson’s model, this would bring in dialog, comparison of perspectives, degrees of attention placed at different angles onto the object.
Maybe that would not work. But the motive behind my tentative gesture comes from this—I am in solidarity with much of what Alford proposes, and her motives for doing so. But, to go back to the opening of this blog, I am firmly cognizant of the fact that Davidson puts forward so cogently—we are brought together now in much different ways, and “attention” now exists in multiple ways. If we persist in seeing only one dimension, one approach to attending, we will necessarily miss a lot. The kinds of creative collaboration Davidson proposes may in fact work together with the ethical poetics Alford argues for in her work.
David, I deeply appreciate both the chat and your post. Having engaged in unorthodox teaching methods myself and had arguments with administrators over them, it was extremely exciting to see more established educators actively rethinking pedagogy to adapt to current circumstances.
The ironic thing for me about the chat was that the lag caused me to distribute my attention because I found that I could do snippets of reading while still keeping up. It was even more ironic that I happened to be reading Renato Rosaldo's Culture and Truth at the time, which has a chapter on time that describes the differing perceptions of the Ilongot people of the Philippines with whom he lived.
This chapter in particular (Ilongot Improvisation) is relevant because one of the underlying issues at stake in your discussion of both Alford and Davidson is not just how attention gets distributed but also whether it gets distributed at a time one expects, as the preference for single, directed tasks can also be traced to the capitalist notion that time must be apportioned into discrete pieces in order to be commodified. According to Rosaldo, what this leaves out is the ability to respond to unexpected, untimed situations (not unlike the chat lag you experienced). I really like this quote from the book, particularly the way it resituates the notion of attentiveness: "Social unpredictability has its distinctive tempo, and it permits people to develop timing, coordination, and a knack for responding to contingency. These qualities constitute social grace, which in turn enables an attentive person to be effective in the interpersonal politics of everyday life."
Thanks for this great blog, David. I tried to leave a comment yesterday but the Arcade system at it. Deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. This is also what kept happening at the CHE Forum. Downside of interactive communication in academe in 2011: we have terrible, mostly proprietary tools that do not allow us to collaborate as freely as we would like. Some, like Blackboard, are so inimical to true collaboration, so bent on surveillance and enterprise student information systems, that they offer us little as thinkers, researchers, and co-learners. Yet the switching costs are so high, few institutions can afford to change. So that is the downside and it is a big one. Upside: nearly 1500 people were part of our Forum. As clunky and cludgy as it seemed, I've never heard of (and neither has Chronicle of Higher Education) 1500 people logging into a webinar. There is a crying need, and, for all our frustration, we met it better than the status quo. Maybe that is our metric, not what we aspire to but how we inch the system along progressively.
Your student's dissertation sounds marvelous and I look forward to learning more. Deep attention is a goal for all of us in our lives at various times. That said, I don't believe our technologies make us any less committed to deep attention. There is no deeper attention than a coder writing code. We have such a naive and uninterrogated view of deep attention in the West because, in fact, almost all our research on attention, beginning with William James's original "Attention" chapter in 1890 (Principles of Psychology) has been focused on the form of attention interrupted by external stimuli. What 5000 years of Eastern thinking on attention tells us is that the hardest attention of all is deep attention: alone, in a meditative space, with no distractions, it is the mind that confuses itself. If it didn't we'd have a lot more Buddhas in the world! That's the profound conclusion of Eastern understandings of attention: it is hard to have deep attention and, in fact, reading doesn't even come close. Even "reading" as a category is a mish-mash. We read from different parts of the brain and in different ways when what we read is new, difficult, a re-read, a re-read of something first read in a pleasurable circumstance, a re-read of something first read in traumatic surroundings, a skim, something that must be memorized, and on and on. We call it "reading" but all those are different cognitive acts, with more or less deep attention. Given that, I dismiss simple binaries of "multitasking" as being about technology. Ask an insurance adjuster and he will say texting is multitasking and distracting--but so is trying to back up a car after you've received a notice that you have cancer, lost your job, or that your wife is leaving you. Heartburn and heartbreak--physical and emotional disruptions of our life patterns--are far greater assaults to "deep attention" than too much email.
