Attention-Seeking
I
It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.
Gertrude Stein, ‘What is English Literature’
Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting – on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. And when we are interested, we pay attention: sometimes, at considerable cost. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity: our official curiosity is a form of obedience, an indebtedness to the authorities. In our unofficial curiosity we don’t know who we want to be judged by. It is the difference between knowing what we are doing, and following our eyes.
It is through both kinds of interest that we tend to recognize and characterize ourselves and other people. ‘We get hooked,’ the critic Aaron Schuster writes in The Trouble with Pleasure,
on certain things, impressions, patterns, rhythms, words that give a warped consistency to our world, the grain of madness that provides us with our style and character, our secret coherence – whether this saves us or drives us to our doom.
Our attention is attracted, and we attract attention, in very specific, idiosyncratic ways. We are not hooked by anything and everything; we don’t desire everybody; only particular people, images, things, patterns, rhythms and words affect us. Indeed, what is striking, as Schuster suggests, is just how selective we are, and how much we assume our coherence, however secretly; as though everything about ourselves could be connected if only we had the wherewithal. Whether or not it is a grain of madness that provides us with our style and character, this assembling of our selves through what we notice, through what, as we say, attracts our attention – both consciously and unconsciously – and just how surely we limit the repertoire of what we do notice, smacks of addiction (‘we get hooked’); and of a fundamental unknowingness about how we make ourselves up. As though what we call our identity, which is to do with what we notice, is a kind of fixation, an obsession with certain ideas about ourselves. What we might call our taste, or more simply our preferences, becomes a type of fate, or a preferred picture of ourselves (which ‘saves us or drives us to our doom’). The famous surrealist motto, ‘Tell me what you are haunted by and I will tell you who you are,’ all too easily translates into ‘Tell me what you are interested in and I will tell you who you are.’
There is an assumption in psychoanalysis, as in the wider culture, that we are by nature interested creatures, driven to pay attention (at least once we have learned what it means to pay). That growing-up, ideally, means discovering one’s interests; initially our apparently innate interest in our own survival, and our imaginative elaboration of this; and then, depending on our affluence and our inventiveness, our following of our curiosity as far as we are able. We may think of our attention as inspired by need, and formed by nurture (attention as another word for appetite). Babies and young children are, as we know, very intent on what they want, very intolerant of frustration, and very troubled by being bored, by losing interest in things. So we are prone, as adults, if we are lucky enough, to take our interests for granted, rather than be unduly bothered by them. Only when they become in some way disturbing do we become interested in our interest (‘interest’ then being a word for phobia, or obsession, or perversion, or addiction, or ideology, or hobby, or discipline). Our so-called symptoms narrow our minds by forcing our attention; and reveal, by the same token, just how much it is forced attention that we suffer from (so-called sexual perversions confine our interest in sex; anxiety and depression over-focus our attention; and this may be part of their function). It is, though, one of our projects to circumscribe the range and intensity of our curiosity; as though our capacity for interest was itself threatening, by being so potentially promiscuous, or unbounded, or unpredictable. As though we always have too much or too little appetite, too much or too little danger. Our interest in anything or anyone threatens to become excessive, or not excessive enough.
Whatever or whoever it is that does interest us, like the appetites that prompt our interest, effectively organizes our lives for us; we follow, and/or avoid following, our attention. Our interests are what we do, who we listen to, where we go. Psychoanalysis redescribes interest and attention as sexual desire, and takes this to be the informing force and purpose of our lives; and clearly sexuality can be used, if only by analogy, as a way of seeing how interest and attention might work (any presumed life force, or essence, is always an explanation of attention and interest). So when one of the early psychoanalysts, Ernest Jones, introduced the Greek term ‘aphinisis’ (disappearance) into psychoanalysis, he was addressing one of our fundamental terrors: the ‘primal anxiety’ of having no interest, ‘losing the capacity or opportunity for obtaining erotic gratification’, loss of desire as loss of life; a predicament, in other words, in which satisfaction is impossible: in which nothing is of interest, nothing engages us, and we are not drawn to anyone (it is perhaps akin to the nineteenth-century fear of the sun going out). Contrasting it with what he calls ‘the artificial aphinisis of inhibition’, real aphinisis is the ‘total extinction’ of ‘sexual capacity and enjoyment as a whole’. Desire might feel or have been made to feel so unbearably conflictual that it has to be abolished; a person is then left living in a world in which there are, to all intents and purposes, no objects of desire. What can we do with ourselves when, or if, nothing is of interest? And what would we have to have done, or what would have had to happen to us, for our interest in life to disappear?
