Individual identity is constituted by what one attends to

Evidence

As we saw at the collective level of media dynamics, attention works like a filter which pre-selects what is supposedly of value to us. At the individual level too, I am defined as a ‘subject’ precisely by what I find myself paying more attention to (my wife, my parents, my cat, new philosophy books, free-jazz concerts), when compared with the millions of things that I may choose as worthy of interest in their place (the beggar on the corner, the pigeons at my window, Marseille’s Olympic victory, the opera programme). In an AUTO-REFERENTIAL CIRCLE – which is only ‘vicious’ insofar as it must be selectively ‘virtuous’ – I give my attention to what I value and I value what I give my attention to, according to the self-reinforcing dynamic discussed in Chapter 3. It is because I am a jazz fan that I pay attention to a notice publicizing a Mary Halvorson concert, and it is because I attend concerts like those of Mary Halvorson that I am a jazz fan. While we easily understand, in light of the pertinence principle, why we pay attention to what we already value, it is to one of Flaubert’s letters that we may look for the opposing principle, which closes the auto-referential circle: ‘For something to be interesting, we need only look at it long enough.’ — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 394

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the auto-referential circle: attention and value reinforce each other, closed by Flaubert’s counter-principle that sustained looking itself creates interest.
• CANDY: Flaubert’s line — for something to be interesting, we need only look at it long enough — is a quotable, tweetable reframe of attention as generative rather than selective.
• XREF: The auto-referential circle echoes Chapter 3’s self-reinforcing dynamic and pairs well with Bourdieu’s habitus and taste-as-distinction arguments. — connects to: Interpretation fails unless it connects to the visitor’s own personality — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 141