The story of the organ shop may inspire some young people to seek out similar ecological niches for themselves, and that is well and good. But most of us find ourselves midway through a life that already has established contours, subject to financial necessities and family ties that compel us to hunker down in whatever spot in the culture and economy seems to be our lot. For us, the utility of the preceding investigation is that it gives us a point of orientation that can help us make sense of the lives we have. Let us revisit some features of our common life.
The problem we began with a few hundred pages ago was that of distraction, which is usually discussed as a problem of technology. I suggested we view the problem as more fundamentally one of political economy: in a culture saturated with technologies for appropriating our attention, our interior mental lives are laid bare as a resource to be harvested by others. Viewing it this way shifts our gaze from the technology itself to the intention that guides its design and its dissemination into every area of life.
The positive attractions of our attentional environment, the ones we willingly invite into our lives, were no less troubling than the unwanted intrusions: we considered the advent of hyperpalatable mental stimuli, and this raised the question of whether the ascetic spirit required for education had a chance. The content of our education forms us, through the application of cultivated powers of concentration to studies that aren’t immediately gratifying. We therefore had to wonder whether the diversity of human possibilities was being collapsed into a mental monoculture—one that can more easily be harvested by mechanized means.
I related my experience at a roadside emporium on an Indian reservation and wondered if it offered a glimpse at the end point toward which we are progressing. But in the course of our investigations, a crucial difference between our situation and the historical experience of Native Americans has become apparent. They were subject to an invading foreign power, and rightly understood themselves to be at war for the survival of their way of life. (They lost.) Our troubles are native to the regime that we cherish as our own, the product of our greatest virtues as children of the Enlightenment.
The positive examples of well-ordered ecologies of attention that I have elaborated, such as that of the short-order cook, the hockey player, the motorcycle racer, the jazz musician, the glassblower, and the organ maker, have been selected and interpreted for their critical force; they bring out facets of experience that don’t fit easily into our Enlightenment framework.
Let me say something about the mode of thinking that I have been attempting in these pages. I take myself to have been doing political philosophy. What I mean is that, like the early modern thinkers I have criticized, I have been doing philosophy in a political, which is to say polemical, mode, in response to a keenly felt irritant peculiar to a historical moment. Centuries ago, the irritant was established cultural authorities that shackled the mind in “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant said. But our emergence from immaturity seems to have stalled at an adolescent stage, like a hippie who hasn’t aged very well. The irritants that stand out now are the self-delusions that have sprouted up around a project of liberation that has gone to seed, ushering in a “culture of performance” that makes us depressed.
I am sure that to some people, the reactive motivation of this book disqualifies the effort as philosophy. The temptation in doing polemics is to offer partial truths to counter other partial truths. I have no doubt that the preceding account is partial, and probably in ways that aren’t fully apparent to me. But I also take the political mode of philosophizing to be indispensable to philosophy proper, and this is worth dwelling on for a moment.
Philosophy is, among other things, an attempt to understand one’s own experience. It therefore has some kinship with the idea of “common sense.” But common sense sometimes has to be defended by elaborate arguments directed against other arguments that cover over lived experience. Recall Albert Schweitzer’s critique of the organs of his time. The muddiness of the sound wasn’t directly accessible to experience; the newspapers raved about the new organ in Stuttgart. Schweitzer had to make arguments to uncover the muddiness and to begin the process of reverse-engineering a more musical possibility.
The covering over of experience often began as theoretical doctrines—sediments in the history of philosophy that were first articulated in some argumentative context. If they prevailed, they trickled down and settled as articles of faith, or cultural reflexes. One must deploy sharp implements to clear these away and recover a more immediate intelligibility to life. Philosophizing politically is not something you do only after you have figured things out, like Plato’s philosopher returning to the cave. It is how you figure things out to begin with.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT
In the course of thinking about attention, we found that we had to reconsider the boundaries of the self through the idea of cognitive extension. As embodied beings who use tools and prosthetics, the world shows up for us through its affordances; it is a world that we act in, not merely observe. And this means that when we acquire new skills, we come to see the world differently.
