joint attention, particularly when people are in groups. There can be co-attention to the same event, at a concert, or reciprocal attention on the dance floor. (This is an aspect Eshun doesn’t really cover.) We don’t all have to feel the same, but our feelings in joint attention are a continuum, and we usually do our best to harmonize with it. That shared feeling might be the hardest part to capture in a media form. As many have noted, conversations in real life can tamp down potential spirals of anger; emojis don’t really do the trick.
Teaching situations are full of moments of joint attention going right or going wrong. Teaching can often be a matter of improvising ways of steering attention. Citton follows Cathy Davidson in thinking that if there’s a problem with attention in the classroom, it may not be as simple as blaming the kids or their phones.233 To isolate one material or agential cause is to miss how it’s a matter of a formal cause, an ecology in which school, teacher, students, and phone are all components. If kids are bored with school, maybe school could engage them differently and in more interesting things. Davidson calls this the new three Rs: rigor, relevance, and relationships. Which might be a way of saying that some key things to teach are things about attention itself as a difficult art.
It was sometimes imagined that making learning more “interactive” would make it work better. Citton thinks there are reasons to retain the masterly as well as the interactive approaches to teaching. It’s a matter of whether a teaching style is working to focus attention and at the same time convey the art of attention itself. Maybe even the notorious massive open online courses might work for certain kinds of learning, if structured around something other than the education tech for the sake of it, saving money, or capitalizing on the prestige of a brand-name university. As Citton suggests, Rancière’s famous ignorant schoolmaster might not have known the French he was teaching, but he knew how to sculpt attention to it.234
Ecology here seems to me a kind of impossible goal—like justice in Derrida or communicative action in Habermas or the world republic in Karatani—which might either be a regulative ideal or a sort of atemporal presence.235 Ecology, like God, does not exist and is probably impossible. Yet it remains in the background. But there might be more than one ecology. Our visions of it extend out from our actual labors and practices. It looks different depending on what you attend to.
Citton mentions two ecologies: the radical and the managerial. The radical ecology of attention comes out of things like the Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter movements. It wants to rebuild the whole practice of what can be seen, heard, known, shared, from the ground up. The managerial ecology of attention comes out of things from institutional forms that try to hold the line against the complete subsumption of attention into the regime of exchange value. It operates on a slightly bigger scale and is perhaps less bracing in its ambitions. Citton wants us to attend to both rather than choose between them. After all, part of steering away from attention in the modes of alertness and projection is to background the habit to digitize, to binarize, to make it all about us or about them.
The space for a politics and an art of attention thus covers a range of sites, from the radical to the managerial, and might be about all four forms of attention, but perhaps with a different emphasis. Attention is a form of care for the defense of the group, but it is also for maintaining its qualities and stabilizing its habits while being open to the new. To pay more attention to the reproduction of abilities is to include things feminism insists are undervalued as they are classified as women’s work. Here we could connect the theme of attention to that of emotional labor. As Hito Steyerl observes of the art world: why does it always fall to women to attend to how everyone feels about the show or the project? To pay more attention to openness to the new is to pay attention to what artists do when they pay attention and to the things they are trying to show us might be interesting. Warhol is an example of that.
Where political groups are concerned, attention may be key to avoiding the opposite problems of endless splits and rigid groupthink. If one attends to the transindividual feelings of a group, one may be able to tune it, without insisting that everyone think or feel the same way. As Anna Tsing has shown, political actions can be successful even with very divergent worldviews involved. This might be a matter of the transindividual imaginal politics that Chiara Botticci extracts from the psychoanalysis of Castoriadis.236
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