From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. I think a lot about the way we talk about attention, because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you're in school? Pay attention. As if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet, we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams. I wish that was how my attention worked.
It certainly did not work that way then. I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can't to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try. My attention just doesn't feel to me like something I get to spend. It feels like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I'm in control and sometimes I am not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder and they try to run away.
It's a dog, I'm from across the street and they turn from mild metaphors to killing machines. Sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone and even when I hurry them past it they spend the whole rest of the walk thinking about the chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there. My attention feels like that to me. This is what I don't like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it.
The context in which our attention plays out what kinds of things are around us, it really matters. And it's supposed to, attention is supposed to be open to the world around us. But that openness, it makes a subject manipulation. You really see that now when you open your computer or your phone. It's like the whole digital street is covered in chicken bones. There's lightning cracking overhead. There are always dogs barking.
And I worry about this for my own mental habits, for my kids, for everybody's kids. I don't think we're creating an intentionally healthy world here. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this. And I keep feeling like we're getting near it but not quite there because the way we talk about attention, it just doesn't feel rigorous enough to me. It doesn't feel like it is getting at the experience of it well. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this.
People who found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in the New Yorker by Nathan Heller. And I came across a D-Grambernet who is doing all three. He's a historian of science at Princeton University. He's working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. And he's a co-founder of the Struther School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grassroots artistic effort to create a curriculum around attention.
And yeah, that got my attention. As always, my email is reclineshowatmytimes.com. D-Grambernet, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks. So you've written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that? Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking's mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. But it's a new technology for doing that.
In the old days, pre-major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were like these big juicy zits of high-value crude oil just sitting there in the earth waiting to geyser up if you tapped them. Drill a hole. Woof, gusher. We've tapped all that out.
The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there, high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface, this kind of slurry, mixture, natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent and juice, and nasty stuff, which you then separate out and you get your monetizable crude. This is a precise analogy to what's happening to us in our contemporary attention economy.
We have a, depending on who you ask, 500 billion, $3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which to get the money value of our attention out of us is continuously pumping into our faces, high pressure, high value detergent in the form of social media non-stop content that holds us on our devices, and that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bitter. How do you find what attention is?
I would love for us to use this whole conversation to sort of roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again. So let me go at it one way. I'm in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called attention since about 1880. In laboratories, using experiments, scientists have since the late 19th century sliced and diced a human capacity that they've called attention. And it is that work that they did that has made it possible.
I would argue to price the thing called attention that we're invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It's entangled with the idea of stimulus and response. The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays, a cursor, a flash.
That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers have conceptualized and placed in evidence of the thing called attention when they started doing sort of early eye tracking experiments to sort of follow where people's gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance and figuring out how to quantify that. Largely it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry.
There was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes. When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention, they could call it attention.
It's very similar to the thing that right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate an auction continuously. In your research, what's been the holiest or most unholy attention experiment you've come across? Oh, I love that question. Well, let's do unholy. Maybe you'll give me two.
The interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like four runners of video games. One cursor that moves around on a non-computer screen, this is manual, like a clockwork cursor that's traveling back and forth in front of you.
You have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move, manipulate, kind of with a joystick, to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you. Then we hook you up to a re-breather so that you're gradually deprived of oxygen. Big twist. We also see that one coming. We might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them. We could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body.
There are a whole set of ways we could complicate the psychology. Then as you gradually lose consciousness, you're asked to continue for as long as you can manipulating the sound below, around the cursor. This was understood to be an attentional test. It's cybernetic, as you can see. It's a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others.
Let me assure you, if you're going to put somebody in the cockpit of one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who's really good at that. I would call that one unholy. Let's be clear. I'm just fixing fighter pilots to see what happens to the attention. Yeah, I'll categorize that in the unholy. Yeah, but we kind of want to sound paranoid. Either I'm in favor of fighter pilots who are able to attention. I'm sure why they were doing that.
