ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Circumperception—omniscience—was once the dream of the mightiest intelligence agencies. Now it is an index, and privacy is valorized in its every liquidity: It can represent secrets, hidden appetites, and desires (which can be satisfied, profitably, only through being revealed), or just vast reserves of “sensibility.” It is time, though, that becomes the most covetable asset in the attention economy. (Alternately, it becomes the least recoverable resource in the attention ecosystem—the natural world continues to borrow its most salient terminology from the marketplace at preferential rates.)

  Advertising is now the cost of free hosting. Celebrities get free clothing so noncelebrities buy same, or cheaper versions of same. Culture is given away gratis, to certain influentials—refluentials—in return for criticism (which at its most perceptive addresses the mechanisms of distribution and hype, and at its least perceptive becomes just another component of them itself). The price of content is nonnegotiable—it is content of your own. Worth is generated for businesses by nonemployees, by the unemployed—freelance consumers, prosumers (producer-consumers). “Remediation,” that anodyne trope casting each and every format iteration as a body/mind ghosted by the soul of the format it has supplanted—painting and sculpture remediated by photography; live music performance remediated by recordings; the typewriter remediated by computer; books remediated by ebooks; hardware and software remediated by network—has already managed to account for every technology besides the human, whose remanence—whose magnetic retention—has been on the wane for two millennia, and yet for whom the newest conception of a supersessionary infrastructure still promises immortality upon “a cloud.”

  Name the minimum amount of money you’re willing to be paid to reread this book in return for recommending it to 1.) one “friend,” 2.) two “followers,” 3.) six “unique connections,” and 4.) your “full circle” (four separate figures); name the minimum amount of money you’re willing to be paid not to reread this, but just to recommend it to 1.) two “friends,” 2.) four “followers,” 3.) twelve “unique connections,” and 4.) your “full circle” (four separate figures); name the minimum amount you’re willing to be paid to reread this book, all over again, from start to finish, in an electronic edition (regardless if that’s how you’ve read it already), while being 1.) optically tracked, 2.) tested via a skin reactance/conductance interface, to measure patience/impatience, resistance/submission, while 3.) you yourself are reading it, 4.) listening to my own reading of it (audio version), 5.) while you’re stuck in traffic, 6.) midday of a Friday in a, 7.) major city in, 8.) Asia (how many primary solutions? how many secondary?).

  Determine how irked you’d be if you’d mentioned this book positively, in a msg you sent via your preferred msging service (no endorsements), and your msging service offered to sell you another copy; determine how irked you’d be if you’d mentioned this book negatively, in a msg you sent via your preferred msging service (no endorsements not considered), and your msging service offered to sell you another copy; rank the objects of your irk in each situation, from most to least (irksome): the msging service; yourself; the partnering online retailer, if a subsidiary of your msging service; the partnering online retailer, if not a subsidiary of your msging service; me; determine, if someone in your circle mentioned this book positively, and you received a msg that informed you that you were currently two miles away from a bookstore—believe it or not—a chain bookstore—that sold this book, and that if you acted within two minutes and bought this book in person, you’d receive 20 percent off, though if you acted remotely, and bought this book virtually, you’d receive only 10 percent, what you’d do; determine, if someone in your circle mentioned this book negatively, and you received a msg that informed you that you were currently two miles away from a bookstore—believe it or not—an independent bookstore—that sold this book, and other books, and that if you acted within two minutes and bought this book, or any book, in person, you’d receive 20 percent off, though if you acted remotely, and bought this book, or any book, virtually, you’d receive only 10 percent, what you’d do; compute your respective objects and levels of vexation; determine, because you’d enjoyed, or at least reviewed (****), a number (10) of your msging service’s GPS/temporosensitive incentivizing offers in the past, whether you’ll opt out of future notifications, whether you’re capable of opting out of future notifications; determine whether you’d be more or less likely to purchase a second copy and/or edition of this book if an advertising msg featuring the book had interrupted, as an “interstitial,” or “pop-up,” a primary task (active: writing/reading email); or a secondary task (passive interactional: alternate promotional game [please specify]; or just clicking through the sites [please specify]); determine whether your willingness to pay for this book if it were being offered by an online biblio-retailer whose ad causes an uncontrollable/incongruent interruption of a primary task is higher or lower than your willingness to pay for this same book if it were being offered by another online biblio-retailer whose ads never cause such interruption (other factors being equal: the retailer’s politics, diversity hiring practices, zero-tolerance harassment policies, fair wages, salaries, and benefits packages); determine whether your willingness to pay for this book if it were being offered by an online biblio-retailer whose ad causes a controllable/congruent interruption of a primary task is higher or lower than your willingness to pay for this same book if it were being offered by the same biblio-retailer whose ad causes an uncontrollable/incongruent interruption of a primary task.