That said, we have not yet even begun to develop the protocols for the new world of communication parallel with the ones we created for the 19th and 20th century world of communication. We will. We're fifteen years into the commercialization of the internet and now is the perfect time to begin thinking how to protect ourselves as worker in an "adjunct" world (and not just for academe), how to train ourselves as life-long learners to make the tools help us not use us.
So that's my take to your wonderful blog. A bit wandering, but hope it is provocative.
I totally agree that we have just begun to realize that there is big need for rethinking digital work flows from the perspective of individual person and worker. To me it looks like we live in the middle of cognitive confusion. The tools that we use are more or less given to us without any understanding how digital work should be organised. I also think that the reason for this is our eternal habit of forcing new possibilities to old jackets. This creates enormous waste of human talent, motivation and productivity. Maybe we should think "green tech as brain green" as well. The change from industrial age to digital one can´t succeed unless we start to knowledge and accept that these issues are no where near as ready as they should be. Flow of information is way too precious to be left for priests only.
Yes, that is a huge question. The horizons opened up are enormous, yet the often sad fact is that attention is called on itself to "organize," even while one is being encouraged to "think outside the box." It was part of our utopian hope in BiblioTech that "industry" might start making different products with truly different kinds of attention to different things. I am still waiting to see if that is possible. I am, as you can see from the blog, attracted, excited by, both models of attention that I mention. What will be the various forms for manifesting "attention." Or should it be called on to manifest itself at all? Can it be left alone? Should it be?
[Lest anyone get the wrong idea, Arcade doesn't use proprietary software; we run on Drupal, much like HASTAC. Arcade also usually doesn't eat comments—Cathy's must have been unusually delicious. Sorry that happened!]
My apologies. I was writing quickly and meant to grump against the proprietary software generally available for educational use, not against Arcade (which did eat my reply---probably my fault: I didn't realize there was an intermediate email acceptance of registration; when I then accepted, it ate my response, typed before the authorization was complete). It's a great site. Thanks much. And even the CHE event was complicated--hosting nearly 1500 people simultaneously on a webinar is no small feat. Does anyone out there know a system that could handle that? I'd love suggestions and bet CHE would too. They were so excited by the response to our chat that I think they'd like to do it again.
I think that counts as eating. I will refer the problem to our webmaster and see if we can prevent it in future.
And Prof. Davidson, thank you so much for your comments on ARCADE and your general wonderfulness, if I may be so brazenly fangirl-y and un-academic.
David, this is fascinating. Thanks so much for posting it, and for your generous response to the dissertation.
I find your approach to this question intriguing -- particularly the use of these two contrasting moments of technological bliss/ disforia. I'm also interested in this proposal about syncing the kind of multidirectional relations of attention found social networking with a plural and perhaps event joint or shared mode of attending -- the notion of "attending together" will stay with me for a while.
A few thoughts: I am with you on the plurality and systemic nature of contemporary attention, and the new kind of relating we find ourselves doing. I'm also in agreement with Davidson that this "scattered" quality of everyday attention is not so new, or so bound to technological experience -- "monkey mind" has been around for as long as we have. In the dissertation, I have two chapters on systemic and ecological models of this kind of plural and multidirectional relation. I believe that the closed encounter, attentional or not, between I and you (or I and Thou or I and Autrui), doesn't hold -- precisely because of the kind of interlocking nature of contemporary relation. We are nested in relation, webs of relation, ecologies or networks of relation. Attention in this sense moves toward plurality, porosity in a much more complex sense than "facing" a single human other.
I have not thought through the implications of social media for this line of thought, but it is certainly an important element and a huge influence in the idea of "systemic relation". Very challenging to work through though -- particularly because working with others in those media formats (particularly with their interfaces, rather than in the quite different role of coder) are often strongly associated with this kind of fragmented, distracted, scattered and out-of-touch, out of rhythm attentional experiences, as you describe with the CHE event.
Nonetheless, it seems that we must -- and do! -- find ways of adapting, responding with new forms of attention, new modes of relation. It's very difficult, however, to think -- much less articulate elegantly -- what that might look like as applied or conscious practices. How do we begin to give language to these more porous and plural forms of contemporary attention? I hope to keep thinking about this and I hope you do too.
