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from New York Times opinion this is the

Ezra Klein

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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 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 and we

have to spend it wisely we need to use

it to buy algebra rather than buying

gossip or jokes or

Daydreams I 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 I just can't to information

delivered in the form of long lectures I

wish I could I try

my attention it just doesn't feel to me

like something I get to

spend it feels I don't know it feels

more 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 sometimes a dog

side eyes them from across the street

and they turn from mild manner Terriers

into 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 clearly thinking

about that chicken bone and scheming

about how to get back there my attention

feels like that to me and 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

there 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 is subject

to 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 the way we talk about

attention just doesn't feel rigorous

enough to me doesn't feel like it is

getting at the 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 heler and I came across dgram

Bernett who's 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 which is a

kind of Grassroots artistic effort to

create a curriculum around attention and

yeah that got my attention as always my

email as reclin show NY

times.com dgr Bernett welcome to the

show oh it's such a pleasure to be here

thanks so you've written that our

attenion is getting fracked what do you

mean by that fracking um 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 Prem

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 tap them drill a hole

wof

gusher we've tapped all that out 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 uh 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 cont

temporary attention economy we have a

depending on who you ask 500 billion 3

trillion 7 trillion doll

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

bidder how do you define 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 uh

history of science book about the

laboratory study of this thing called

detention 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 a thing called detention

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 form of experimental

psychology and those who were trying to

study how to sell mouthwash and

cigarettes uh when those folks were

doing that kind of work they were

certainly talking about a thing that was

attention they could call it attention

and 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 wor

working to aggregate an auction

continuously in your

research what's been the holiest or most

Unholy attention experiment you've come

across oh uh I love that

question well let's do

Unholy and maybe you'll give me two in

the inter War 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 forerunners of

video games imagine a 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 and 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 and then we hook you up to a

rebreather so that you're gradually

deprived of oxygen it's a big

twist we I didn't see that one coming

yeah we might also hook you up with

headphones and uh run a lot of really

loud and distracting noise through them

and we could also ask you to pedal or do

other exhausting things with your body

they're a whole set of ways we could

complicate this ecology and then as you

gradually lose Consciousness you're

asked to continue for as long as you can

manipulating this envelope 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 attentional 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 and let me

assure you if you're going to put

somebody in the cockpit on one of these

very expensive fighter planes you want

somebody who's really good at that so I

would call that one kind of uh Unholy I

mean let's be clear I mean fiating

fighter pilots to see what happens to

the attention yeah I I'll categorize

that in the Unholy yeah I don't want to

sound paranoic either I'm in favor of

fighter pilots who are able to pay atten

okay yeah where nevertheless you can get

a little shiver when you think about

the way now we've been um 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 OTS

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's comes to be

called the vigilance decrement the drop

off in vigilance to a statistically lowf

frequency phenomenon and that work too

can give you a little shiver to come to

understand that there is again this deep

technoscientific 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 attention was

sliced and diced in Laboratories and

that very same thing is what's now being

priced with these calamitous effects and

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 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 is being a

life where I have the attentional

capacity of the perfect worker right a

lot of what I'm interested in you know

in theory with attention is a sort of

more open form of awareness an ability

to see other people more

deeply and I'm a meditator and so one

thing I I notice 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 detention right now both so

difficult and so important is that

secreted within that term are in fact

two 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 a 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 and let

me give you two recent theorists of

attention uh both very prominent whose

accounts of what attention is are

absolutely contradictory perfectly

paradoxical but sort of both

interestingly

true two Biz School theorists Davin

Porton Beck do a book called um 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 eer 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

atandra in

French is waiting the exact opposite of

like catalytic triggering it's waiting

it's in fact for him infinite waiting

and what are you waiting on when you

attend to to an object wait 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 so 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 pain painting it

might be a let's say a religious icon or

something and 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 and as we experienced

that kind of web of things that are in

the image we'd really be sort of seeing

a long web of connectedness that's in

ourselves and so for stegler

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 the early 20th century novel wings

of the dove the American novelist Henry

James describes a really beautiful and

intense scene in which a a very very ill

woman terminally ill

woman has a fleeting encounter with the

doctor she desperately needs she

believes this doctor kind of knows what

she needs to

survived she hopes that this doctor can

kind of get her past her anguish the

doctor's 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 that 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 is like I think it exquisitly

invokes that idea of imminence 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 a