We need to wonder, then, why we would ever want to accuse anyone of being attention-seeking. Attention-seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it. In its familiar sense, it is a way of wanting something without always knowing what that is. And it is, by the same token, a form of sociability, an appeal to others to help us with our wanting. Whether it is a cover story for the straightforwardness of desire, or a performance of the perplexity of demand, we seek attention without quite understanding what the attention is that we seek, and what it is in ourselves we need attending to. It is out of this complexity that people get together, to find out what is possible (sociability depends on attention-seeking). Part of the apparent relief of acquiring language is that it seems, occasionally, to clarify the obscure exchanges we make our lives out of.
We are attention-seeking, in both senses – throughout our lives, and not only as children – partly, as I say, because it is not always clear what we are seeking attention for, and what we want to pay attention to: what in ourselves, and outside ourselves, needs attending to, and what we hope will be the consequences of securing the attention we seek. Because attention-seeking is not generally prized, it has to be disguised as something else – as art, say, or manners, or prayer, or success – so a lot of our so-called creativity involves us in finding acceptable ways of finding and attracting the attention we desire. This attention may misfire, may not get us the lives we want, but attention-seeking is where we start, and what we start with. What Lee Edelman calls, with deliberate tastelessness, ‘the fascist face of the baby’ is drawing our attention to our earliest gifts and talents for getting people to notice – or rather, to reveal – what we need; the attention we have to give to being paid attention, and the attention we have to give to what is worth paying attention to.
Need requires attention, and everything relies, initially, upon the kind of attention that meets our needs; and then on the kind of attention we can give to our needs and wants as we grow up (needs are constituted by the ways in which they are responded to). Everything follows on from how and where we pay our attention; both the attention that is demanded of us, and the attention we give without intending to, without noticing. The bringing-up and educating of children, whatever their culture or class, initiates them into regimes of attention; it tells them, in no uncertain terms, what is worthy of their attention, and how it should be paid, as well as what kind of attention they should be wanting, and how they should go about getting it (neither distraction nor showing off is taught in schools). All religions, moralities, arts, sciences, politics and therapies organize and promote certain kinds of attention; in their different ways they tell us where to look and who to listen to; they tell us what about ourselves we should value and be valued for: what about ourselves we should take an interest in, and what we should take rather less interest in than we do.
And yet, of course, no one can actually predict the consequences of the attention they pay and are paid. As education and propaganda and advertising and sexuality continually reveal, people’s attention can be exploited and manipulated and directed, but it can’t be ultimately controlled. We never quite know what people will make of what they are given; or how their minds may drift while they are paying attention. These essays, then, are about this curious and revealing phrase, ‘paying attention’; not quite a cost–benefit analysis, but to do with investments and risks, and questions about currency and exchange rates. By attention, I mean simply how we find and involve ourselves with what interests us, what encourages and what inhibits us in following our curiosity, and what effect our being interested may have on ourselves and other people. As these essays want to suggest, it is worth noticing both what provokes our attention and what, like shame, inhibits it. So they are also about what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls our ‘capacity to be affected’.
We have to back our interests to find out what they are; and ideally our earliest environments should allow for and encourage certain of our interests – what John Stuart Mill called ‘experiments in living’ – rather than simply or solely determining what they should be (morality not born of experimentation can only be dogma). Attention and interest are always themselves experimental, even when – or perhaps particularly when – we are unaware of the risks being taken; curiosity never comes with a guarantee. Clearly, to prefer safety to curiosity, or to experience them as too much at odds with each other, is to limit the possibilities of experience, as is a consistent or too certain knowing of what one is interested in (it is always worth wondering what our interests are a way of not being interested in). Having been, at first and of necessity, consistently interested in and attentive to our parents, it is always an extraordinary moment in a child’s life when she begins to realize that there are pleasures outside the family, that her parents’ words are not the only words in the world (one of the ways we look after our parents is by believing what they say). One of the child’s fundamental questions is: what is he allowed to be interested in outside the family? The history of our attention, in other words, is one of the stories of our lives.
II
Language only ever shows you how things would look if language was used.
