A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism

Reclaiming the Mindful Commons

Peter Doran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317743415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökologie

The power of capital is the power to target our attention, mould market-ready identities, and reduce the public realm to an endless series of choices. This has far-reaching implications for our psychological, physical and spiritual well-being, and ultimately for our global ecology. In this consumer age, the underlying teachings of Buddhist mindfulness offer more than individual well-being and resilience. They also offer new sources of critical inquiry into our collective condition, and may point, in time, to regulatory initiatives in the field of well-being.

This book draws together lively debates from the new economics of transition, commons and well-being, consumerism, and the emerging role of mindfulness in popular culture. Engaged Buddhist practices and teachings correspond closely to insights in contemporary political philosophical investigations into the nature of power, notably by Michel Foucault. The 'attention economy' can be understood as a new arena of struggle in our age of neoliberal governmentality; as the forces of enclosure– having colonized forests, land and the bodies of workers– are now extended to the realm of our minds and subjectivity. This poses questions about the recovery of the 'mindful commons': the practices we must cultivate to reclaim our attention, time and lives from the forces of capitalization.

This is a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental philosophy, environmental psychology, environmental sociology, well-being and neweconomics, political economy, environmental politics, the commonsand law, as well as Buddhist theory and philosophy.

1 Towards a ‘mindful commons’

The Anthropocene and the attention revolution

Introduction

Large parts of the global mindfulness industry – dismissed as purveyors of ‘McMindfulness’ – stand accused of falling into step with the logic and demands of corporate employers and consumer capitalism, with promises of personal resilience, enhanced productivity and happiness in the face of unacknowledged power structures. One of the most influential philosophers of our times, Slavoj Žižek, has even described Buddhism as the perfect supplement for a consumerist society.

This book takes those claims seriously. However, with the dawn of the ‘attention economy’ – an era of corporate targeting of our attention energy to feed the global processes of capitalization – it is time to reclaim mindfulness together with its underlying Buddhist teachings as a critical resource to throw new light on Western experience and support a transition to more sustainable forms of society and economy. My understanding of capitalization comes from Bichler and Nitzan (2009) for whom capital has come to mean much more than the ‘material-productive apparatus’ associated with capitalism. Rather, capitalization – given its universality, cohesion, expandability, intensity and flexibility – is best understood as a ‘symbolic architecture of social power’. Operating through the price system, capitalization quantifies and reduces qualitatively diverse power processes into a universal language, and by doing so ‘absorbs them into the process of accumulation’ (ibid.: 268–9).

Two movements have enjoyed a popular surge of interest and participation over the past decade or two. One is the mainly secular mindfulness movement, with roots in Buddhist teachings, which often involves a therapeutic response to the mental pressures associated with modern lifestyles at work, in the market place or at home. Indeed, the rapid rise of the movement is undoubtedly a marker of the ‘social recession’ (Jackson 2017) or attack on our well-being associated with contemporary neoliberalism, inequality (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009), materialism (Kasser 2002) and consumerism, including rising rates of anxiety and clinical depression, addiction and a decline in morale at work.

At a moment of transition in the economic and ecological trajectory of the West and the eclipse of its totalizing grip on our geopolitical and cultural imaginations, ideas and practices associated with non-Western philosophical traditions are throwing new light on the limits and legacy of the West’s traditions of thought and experience, supplemented by insights from neuroscience on the plasticity of our mental functioning. From the point of view of mindfulness-based paths to enhanced awareness, human beings are not trapped forever in the abstract attitude: another world is possible and it will be accompanied by another set of possible dispositions, characterized by a greater sense of intimacy, compassion and continuity with all beings. The dissociation of mind from body, of awareness from experience, is the result of habituation – personal and institutional – that can be interrupted and broken through meditative technologies or practices that suspend the flow of discursive thought, can tame the inherent restlessness of the mind, and lead to calm and enhanced awareness or presence (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1993: 25–6).

For those who choose to do so, locating mindfulness practice within an ‘engaged’ Buddhist philosophy or community of practice can also uncover both practice-based and conceptual resources for ‘radical critique and revolutionary praxis’ (Clark 2014), peace, and both social and environmental justice (Strain 2014; Nhat Hanh 1992). Prompted by a political and economic system where the prospects of living fully and in full awareness are deeply compromised, mindfulness practitioners, potentially and in actuality, are accessing resources that, to paraphrase Enrique Dussel (2008: 80–81), are tapping into the conatio vitae conservandi (life-conserving drive) in a confrontation between the will-to-live and the will-to-power, sometimes articulated as a reclamation of our right to well-being. Together with unprecedented numbers of social movement actors – notably those gathered around the cause of climate change and environmental justice – mindfulness practitioners, teachers and engaged Buddhists have glimpsed – if not begun to tear down – the walls of a ‘totality’ and open a space at the limits of a system through which exteriority may yet burst into history. As Michel Foucault commented in the spring of 1978 (Davisson 2002) at the conclusion of a period of Zen meditation practice in the Seionji temple in Japan: ‘if a philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe, or equally, born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe (Foucault 1999: 113). Mindfulness-based practices, especially those located in or reconnected with their engaged Buddhist origins, offer a threshold or opening to reflection on the deep structural or societal causes of dis-ease that have accompanied individuals with the rise of modernity, neoliberalism and life as it is increasingly defined by the extrinsic values of the market place where we are invited to internalize a radical and isolated responsibility for our larger fate and where our sense of agency retreats to the realms of ‘self-help’ solutions in the enclosures of the psyche and the body.