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 and

see what happens

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you'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 crer

Jonathan CER is an art historian at uh

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 Curry 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 uh white guys in wigs

with knickers on those 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 the mind is like that box

there's a world out there there's a

world in here there's a nice mapping

function between those two worlds and

therefore I as a uh propertied white

male subject am good in the world

because the world is out there and in me

in a relatively unpro

way CER 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 a minc 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 obscure creature well CER 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

that for William James attention and

will were almost inextricable right that

Free Will itself if it existed its

Locust was the moment in which I could

choose to give my attention here versus

there and 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 and starting here so obviously he

knows the discourse around detention

much better than than I ever will but

the first thing that 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 their traditions in

Judaism around around that I'm sure

there's much more in other religions

that I know less well prayer is an

attentional question meditation is a

technology of attention as it gets

talked about now but but you know 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 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 the senses and the and

the will um 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 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

and there are some 20th century thinkers

who have commented in really profound

ways on the relationship between prayer

and the sort of thing we're now worried

about when we talk about attention the

great French Mystic Simone V comes to

mind so Simone V who kind of skirted up

to the edge Christianity in different

ways but never kind of crossed over was

a political activist a labor activist um

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 space is to sort

of enumerate everything that's not God

to get at God via the Via negative AA

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 V's

account of attention as a sort of

radical pure emptying of oneself an

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

experimentations because it waits in a

kind of ecstatic and infinite openness

for that which it knows

not so that's the other question that

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 the early 19th century that people

were complaining about how we were

losing our attention then 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 Right

blogging was great social media was too

far or if blogging was too much

newspapers were great but you know

digital news is too far how do you think

about that concern that that you and me

we are aging and just part of a

perennial moral

Panic I'm sympathetic to that critique

of all this uh by 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 um 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 there sure was why because

people started experimenting with

projecting advertisements using very

bright lights Ark lamps on the underside

of clouds and everyone was like this is

horrible I don't want to read soap ads

like on the night sky and then people

began to think it would be amazing to

sort of have Amplified screaming ads

floating in the air over cities so that

you would have continuous barges of

sound advertisements in space Also

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 that 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 the years

ahead maybe this is a digression maybe

it's not because you're a historian

who's dealt with this

question I think a bunch I'm fascinated

by the way we think about past moral

panics call the moral panics right the

the very term assumes just a hysteria

that then went

away often 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 sitting here talking and it is

also often true that they were right you

go back in your readal Postman amusing

ourselves to death and the thing he is

predicting roughly will eventually

happen is that we will think everything

must be

entertainment and so even things that

should not be entertainment will become

driven by and assessed on the values of

entertainment and it is just like a

direct line to Donald Trump and you

could say oh you know 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 about

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 affluence Society by John

Kenneth GB and he's very interested in

this question and my senses among

economists and others that's looked back

on as a little bit embarrassing right

like look there's advertising and it's

fine and I don't know I'm actually

amazed I 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 uh advertising The Exorcist reboot

horrifying image like two girls like

black ior dripping from their mouth I

mean just grotesque every morning I

would see it and it seems a little bit

dystopic this is public space why am I

being why every morning when I bring my

5-year-old under the subway he's seeing

an ad for a horror movie but we've just

gotten used to it I'm curious how you

think about this discourse a sense that

the things we worried about in the past

we were obviously wrong to worry about

and 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 and if it does that then you

know clearly was fine yeah where even to

begin oh my Heavens I mean

uh those who have worried that things

were getting worse have been essential

to our being cleare eyed about our

condition again and again the process by

which money value has displaced other

languages of

value big picture that's one of the

enormous secular Trends one can discern

over the last 150 200 years and I would

say many of the things you just invoked

are in effect explicable out of that

Dynamic now I don't want to sound

reactionary when I say that and I also

don't wish to kind of invoke some uh

fantasy Utopia of the past but we are

more severed from each other now than at

any time in human history even as we

have this kind of uratz 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 kind of a harrowing ideology

that created new forms of collective

identity and displaced experiences of

intimacy at the same time with monstrous

consequences so 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 I think 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 in ourselves

that the amount of time we spend on any

single task on 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 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 MH and also asking a

