Direction and Socio-spatial Theory

A Political Economy of Oriented Practice

Matthew Hannah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351668910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Conditions
• Index: Economics

The embodied directedness of human practice has long been neglected in critical socio-spatial theory, in favor of analyses focused upon distance and proximity. This book illustrates the absence of a sense for direction in much theoretical discourse and lays important groundwork for redressing this lacuna in socio-spatial theory.

Many accounts of the social world are incomplete, or are increasingly out of step with recent developments of neoliberal capitalism. Not least through new technological mediations of production and consumption, the much-discussed waning of the importance of physical distance has been matched by the increasing centrality of turning from one thing to another as a basic way in which lives are structured and occupied. A sensibility for embodied processes of turning, and for phenomena of direction more generally, is urgently needed. Chapters develop wide-ranging and original engagements with the arguments of Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Beller, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Held, Bernard Stiegler, Theodore Schatzki, Rahel Jaeggi, Hartmut Rosa and David Harvey.

This book reinterprets practice, embodiment, alienation, reification, social reproduction and ethical responsibility from a directional perspective. It will be a new valuable resource and reference for political and social geography students, as well as sociologists and anthropologists.

Part I

Foundations

1 Political economies of attention

Attention is a name given to a complex set of processes relating embodied human beings – and of course other living things – with their actual or virtual surroundings, as we shall see in Chapter 2. One central feature of attention, however understood, is that in many of its forms it is characterized by selective directedness. This has been the most prominent idea running through over a century of research on attention in phenomenology as in psychology (Styles, 2006; Wehrle, 2013). The discourse on economies of attention that emerged in the 1990s takes this selective directedness as its point of departure and develops a set of conceptual tools with which to begin to grasp the larger effects of the directedness of engaged practice. By tracing some themes in this discourse the present chapter begins to flesh out both what is meant by directional asymmetry and the critique of the centrality of distance in explaining socio-spatial phenomena. Attention has begun to attract the interest of geographers, whether researching principles of urban design (Schmid, 2007), the politics of landscapes (Hannah, 2013), design of video games (Ash, 2012, 2015), or activist geographic information system (GIS – Wilson, 2015). All of this work draws upon the discourses reviewed here, but as yet a more systematic assessment of the spatial politics of attention has been lacking (though see Hannah, 2015).

The discourse on (political) economies of attention is thought-provoking and innovative, particularly in historicizing the problematic of directed attention and in linking it to power relations. A critical overview of this discourse turns up important concepts and insights that will be developed further over the course of the book. Sprawling loosely over a variety of disciplines, it is not tightly organized into a conversation. Nevertheless, for the sake of efficient presentation, I distinguish between three important strands or thematic groupings, while acknowledging that there are overlaps and common themes shared across them. I focus in each case on a small number of authors whose writings raise exemplary points. Broadly speaking, the first strand constructs attention as a limited embodied capacity of human beings, a capacity susceptible to commodification. The second strand treats attention as a vehicle of surplus value creation, and the third focuses more on attention as a contested field of subjectivation. Against the background of these three strands, the work of Bernard Stiegler on attention is introduced in more detail. Stiegler’s approach to attention can be read as a partial synthesis of important points from all three strands, and a number of aspects of his thinking will play an important role in shaping the subsequent argument. Although the entire discourse surveyed here strongly implies that there are relatively stable phenomenal features of attention, the arguments put forward in this literature nevertheless leave the details and structure of attentional processes under-discussed. Again, Chapter 2 will address this silence by turning to phenomenological accounts of attention. This then sets up an encounter with practice theory to be staged in Chapter 3.

Attention as a commodity

The first set of recent writings depicts attention essentially as a commodifiable human capacity around which a market economy has emerged. The basic problem that motivated this strand is one the cognitive scientist Herbert Simon already identified in 1971, namely, that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon, 1971, 40–41). This idea led Michael Goldhaber to identify the “attention economy” as a new economic form destined to eclipse the material-industrial economy in the same measure as the Web and the Internet become the central platforms for economic activity (Goldhaber, 1997). As Goldhaber himself admits, he was not the first to make this kind of argument, but his version of it proved to resonate strongly. His paper originated as a presentation for a conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in January of 1997 on “The Economics of Digital Information”. In his presentation, Goldhaber pointed out that an academic conference like the one where he was speaking is itself a miniature attention economy:

While you are here, your main concern is how you pay attention and where you pay it, perhaps whether you get enough in return to have a chance at being one of the conference stars, perhaps only through the brilliance of the questions you ask. Even between sessions, the exchange of attention is what mostly tends to occupy people at a conference. Of course, there are material considerations, such as having enough to eat, a comfortable chair, etc. But they tend to be secondary issues, taken for granted, and not occupying much attention. We are living a temporary attention economy in miniature right at this moment.