I am interested in your thought to combine the productive, goal-oriented approach to attention with an ethical attention. One challenge I foresee lies in the possible conflict between this goal-oriented or productivity-oriented attention and the form I'm proposing, which would precede and ground the very formation of goals and responsible action. In other words, attention first, then goal. That you and I get together to push our plan through may mean that we need to master a collaborative way of working, but does not necessarily mean that we're any more attentive to the implications of our plan, or to the systems, terrains, and ecologies in which it takes place.
One of the most interesting aspects of attention is the way in which, despite all our adaptation and brain-training exercise, the cognitive fitness movement, and countless new mediatic demands on our attention, the span and endurance of our attention has remained very human-all-too-human. There have been some studies have suggested a decline of our attentional endurance and plasticity, and a weakening in our ability to effectively multitask, particularly among those growing up in today's attention economy. This is no doubt a very difficult change to measure, however. Nonetheless, it may well be that while the demands on our attention are different and the modes of working and communicating are different, we are still using a very old tool, a very slow to evolve and limited resource.
Two great, important, questions! As you see from my reply above, my blog on this is full (maybe too full) of utopian thought. I really want to work with you and others on this. The new element you introduce--that of duration, is wonderful. I am sure brain science has all sorts of calibrations for that--different peaks and troughs and liminalities. Can't help but think too of hypnotics--and meditation, zen. But remember the Zen of business? By the way, have people seen this remarkable essay in the Atlantic by Marie Myung-Ok Lee on horse eyes? And work?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/want-to-be-a-better-...
I am reserving comment--await yours!
The blog is entitled, "Consult this horse, but cut out the middle man." Should appear at some point. It's on my Tumblr now: http://tumblr.com/xx54mg8xm4
Hi David,
This is a provocative conversation on several levels, but for now I'll stick to one...or maybe two. I've been teaching a course called Writing & Cognition for a few terms and I've noticed that on the "test" for hyper/deep attentiveness, I always have a perfect score on hyperattentiveness and they always have a mixed score. Let's not dwell on my need to have 13 tabs open right now. One student argued that the mixed scores indicate a strain between the kind of concentrated work required in most book-based classes and the maintenance of social networks. Maintenance of friend networks happens online of course, but mostly through the cell phone. It's not inherently connected with an impulse to 'search' or 'query'. It's a critical tool to relate. In fact, I see the panic on students' faces in all my classes when I ask them to put the cell phone in a bag or back pocket because the majority have it on the desk, in view at all times. Attentiveness to those relationships is always urgent, no matter the message content and no matter the length or stability of the friendship. Digital connections trump physical presence (with other students in the room, for instance), mostly because the form of interaction is brief, rapid-fire and consistently re-enforcing that one has the attention of a friend in any given space. Dispersed attention, or collective attention that is not particular seems frustrating. Even with mass protests here in Cairo, one attends to friends in Tahrir while chanting, taking photos, tweeting updates, hoping to increase or satisfy the number of 'followers' attracted to their individual perspectives on what's happening. No one is anonymous, everyone particular, standing out by a comment or photo, or picked from among the scrolling mass of new tweets with a provocative phrase or new bit of information.
That said, back to Lucy's dissertation (everyone wants to read it by the way) and follow-up comment. While I agree monkey mind describes quite a familiar hyper-attentive state, I do think technology not only matters, but makes use of it. Instead of thinking that inner quiet is a value, many students at least believe it's the nightmare of 'nothing to do' and a sign of broken relations. No one is reaching out to connect. The question I'd love to think through is how to produce the desire or craving for collaboration? How to produce more deeply attentive knowledge from sustained and expanded connections. Cathy has lots of experience with this, and I'm still wading through it.