question about prescription are we going

to prescribe for people this versus that

and who will prescribe you know I think

of the extraordinary definition of

Education that qari SPAC offers which is

the noncoercive

rearranging of

Desire what's education the

non-coercive rearranging of desire and

that rings for you I have to say it does

so not how my education felt to me well

I don't think a lot of our educations

work that way so I would say that that's

a richly humanistic and at the same time

critical account of Education it's not

especially an account of Education that

conduces to making optimize workers in

the labor force but let's just sort of

unpack it for a second we organize our

lives around desire in some basic sense

you say look who we just tell people

that they shouldn't want enjoy receive

that little like dopamine hit feel good

when they're scrolling through Tik Tok

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

impoverishing 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 that's in a sense why

the humanistic

tradition brings with it tradition stuff

the kind of best that's been thought and

said texts 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 so first for me education

was coercive I did not want to spend

eight hours a day sitting in these small

classrooms being lectured at just didn't

I had to which I don't think is a bad

thing I 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

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 at

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 because ah 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 book's thesis is

that smartphones and social media have

kicked off a 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 on either end of it is that

if you convinced me that my kids scroll

on 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

that the language of society right now

and 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 at other points in

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-coercive

rearranging of Desire but I also wonder

about I mean I don't love calling it The

coci of rearranging of Desire but the

ability to talk about what we think we

should desire or socially approve of and

then particularly for younger kids for

whom their attentional resources are

being

formed

actually insist upon that so I want to

ask you back a question

uh 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 Tik Tok

for four hours if I'm being honest as a

parent right 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 or mind and also create a lot

of space for your own mind

wandering and I will say and it's one of

the reason 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 at 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 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 that was in

contestation with economic ways of

thinking about that I think his religion

has weakened not only as an organized

Force but as has a 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 universi is because you can't

monetize it and uh but 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 C

then uh 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-instrumental isable attention

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is attention 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

told you health is important you nod

your head you're nodding your head in

fact right now if I said I 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 wouldn't really tell you anything

there's so many subcategories to health

right you know 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

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

cardiovascular fitness not Health right

and then alongside that there are all

these other things you might want to

cultivate and 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 are in uh 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 Odell and James Williams and

Tim woo all these folks who' written on

this 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 who ran were people who were sort

of athletes uh 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 Gold's Gym where

you could go if you were a powerlifter

or a boxer I'm talking 1974 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

health since forever but the specific

activation of Fitness that's a

relatively new thing and it's really

changed in our lifetimes and 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 our 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 for and

about out attention that's what it needs

to teach and 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 this 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

garment Workers Union which were more

like activist projects to promote a

certain kind of politics so that's kind

of the triangle in which we placed 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 a course on Zen

meditation as an intentional 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 this is 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 4minute 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 10 people will

get together usually a bar a cafe and

they 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 situationist style activity so

an example would be like a great Audrey

Lord passage on food in the city the

action is going into a bodega and

actually exam in 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 Lord

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 what do I mean by

I want them taught

attention some part of it is just like I

want them to have familiarity like a

visceral sematic familiarity with what

different kinds of attention feel

like I'm not sure I had that for a very

long time i' I'd 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 it furnishes I don't

like how I feel when I leave it reason

I've sort of moved back to paper books

is like I do like the feeling of the

attention I 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

attention

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 struther 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 olero

would use in her practice it's not

exactly like her stuff but we always

kind of talk a bit about Pauline

oliveros when we set this one up and

there are other sound artists who inform

the kind of stuff we care about Ana

Lockwood and others the exercise is

going to have four phases um I

understand that you've got a 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 uh I think we've cut it till 30

seconds or so okay so it's 30 seconds we

normally do this for a little longer but

all right um 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

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[Applause]