The second movement involves activist and academic champions of the commons who have begun to respond to neoliberal capitalism and consumerism with a series of critical counter-practices, piloting a radical alternative to the prevailing hyper-individualist and consumerist ethos that recycles ‘biological necessity into commercial capital’ (Bauman 2010: 67). A commons has a number of important characteristics:

• It is a social (sometimes legal) system with some self-organizing capacity and a commitment to preserving and sharing a local resource and working together with shared values and identity.

• Access to the protected resource is organized on an inclusive and equitable basis.

• A commons is often identified with the particular resource that it has evolved to safeguard, use and preserve. In fact, a commons is always more-than-a-resource. It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.

• Finally, there is no commons without commoning or the practices that embody the social practices and norms for managing a resource for collective benefit.

As Ugo Mattei, one of the premiere theorists of the law of the commons, explains:

phenomenological understanding of the commons forces us to move beyond the reductionist opposition of ‘subject–object,’ which produces the commodification of both. It helps us understand that, unlike private and public goods, commons are not commodities and cannot be reduced to the language of ownership … It would be reductive to say that we have a common good. We should rather see to what extent we are the commons.

(Mattei 2012: 5)

Silke Helfrich (2012) has identified a number of core beliefs that seem to be intrinsic to the practice of commoning and the organization of the commons, including: for rivalrous resources there is enough for all through sharing; while for non-rivalrous resources, there is abundance; humans are primarily cooperative; knowledge is produced through peer-to-peer networking or collaboration; and the vision of society foregrounds a conviction that one’s personal unfolding is a condition for the development of others.

A feature of this contemporary commoning movement is the shift from a view of the commons as a ‘thing’ or even as a set of arrangements to a phenomenological emphasis on the active promotion of commoning as a way of being, doing and seeing the world (Bollier 2014). Commoning has been described (Weber 2013: 44) as an attempt to redefine our very understanding of ‘the economy’, to challenge a dominant understanding that valorizes rationality over subjectivity, material wealth over human fulfilment, and the system’s abstract necessities (growth, capital accumulation) over human needs.

Commoning shatters these dualisms and reconfigures the role of participants so that we are not simply reduced to the roles of producers or consumers but come to be regarded as participants in a physical and meaningful exchange with multiple material, social and sense-making needs. Commoners realize that their household needs and livelihoods are entangled with the specific place and habitat where they live, and with the earth as a living entity. The recovery of the commons is a collective act of restorative memory and remembering (Bollier 2014), practice, and a rendering visible of new possibilities for economic and legal forms in the face of a failed attempt by champions of capitalist power to impose a false arrest on the historical evolution of economic ideas: to revive and re-embed slow practices in an ethos that is local or situated, entangled in relationships that are human and non-human, and that command an ethics of care, reciprocity and interbeing (Weber 2013).

Rowe describes the commons as the ‘hidden economy, everywhere present but rarely noticed. It provides the basic support systems of life – both ecological and social’ (Rowe 2001a). He notes that the ‘destruction of the commons has been the leitmotif in much that passes for “development”. It is the threat that connects many of the problems that beset the world’, from pollution of the water and sky, to the breakdown of community, the toxic entertainment industry, and attempts to engineer and patent the genetic substrate of life itself. Bresnihan (2015) sums up one perspective of the commons, one that refuses to fix the idea to that of a ‘resource’, for the commons is not merely land or knowledge but the way these, and more, are combined, used and cared for by and through a collective that is not only human but also non-human.

Commoning, then, denotes the continuous making and remaking of the commons through shared practice. Bresnihan (ibid.: 4) adds that at the heart of this relational, situated interdependence of humans and non-humans is not an impoverished world of ‘niggardly nature’, nor an infinitely malleable world of ‘techno-culture’, but a more-than-human commons that navigates between limits and possibilities as they arise.

