forms of life, and that can be comprehended as part of a shared humanity?”202 Against a gamespace that is everywhere and leaves no option but to try to game it from the inside, desirable games might be restricted in time and space, able to be reset, scores erased. They would have rules that are not proprietary secrets and can be modified by the users.
Steyerl is no accelerationist: “Acceleration is yesterday’s delusion.”203 But she might still be interested in an aesthetic of detecting the forms of information that contour the totality of this world as it is experienced from the inside and also what it can contribute to making it otherwise. This might take the form of particular hacks or of the equally challenging task of imagining the totality otherwise.
The Situationist artist Constant Nieuwenhuys is a touch-stone for Steyerl here.204 His central question was how to design an infrastructure where humans could play freely, on top of a gamespace of machine logistics that ordered the world of things. This was Constant’s New Babylon (1956–74), in which his New Babylonians could be world nomads, rather like an international art biennale imagined as a free global party.205
Maybe it was not a realistic plan. In Steyerl’s aesthetics, it’s the gap between New Babylon and the world that is the value of the utopian. The point is not to make the world over into sameness with the model, the ideal, the algorithm, but to think and act in the difference. This is not quite how I read it, but perhaps our approaches can be squared. I treat New Babylon as radically practical. I read Constant as doing what Charles Fourier did, which is to pursue the practical so relentlessly that our actual totality appears by contrast to be fake, made up, impossible. Because it is. It won’t last, and we all know it.
For me the limit to stressing the autonomy of the art work is that it becomes an object of contemplation, of a particular mode of attention. But it’s not a matter of imposing the work on the world and falsifying it. It is rather a matter of pursuing the practical question, the question of the good life, so thoroughly as to show how the commodity form has falsified the world, made it unable either to be beautiful for us or beautiful without us.
Yves Citton: Ecologies of Attention
I once tried to watch Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) for as long as I could. I lasted maybe twenty minutes. The whole eight-hour film is a single shot of the Empire State Building. It got boring, but then a bird flew by and it was like being struck by lightning.
One could think of the subject of all Warhol’s art as the act of paying attention. It is worth having Warhol in mind while reading Yves Citton’s The Ecology of Attention. Warhol is not mentioned in it, but he does cover both ends of the attention problem. On the one hand, Warhol made work that is very demanding of attention; on the other, he got his own image to circulate as an instant attention attractor. He understood the value of attention.
He was not the first, of course. Citton begins with Gabriel Tarde, who starts a line of thinking about an economy of visibility whose currency is fame.206 It became an economy in a double sense, in that fame can be measured, and the attention it garners can be scarce. An increasing wealth of information means a scarcity of something else. Economists treat attention as a commodity, to be hoarded or strategically acquired. Citton wants to put some critical pressure on that view, by paying attention to what it leaves out. Perhaps the design of the attention-gathering apparatus is suboptimal.
Attention is not a new concern. The ancient art of rhetoric was about taking and holding it.207 Among the moderns, attention to innovation in style has long been a way of renewing attention. One might connect this to the way Sianne Ngai thinks about the aesthetics of the zany, interesting, and cute, each of which draws attention to, and also away from, aspects of modern life, to production, circulation, and the commodity, respectively. Warhol pioneered forms of all three as ways of attracting attention.
Citton offers an attention ecology rather than an attention economy. The latter tends to start with individualized attention as if it always existed, whereas an attention ecology takes an interest also in how attention regimes produce individuals in the first place.208 This ecology can be rather noisy, more like the turbulent information soup studied by Tiziana Terranova than the simple sender → receiver of the classic communication diagrams.209
One cannot make causal statements about the media any more than one can about the weather. Neither works like a gun or a hypodermic. Media, like weather, may have material, agential, and formal causes, but not final causes. They don’t tend toward a goal. And it may help to think more about formal causes a little more than agents or materials. This was McLuhan’s innovation, to think of media as not being about objects or subjects, but forms that shape both.210 The form of a given media shapes how things can appear to us and what kinds of subjects we can be in regarding them.
This is not too far from what Karen Barad calls an agential realism, where the agents are produced retrospectively by an apparatus that assigns them their distinctive identities.211 Hence, one can think of media as a matter of attending together, where the attention is shaped in particular ways, carving out things to perceive and know and individuating us into our selves through the act of attention. The feelings I have of a self are cut from the flow of transindividual affect that may be the main thing media are actually for and about.212
A view which sees an ecology—rather than a more restricted economy—of attention might wonder if it is working quite as it should. Even assuming we are all the rational actors of economic folklore, one can wonder if we can really attend to what might matter and decide accordingly. Such an optimistic view depends on us having access to useful information to attend to in the first place. “The rationality of our behavior is constantly jeopardized by the deficiency of the information we have about the environment. In other words: we never have the means to pay enough attention.”213 Our behaviors are irrational because our actions are constrained by the surreal spectacle to which we are supposed to constantly attend.
An economy attending only to a metrics of attention has no way of measuring or even really knowing what is needed to reproduce the conditions of attentiveness themselves. Bernard Stiegler has a usefully counterintuitive argument about this: the problem is not that we are narcissistic, but that we are not narcissistic enough.214 The dominant attention economy is too impoverished to enable us to individuate ourselves from it. We don’t go through Freud’s stage of primary narcissism, from which one might return and get some perspective on the world. Instead, we remain within an undifferentiated and pre-individual state, a group narcissism, in which state we get a bit crazy, trying to both belong and be separate without a primary separation to secure either. For Stiegler, mass shootings are symptoms of this failed media ecology. Citton’s diagnosis is a little different but not incompatible.
Citton channels Paul Valéry: attention is the struggle against entropy. It’s the effort to direct oneself to what matters and in the process both preserve and adapt the forms of the world. Like Paolo Virno, Citton is interested in clichés, proverbs, habits of speech—what he calls schemas.215 These are the collective reserve of accumulated experience that we test and hopefully can modify when they come in contact with new perceptions of the world. I would connect this to what Bogdanov called tektology, which one could see as the organization of collective attention through a self-aware practice of filtering and modifying the schemas or worldviews that our collective labors have inherited from our predecessors.216
Like Bogdanov, Citton is interested in something that is at once a politics and an aesthetics of attention. There are four different regimes of attention, of acquired schemas or habits, perhaps even genres. One could call the four regimes alertness, loyalty, projection, and immersion.217 Alertness attends to warnings and threats, to what