For now, I'd say the two modes that you describe are evident in day-to-day interactions but doing different kinds of work. Ideally, I'd like to bring them together for myself as much as in the classroom. My thirteen tabs are open in an effort to trigger an epistemological connection, to ripen the conditions for learning something new. In that way, my friend feed is a way to maintain friendships, sure, but moreso a way to 'bump into' what's happening in the world and rhizomatically probe new information until ideas click. But this is hardly the norm and I'm definitely not doing it in an ideal way. Ethan Zuckerman has talked about the limits of this, how social media has made us provincial. While we think friends' info-recommendations expose to a world of issues and ideas, we tend to see repeat postings and a limited range of issues represented. He encourages us to make use of 'bridge people' who regularly link distinctly different networks. i think new technology that targets global citizenship could be promising insofar as it can stretch attentiveness to friends into attentiveness to strangers' lives, aspirations, and struggles in a sustainable way. And it might also relieve the bridge-people from so much labor.
That said, the potential to open up an ethically attentive space seems promising but still far away from instinctive habit, and it's not even easy to do. I'd be interested in the epistemology of empathy and connection online. Under what conditions do we gain/generate knowledge from empathetic connections with strangers, across difference, and even toward those who haven't been imagined yet? How do activist communities attempt to provoke this kind of civic feeling in the broader public? And how do the temporal limits of empathy narrow the window for action, or make it unpredictable?
As usual, Ebony, you hone in on the essential and come up with a bouquet of new ideas. I would really like to see what Lucy says about your final points in particular. Though I should let her speak for herself, in the thesis there is a strong wrestling with the idea of empathy and intuition--how they merge and separate precisely under the weight of specific media, and in fact rhetorical "scenes," to borrow from Kenneth Burke. And as you know, this is also a lot of what my book talks about (due out in June!). Thanks for joining in--please keep reading/writing!
I want to respond to this beautifully stated query: "The question I'd love to think through is how to produce the desire or craving for collaboration? How to produce more deeply attentive knowledge from sustained and expanded connections. Cathy has lots of experience with this, and I'm still wading through it. " To me, that is how we inspire lifelong learning, as in Wikipedia tapping into a desire to share what we know. How do we work against all the years of individual achievement as ascertained by perfect individual grades, class rankings, and test scores, to remind students that, even in school, our real quest is to be learning and questing together? In other words, you see kids or anyone out there working on something and often there is a profoundly collaborative moment, even for those of us who love to spend hours alone and writing---but school is almost anti-collaborative in its conditioning and institutional structures. We have to consciously break patterns ('unlearning' in Toffler's phrase) before we can inspire new ones.
collaborative than others. I'm thinking, of course, of the sciences and engineering. To some extent the collaboration is forced by the nature of the work. And often the collaboration is that of a half dozen or a dozen junior people in a lab working on the intellectual agenda of the lab director, though I'd imagine that there is wide variation among laboraties as to how much freedom junior members are given in pursuing their own ideas.
As for literary studies,the discipline has come to be organized around the activity of explicating texts and that is, almost by definition, something done by individuals. In some versions of the discipline's meta-narrative the multiplication of individual explications is more or less the point.There's collaboration on, e.g. major editorial projects, but how many have ridden that horse to intellectual stardom? Can the work budget be re-conceived so as to be more conducive to collaboration?
Absolutely, Cathy. Clay Shirky talks about Wikipedia in this way and looking at the discussion page behind any entry really captures the attentive spirit of composition and revision. Perhaps I've thrown myself back into a twisted Dewian mode, but I've been working on annoyance as a back-door into collaborative problem-solving. Not solving small problems that arise--from technology issues to a broken door, to figuring out the credibility of sources--I try not to give advice right away (and this is so hard for me). The silence doesn't last of course, particularly in first year comp. A burst of intolerance and critique takes over after the first person's suggestion doesn't solve the problem. Then trust in the second person's idea fades and a new one takes its place, but just as the deafening sound of disagreement makes collaboration seem like an impossibility, something shifts. The desire to solve it faster together takes over the desire to critique an idea when the complexity of the issue becomes clear. It's hard. And the difficulty will go away faster when we work together. So, feelings about problem-solving are not always characterized by the noble curiosity we publicly champion, but also the discomfort of a dilemma that is not solved easily. This tampers with the meditative ideal when annoyance and intolerance of sustained difficulty say as much about collaboration as mutual curiosity in problems that arise. It's not all one or the other. I wonder if this mixed bag of feelings makes collaborative work seem unattractive to students, at least initially? We get over the hump, but the memory of an uncomfortable beginning and false starts may need some re-coding to make it desirable in the future with other people and situations. Thanks for the reminder about Toffler by the way. I haven't thought of him in years and it's helpful to return to some of his pithy phrases.
