Attention has quality and volitional character invisible to the market

Evidence

In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes sleep as the last vestige of humanity that capitalism cannot appropriate (thus explaining its many assaults on sleep). The cultivation of different forms of attention has a similar character, since the true nature of attention is often hidden. What the attention economy takes for granted is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform and interchangeable. “Units” of attention are assumed undifferentiated and uncritical. To give a particularly bleak yet useful example, if I’m forced to watch an ad, the company doesn’t necessarily know how I am watching the ad. I may indeed be watching it very carefully, but like a practitioner of aikido who seeks to better understand her enemy—or for that matter, like Thomas Merton observing the corruption of the world from his hermitage. My “participation” may be disingenuous, like Diogenes rolling his barrel industriously up and down the hill to appear productive. As a precursor to action, these drills and formations of attention within the mind represent a primary space of volition. Tehching Hsieh referred to these kinds of tactics when, speaking of the year he spent in a cage, he said that nonetheless his “mind was not in jail.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 345

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the crucial distinction between attention-as-commodity (undifferentiated units) and attention-as-quality/volition — central to the whole book.
• XREF: Crary on sleep ties to the broader literature the reader is building on; also the aikido/Merton/Diogenes examples rebut the withdrawal misreading.
• QUESTION: Chasing: whether ‘attentive but disingenuous participation’ is truly a form of resistance or risks becoming its own quietism.