Your Attention Is Not a Resource

Metadata

Author: theconvivialsociety.substack.com
Full Title: Your Attention Is Not a Resource
Category: #articles
URL: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/your-attention-is-not-a-resource

Highlights

After he published a burst of spirited and prophetic works of social criticism in the early and mid-70s, Ivan Illich decided that it was time to re-evaluate his own critical approach. Despite their obvious faults, the industrial age institutions Illich targeted in his scathing critiques proved to be more resilient than he anticipated, and not necessarily because they were, in fact, useful, just, and sustainable enterprises. Rather, Illich came to the conclusion that we remained locked into these inevitably self-destructive institutional structures because they were, as David Cayley explained, “anchored at a depth that ‘rabble-rousing’ could not reach, even if it were as lucid and rhetorically refined as Illich’s critiques had been.” Illich began referring to the “certainties” upon which modern institutions rested. These certainties were assumptions of which we are barely aware, assumptions which lend current institutional structures a patina of inevitability. These certainties generated the sense that people couldn’t possibly do without such tools or institutions, even if they were, in fact, relatively modern innovations. And in this next phase of his career, Illich set out to trace the origins of these certainties, which, in his view, were anything bu
Attention discourse proceeds under the sign of scarcity. It treats attention as a resource, and, by doing so, maybe it has given up the game. To speak about attention as a resource is to grant and even encourage its commodification. If attention is scarce, then a competitive attention economy flows inevitably from it. In other words, to think of attention as a resource is already to invite the possibility that it may be extracted.
So here is a proposition for you to consider: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need. In fact, I’d invite you to do more than consider it. Take it out for a spin in the world. See if proceeding on this assumption doesn’t change how you experience life, maybe not radically, but perhaps for the better. And the implicit corollary should also be borne in mind. If I have exactly as much attention as I need, then in those moments when I feel as if I don’t, the problem is not that I don’t have enough attention. It lies elsewhere. (There is an additional consideration, which is that I’ve failed to cultivate my attention, but, again, this is not a question of scarcity.) In any case, I obviously can’t make any promises, but, you may find, as I have of late, that refusing the assumption of scarcity can be surprisingly liberatin
Let’s put it this way: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need at any given moment provided that at that moment we also know what it would be good for us to do.
To draw this more directly into our present theme, Illich and Cayley each has just as much attention as they need in the moment. The joy of their conversation, the resonance of their encounter, to borrow another formulation, may tacitly derive from the sense that there is nothing else to which they ought to be giving their attention in that moment because their attention is ordered toward the good at that moment.
It is not simply that my work lies in the realm of value and my children in the realm of the good. At a given moment it may be good for me to attend to my work, and at another the good requires that I set my work aside to attend to my children. My point all along has been that I have just as much attention as I need in either case, so along as I can be responsive to what is good and my circumstances enable me to be responsive in this way. The myriad factors that complicate matters do not entail a scarcity of attention.