Goldhaber, 1997

Not coincidentally, another author whose writings would help draw attention to attention in the late 1990s, the Austrian planner, architect and philosopher Georg Franck, likewise modeled his analysis of “the economy of attention” centrally upon the neoliberalized academic world of citation indices, impact factors and reputation (Franck, 1998). “Scholarship”, he asserts, “is [little else than] a dance around attention” (Franck, 1998, 37). Franck defines attention [German: Aufmerksamkeit] as a combination of the English terms “awareness” and “attention” (the latter in the narrower sense studied in psychology), insisting that he does not reduce it to mere information processing on the model of a computer. Instead, “with Aufmerksamkeit both the capacity for selective information processing and the state of conscious presence [Geistesgegenwart] are always addressed” (Franck, 1998, 28–30). Nevertheless, like Goldhaber, he often treats attention simply as a limited capacity or scarce resource:

The capacity of our attention for information processing is organically limited. […] Our intentional consciousness is limited both in terms of the number and complexity of objects on which we can concentrate and in terms of the speed with which we can take up, grasp and order them.

Franck, 1998, 49

Franck argues that as attention has become more measurable and comparable through innovations such as impact factors and citation indices, it has started to take on the full range of functions of an academic currency. Using academic discourse as a touchstone, he explores how phenomena such as reputation or stardom can be understood in attentional-economic terms in other areas of professional life as well. His and Goldhaber’s portrayal of attention as a commodity in which we can invest, as well as a form of income or profit, can easily be extended to the techniques by which large internet concerns such as Google® and Facebook® track user activities, whether to generate real-time customized advertising markets or to refine search suggestions. The process by which advertisers engage in automatic bidding to place their ads at precisely defined locations on the screens of individually profiled Google® users illustrates very literally how the scarcity of attention can create a competitive market (Wu, 2016, 323–324).

Taken as a whole, these and related writings establish a crucial point that plays a key role in this entire study: that however historically contingent as a concept, and however many levels, modalities and dimensions it can be seen to have, in the flow of purposeful activity or practice, focused attention is selective and exclusive in its effects. This conclusion has been confirmed again and again in experimental psychology as well as in our naïve everyday experiences (Gazzaley and Rosen, 2016; Styles, 2006; Wehrle, 2013). A crucial point to make here is that this circumstance is not merely an artifact of neoclassical economic epistemology, regardless of how well it has lent itself to incorporation within essentially neoclassical narratives (contra Dzudzek, 2015, 246). The scarcity of focused attention was first constructed as an epistemological object in the decades of intense industrialization around 1900, as Crary shows (Crary, 1999). However, what was then first defined is not merely an epistemological convention but is anchored in an embodied feature of human being-in-the-world, as will be argued at greater length in Chapters 2 and 4. Put differently, I want to argue that the scarcity of focused attention is an important, if hitherto under-appreciated, dimension of the analytic of finitude within which we still find ourselves. Acknowledging that the idea of the scarcity of focused attention has a specific genealogy as a concept does not disqualify an acknowledgement that it also has real bodily referents. And thinking of it as a real form of embodied finitude does not automatically imply buying into the entire edifice of neoclassical economics, homo œconomicus, etc. This becomes clearer once we move from the conceptions of Goldhaber and Franck to more political-economic approaches.

Attention as a vehicle of value-creation

The second strand of recent discussions of attention offers a more historical materialist political economy of attention. Attention appears here as a vehicle of value creation increasingly appropriated by capital. This strand highlights the genealogy of attention. The aesthetic theorist Jonathan Crary’s subtle study Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Crary, 1999) shows that attention is an historically specific concept that emerged in close connection with the crisis of epistemology – and of the sovereign, self-transparent subject – in late 19th century philosophy, psychology and art. This period was characterized by alarmed reflection on widespread experiences of subjective faculties being overwhelmed by ever-faster, ever-more-complicated sensory and cognitive environments thrown up by industrializing capitalism. The alarm provoked by accelerating industrialization, urbanization and mobility in Europe and North America is well documented (Kern, 2003). Developments in psychoanalytic theory and philosophy gave discursive shape to the felt loss of control. In Crary’s account:

attention emerges as a discursive and practical object at the historical moment when vision and hearing have become progressively severed from the various historical codes and practices that had invested them with a level of certainty, dependability and naturalness. The more the senses are revealed to be inconsistent, conditioned by the body, prey to the threat of distraction and nonproductivity, the more a normative individual is defined in terms of objective and statistical attentional capacities that facilitate the subjects functional compatibility within institutional and technological environments