Nevertheless, you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now. If you like cybernetically integrated into our devices, and you can see aspects of that reality prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I'm describing. I'll give you another one. The development during the Second World War of radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities in relation, particularly to German U-boats.
Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn't paying attention to it, you're totally screwed. A really intense set of classified experiments took place during the Second World War to assess a very new problem. How long could people pay attention to screens? And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention.
What comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop-off in vigilance to a statistically low-frequency phenomenon. And that work, too, can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is, again, this deep, techno-scientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting.
And we see the legacy of that kind of work to this day in the way we think about attention, that attentionless, sliced and diced in laboratories. And that very same thing is what's now being priced with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves. I'm so interested by that form of attention.
And it gets at something that has bothered me about a lot of the writing on attention, some of the conversations I've had on the show about attention, which is it's so wound up in this idea of attention as being something we should always have agency over. I think that implicitly in a lot of discussion of attention and a lot of research around attention, the attentional goal seems to emerge as a worker who never breaks focus on their task across the entire day.
And so the enemy of attention in this telling is distraction. And I do feel that as a worker, right? I come in and I open my computer and I immediately feel distracted by messages coming and slacks and a million things. And then at the same time, that discourse, it points somewhere I'd like to go, but not the only place I'd like to go, right? I don't imagine the good life as being a life where I have the attentional capacity of the perfect worker.
I had a lot of what I'm interested in, you know, in theory of the attention is a sort of more open form of awareness and ability to see other people more deeply. And I'm a meditator. And so one thing I noticed a lot over time is that what I think I should be paying attention to and then what appears to come up with great value to me are not the same thing, right? Too much agency over my attention, too much control is a way of not hearing other things in the world too.
You put your finger on really the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around attention right now both so difficult and so important is that secreted within that term are in fact too very different projects bumping up against each other. In a laboratory, you use instruments. As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely.
In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful. You can quantify it. You can place it in evidence experimentally. Is it part of what's in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is.
But that other thing that you're kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the sort of experience of being the kind of ecstasy that can come with us, certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, an object. That comes from a different place. It's also in the language of attention and it has its own separate history.
If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but both interestingly true. Two Biscool theorists dab in port and back through a book called The Attention Economy. I think it's 2001. They don't actually coin the phrase, but they're responsible for it, sort of exploding into the collective conversation.
How do they define attention in that book? They say attention is what triggers, catalyzes, awareness into action. Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action. Definition that couldn't be more different. The recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, centers that book on attention. What does he say attention is? He says attention, playing with the Aton Dra in French, is waiting.
The exact opposite of catalytic triggering, it's waiting. It's in fact for him infinite waiting. What are you waiting on when you attend to an object, waiting on it? He says you're waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object, which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you. Let's imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio and you and I were looking at it together.
We might look at that painting, it might be a religious icon or something. You and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have. We would notice colors. We would think about other images like it. We might have seen. We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be or the symbolic things that are in it. As we experience that kind of web of things that are in the image, we'd really be seeing a long web of connectedness that's in ourselves.
And so for Stiegler, attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness, which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention. Infinite waiting. Attention. Triggering. Sharp contrast. And let me try to bring in like a third thing that I think is kind of exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation between those two.
In the early 20th century novel, Wings of the Dove, the American novelist Henry James, describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with a doctor she desperately needs. She believes this doctor kind of knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish. The doctor is very busy. And James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a moment.
And he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them a clear, clean, crystal cup empty of attention, an empty crystal cup of attention that the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention is a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention. It's like I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of eminence, that kind of negative capability, anything's possible here, the gesture of generosity.
It has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of solicitation, something needs to happen. So it includes elements of that catalytic, and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring waiting image. And so when I have to sort of talk about what I think attention is, I'll often use that image. Like what's attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world to see what happens.
We've talked about how attention is, or at least the way we think about it now, is a modern construct. Can you talk a bit about that? Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that's ever been made by anybody, by my distinguished colleague Jonathan Crary.
