In his final years, the novelist David Foster Wallace appears to have been exploring the possibility of something like mystical ecstasy, through prodigious feats of attentional self-mortification. In a note discovered after his death, he wrote:
Bliss … lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
This gem reads like a report from the cutting edge of ascetic self-experimentation. The meticulous filing of tax returns and watching of televised golf are offered in the spirit of Timothy Leary’s acid trips, adapted to the clean-living imperatives of someone who has struggled with chemical addiction (as Wallace did), and who perhaps retains a jones for bliss of the sort that ordinary life doesn’t offer. Given the sheer effort required to stay sober, it is understandable that Wallace would be fascinated by the will, and by the transcendent possibilities of self-overcoming. “Riding it out, an agonized and patient abiding, seems to have been a condition of survival for much of Wallace’s life,” says Matt Feeney. This is the chastised, wise asceticism of a twelve-stepper rather than, say, the hectoring rectitude of Straight Edge.
Recall the quotation from Simone Weil: “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.”
Weil and Wallace both offer an ascetics of attention, whether in the service of otherworldly bliss or “destroying the evil in ourselves.” Both are quasi-religious, but in a peculiarly modern way—they rely on an effort of the will rather than divine grace. I would like to offer a gentler understanding of the role that attention can play in a life, one that is entirely this-worldly. I call it an erotics of attention because the point is to fasten on objects that have intrinsic appeal, and therefore provide a source of positive energy.
FINDING VERSUS CONSTRUCTING; ATTENTION VERSUS IMAGINATION
In his commencement address at Kenyon College, Wallace suggested that
learning how to think really means learning to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Wallace is saying something important: the ability to direct our attention as we will is a basic condition for living well. This sounds about two-thirds right to me, but I want to quarrel with his language of “choice”—the language of mere decision—which makes it sound like “construct[ing] meaning from experience” is somehow arbitrary, and insist rather that meaning and agency are tied in interesting ways to our efforts to reconcile ourselves to a world that is what it is, and find ways to love it.
Wallace states the central problem of life as one of critical self-awareness, as opposed to self-absorption. “[A] huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” In particular, “everything in my immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe…” The task, then, is one of “somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of the self.” His point, he makes clear, is not a moral one about being altruistic. The point is not to be deluded, “lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me…”
The reason to worry about being self-centered is that it makes it hard to cope with life. “There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration.” He describes the experience of getting off work, exhausted, and having to endure traffic and a crowded supermarket before getting home.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.
Wallace offers for the graduates a train of thought about fat, ugly SUV drivers, and points out that patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the most disgustingly selfish vehicles. The crowd begins to cheer, and Wallace intervenes: “This is an example of how NOT to think, though.” Then he gives some examples of what he has in mind by way of choosing to think differently.
In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.1
Wallace concedes that “none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible.” Such generosity is meant as a corrective to our default setting, which is to be sure we know what reality is, to be sure it revolves around us, and therefore not to consider “possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable” when it comes to others who stand in our way. But “if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.”
This impatient, hostile self-absorption is spot-on as a description of my own default state, while driving especially. And Wallace is surely right about the need for charity of interpretation in our dealings with others, not least for the sake of our own tranquillity. The criticism I would like to make of his account begins with a seemingly minor point: when he suggests that the generous response results from “learn[ing] how to pay attention,” I think he has misdescribed his own examples. They are acts of imagination, not attention. He is positing scenarios that will engage his sympathies. On this point turn some crucial matters.
The first is a practical question about how effective or sustainable such an approach is likely to be. Wallace recommends a basically Stoic strategy of minimizing one’s pain by changing one’s beliefs about the irritants that are disturbing one. The problem with the Stoic strategy is that beliefs involve states of affairs in the world, so it isn’t simply up to us to decide to believe what we want. It would be nonsensical to come into a building and announce, “It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it.”2 Short of such outright contradiction, one has only so much interpretive latitude before one’s imaginings take on a hallucinatory aspect. Forrest Gump has a positive affect that is impervious to the world, but there is something defective about him.