Miles Hollingworth, Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is, of course, a great deal of concern currently about the effect of modern technologies on attention, and particularly the attention spans of the young (attention spans, to some people’s relief, unlike qualities of attention, can be measured). In one of many clearly heartfelt contemporary jeremiads, the philosopher Talbot Brewer writes in a striking recent essay, appropriately entitled ‘What Good are the Humanities?’:
Our attentional environment has not equipped students with the traits required for appreciative engagement with literature or art or philosophy; the habits of devoted attention and of patience and generosity in interpretation; the openness to finding camaraderie and illumination from others in the more treacherous passages of life … What degrades our attentional habits is not just advertising itself but also those communicative forms that survive the fierce competition for advertising dollars.
Of course, many more people are interested in those ‘communicative forms’ – social media – than in literature, the arts and philosophy; and not everyone values devoted attention, patience and generosity – which do not necessarily go together – nor, indeed, the acquiring of ‘good’ habits (it is part of the consensus being assumed here that ‘we’ all know what these words mean, and why they matter; what is being promoted here is the right kind of attention to what words are used to do). But it is not unusual now for loss of attention to be equated with loss of morality, if not the loss of culture itself (that is, the culture defined by those people who claim to be in a position to decide what culture is). Nor is it unusual to assume that changes in habits of attention portend larger changes; and that our morality or civility is somehow bound up in the ways we pay attention: in what we make of our attention, and what we make out of it.
I was educated in the culture that is being defended here – a culture of close reading and slow looking, in which the arts were taken to be formative – which tended to pride itself, as certain kinds of liberalism do, on the ability and freedom to question and cast doubt upon itself; and to concentrate in a way that made recognition of something other than one’s self and its abiding preoccupations possible. As though this, in and of itself, guaranteed something; something that could be called the impossibility of fanaticism, or fascism, or certain kinds of egotism; or the imagining of lives not devoted to profiteering; or the possibility of including as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as little demeaning hierarchy as possible (all in the service of personal development, assumed to be the ultimate value). Which at its best it can do and at its worst is as coercive and sure of itself as the people it claims to oppose. Liberalism always claims to be widening our attention (and sympathy) without always being able to know what to do with the attention it has made possible (and, indeed, whether we can bear the sympathy we find ourselves feeling). We have to wonder what the good reasons are for regulating people’s attention, and what the best ways of doing so are; and also what we imagine unregulated attention would be like (undevoted attention is presumably attention devoted elsewhere). The catastrophe is always of people being too interested in the wrong things, in the wrong ways; for the fascist and the anti-fascist alike, for example, it is by definition very difficult to give attention to anything other than fascism. Morality is always about seeing things as they should be seen: the right kind of attention pointed in the right direction, the right language about the right forms of attention.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, psychoanalysts of very different schools have taken up this issue of the widening of attention. Following on from Freud’s idea of a new way of listening, which he called ‘free-floating attention’ – a kind of attention in which one doesn’t know beforehand what is of interest – Christopher Bollas (of the Independent Group) has written of people’s fear of the complexity of their own minds; Marion Milner has written of ‘wide-angled attention’, which is receptive by not focusing (when I paint a tree in a field, she once told me, I look at everything except the tree); Michael Feldman (a Kleinian) has written of the active narrowing of the mind that is required for people to attack their own development; and the French analyst Jacques Lacan remarked that the psychoanalyst starts explaining things to the patient when he, the analyst, begins to be frightened of his own curiosity. Each of these writers is alerting us to anxieties about attention and curiosity, while not always being able to give us an account of what a person’s life might be like if they were unfrightened of their own complexity, or refused to determinedly narrow their minds, or were unintimidated by their unbidden curiosity. What, after all, is it imagined could happen between an analyst and her patient – or indeed any couple – if they were less frightened of their curiosity, less focused on what they imagined they wanted from each other? If explanation is the self-cure for curiosity, we have a lot of explaining to stop doing; if desire is the refuge from wide-angled attention, we have a lot of wanting to relinquish. And yet here, as everywhere in such discussions, the wrong kinds of attention are shown to make us suffer, but the consequences of the right kinds of attention are somehow unelaborated, shied away from. What would a complex or a broader mind be good for? What would a more curious life be like to live? What kind of sociability, or sexuality, would it entail? What would our lives be like without focus? Or without our attention always being prescribed, or described as a means to a known end?