Jonathan Crary is an art historian at Columbia University in a book called Suspensions of Perception, published around 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why in the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying in laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way.
Crary argues that you don't see a lot of discussions about attention in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820, it's not a thing. He says that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys in wigs with knickers on. Guys thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscura, right?
Those boxes that have a little pinhole in them like a forerunner of the camera. In the mind it's like that box, this world out there, there's a world in here, there's a nice mapping function between those two worlds and therefore I as a property white male subject, good in the world because the world is out there and in me in a relatively unproblematic way.
Crary argues I think correctly that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it, what does it in?
We discover that in fact everybody doesn't have the same picture inside themselves as what's out there in the world that were these oozy things made of meat, you know, and that actually our eyes have blind spots and suddenly the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes immense meat of the classical model. So then where are you in this kind of blooming buzzing confusion of modernity now that you're like an opaque thick meat creature instead of this nice camera obscura creature?
Well, Crary argues that attention is born in that moment as a way of saying again that I hold together as one being as I confront or encounter the world. Where are you? You are where your attention is. Your will maybe that's that idea that somehow will has something to do with it. For William James, attention and will were almost inextricable, right, that free will itself, if it existed, its locus was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there.
While everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention, there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject. Let me offer two responses that come to mind and starting here.
So obviously he knows the discourse around attention much better than I ever will, but the first thing that I know where there was a lot of discussion and conversation about attention going far, far, far back before the 19th century is within religion. So in Christianity, you have deep attention to attention among different kinds of monks and monastics. Buddhism has that. There are traditions and Judaism around that. I'm sure there's much more in other religions that I know less well.
There is an attentional question, meditation is a technology of attention as it gets talked about now, but you can frame it in much more spiritual ways than that. So what should that make us think that there was so much more, perhaps, attention to attention within the monastic religious traditions? It's a great question again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention.
I do want to say that while it is certainly true that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses objects since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of those senses and the will. If one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn't sort of the language we would use.
Contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks, but if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning that sort of stimulus response phenomenon or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them. That said, much of my own interest in attention actually comes out of my own meditational life
as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources as we begin to think about what to do now. There are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the sort of thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention. The great French mystic Simone Vé comes to mind.
Simone Vé, who kind of skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways but never kind of crossed over, was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the Second World War, wrote passionately that pure, unmixed attention is prayer. So for her, that if you like apophatic attention, attention that won't have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apophatic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, right?
Two theological traditions. One where you try to get at God directly. One where you say, look, God's so beyond us, we're not going to get to God. We're finite creatures. God's infinite. Our best chance to get anything like the God's base is to sort of enumerate everything that's not God. To get at God via the via negative, the negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves that we're having a conversation with God.
I would argue that Simone Vays' account of attention as a sort of radical, pure emptying of oneself and openness to imminence is apophatic. It's an attention that isn't triggerable. It won't target. You can't bring it out in stimulus and response experimentation. Because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows not. So that's the other question that comes up for me.
There is an argument that what we are saying about attention now is just another moral panic of the kind we've been having since early 19th century. The people were complaining about how we were losing our attention. And trains were too fast, life was too fast, everybody's reading newspapers. And it's the same arguments and yet it's all been fine. We worried about this with the advent of radio, with the advent of television. It just comes up and up and up and up.
And then we could just kind of move on to the next thing and we worry about it again. And when people think about the attentional golden age to the extent they imagine it, they don't mean the 15th century. They mean right before whatever the thing they're worried about now is, blogging was great. Social media was too far. Or if blogging was too much, newspapers were great, but digital news is too far.
How do you think about that concern that you and me, we are aging and just part of a perennial moral panic? I'm sympathetic to that critique of all this. The same token, people have been deeply right again and again that things were changing and things have changed in ways that were catastrophic in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good. And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments.
So was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? I'm sure it was, why? People started experimenting with projecting advertisements using bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds. Everyone was like, this is horrible. I don't want to read so bad, like on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities so that you would have continuous barrages of sound advertisements in space.