  Determine “whether interactivity promotes stickiness”; determine what that sticky substance is on your keyboard; determine to what degree your enhanced voluntary attention, gained through this book’s PR/marketing campaign, initially came in the form of attention directed toward the book’s design or executional elements (its cover), or toward its conceptual property (its “copy,” or the publisher’s explanation of what the book is about); determine to what degree your enhanced involuntary attention, gained through this book’s PR/marketing campaign, initially came in the form of attention directed not toward the book but toward the campaign itself; gauge your interest in what have been called “interrupt rights”—a scheme by which I would pay you for the opportunity of interrupting you, so that I might read you, in person or over the phone, the corrections to the first edition of this volume, line by line, with your time appraised according to your earnings, or alternate metric of socioeconomic position (a fame rating, like the “Q score,” Marketing Evaluations, Inc.’s quotient of namebrand/brandname recognition);*3 gauge whether you’d be more or less interested in what has been called an “attention bond”—a plan by which I would make an escrow payment representing the guarantee that my communication, my reading you this edition’s corrections, won’t waste your time; your cashing out the bond would cancel the contact and stop me from contacting you ever again, but your leaving the money in the bank would represent the hope for further interaction—meanwhile, for the duration of our info-relationship, we’d split the interest earned by the escrow (though my publisher, and agent, will have to take their percentages—strictly from my half, I assure you).*4

  Determine the quanta of respect, bummed cigarettes, and cadged drinks I will get from friends—true friends—for giving them free copies of this book; square that with the quantum of capital—cash money—I will earn from the sale of this book (to lesser friends, least acquaintances, strangers); determine the dimensions of my cell (currently twelve feet by twelve feet); pronounce the length of my sentence (on this essay alone: 186 writing days, 10 hours, 8 minutes, 4 seconds).

  * * *

  —

  BUT THIS IS NOT the way it has to be, and this is not the way it is. I offer as proof, Asia. Attention (in the sense of its lack) might be an interpellative first-world problem, a telemediated problem, a late-stage capitalist problem—it is not, or not yet, an Asian problem, and it might be difficult to find a country more first
world than Japan, more telemediated than Korea, more late-stage capitalist than China.

  That the closest equivalents to “attention,” in all the Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages and Korean, are totally static, or spiritually contemplative, translates the Western regard for the concept’s utility into a condition bordering on mania. A deficit of attention is, perhaps, just a surplus of fearmongering. Now the West’s might be the closed economy—creating an artificial resource, only to create an artificial scarcity: a scare, a run on the bank of attention.

  To Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, Western perceptions can only be linking devices, connections between, and conditioned by, life’s myriad disparities. Attention, in the West, is the very essence of this disparity, as it’s neither a principle of conduct, nor a self-development discipline; neither a religious practice, nor tenet; instead, it is an addiction, a delusion. Founded in sequence and lost in rupture, attention is incapable of anything but a perpetual reprioritizing, becoming not the arbiter of experience, but experience itself—a substitute, a sham. True present—being—is set in competition with unsatisfiable drives, the pursuit of which is pleasureless, or resembles the recouping of an investment. To attend to stimuli, regardless of their source, is either to reinforce by compensation, or to compensate by reinforcement. To merely recognize the existence of a stimulus is to fail to transcend it—to lose not nothing, but nonexistence.

  Buddhism’s analogues of attention are not fixations on the discrete and linear, but contemplations of an integrative cycle. Its great turning dynastic wheels serve as calendars, chronometers, paradigms of reincarnation, and emblems of memory. The human too must become this wheel, whose turning must be ceaseless. Meditation within this motion—spiritual stasis in material motion—is the only way to attain both contentment and Nirvana. This practice is neither a compelled reaction (there is no compulsion), nor a willed response (there is no will)—just a receptivity.