Despite his repeated references to attention, Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that “you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.” But is this not, precisely, “to see and interpret everything through this lens of the self” and thus reproduce the problem that he is trying to solve? Wallace speaks a subjectivist language in which we posit the world, and do so according to the free movement of our will. His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own. Wallace’s therapy is offered in the spirit of virtual reality.
Iris Murdoch, like Wallace, is impressed by the problem of self-enclosure. But she suggests a different way out of one’s head—what we might call the Epicurean way. The Epicurean recommendation, in contrast to the Stoic, is that if you are being disturbed by some unwanted emotion, it is a shift of attention, rather than a willful effort of belief, that will deliver you from it. As she writes:
Where strong emotions of sexual love, or of hatred, resentment, or jealousy are concerned, “pure will” can usually achieve little. It is small use telling oneself “Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just.” What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. Notice the metaphors of orientation and of looking … Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.3
Murdoch’s therapy is predicated on realism: new energies come from real objects that one becomes interested in. This strikes me as more thoroughly liberating than the effort of reinterpretation that Wallace recommends. It is less concerned with moral improvement or being just. You simply abandon the object that is tormenting you. You walk away, and don’t even notice that you have done so, because your energies are focused elsewhere. Eros is the faculty that does this for us.
Murdoch points out that “the religious person, especially if his God is conceived of as a person, is in the fortunate position of being able to focus his thought upon something which is a source of energy,” and that “prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.” She asks, “What is this attention like, and can those who are not religious believers still conceive of profiting by such an activity?”4 This is a crucial question.
ACTING VERSUS RUMINATING
Consider as an example someone who suffers not from some raging emotion of lust, resentment, or jealousy, as in Murdoch’s examples, but rather sadness, discontent, boredom, or annoyance. A wife, let us say, feels this way about her husband. But she observes a certain ritual: she says “I love you” upon retiring every night. She says this not as a report about her feelings—it is not sincere—but neither is it a lie. What it is is a kind of prayer. She invokes something that she values—the marital bond—and in doing so turns away from her present discontent and toward this bond, however elusive it may be as an actual experience. It has been said that ritual (as opposed to sincerity) has a “subjunctive” quality to it: one acts as if some state of affairs were true, or could be.5 This would seem to be a particularly Jewish sort of wisdom—an emphasis on observance as opposed to the Protestant emphasis on inner state. It relieves one of the burden of “authenticity.”
William James offers just such relief in his essay “The Gospel of Relaxation.” He writes, “In order to feel kindly towards a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things … To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind; whereas if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and silently steals away.”6 We should “pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not … care too much for what we feel.”
It might well be asked, how is the wife’s subjunctive mood of prayer any different from the generous imaginings that Wallace recommends? I think the answer turns on the fact that it issues in an action—here, the ritual of saying “I love you” (to which it is impossible not to respond). Saying this alters somewhat the marital scene; it may not express love so much as invoke it, by incantation. One spouse invites the other to join with her in honoring the marriage, and it is the activity of doing so, together, that makes the marriage something one could honor. It is an act of faith: in one another, but also in a third thing, which is the marriage itself.
Likewise, if Wallace’s generous imaginings of an annoying person in the supermarket checkout line were to issue in some action or utterance by Wallace that could be taken up by the stranger, becoming material for a generous response by the stranger in turn, then together Wallace and the stranger might become coauthors of a scene that is quite different from what it seemed initially, the lonely hell that Wallace describes.7 But Wallace’s generous imaginings cannot catalyze such a transformation if they remain mute and issue in no speech or deed. They are then a means of escaping the world rather than joining it.
To repeat, the Latin root of our English word “attention” is tenere, which means to stretch or make tense. External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they can pull us out of ourselves. But only if they are treated as external objects, with a reality of their own.