So horrible, new technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system certainly improved life in lots of ways. It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance, but you'd have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor conditions against which people had to gather together and mount resistance.
I would argue that we are in a moment now in which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves, the instrument of our being, this is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this and we need to like mount new forms of resistance.
We don't know yet what the forms of resistance will be, just like those early resistors in the factory system didn't yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies of collective action. We don't yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. What is what we need is like all hands on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness and this work is happening in lots of different places already.
We need to see what happens with it in years ahead. Maybe this is a digression, maybe it's not because you're a story who's dealt with this question, I think, a bunch. I'm fascinated by the way we think about past moral panics. Call them moral panics, right? The very term assumes just a hysteria that then went away. Even when I go back and I read critics of a previous technological moment, it's true on one level that obviously the world did not come to an end or sit in here talking.
It is also often true that they were right. You go back and read Neil Postman's and using ourselves to death and the thing he is predicting roughly will eventually happen is that we will think everything must be entertainment. Even things that should not be entertaining will become driven by and assessed on the values of entertainment. It is just like a direct line to Donald Trump. You could say, we had a previous moral panic about television or you could say all these people were right.
The world didn't end but a lot of things actually did happen. I think about this with advertising. Mid-century there is a tremendous amount of critique and interest in the rise of advertising. You can read The Affluent Study by John Kenneth Galbraid and he is very interested in this question. My sense is among economists and others that's looked back on a little bit embarrassing, like look, there is advertising and it's fine. I don't know. I'm actually amazed.
I moved to New York about a year ago. I'm amazed at how much advertising is permitted on the subway. Public space, right? The subway I would go into for a long time. It had a grayscale image advertising the exorcist reboot. Or a fine image like two girls, like black, hick or dripping from their mouth. Just grotesque every morning I would see it. It seems a little bit dystopic. This is public space. Why am I being...
Why every morning when I bring my five-year-old onto the subway as you see an ad for a horror movie, but we've just got in use to it. I'm curious how you think about this discourse. The sense that the things we worried about in the past, we were obviously wrong to worry about. As such worrying about things in the present is probably going to be wrong too because eventually we'll simply make our peace with it and the world will move on. If it does that, then clearly it was fine.
Yeah. Where even to begin, home I have. Those who have worried that things were getting worse have been essential to our being clear eye at our condition. Other languages of value, big picture, that's one of the enormous secular trends. One can discern of the last 150, 200 years. I would say many of the things you just invoked are inexplicable out of that dynamic. I don't want to sound reactionary when I say that. I also don't want to invoke some fantasy utopia of the past.
We are more severed from each other now than at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of ersatz experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways. We've seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations.
For instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century, which was a kind of a harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. It's totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we're seeing.
One thing that has, again, bothered me about a lot of the discourse on attention is I think because we don't have a good definition of it itself, we don't think about it very clearly. We know what we often don't want. A lot of us don't want the feeling, the fractured, irritated, outraged feeling we have on social media or online, we don't like learning and noticing ourselves that the amount of time we spend on any single task on the computer has dropped and dropped and dropped.
A lot of us have this experience of fracture. So, kind of we know what we don't want. This. I don't think we have a very good positive vision. How do you think about the creation of a positive vision of attention given the extraordinary diversity of human experience and wants? Yeah, it's a very hard question. In a sense, you're asking both a question about authority and also asking a question about prescription. We're going to prescribe for people this versus that and who will prescribe.
I think of the extraordinary definition of education that Atari's Spivak offers, which is the non-coercive rearranging of desire. What's education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire. And that brings for you. Have to say it does. It's not how my education felt to me. Well, I don't think a lot of our education has worked that way. So I would say that that's a richly humanistic and at the same time critical kind of education.
It's not especially an kind of education that conduces to making optimized workers in the labor force. But let's just sort of unpack it for a second. We organize our lives around desire and some basic sense. You say, who we just tell people that they shouldn't want, enjoy, receive that little like dopamine hit, feel good when they're scrolling through TikTok. Okay. Our desires can go lots of different places.
