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The Attention Complex: Media, Archeology, Method
Over the past two decades in the United States, a profound reorientation of human attention has taken shape. This book addresses the recent cultural anxiety about attention as a way of negotiating a crisis of the self that is increasingly managed, mediated, and controlled by technologies.
323 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 11, 2012
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January 1, 2016
What if there was no such thing as “attention”, outside of how it was brought into existence though discourses and practices? Rogers’ Focauldian analysis of the nature of “attention” makes this possibility seem more plausible than the reader might initially presume. Tracing the history of how “attention” has been conceived and used in psychological and other societal discourses, Rogers shows that the nature of how “attention” gets conceived, and how this affects various forms of practice, has changed quite significantly over time. Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge hangs heavily over Roger’s analysis, as Rogers attempts to outline the ways, according to him, that changes in the posited nature of “attention” occurred due to changes in the way that power operates in society.
A book by John Crary, called Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, earlier used a similar Foucauldian approach to unpack the development of the concept of “attention” in the nineteenth century, where the term first gained something like its modern meaning and importance to societal discourses. Rogers at one point describes his book as picking up the history (or more accurately, “genealogy”) of attention where Crary left off, in the early 20th century. But while reading Crary’s work may be helpful for a more complete genealogy of attention, it shouldn’t be necessary: Rogers’ historical work stands quite well on its own as a description of “attention” from the early 20th to the early 21st century. That said, as might be inferred from my frequent use of the terms “discourse” and “genealogy”, at least a passing knowledge of Foucault would be a very good idea going in.
After an initial section outlining how his methodology is derived from Foucault’s later works, Rogers’ book has five main sections, one for each phase of the history of attention at issue. He traces the history of attention as it is conceived and put to use both in psychological descriptions of human subjectivity and in various societal purposes, with “attention” itself often acting as a linking concept (Roger’s calls it a “dispositif”) between the two. The history runs through a “behavioralist” model of attention as habituation, to a “cognitive” model of attention first as a “selection process” and then as a cognitive “resource”, up until the present day where the notion of the “attention economy” is reconfiguring attention once again as both an individual and now a collective economic rather than just cognitive resource.
The last section on the nature of the “attention economy” is underdeveloped, which is probably understandable given the concept’s relative newness. But Rogers is I think too quick to presume that a unitary discursive framework for the “attention economy” has coalesced and become stable, as there are still considerable variations between the attention economy as described by, say, Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information and Davenport/Beck's Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business.
Anyone who has any tendencies towards any form of philosophical realism might also find the book frustrating. While Rogers’ disclaims any intention of investigating whether or not there is anything “real” beyond the discourses and practices that constitute what people have variously understood as “attention”, the analysis seems to very much presume, in true Foucauldian fashion, that the only thing that really exists is “power”, understood as network of relations of force that constitute discourses and practices through their inter-relation and conflict. Yet on occasion there is tacit acknowledgement from Rogers that the operations of power, at least as they are manifested in the discourses and practices around “attention”, can fail, for reasons not clearly related to discursive operations.
Nevertheless, the book is a very good demonstration of how Foucault’s genealogical methodology can yield important insights about how concepts that might seem natural to us are actually, at least to some degree, historically contingent, potentially variable, and defined in accordance with criteria more insidious than a neutral, “objective” attempt to describe reality. Attention, it seems, is one of those concepts.
A book by John Crary, called Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, earlier used a similar Foucauldian approach to unpack the development of the concept of “attention” in the nineteenth century, where the term first gained something like its modern meaning and importance to societal discourses. Rogers at one point describes his book as picking up the history (or more accurately, “genealogy”) of attention where Crary left off, in the early 20th century. But while reading Crary’s work may be helpful for a more complete genealogy of attention, it shouldn’t be necessary: Rogers’ historical work stands quite well on its own as a description of “attention” from the early 20th to the early 21st century. That said, as might be inferred from my frequent use of the terms “discourse” and “genealogy”, at least a passing knowledge of Foucault would be a very good idea going in.
After an initial section outlining how his methodology is derived from Foucault’s later works, Rogers’ book has five main sections, one for each phase of the history of attention at issue. He traces the history of attention as it is conceived and put to use both in psychological descriptions of human subjectivity and in various societal purposes, with “attention” itself often acting as a linking concept (Roger’s calls it a “dispositif”) between the two. The history runs through a “behavioralist” model of attention as habituation, to a “cognitive” model of attention first as a “selection process” and then as a cognitive “resource”, up until the present day where the notion of the “attention economy” is reconfiguring attention once again as both an individual and now a collective economic rather than just cognitive resource.
The last section on the nature of the “attention economy” is underdeveloped, which is probably understandable given the concept’s relative newness. But Rogers is I think too quick to presume that a unitary discursive framework for the “attention economy” has coalesced and become stable, as there are still considerable variations between the attention economy as described by, say, Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information and Davenport/Beck's Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business.
Anyone who has any tendencies towards any form of philosophical realism might also find the book frustrating. While Rogers’ disclaims any intention of investigating whether or not there is anything “real” beyond the discourses and practices that constitute what people have variously understood as “attention”, the analysis seems to very much presume, in true Foucauldian fashion, that the only thing that really exists is “power”, understood as network of relations of force that constitute discourses and practices through their inter-relation and conflict. Yet on occasion there is tacit acknowledgement from Rogers that the operations of power, at least as they are manifested in the discourses and practices around “attention”, can fail, for reasons not clearly related to discursive operations.
Nevertheless, the book is a very good demonstration of how Foucault’s genealogical methodology can yield important insights about how concepts that might seem natural to us are actually, at least to some degree, historically contingent, potentially variable, and defined in accordance with criteria more insidious than a neutral, “objective” attempt to describe reality. Attention, it seems, is one of those concepts.
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