SELF-PROTECTION
When someone has difficulty relating to objects (including other people) as independent things, the name for this condition is narcissism. It is not a condition of grandiosity so much as fragility; the narcissistic personality needs constant support from the world, and is unclear on the boundary between self and other. As Sherry Turkle writes, such a personality “cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use. So, the narcissistic self gets on with others by dealing only with their made-to-measure representations.”8
Such representations may take the form of David Foster Wallace’s generous imaginings in the supermarket checkout line, which are made to measure by Wallace for the purpose of moderating his own impatience. If these representations don’t result in an interaction, they go uncontested, and Wallace is then free to “construct meaning” in whatever way best serves his psychological need. (And, Christ, maybe we should be grateful for any strategy that can prompt some humane feeling toward others.)
Another way we deal with others through representations is in the Kabuki dance of our electronic lives. Turkle conducted interviews with people about their use of various digital technologies. In her very interesting interpretation of her findings, she locates the narcissism of the e-personality not in the grandiosity of our self-representations, but in the simple fact that we increasingly deal with others through representations of them that we have. This results in interactions that are more contained, less open-ended, than a face-to-face encounter or a telephone call, giving us more control. In this domain we have a frictionless array of weak ties to other people who can be summoned according to our own needs.
You are sitting at an airport bar by yourself, feeling a bit antsy, and go through the contact list on your smartphone. You find one or two people who might appreciate the witty observation you just made, and fire off a couple of texts. Even before getting any response, you feel validated (as Turkle points out). I do this often. It is more appealing than getting bogged down in a phone call, which could go in any number of directions, and be awkward to extricate myself from if it gets stilted or boring. At such moments I am a bit like the quasi-autistic gambler who seeks control, and prefers not to deal with the full, messy presence of friends.
Armed with your list of text buddies, each of whom appreciates a particular side of your multifaceted brilliance, you also won’t be called upon to respond to the person on the stool next to you at the bar. This is nice, because in such a conversation you may get an inkling—conveyed by the voice or the eyebrows—of some emotional register that was not on your agenda. Maybe he’s hitting on you. Maybe he’s sizing you up for some investment pitch, or getting ready to share the good news about Jesus Christ. Thank God for your phone. Then again, maybe he’s just another weary traveler looking to connect, offer a wry take on the TSA, and share a chuckle.
It’s not simply that we are too busy for others; we have also developed a heightened instinct for self-protection. Turkle reports that teenagers would far rather text than make a phone call because on the phone they fear that they “reveal too much.” In texting you can carefully craft the version of yourself that you present.
Interviewing people about their use of social media, Turkle says her informants express “a certain fatigue with the difficulties of life with people.” Real people make too many demands and constantly disappoint. She suggests we have developed a widespread emotional readiness for substitutes, for example robots that can mimic intimacy of one sort or another, as pets for the elderly, or as sexual partners for the lonely. “When people talk about relationships with robots, they talk about cheating husbands, wives who fake orgasms, and children who take drugs. They talk about how hard it is to understand family and friends.”9 There is no doubt about it: other people are a major pain in the ass. Put differently, they stand in the way of our freedom to “consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t,” to use Wallace’s formula.
Faced with “how hard it is to understand family and friends,” the autistic retreats into autostimulation. For his part, the narcissist splits off from others what he can use: the parts that bolster his own self-image. We recognize both as pathologies; they might also be understood as the destination toward which the ideal of autonomy tends, absent other ideals that can serve as a counterweight to it. As we saw in our discussion of Freud, the ideal of autonomy seems to have at its root the hope for a self that is not in conflict with the world.