It's also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing. The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want, that is what we really want or what in wanting most dignifies and extends our experience of being as opposed to again, severing and compoverishing us. That's the hard work of education.
And people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also they have to work that stuff out with other people. Because in a sense, why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition stuff that's kind of best that's been thought and said, text objects here. Here, look at this. It's not, look at this. I'm going to force you. It's, I want you non-coercively to discover that in being with this in these ways something good will happen. Yeah. Let me hold on this idea of non-coercion.
For me, education was coercive. I did not want to spend eight hours a day sitting in these small classrooms, being lectured at. This didn't. I had to. Which I don't think is a bad thing. I am not really one of these people who thinks that childhood should be up to the whims of the child. I don't think I would have made good decisions as a kid. I'm not sure the decisions made for me were great decisions either, but nevertheless.
And something that has been on my mind has been how bad I think parents, at least of certain classes right now, have gotten it coercion. And it worries me because my kids are young, so it's kind of easy right now, but I know it's going to get harder. And I see all these parents who know that they don't think their kids should have a smartphone when they're 11. And they fall. And the other kids do.
And I see in this debate that we're having right now about smartphones and kids, what I would describe as a real discomfort with how to be paternalistic when paternalism is actually needed. So John Height writes this book, The Anxious Generation, Part of the Books thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off of mental health crisis and our children. Then there's a huge back and forth on these exact studies.
And one thing I really noticed in this whole debate, where I think the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it, is that if you convinced me that my kids scrolling their phones for four hours a day had no outcome on their mental health at all, it did not make them more anxious, it did not make them more depressed. It would change my view on this not at all.
I just think as a way of living a good life, you shouldn't be staring at your phone for four hours a day. And yet I also realize the language of society right now in parenting doesn't have that much room for that.
And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just like what we think a good life would be, not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we are more comfortable talking in terms of it, other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books, no matter if you can measure that on somebody's income statement or not.
And so I wonder not just about the non-chorus every ranging of desire, but I also wonder about, I mean, I don't love calling it the chorus every ranging of desire, but the ability to talk about what we think we should desire or socially approve of, and then pretty for younger kids for whom their attentional resources are being formed actually insist upon that.
So I want to ask you back a question in response to that, which is just where do you anchor your intuition that it is say better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for four hours? If I'm being honest, as a parent, and I'm not saying I would legislate this, I anchor it in my own experience of attention. I think books are remarkable and specific in their ability to simultaneously allow for a deep immersion in somebody else, right?
Another human being story or thoughts are mined, and also create a lot of space for your own mind wandering.
And I will say, and it's one of the reasons I want to invite you on the show, we'll talk about the school of attention that you're part of in a bit, I will say that my biggest concern, and the concern that nobody really has an answer to for me, because I do want to send my kids to public school, is that I care less about how they are taught subjects and how they are taught attention, what kind of attention they're able to bring to the things they will want to know.
But again, the thing that worries me is that I see so little discourse like that. I'm enormously moved by what you're saying. The dynamics that you're describing are not unfolding in empty space. They're unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled, dynamic of financial optimization. Like, we just can't leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing.
And there may be no other way to organize large modern, complex societies, but we would be insane not continuously to hold before us the essential adversary here. The corporations are not on our sides, and the fact that a major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non-inhuman beings.
I think I'm getting it something similar when I talk about my discomfort with how hard we find it to criticize choice. People mean a lot of things when they talk about neoliberalism, and I don't love the term one because I think it annoys people and shuts them down. But the other is because it's imprecise. But the thing I mean when I talk about neoliberalism and the neoliberal age is a period in which the logic of markets became the logic.
Absolutely. And I think it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic. And when I read older texts, I see a lot more discussion of the good, of virtues, of and a lot of it is very religiously inflected to be fair. I mean religion was an alternative structure of logic, of meaning. There was in contestation with economic ways of thinking about that. I think his religion has weakened not only as an organized force, but as a kind of conceptual way of looking at the world.