First, thank you, David, for drawing my attention to his post. As always, your thoughts on engaging otherness are generously directed at others. Given my research focus, I honed in on nods to action that the enthusiastic responses to DPL make. (Apparently, it is impossible to avoid the vocabulary of attention in this conversation, or in our chosen métier of literary criticism.)
Meredith quotes Rosaldo on the "interpersonal politics of everyday life" to think through the time of attention. Ebony wonders how to widen the "window for action." And Lucy considers whether her "ethical attention" must precede Cathy's "goal-oriented" variety. This language of the political raises the question: What goals does attention have? And might the varieties of goals we identify somehow shape the forms that attention takes?
In my work on how narrative fiction deploys affect to promote or jam response to environmental dilemmas, I puzzle through the steps between awareness (which may or may not be synonymous with attention), investment, and action. Is attention predicated on intention? That is, must we have some pre-existing goal—for action, in particular—before we "single out" and direct our energies at a problem? Or can attending to a detail from everyday or literary life as it bursts forth help manage our responses and set our goals? Another approach to the issue: some of the "external stimuli" about which Cathy writes above might in fact be determinants and not deterrents of attentiveness. At the base of these questions, then, is a challenge to the distinction between goal-oriented and ethical attentions, a different way of imagining how Lucy's and Cathy's proposals might "work together."
More questions than answers, I realize.
"Is attention predicated on intention? That is, must we have some pre-existing goal—for action, in particular—before we "single out" and direct our energies at a problem? Or can attending to a detail from everyday or literary life as it bursts forth help manage our responses and set our goals?"
There is a widespread notion that the brain is about prediction. At a range of timescales it's got a prediction about what's coming next. If you will, it's intending something, whether passively, 'out there' in the world, or actively, as something it's directing the body to do. If experience fails to meet that prediction, attention is aroused.
Karl Pribram gave an amusing example in his Languages of the Brain (1971, p. 51):
A somewhat different example that I like is what happens when you go up or down stairs in the dark and misestimate where you are. If you're going up, you'll expect a riser where there isn't one and your foot, instead of firmly coming in contact with a surface, will suddenly 'plunge' through the non-existent surface, the one that, if it had been there, would have accepted the weight of your body. Going down, you attempt to pound your leg through a surface that wasn't there in your intention. In either case, you're disconcerted for a moment as you try to regain your footing.
that are relevant.
Great comic!
More later.
Hi David, Cathy, Lucy, and all,
This is all fascinating stuff! I've just finished a dissertation at the University of California, Irvine that focuses on dysfunctional states of attention in 20th-C experimental poetry: my chapters look at poetry of trance (in H.D. and the Surrealists), boredom (in Stein, Cage, and Goldsmith), and distraction (in the Language and Flarf poets). I'd be very interested to read more about how Lucy describes the ethics of attention in lyric poetry. Part of the project of my dissertation is to point out that embedded in the moralized imperative to concentrated attention in poetry (I look specifically at Imagism and its legacy) are ableist assumptions about the body and mind, and a somewhat antiquated idea of attention as mostly a matter of will. Cathy's positive view of multitasking is just one way in which other parts of the attentive spectrum might be "rescued" and considered worthy of the phenomenological investigation that poetry makes possible. I'd argue that the poets I examine in my dissertation are already looking for answers to the question that Lucy poses in her comment above: "How do we begin to give language to these more porous and plural forms of contemporary attention?" For one thing, these poets of "dysfunctional" attention generally complicate or abandon the notion of a unified speaker in favor of depicting a more complex and multi-tiered cognitive experience. For another, their poetry often depicts processes unfolding in time, rather than fixating on the "significant" moment in the way that Imagism often does.
I'm delighted to have found some people interested in these issues, and look forward to continuing these discussions!
Best,
Erin