I started what turned out to be this book after writing a talk – not incidentally in the light of Talbot Brewer’s account of the so-called humanities – about the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt (included in the Appendix). It was striking to me that Greenblatt was preoccupied by distraction – language being one way of paying attention – and that, unsurprisingly, distraction was a way in to thinking about the vagaries of attention (and, of course, with how reading itself confronts us with questions about attention, and about the quality and purpose of our interests). Both psychoanalysis, as a writing and a therapeutic practice, and the reading of literature – literature and psychoanalysis being the informing presences in this book – work by making us self-conscious about the nature and the quality of our attention, our language; by drawing our attention to certain preoccupations, they make us wonder what our attention may be seeking and avoiding. Most people are not, and never will be, interested in ‘literature’, or literary criticism, or indeed in close reading; but everyone’s attention is absorbed by something, even if it is only distractedness, or the lack of control they have over their attention. And many people seek out and value experiences in which they can lose themselves, or become absorbed (psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves; there’s nothing more self-preoccupying than a symptom, nothing finally less interesting than one’s self). The kinds of interest we take, the forms of attention we prefer, seem to be the best ways we have so far of trying to get the lives we think we want.
To begin with, the question is always: at any given moment, what is worth paying attention to? And then, what kind of attention should we be paying? And then, what are the reasons we can give for doing this? And then, how do we decide between reasons? And then, what are our criteria, and who do they come from? We must be interested in the right things in the right way. Or at least this is what everybody tells us.
And yet, in Freud’s description of dreaming, attention becomes the word for a multiplicity of competing aims and wants. Freud gives us an account of a new form of attention, unknowing attention, in which we take in the world around us in ways, and for reasons, that we are unaware of. Dreaming gives us a picture of how we are interested otherwise in our lives. And whether or not we agree with Freud’s account, it shows us what it might be to pay our lives a different kind of attention; and, moreover, to pay our attention a new kind of attention. During what Freud calls ‘the dream-day’, for example – the day before the night of the dream – we are not paying attention in all those ways we are supposed to, or imagine that we are supposed to. We are, Freud suggests – attentive as ever to our possible future satisfactions – gathering material for what he refers to as ‘the dream-work’ we will do when we are asleep, but without registering that this is what we are doing. During the day we are like sleep-walkers (and workers) preparing for our dream. During the dream-day, then, we are unwittingly at work on that night’s dream. And this involves our being interested not in the right things – the taken-for-granted obvious objects of interest – but in unpredicted, quite unexpected things; and being interested in the unpredicted things in an unpredictable way. Freud’s concept of dream-work, in other words, radically revises our notions of the attention we thought we could pay. Dream-work shows us that we are more interested, and differently interested, in the things that interest us, and also in those in which we seem to have no interest at all. And that we are all the time unconsciously paying attention in ways we are, by definition, unaware of, to things we didn’t know mattered to us. We are more than interested in the day because we never know beforehand what it can provide, or what it contains (and we can never know beforehand, never predict, the dream we will have at night). Whatever else we are, we are the feral children of our day, but alert for what we didn’t know we needed; mindful of the dream ahead.
As we know from experience, things crop up in our dreams – images, phrases, gestures – that we have either forgotten we noticed during the day, or that we were absolutely unaware of noticing. Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams about ‘the exclusiveness of the claims of the day immediately preceding the dream’, suggesting that the day makes claims on us, and we make claims on the day that we are unaware of; and that these claims that always go unnoticed have some kind of urgent priority, an ‘exclusiveness’; and, indeed, that our days are there for us to make dreams out of (to make a dream, in Freud’s view, is to formulate unconscious desire; and that is the way we go on making a future, working out what we want and need). It is as though there were a figure inside us – call it ‘the dream-maker’ – who is interested in our day on our behalf, but without our ever realizing what is of interest, what might be of use, in that day. The dream-work – the work of whatever about us makes our dreams – is, Freud writes, ‘under some kind of necessity to combine all the sources which have acted as stimuli to the dream into a single unity in the dream itself’. And in a footnote he writes of ‘The tendency of the dream-work to fuse into a single action all events of interest which occur’ in the dream-day. It is not surprising that many people have noticed that the way Freud describes the making of a dream sounds similar to the making of a work of art, the dream-maker collecting the materials for the dream during the day, but without telling us; or indeed telling us that there is a dream-maker at work (Nietzsche had remarked, as Freud must have known, that ‘we are all artists in our dreams’).
Copyright © 2019 by Adam Phillips