Capitalism, market logic has taken over a lot of that space. And the market does not have our interest at heart. You invoke religion as one of the sort of traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke two other kinds of institutions that have been really important. There's the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities is a training of attention.
And partially that's like why we have to hold on to and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It's part of the reason it's getting increasingly exterminated from universities because you can't monetize it. But I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention. And there's a third which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics.
I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeois collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, you know, show me the most expensive thing and I'll take it. And you know, the people in the know in the space of the arts would sort of snicker and say, you know, how calo that he walked out with that. That's not the good stuff.
So each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching and learning and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music, each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention. Is it tension the category of the thing we want or a subcategory of the thing that we want? So sometimes I wonder if attention is a word like health.
If I tell you health is important, you nod your head, you're nodding your head in fact right now. If I said, I'm really trying to work on my health. On the one hand, you would get what I meant by that. On some level, I don't want to die soon and young for a preventable reason. But also, it wouldn't really tell you anything. There's so many subcategories to health, right?
You go to doctors for different parts of the body and there's mental health and fitness and different kinds of fitness and cardiovascular and strength. And sometimes when we talk about attention, it feels to me like we are talking about a thing like health, the entire basket of different forms of awareness and experience we use when we are moving through the world. And sometimes it feels like we are talking about something very specific, right? Part of your vascular fitness, not health, right?
And then alongside that, there are all these other things you might want to cultivate and be concerned about. Which one is it for you? I think you put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use.
And I would argue that what's important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts you've done on this and the wide range of authors like Jenny O'Dell and James
Williams and Tim Wu, all these folks of fitness, we need more of all of that because, and here's where your language of health is exactly right, what we need is a kind of almost revolutionary rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I'm old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F. Fix, right? He wrote the book Running in what was it? 77? Before that, regular people didn't go jogging, they didn't go running.
People ran where people who were sort of athletes or people in sort of school because they were doing collective sports. Also there weren't gyms that regular people went to, right? There were places like Golds Gym where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I'm talking 1974 or 75. The whole idea that ordinary people would sort of concern themselves with their fitness is something that's emerged over the last 40 years.
It's staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No. People have been worried about their house and forever. But the specific activation of fitness. It's relatively new thing and it's really changed in our lifetimes. I'm proposing to you that that's going to happen again.
Over the next 40 years, a collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives are, hygiene and health and our attention is going to be constitutive of our experience of being. This is what's going to happen. It's going to reshape education, which as you've signaled needs to be fuller and about attention. That's what it needs to teach. It's going to transform our other ways of being together. So you're trying to do some of this. You have along with others the school of attention.
What are you trying to teach? Yeah. I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as sort of a little bit like Black Mountain College, sort of creative artistic collaboration, a little bit like something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, like continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person in a place.
And then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and 20s, like the schools created by the International Ladies Garbant Workers Union, which were more like activists' projects to promote a certain kind of politics. So that's kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we're interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward.
We had a senior Zen student to a course on Zen meditation as an attentional form, class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically. A class on perfume where smell as a sensory modalities centered as a sort of attentional form. We run workshops and it's separate from the classes. We do free workshops.
And the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some attentional stuff together, exercises in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four minute piece of music under, again, different sort of mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of used their attention.
And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies in which between five and ten people will get together, usually a bar, cafe, and they'll read a carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it, seminar style, having a drink. That paragraph is on a card. When you flip the card over, there's a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situation, a style activity.
So an example would be like a great Audrey Lorde passage on food in the city. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening, and then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to sort of be in the space of the bodega with the Audrey Lorde passage in our heads together.
And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together. They do it because it's a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity. I'm interested in that idea of practicing attention together. You know, with my kids, when I think about this, one of the things that I wonder is, when I ask like, what do I mean by I want them to attention?