A call for a political economy of attention

The subject of this book is a call for a political economy of attention: a mindful commons. Its cultivation will demand a network of new conversations and practices, some of them embodied in the technologies of meditation and related mind–body practices or askēsis. This is an opening contribution about the ground upon which these two movements (mindfulness and commoning) can meet and how that ground can be cultivated to deepen our critical and collective understanding of the ‘attention economy’ and what’s at stake.

Attention is that to which we attend. William James (1958) observed that what we attend to is reality. Wallace (2006) believes that our very perception of reality is tied closely to where we focus our attention. Increasingly, our individual and collective ability ‘to see’ has been mediated by a highly reductionist mindset of market-based economics and culture. Bollier (2014: 150) notes that ‘to see the commons – to really see the commons’ we need to escape this reductionist mindset. This is true of the urban garden waiting to emerge through an act of attending and imagination, a pause that allows us to see through what has become hidden in plain view behind the appearance of an abandoned piece of urban ‘waste’ land. This is also true of the quality of our attendance to our own bodies and dispositions if ‘care for the self’ is to be cultivated and inform our relations with the world. In her article ‘Nothing Comes Without its World: Thinking with Care’, María Puig de la Bellacasa, reminds us that all knowledge is situated, knowing and thinking are inconceivable without a multitude of relations that also make possible the worlds we think with. She wants us to remember that ‘relations of thinking and knowing require care’ (de la Bellacasa 2012: 198). Care is relational. She proceeds to offer Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s definition of care as including ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (ibid., citing Tronto 1993: 103).

Only what we pay attention to seems real to us, continues Wallace (2006). While what we ignore seems to fade into insignificance until, perhaps, we are blindsided and events suddenly call out for attention. He adds: ‘Each of us chooses, by our ways of attending to things, the universe we inhabit and the people we encounter. But for most of us, this “choice” is unconscious, so it’s not really a choice at all.’ Which raises interesting questions about freedom.

While we hold to our beliefs about free will, we are equally conscious of our struggles to direct our attention. As Wallace observes:

We may believe in free will, but we can hardly be called ‘free’ if we can’t direct our own attention. No philosopher or cognitive scientist needs to inform us that our behaviour isn’t always guided by free will – it becomes obvious as soon as we try to hold our attention on a chosen object.

(Wallace 2006: 14)

James (1958) also held that attention has a profound impact on character and ethical behaviour, and that our capacity to voluntarily bring back wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character and will. While James regarded a gift for sustained attention as a fixed deposit, a capacity one inherited or not, the contemporary mindfulness movement and associated spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, are associated with forms of training to enhance the capacity for attention in attempts to interrupt patterns of conditioned behaviour and cultivate a genuine quality of freedom and spaciousness around our capacity to see, our capacity for awareness. There is an emerging homology – rendered all the more urgent by the nature of the attention economy – between the practices and dispositions of commoning and the mindfulness movement, especially for those who wish to inform their activism and powers of resistance.

Attention is now regarded as an essential part of practices of consumption, entertainment and media culture, as it has become intensely valued both as capital and as a scarce commodity. That innate tendency towards ‘absence’ from our moment-to-moment experience has become an open door for a highly sophisticated series of social and corporate technologies designed to target and capitalize our attention energy. Indeed, in the context of post-industrial society, attention is now regarded as a currency with greater value than that which circulates in our banks, one that is now the single most important determinant of business success:

The problems for businesspeople lie on both sides of the attention equation: how to get and hold the attention of consumers, stockholders, potential employees, and the like, and how to parcel out their own attention in the face of overwhelming options. People and companies that do this, succeed. The rest fail.

(Davenport and Beck 2001: 3)

For Guattari (1984, 1995) modern-day capitalism and its worldwide complex of production and consumption is the primary and most important source of human subjectivity because subjectivity conditions and participates in the production of all other commodities. We are the product. Subjectivity has become a key commodity (Lazzarato 2014) – an achievement of a global media, information and entertainment complex – the nature of which is conceived, developed and manufactured as systematically and predictably as the Apple iPhone or any other commodity. Advertising, the mass media, technological advances in social media and celebrity culture underpin deeply rooted practices of individualism and materialism by facilitating a global competition for ‘mind share’ in the attention economy (Rowe 2001b). These technologies have also gotten under our skin, and have come to mediate how we relate to notions of self in a profound way. But at what cost? There is an increasing recognition that attention deficit is the price individuals now pay for their participation in the new attention economy that treats attention as a scarce commodity to be pursued and monetized at every opportunity. The deficit is commonly experienced – at the very least – as a form of time poverty, but it is in the realms of our subjectivity where the most subtle influences occur. This conditioning has multiple implications for our quality of life, well-being and ability to negotiate wise and sustainable choices for ourselves, society and ecology.

As Clark (2014) has observed, the history of domination is older than the history of capitalism. It is nevertheless essential to understand the ways and forms tha...