Sabbath traditions and sleep are ancient attention sanctuaries

Evidence

These sanctuaries can be physical or virtual, fixed or mobile. In addition to places of refuge, they are also sites of dreaming—where communities can cultivate, through the practices of shared attention, a sense of common reality, and imagine a livable future. They have deep roots in our culture, and every culture. Think, for instance, of the profound importance of “Sabbath” traditions across so many vastly different religious systems. A time set apart, bracketed from ordinary conditions, in which different rules (for work, for contemplation, for rhythms of exchange and encounter) apply—these nearly universal features of the cycles of life from one corner of the globe to the other, what are they if not regular “attention sanctuaries” set in the calendar? Even night itself, as a place of organic repose, can be understood as temporal sanctuary for attention to dreams, to bodies, to silence. The sleeper, after all, cannot be fracked. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 347

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the temporal-sanctuary category by re-reading Sabbath and sleep as attention sanctuaries.
• SEED: Claim that ‘the sleeper cannot be fracked’ suggests an essay angle on the moral economy of sleep and wakefulness in surveillance capitalism.