We also considered how other people set up shop in our consciousness at a fundamental level, conditioning how we perceive even simple objects like chopsticks and uniformly colored walls. To a significant extent, we know things by having heard about them; they appear to us through the lens of social norms.
This suggested that our cognitive apparatus is thoroughly conventional. We were therefore compelled to ask, what about individuality? How is it possible? For it does seem to be the case that people differ and, if all goes well, a person may develop a deepened understanding that is the fruit of his or her particular biography.
We discovered that individualism, as a doctrine about how we acquire knowledge, arose in a certain political context, that of the Enlightenment, with a polemical intent to liberate us from authority. But the radical self-responsibility that the enlighteners offered as the basis for knowledge seemed to be incompatible with what we had learned about the social nature of knowledge. Therefore we had to ask, is it possible to understand individuality differently? To place it on a different footing from individualism? With the help of Hegel, I suggested that it is by bumping up against other people, in conflict and cooperation, that we acquire a sharpened picture of the world and of ourselves, and can begin to achieve an earned independence of judgment.
But for this to work, they have to be concrete others against whom we differentiate ourselves, not “representatives” of something general, an abstract Public. Yet such abstraction seems to be the tendency of a mass democratic society predicated on liberation from authority. Kierkegaard taught us that rebellion—the moment of individuation—is impossible without a prior reverence. He argued that a flattened human landscape, in which we are embarrassed by the idea of superiority, makes rebellion impossible.
The Enlightenment project for self-responsibility appears to be self-undermining, and has issued in an ideal self that views itself from a third-person perspective. This helped us understand the appeal of early social surveys like the Kinsey Reports (which assigned us to boxes and made it a point of sophistication to view oneself as a representative) and the current appeal of the “wiki” mentality, in which we aspire not to an earned independence of judgment, but rather to participate in the “wisdom of the crowd.” Through a logic that Tocqueville laid out, the sovereign individual becomes the statistical self.
Finally, we considered how tradition—a robust cultural jig—can foster a community of practice in which real independence does seem to become possible (though it is surely never guaranteed). At the root of this possibility is an untimely fact about education that we recovered along the way: it begins by submission to the authority of teachers, as in scientific apprenticeship and craft traditions like organ making.
Obviously, we have not remained narrowly focused on the topic of attention. To make sense of our current crisis of attention required a wider inquiry into the cultural forces and self-understandings that have produced it. In the course of our travels we discovered a few things that bear on that original concern with distraction, and let us now gather these together.
One thing we learned is that the Enlightenment legacy of autonomy talk, persisting as a cultural reflex, can neutralize our critical response to various ways in which our attention gets manipulated. This became most clear in the case of machine gambling, where we found that the gambling industry and its apologists rely on a notion of the sovereign individual to forestall criticism and regulation, even while pursuing “addiction by design” as a social engineering project.
This political thread of argument appeared also in our discussion of the nudge. Libertarian objections to being nudged by the government rest on a notion of autonomy wherein a person’s preferences express an authentic core of the self that is not to be tampered with. But this view is hard to sustain, because in fact our preferences are highly influenced by our environment—as sculpted by various “choice architects” who channel our attention for their own interests. For the libertarian to adopt a resolutely individualistic view of the self is to miss this massive fact, and fail in his stated concern for defending liberty.
I sketched our need for the concept of an attentional commons: a concern for justice in the sharing of our private yet public resource of attention. How does the concept of joint attention, which we encountered in developmental psychology, bear on this? Joint attention occurs among two or more people who are engaged in a common enterprise (such as a child playing with blocks with a caregiver), or at any rate in some shared pragmatic situation in which they are mentally present and aware of one another’s being present. Joint attention has a natural scale to it, which may have something to do with the limits of physical copresence. It is something that arises organically. Sometimes it is serendipitous, as when two strangers come upon a man passed out in the street and must decide what to do. Or one may deliberately give oneself over to an episode of joint attention, such as a concert, where the whole point is for people to come together and pay attention to something worthwhile. In neither case does one find oneself the object of an engineered effort to appropriate one’s attention merely because one’s presence in some shared space makes this possible.