Crary, 1999, 287

Crary traces the rise and elaboration of the problem of attention in the works of figures as diverse as William James, Edward Muybridge, Edmund Husserl, Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne and many others. Drawing upon Guy Debord’s 1967 argument in Society of the Spectacle (Debord, 2009), Crary makes an important claim about what the historical emergence of the problematic of attention implies for modern power relations, both a century ago and today:

[T]he management of attention, whether through early mass-cultural forms in the late-nineteenth century or later through the television set or the computer monitor […], has little to do with the visual contents of these screens and for more with a larger strategy of the individual. Spectacle is not primarily concerned with looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way attention becomes the key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power.

Crary, 1999, 74

Crary sees here a convergence between Debord’s diagnosis of the spectacle and Foucault’s concern in his studies of discipline: in both cases it is a question of how “docile bodies” are produced (Crary, 1999, 74). The seemingly paradoxical separation effect of strategies of attentional control in the midst of a world characterized by mobility and connection is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in a phenomenon that has only appeared since the publication of Crary’s book: people glued to smartphone screens and heedless of the surrounding hustle of city streets, or immersed in gaming worlds and deaf to all else (Ash, 2015). Crary closes the main text of his study by crediting Cézanne in particular for relentlessly attending to “both the ground and the overcoming of the administered perception of spectacular culture, for which attention would be made attentive to everything but itself” (Crary, 1999, 359). In the argument to follow, I will elaborate on Crary’s suggestions about how to understand modern, non-coercive power, bringing the individuating and separating effects of attention management into an analysis of “occupation” as a distinct form of power relation that encompasses not only attention but embodied practice more generally.

If Crary’s approach updates Debord’s “society of the spectacle” and lends the attention economy historical depth, the work of Jonathan Beller can be seen as an elaboration of the basic insights of Walter Benjamin in his 1935 study of “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility” (Benjamin, 2008). Like Benjamin, Beller investigates the impact of cinematic forms of engagement of attention upon social, economic and political consciousness. If Crary chronicled the impacts of the intense phase of industrialization in the decades around 1900, Beller can be seen to do something broadly similar for the current phase. He argues that we now live under a “cinematic mode of production” organizing the consolidated reign of the visual in modern capitalist life. We can understand this mode of production on the basis of an “attention theory of value”, which “finds in the notion of ‘labor’, elaborated in Marx’s labor theory of value, the prototype of the newest source of value-production under capitalism today: human attention” (Beller, 2006, 4). Beller later suggests that the labor theory of value can even be understood as a special case of the more general attention theory of value (Beller, 2006, 201). Through the ingenious new methods of attracting and exploiting attention, “the image structures the visible and the invisible, absorbs freeing power, and sucks up solidarity time” (Beller, 2006, 5). We are divided from each other and diverted from projects of solidarity by the new technologies of attention capture. One of the few geographers to follow up on this idea was Heiko Schmid, who applied analysis of visual strategies of attention capture to urban design (Schmid, 2007).

By capturing and managing our attention, “cinema” – by which Beller means not just specific cultural institutions but the increasingly visual mediation of culture in general – “ceaselessly coordinates global economic forces with the extremely local (meaning regional, but also interior to particular individuals) productions of affect, trajectories of desire, and proprioception” (Beller, 2006, 26). In ways that suggest intriguing extensions of Harvey’s sketch of “the body as an accumulation strategy” (Harvey, 1998), Beller puts forward the hypothesis that “from the standpoint of capital, as geographical limitations are in the process of being overcome by capital, capital posits the human body as the next frontier. By colonizing the interstitial activities of bodies, each muscular contraction or each firing neuron is converted into a site of potential productivity” (Beller, 2006, 202). As capital recognizes the enormous potential of mining human attentional capacities, “[t]he increasing efficiency and development of new attention-siphoning technologies becomes [its] central province of endeavor” (Beller, 2006, 206). Tim Wu’s documentation of the 20th century quest by US me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Foundations
• PART II: Turning-in-the-world
• PART III: Direction, socio-spatial theory and ethics
• Conclusion: Ethics and directional responsibility
• Index