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second listen

recall what have you heard before

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[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

third lesson discover what do you hear

for the first time

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Music]

and four finally don't listen what do

you find when you don't don't listen

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

so let's talk back and forth um an

observation about each of the phases

what happened in the first phase

few the Striking thing about listening

to it the first time was

the way the my body's response kept

changing so initially it's like you got

these birds you know it seems like it's

be a kind of nice ambient piece of music

and then just like the intense

escalating tension somewhat mounting

dread the noise goes up the uh 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 like a nice like Jesus Christ

why did my producers choose this piece

of music uh so yeah it was a little bit

the first time I was just on the ride of

the 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 over a

long time so you know longer more

immersive more people so a lot of

anxiety as to whether this kind of thing

can work in this setting uh 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 uh we go to the second listen where

we were trying to hear something that

we'd heard before

recall the second one I was struck by so

I remember the birds right I I noticed

they go on a little bit longer than I

thought and the second I was a little

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

the remembrance was of what was coming

in the way that then made me surprised

by what was there in the in in the

moment super interesting this is so

embarrassing but I heard the birds for

the first time in the second phase it'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 uh sort of rounded on

that and um became aware of that sort of

inexurable March time that comes in and

the sort of harrowing fatalism that one

Associates with that musical mode and so

I I had gotten to that in the first uh

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 I

was sort of tracking them I realized

they disappear the whole piece then on

the third the thing I noticed was it it

feels like you're clear cutting a forest

right that that felt to me like what

that piece of music was right you were

going through the forest it's initially

fairly untouched and then with each

Rising I mean the bird's eventually

falling silent you know that tick tick

tick tick when you talk about the

fatalism of it I mean this felt like a

like a piece of music that was about the

clear cutting of of an 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 were they at a machine

what kind of machine what kinds of Clips

or samples were they drawing 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 Ezra what

happened is more

comfortable that that body response that

kind of mounting dread that anxiety just

was

muted so it was more like the way I

listen 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 but 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 uh more of my attention

was what I was seeing yeah I had did

exactly the same thing did you close

your eyes in the first three phases did

you keep them open is in listening you

did 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

so I kind of had hypervision for a

second and an effort to sort of blast

out of my ears the acoustic experience

by overwhelming it with the other

sensory modality and that felt um that

was 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 I must say I

enjoyed that so what's the point of all

that for you if if that is a successful

lesson when you do it what are you

hoping people people have experienced

like what is the meta lesson of that

lesson right it's not just what you

heard in the

music what did we just do yeah um I want

to just admit that I'm not super

sure and that kind of uncertainty is

part of

it and 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 and 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 Str School

of radical

attention but 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 and for my answer I'm

going to um read one of the 12 thesis on

attention written by the friends

um thesis 9 of the 12 thesis

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 and this seeking is also

attention's effort to heal

itself so my answer is find a sanctuary

it's there and your listeners out there

they all have their different sort of

sweet spots where they are able to

protect themselves from the frackers it

might be gardening it might be that they

actually you know can weld and like when

they've got their visor down and they're

kind of in the puddle of the hot metal

that 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 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 are

so many great books um and uh all we

need to do is protect the ability to

read them and will be good um 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 colleague Natasha daul down at NYU uh

it's called addiction by

Design Natasha dul is a science and

technology studies scholar an

anthropologist by training and she did

an extraordinary book on video poker

machines gambling machines in Vegas it's

a kind of a pre-smartphone 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 fullcolor 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 it's amazing uh Natasha daul

addiction by design a second book that I

love and that also comes out of my field

and that 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

transhistorical and they do an

extraordinary and counterintuitive job

of showing how radically historical our

conceptualization of objectivity itself

is how entangled it is with shifting

ideas of subjectivity for instance or

the way that it plays off off of the

emergence of mechanical Technologies for

making inscriptions uh so objectivity by

Peter gson and lorine

daston and then I guess my Wild Card

book would just be a book I love and uh

a book about the imagination belief

dreams and about America it's by Herman

Melville of course the author of Moby

Dick a book I also love but I'm going to

invoke his much stranger book The cont

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 uh hope and belief 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's the confidence man D Grand

brette thank you very much total

pleasure thank

[Music]

this episode of the E kin show was

produced by Roland who and Christen Lynn

backchecking by Michelle Harris with

Mary Marge locker and Kate Sinclair our

senior Engineers Jeff geld with

additional mixing by Isaac Jones and

ammen sahota our senior editor is CLA

Gordon the show's production team also

includes Annie Galvin and Elias isth

original music by Isaac Jones and ammen

sahota audience strategy by Christina

simusi and Shannon Busta the executive

producer of New York Times opinion audio

is Annie Ros ster and special thanks to

Sonia Herrero

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