Joint attention is an actual experience that we have. By contrast, the attentional commons is best understood as a purely negative principle, by analogy with the “precautionary principle” invoked by environmentalists. The point of being aware of the attentional commons is not to make it happen but to refrain from damaging it; to be aware of the valuable absence that creates space for private reverie, and indeed for the possibility of those episodes of joint attention that arise spontaneously and make cities feel full of promise for real human contact.
What this boils down to: Please don’t install speakers in every single corner of a shopping mall, even its outdoor spaces. Please don’t fill up every moment between innings in a lazy college baseball game with thundering excitement. Please give me a way to turn off the monitor in the backseat of a taxi. Please let there be one corner of the bar where the flickering delivery system for Bud Lite commercials is deemed unnecessary, because I am already at the bar. The attentional commons is an idea that I hope will catch on among those who are in a position to make such sanctuaries happen: building managers, commercial real estate developers, and interior designers. Here is a modest proposal: Could the Muzak be made opt-in rather than opt-out? Once every twenty minutes, somebody in the room would have to deliberately hit a button to restart it, and thereby actively affirm “Yes! We want some emo in here!”
We learned encouraging things too. Joy is the feeling of one’s powers increasing. The experience of hitting one’s flow as a cook, or feeling one’s awareness run out through the contact patches of a motorcycle’s tires, seems to reveal something deep about the situated, embodied character of impressive human performance. Merely to highlight such experiences provides a point of orientation that can help us assess the manufactured experiences we are offered under “affective capitalism.”
Finally, our investigation of “the erotics of attention” yielded some insight into how one might go about escaping the lonely hell described by David Foster Wallace, in which other people are simply impediments to my will. Contrary to Wallace’s own take on the matter, I suggested that it is not by freely “constructing meaning” according to my psychic need and projecting generous imaginings onto others that I escape my self-enclosure. It is by acquiring new objects of attention, which is to say, real objects of love that provide a source of energy. As against the need to transform the world into something ideal, the erotic nature of attention suggests we can orient ourselves by a selective affection for the world as it is, and join ourselves to it.
RECLAIMING THE REAL
Affection for the world as it is: this could be taken as the motto for a this-worldly ethics. How much of a departure that would be from the ethics that informs our society we have seen in our consideration of children’s television, where the business of forming souls is carried on. In the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, as in many other manifestations of contemporary culture, dealing with reality through a screen of representation serves to make the world innocuous to a fragile ego and the self more pliable to the choice architecture presented by whatever functionary of psychological adjustment is in charge. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the “negative affordances” of material reality. As I said before, to pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to give up on the possibility of real agency.
To reclaim the real would be to go in the other direction. There are, in addition to the slapstick, moments of real physical grace in the original Disney cartoons. When Donald Duck is skating on a frozen lake, he recruits overhanging branches and snowdrifts, incorporating their affordances into a balletic performance in which he is able to do amazing things. His skating is amazing, but not fantastical or magical; it is a heightened version of what you admire when you watch a real skater, or a masterful juggler who is able to improvise and incorporate odd objects supplied by the audience into his act, finding their affordances of weight, rotational balance, and graspability on the fly. To watch the original Donald Duck skate on a lake is likewise to be surprised and delighted by the real. At such moments, the possibilities for beautiful human action in the world as it is—the undiscovered possibilities of fit—seem inexhaustible.
This can inspire wonder and gratitude: the most creditable of religious intuitions is available within a this-worldly ethics of attention. For there does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us. Such are the rules of gravity and buoyancy that surfing is possible. That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities, and giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.
DEMOCRACY WITHOUT FLATTENING
What about encountering other people (as opposed to things)? Here too an ethics of attention would be erotic. We are attracted to examples of human excellence, as in our love of sports. Sports seem to be the one realm where we remain unembarrassed by superiority; here the flattening of the human landscape described by Kierkegaard has not taken hold.
