solidarity, community, what “binds” us through the long term. Projection is looking outward from the familiar, looking for what is mine or ours. Immersion is allowing the strange or the new to come in.
Immersion fascinates, projection bedazzles, loyalty hypnotizes, alertness excites. One might have need of all four, but the current attention economy privileges some over others. Certain kinds of games, for example, highlight alertness. So does Fox News. A certain kind of art and a certain kind of pedagogy, on the other hand, might try to counterprogram with loyalty and immersion, with an acceptance of others and a joint project of new sensation, negotiated through what Ngai calls the interesting, in which the artist eases us toward the new sensation by securing our trust with formats that hold and repeat the strange or overlooked elements of the work. Warhol’s Empire might be an example here: repeating the one thing, but gently on the eye.
But what’s more common, when it’s not the alert, is projection. Attention economies like us to feel at home, as if the world is no more than our living room with brighter colors. It’s a way of working with the constraint: that our attention is limited but information is abundant. We’re encouraged to see a handful of what in media industry parlance are called “properties” as an extension of home, a landscape onto which to project, populated by a handful of stars and characters.
In Guy Debord or Vilém Flusser there’s the beginnings of a critique of the political economy of stardom.218 As Debord said, stars model the acceptable range of desires to which one might look. As Flusser saw, the attention paid such objects increases their value. Here I might put more stress on how attention both adds value but may also exhaust it. Jean Baudrillard thought seduction ran a fine line between exposure and concealment.219 Dominic Pettman thinks we may be overexposed and have reached peak libido, falling into diminishing returns on visibility.220
Citton: “from the moment we start living off visibility, everything that lifts us out of obscurity is worth having.”221 Attracting attention even starts to appear as an ethical goal. One is supposed to “raise awareness” of worthy goals and to oneself in the process. As Baudrillard already saw in the seventies, the logic of visibility has its evil side.222 Acts of terrorism and shooting sprees exploit this same visibility. They are the hideous other side to Debord’s motto of the spectacle: “that which is good, appears; that which appears, is good.”223
Citton usefully connects the logic of media as value to finance. The culture industries now work less like manufacturers and more like banks. Their market capitalization is a derivative of the attention value of a portfolio of the “properties” they claim to own or claim to be able to keep extracting from the information commons and privatizing. The culture industry is the finance industry whose financial instruments monetize the unconscious. I think we could extend this by connecting Citton to the work of Randy Martin. Perhaps it is not just that media becomes finance, but finance becomes media.
Financialization might then be just one piece of a transformation of the commodity economy under the control of information. Matteo Pasquinelli draws our attention to prevalence of ternary structures, inserting themselves between information providers and receivers, parasites channeling off a surplus of the flow generated by attention,224 which then shape attention in the interests of generating their surplus. This might give rise to whole new categories of political and cultural struggles about the geopolitics of what is visible and not visible, or about what Nick Mirzoeff calls the right to look.225
Besides our day jobs, if we have them, we have a whole other job these days, doing free labor for Google, Facebook, and others. The culture industries at least let us relax while they did the job of entertaining us. What I call the vulture industries of social media outsource that to us as well. The vulture industries might form a component, alongside finance and some other curiously information controlling businesses, of a distinctive kind of ruling class. Citton uses my term for it: the vectoralist class. This ruling class concentrates power by controlling stocks, flows, and protocols of information and keeping an information surplus for itself.
In Citton’s reading, the vectoralist class is more than a power over information. It is a power over attention and visibility—even knowability—as well. Its rise is premised on the digital as the latest wave of what Stiegler calls grammatization.226 For Stiegler the invention of writing, the seriality of the production line and digital tech are all part of the same, long, historical phenomenon of grammatization. It reduces the sensory continuum to digital bits, imposing a grammar on their order. It standardizes the world, now including everything from software (Manovich) to urban design (Easterling).
Grammatization leads to information abundance, channeled in vectors of control, but then subject also to ternary forms that interpose themselves between ceaseless information and limited attention spans. One example is Google, whose PageRank algorithm is modeled on academic citation ranking procedures.227 Another is Facebook, modeled initially on the look-books of elite American universities. They might between them crudely cover the two ternary procedures most common: ranking and rating. The former uses an algorithm to choose what humans want; the latter uses humans to choose what algorithms want. In both cases the attention of the humans is for sale to advertisers.
What results is a fairly novel kind of cultural inequality. Citton:
What counts … is not whether something gets included (or not): it is being at the height of visibility, right at the top of the first page of search results. The new proletarians are not so much the “excluded” as the “relegated.” The organization of our collective digital attention by Google structures our field of visibility on the basis of a PRINCIPLE OF PRIORITIZATION: the power of the vectoralist class consists in the organization of priorities, rather than the inclusion or exclusion from the field of visibility.228
Citton quotes Paul Valéry: “attention is vector and potential.”229 Attention is a pressure, an effort, a Spinozan conatus—a tendency toward endurance and enhancement. Attention comes from ad-tendere, to tend toward. Citton emphasizes an irreducible, qualitative aspect of attention. What the industries of the vectoral class do is turn the vector into the scalar. But in this media regime, the arrow always has to be measured. An attention ecology is reduced to an attention economy.
Citton:
The vectoralist class is not exploitative because of its “power to move anything and everything” but because of its requirement that “value be realized” in countable terms. Such is THE TRUE CHALLENGE OF THE DIGITAL CULTURES now emerging: how can you take advantage of the vectoral power of the digital without allowing yourself to be inprisoned in the scalar cage of digitalization? Only the art of interference, the elusive art of hackers, can rise to such a challenge—which is at the heart of the attention ecology in the age of its electrification.230
I take a slightly different view: the problem is not so much that the vector becomes the scalar, for that attention has to be measured. The problem might be more what is attended to, and what is measured. Perhaps we could pay attention to what this commodity economy can’t include as something measured, but which is not some ineffable qualitative and vital force. It is rather some quite measurable things whose measure does not compute because it does not take the form of exchange value. That might be one aspect of ecology, for example. Earth science can measure climate change, but this economy can’t really pay attention to it.231
So what’s to be done? Citton thinks we can start paying attention to attention itself as something that can be learned, cultivated, practiced, designed, in ways that produce forms of both collective and individuated becoming. To do so involves stepping down a scale, from attention ecologies to forms of joint attention and finally to individuated attention. It is helpful to fixate on neither the big picture nor the individual, but to look at what could mediate in-between.