One way this shows up is as an aversion to face-to-face confrontation. For all our online nastiness, my impression is that this aversion is stronger now than it was a few decades ago. This becomes apparent if you look at children’s television. I have a set of DVDs of the first-generation Sesame Street episodes, from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before an episode begins, a warning comes up on the screen: “This show is historical, intended for adults, and may not be suitable for viewing by today’s children.” And indeed the show is bracing, if you are accustomed to today’s offerings. In the early 1970s, it was apparently still all right to show characters getting mad at each other. There is real conflict, as for example when Bert and Ernie are at a movie, and Ernie keeps talking during the movie, reporting to Bert his own responses to it, despite Bert’s embarrassed efforts to get him to quiet down. The Muppets nearby get increasingly annoyed with Ernie. It starts with disapproving clucks and hisses, and eventually devolves into shouted insults and threats, with Muppets getting up out of their seats and coming down the aisle to get in each other’s faces—a real melee.
In another episode, it is late at night and Ernie is unable to sleep. He starts singing at the window of his tenement building. The complaints start low and build into a chorus; soon there are some choice insults echoing amid the laundry lines and alley cats. You will not see anything remotely like that in today’s children’s programs. At some point the messy urban sociality depicted in the original Sesame Street gave way to a suburban scene of isolation and absolute niceness. The physical spaces depicted—the interiors of single-family dwellings—mirror the moral isolation of the autonomous liberal subject.
In one of the early episodes, a blue monster is doing what is clearly an ad-lib improvisation with two (real) children. They are eating apples together. The blue monster is conversing with them in gruff, unsoftened male tones, without any particular solicitude on display, and this seems to give their shared apple-eating a special kind of intimacy. There’s not much talking, actually. Eventually the blue monster asks the children what other kinds of fruit they like. Grapes. “Uh-huh.” Bananas. “Yeah.” Celery. “Celery?! That’s not a fruit!” He says this with unhesitating force; it is an immediate verbal slap across the face. The young boy is momentarily taken aback. But then something in his face becomes more clear. He is smiling. The blue monster takes the boy seriously enough to treat his response as a statement about the world, which can be wrong, not simply as a report about his feelings, which must be protected. In this bold bit of improvisation we witness a moment of maturation. It is a treat to watch, but it is “not suitable for viewing by children today.” The tamping down of face-to-face conflict must be connected to the fragility of the contemporary self. (Meanwhile political discourse has become a performance art of fake outrage.)
On this front, consider the hipster. Christy Wampole offers us the spectacle of the tattooed twenty-five-year-old male wearing a Justin Bieber T-shirt. Or perhaps he invokes some obscure system of allusions by embracing an outmoded style (Wampole gives the example of tiny running shorts). He may take up the accordion, expressing nostalgia for an era he never lived through himself. Wampole points out that all this irony can be understood as a preemptive defense against the kind of exposure one risks in putting forward one’s own aesthetic statement for others to respond to. One might be ridiculed.
Would it be possible for a rock front man like Robert Plant to appear now, after the movie This Is Spinal Tap has percolated through our consciousness for a couple of decades? A brilliant satire of rock, I suspect it had the unfortunate effect of helping to spawn the hipster’s evasive ethic of self-protective cleverness. There is some great popular music these days, but at present it would be hard to name a band that aspires to the epochal stature of a Led Zeppelin. We seem to feel ourselves latecomers to history, as though the human story has played itself out and there remain no great deeds to be done. What is left is to play with the forms we have inherited, sampling and referencing.
* * *
In a previous chapter we considered Hegel’s idea that we need other people to achieve individuality. For others to play this role for me, they have to be available to me in an unmediated way, not via a representation that is tailored to my psychic comfort. And conversely, I would have to make myself available to them in a way that puts myself at risk, not shying from a confrontation between different evaluative outlooks. For it is through such confrontations that we are pulled out of our own heads and forced to justify ourselves. In doing so, we may revise our take on things. The deepening of our understanding, and our affections, requires partners in triangulation: other people as other people, in relation to whom we may achieve an earned individuality of outlook.
Absent such differentiation, there is a certain flattening of the human landscape. In the next chapter, I’d like to consider how the built environment of our shared spaces may contribute to this flattening. When they are saturated with mass media, our attention is appropriated in such a way that the Public—an abstraction—comes to stand in for concrete others, and it becomes harder for us to show up for one another as individuals.