Some part of it is just like, I want them to have familiarity, like a visceral, somatic familiarity with what different kinds of attention feel like. I'm not sure I had that for a very long time. I've, of course, experienced many kinds of attention, but it's only later in life I become more mindful of what they feel like. And that's helped me diminish the role of some in my life, right? The reason I'm not on Twitter or X anymore is that I don't like the feeling of the attention if furnishes.
I don't like how I feel when I leave it. The reason I've sort of moved back to paper books is like, I do like the feeling of the attention I notice that it is healthier for me. It sounds to me a little bit like something you all are trying to do is just creating context in which you experience different kinds of attention. So you have that internal map you can work with. Absolutely. It's a do by doing kind of thing.
You actually have to come together with other people and surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one's attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it, intentionally. So I thought a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity, or at least a truncated version of it that you described earlier.
So how do you lead people through this? Okay, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Strother School. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions. So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist, genius, Pauline Oliveiros would use in her practice. It's not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about Pauline Oliveiros when we set this one up.
They're other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about, any a lot would and others. The exercise is going to have four phases. I understand you've got sort of sound piece queued up. We've got it. Okay, we're going to actually play it four times. So your listeners have to be ready. You're going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes would you say? I think we've cut it to 30 seconds or so. Okay, so it's 30 seconds.
We normally do this for a little longer, but all right. So wherever you are, get ready. You're going to hear this 30 second sound piece four times. And I'm going to give you the mood under which you'll attend to it. First, just listen. Okay, first, listen. Second, listen. We call. What have you heard before? Whoever. And then we've started chilli sauce. Hey. 3rd lesson. Discover. 2 here for the first time. 4. And 4. Finally. Don't listen. What do you find when you don't listen?
Or does it mean that you do not have the time to listen. So let's talk back in fourth. An observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase, Fuegazard? The striking thing about listening to it the first time was the way my body's response kept changing. So initially it's like you got these birds. It seems like it's going to be a nice ambient piece of music and then just like the intense escalating tension, somewhat mounting dread. The noise goes up.
The number of sounds happening simultaneously feels like it goes up. The volume goes up. So by the end you've begun or for me, I began as like, oh, a nice, like Jesus Christ. Why did my producers choose to be some music? So yeah, it was a little bit. The first time I was just on the ride of the bodily response to it.
For me in the first time through, I was acutely attuned to a thousand questions sort of pulling me in all directions because I'm accustomed to doing these kinds of things like for all long time. So you know, longer, more immersive, more people. So a lot of anxieties to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting.
So the truth is I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through trying, but trying but failing for me on the first one. We go to the second. Listen, where we were trying to hear something that we'd heard before recall. The second one was struck by, so I remember the birds, right? I noticed it go on a little bit longer than I thought. And the second I was all braced because I remembered the feeling I had on the first.
I was like, oh, as this keeps going, you feel worse. And so the remembrance was of what was coming in the way that then maybe surprised about what was there in the moment. Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time in the second phase. That's not remembering. That's not so it was a double catastrophe because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase? My listening was so bad in phase one.
And two, wait a second, I'm not supposed to discover new things until phase three. So I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt bad about myself. But then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that sort of inexorable march time that comes in and the sort of harrowing fatalism that one associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, okay, okay, I'm remembering that. I'm remembering that.
Third listen, were you able to discover anything new? Yeah, I was more attentive to the birds. So sort of tracking them. I realized they disappear. The whole piece then on the third. The thing I noticed was it feels like you're clear cutting a forest. That felt to me like what that piece of music was. You are going through the forest. It's initially fairly untouched. And then with each rising, I mean, the birds eventually falling silent. You know that tick, tick, tick, tick.
When you talk about the fatalism of it, I mean, this felt like a piece of music that was about the clear cutting of any ecosystem. Yeah, and I love discovery for me involved a loop into how this piece came to be. I heard a twang that felt guitar-like, but I'm almost certain that the music was composed electronically.