In the flattening, we come to view ourselves and others in the third person, as representatives of a generic category. Taken to its conclusion, this egalitarian logic demands that we regard everyone as a representative of Kant’s all-inclusive genus “rational beings,” so as to guard against special pleading and guarantee moral purity—the kind that requires universality and (says Kant) abstraction from all particulars. Is Kierkegaard’s thought—that human difference appears in the form of hierarchy—an antidemocratic thought?
The physical prowess we admire in sports is hard to miss; it requires no special effort of attention. But, as I concluded also in Shop Class as Soulcraft (in a section entitled “Solidarity and the Aristocratic Ethos”), our attraction to excellence—our being on the lookout for the choicer manifestations—may lead us to attend to human practices searchingly, and to find superiority in unfamiliar places. For example, in the embodied cognitive finesse of the short-order cook, or the intense intellectual labor that may be required in work that is dirty, such as that of the mechanic when he is diagnosing a problem. With such discoveries we extend our moral imagination to people who are conventionally beneath serious regard and find them admirable. Not because we heed a moral demand such as the egalitarian lays upon us, but because we actually see something admirable. Our openness to superiority can connect us to others in a genuine way, without a screen of egalitarian abstraction.
This is not antidemocratic. When the humanity of others who were previously invisible becomes apparent to us for the first time, I think it is because we have noticed something particular in them. By contrast, egalitarian empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill. We all strive for distinction, and I believe that to honor another person is to honor this aspiring core of him. I can do this by allowing myself to respond in kind, and experience the concrete difference between him and me. This may call for silent deference on my part, as opposed to chummy liberal solicitude.
In other words, when a mechanic diagnoses that intermittent electrical gremlin that has been bedeviling your Mercedes for months, be quiet when you write that check, because you are in the presence of genius.
Far from threatening our democratic commitments, attention to rank—the well-earned kind—can put those democratic commitments on a more real foundation.
ON BEING LED OUT, REDUX
To reclaim the real, both in the way we encounter other people and in the way we encounter things, would have implications for education. They are crystallized in the following quote from Doug Stowe, a woodshop teacher and first-class thinker about education: “In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention. Without the opportunity to learn through their hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”1
I don’t think this is true of every student, but it is true of enough students that we ought to worry about it. A due regard for the diversity of human excellence would include a due deference to the diversity of learning styles. But let us go further: to encounter things directly is more fundamental than doing so through representations, so maybe we needn’t regard hands-on education as second-class, and those who require it to flourish as second-rate. Very few of us are scholars by nature, and it seems strange that sitting at desks, looking at books, would become the norm of universal education. Stowe puts his finger on the problem when he suggests that many students are sitting there in class with the silent conviction that what is on offer is “undeserving of their full attention” and engagement. This problem is surely exacerbated by the availability of hyperpalatable mental stimuli. But I believe the more basic issue is the disembodied nature of the curriculum, which divorces the articulate content of knowledge from the pragmatic setting in which its value becomes apparent. By contrast, suppose a student is building a tube frame chassis for a race car. Suddenly trigonometry is very interesting indeed. To reclaim the real in education would be to understand that one is educating a person who is situated in the world and orients to it through a set of human concerns. This is more effective than addressing oneself to a generic “rational being” and expecting him or her to get excited. Our current regime of education has been flattened in this way.
As Stowe’s use of the word “undeserving” suggests, at the heart of education is the fact that we are evaluative beings. Our rational capacities are intimately tied into our emotional equipment of admiration and contempt, those evaluative responses that are inadmissible under the flattening. A young boy, let us say, admires the skill and courage of race car drivers. This kind of human greatness may not be available to him realistically, but is perfectly intelligible to him. If he learns trigonometry, he can put himself in the service of it, for example by becoming a fabricator in the world of motor sports. He can at least imagine such a future for himself, and this is what keeps him going to school. At some point, the pleasures of pure mathematics may begin to make themselves felt and give his life a different shape. Or not. He may instead become enthralled with the beauty of a well-laid weld bead on a perfectly coped tubing joint—like a stack of shiny dimes that has fallen over and draped itself around a curve—and devote himself to this art. There are websites for “weld porn,” and the mere fact that this is so should be of urgent interest to educators. Education requires a certain capacity for asceticism, but more fundamentally it is erotic. Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.