Seepticised traditions gain value when reconceived as attention formation

Evidence

These new conditions reactivate our past and remake our inheritance. We see old things anew. Are you a little embarrassed about your evangelical cousin? The one whose kid is being forced to learn the Bible by heart? Think again! There is surely something very special in that form of attention-formation. Anxious about the lingering gender stigma of domestic labor? And the complex shame that too often comes with both doing and not doing childcare? And what about that “Great Books” curriculum at the college on the hill? Again, there is a world of rethinking to be done, as those complicated legacies are reconceived in attentional terms. How can those traditions be renewed, and serve all of us differently as we fight back against the frackers? Everything we have, re-seen through the lens of attention, becomes a way forward: music, sports, cooking, Talmud, feeding the baby, sitting with those who are soon to die. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 438

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s Silences/One Square Inch material on reframing — and specifically the earlier chapter’s idea that practices carry value independent of their original framing. — connects to: Aesthetic experience succeeds or fails on attentional quality, not object traits — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 431; Shaming traditions like rote memorization contain valuable attention-forming practices — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 438
• QUESTION: What, precisely, is ‘attention-formation’ as a diagnostic lens? The chapter gestures at it but the mechanism (how memorizing scripture forms attention differently from say sports) is left open — worth chasing.