Seeking Attention

About Seeking Attention

A book depicting the intimate complicity between attention and identity. . . “You are what you pay attention to.”

Simone Weil famously stated: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” But what, in fact, counts as attention? Especially in our discombobulated age?

Seeking Attention contributes to the burgeoning discussion around “attention studies,” in a novel format – one that seeks to be as accessible as it is thought-provoking. The book presents a series of short “portraits” of different archetypal figures – the detective, the fan, the shrink, the parent, the lover, and others – with a focus on the specific ways in which they pay attention (to themselves, to others, to the world, and so forth). Using this frame allows the reader to reconsider the ways in which they themselves have likely been taking their own attention for granted. The figures featured in the book share certain traits, but also exhibit their own idiosyncratic relationship to the situations and contexts in which they find themselves. In this sense, the book is a somewhat mischievous phenomenology. Each “type” represents a different relationship to attention, and thus reframes its many failures, compromises, blind-spots, and discontents. (As well as its occasional triumphs.)

By paying attention to attention, this book offers a rogue’s gallery of customary ways in which we not only navigate the world, but help co-create it. These thirty portraits aim to inspire readers from diverse backgrounds to think more carefully, and in a more textured way, about precisely why it is so difficult these days for us to pay attention in a sustained way. As such, the book offers some models – traditional and emerging – for practicing multi-sensual ways of being truly present: ones that potentially embody the collective will to work effectively against all the insidious avatars of the Industrial-Distraction Complex.