So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creatives, whoever's back there are making this and where they add a machine, what kind of machine, what kinds of clips or samples were they growing on. So my kind of discovery in a sense was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase four, you tried not to listen as to what happened. It was more comfortable.
That body response, that kind of mounting dread, that anxiety just was muted. So it was more like the way I listened to music when I work, where my attention is not on the music and the music is providing a mood and an energy. Right, the music is a kind of stimulant. What did you do? I'm not deeply immersed in it. What did you do with the rest of you to not listen? Because of course our ears are funny, you can't close your ears, so the stuff's going to keep coming in.
It's not like our eyes where like we... I moved to the eyes. Yeah. More of my attention was on what I was seeing. Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open as you're in listening? You did. You kept them open on all. That's interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes in the final phase and had a little taste.
It was quick, but a little taste of that, like a foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field and brighten it such that it would sort of displace my acoustic experience. I kind of had hypervision for a second in the effort to sort of blast out of my ears, the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. That felt a little tremor of the good stuff where you can sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention as an aspect of being.
I must say I enjoyed that. What's the point of all that for you? If that is a successful lesson when you do it, what are you hoping people have experienced? What is the meta-blussent of that lesson? It's not just what you heard in the music. What did we just do? Yeah. I want to just admit that I'm not super sure, and that kind of uncertainty is part of it.
What I can assure you is that when seven or eight people get together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour, 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good. It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do, and with other people in relation to what's in the world this way. I think that at this moment, we need to carve out more spaces for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments. Let me end on this.
If you're somebody who's not near the Brooklyn School of Radical Attention, by somebody who kind of senses something is wrong with your attention, wrong, the intentional world that you inhabit, and you want it to be better for you. You want to find a space of what will feel like attentional health. Where do you start? Yeah, it's a great question. For my answer, I'm going to read one of the 12 theses on attention written by the friends.
Theses nine of the 12 theses reads sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now, but they're endangered, and many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them. This seeking is also attention's effort to heal itself. My answer is find a sanctuary. It's there.
Your listeners out there, they all have their different sweet spots where they are able to protect themselves from the frackers. I'd be gardening, it might be that they actually can weld, and when they've got their visor down and they're in the puddle of the hot metal, that's when everything is zoned out. They may be knitting, and they may be doing Zumba class.
I don't know what it is they're doing that's near you and what you would find and make possible, but find your people, and out of finding your people, and with a measure of intentionality, insisting upon the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fracked, attention can begin to heal. And that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing. So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
Oh, there's so many great books, and all we need to do is protect the ability to read them and will be good. Well, let's start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book in this kind of attention space. And it's by my esteemed colleague Natasha Dauchel, down at NYU. It's called Addiction by Design. Natasha Dauchel is a Science and Technology Studies scholar, anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas.
It's a kind of a pre-smart phone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit. And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated dark pattern, technologies that can be achieved even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fancy in important ways, right?
They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets, but already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them. That's amazing, Natasha Dauchel, Addiction by Design.
A second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science would be the book Objectivity by Peter Gallison and Lorraine Daston, both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, Objectivity doesn't have a history, like, Objectivity is just being objective. That's like trans-historical.
And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing, erratically, historical or conceptualization of objectivity itself is how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So Objectivity by Peter Gallison and Lorraine Daston. And then I guess my wildcard book would just be a book I love and a book about the imagination, belief, dreams and about America.
It's by Herman Melville. Of course, the author of Mobidic, a book I also love, but I'm going to invoke his much stranger book, The Confidence Man, which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief. And it's very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Herman Melville is the Confidence Man.
D. Graham Brannett, thank you very much. Total pleasure, thanks. This episode of The Asher Cline Show was produced by Roland Hu and Kristen Lenn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our Senior Engineer is Jeff Gowald with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amman Sahuta. Our Senior Editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith, original music by Isaac Jones and Amman Sahuta.
Audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Basta. The executive producer of New York Times' opinion audio is Annie Rose Strosser and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.