  In Sanskrit, the receptive faculties are called samadhi, which mark three circuits of Buddha’s Eightfold Path: “right effort/diligence,” “right mindfulness,” “right concentration,” constellating a class that Mahayana Buddhism has defined as the third of the Trainings (the Eightfold Path is itself a stop along the way of the Four Truths, the first of Buddha’s teachings after his enlightenment). “Right effort/diligence” is a ridding of physical baseness; “right mindfulness” a ridding of mental baseness; while “right concentration” is the meditative practice itself—ideally as imperturbable in light as in darkness, in noise as in silence, and in my own ignorance of the languages of Buddhism as in the obscurities of translation. Meditation is a blankness, unless it is trained on a concept (thing/image) or mantra (word/sound), on your breath alone, or an object retrieved from Theravada Buddhism’s karmasthana, or “workplace,” a mental space of forty essential substances, beginning with earth, water, fire, and air—the krtsna or “substances that can be conceived of directly”—and proceeding through the “foulnesses” (corpses swollen, festering, dismembered), through to the virtues, only to end, though never ending, in paradox: “infinite nihility,” “neither perception nor nonperception.”

  Historically, Theravada Buddhism emphasized samadhi, while Mahayana’s Zen emphasized prajna, or “wisdom” (“discernment,” “understanding”). To the other, older Buddhist schools, prajna was the first training of the Eightfold Path—whose circuits were “attitude” and “intention”—but to Zen, such divisions only frustrated the spirit of the very “attitudes” they were “intended” to inculcate. “Sudden” insight—not lasting attainment—was the Zen epiphany, while, between the seizures, “gradual” cultivation might continue, if not in life then in parable:

  Once when Master Bankei [19–90 Edo] was preaching to his followers, he was interrupted by a Shin monk who espoused a belief in miracles, and would not be silent about how their power might be attained by the repetition of holy words. Master Bankei’s followers were distracted, and, as he was unable to proceed, he ceded his time to the monk:

  “The founder of my sect,” the monk said, “stood on one bank of a river with a writing brush in his hand, and had his disciple stand on the other, holding a sheet of paper. The founder waved the brush in the air, and across the river the sacred name of Amitabha [Amida Buddha] was written. Tell me, Master—are you capable of anything so miraculous?”

  Master Bankei shook his head.

  “Alas, my miracles are of a lesser variety,” he said. “When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m thirsty, I drink. When I’m insulted, I forgive.”

  *1 The fMRI reads all areas of the brain, while the EEG/MEG (electroencephalography/magnetoencephalography), which situates electrodes or magnetometers directly on the subject’s scalp, reads more superficially, from the cortical surface. This gives the fMRI a spatial edge, though because hemodynamic response takes more time to measure than do electrical currents, EEG/MEG is considered temporally superior. The two, then, are regularly used in tandem, though the magnetic field of the fMRI can affect the electrical current, which effect must be calculated into the results.

  *2 The temporoparietal junction (TPJ), according to Michael Posner (b. 1936), whose study was quoted above, “appears to be a very specialized region that plays a role in reorienting away from an attended location, irrespective of the direction of new stimuli” (Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention, Second Edition). The right TPJ remains the only brain region “activated by a shift of attention both when shifts are expected and when they are unexpected.” Also, “whenever an expectation is breached.” The rTPJ, then, acts as a “reset device,” “activated by reorienting irrespective of whether cognitive control was exercised.” However, the rTPJ “also appears to be the most frequently damaged brain area in patients who experience neglect.”

  In September 2006, the journal Nature published an account of an experiment at University Hospital, Geneva, in which researchers treated a bedbound epilepsy patient by applying an electromagnetic current to her left TPJ. The patient immediately sensed the presence of another person—young, of indeterminate gender, but speechless, motionless, and mimicking her posture. She identified this person as being behind her, which would’ve been beneath her—within the bed itself. A second, more intense electromagnetic current, applied with the patient in a sitting position, her arms across her chest, resulted in her feeling another presence—this time a man, aggressively wrapping his arms around her. A third current, of less intensity, was applied with the patient still in the sitting position, but this time instructed to conduct a language test, with flash cards. This time the patient detected a man sitting behind and to her right. She claimed he was attempting to interfere with the test: “He wants to take the card—he doesn’t want me to read it.” Experimentation continued in different poses, producing similar effects whenever the current applied to the lTPJ exceeded 10mA. The researchers speculated that the lTPJ was responsible for “self-image”: interoception, proprioception/kinesthesia. When the lTPJ is disrupted, so too might be the sense of autopossession, or selfhood, projecting instead an exteroceptional doppelgänger whose pose mirrors that of its host.

  *3 Scott Fahlman, “Selling interrupt rights: a way to control unwanted e-mail and telephone calls,” IBM Systems Journal, 2002. Another interruption: In a Carnegie Mellon University message-board post of 1982, Fahlman invented the smiley and frowny emoticons: :-) and :-(.

  *4 Thede Loder, Marshall Van Alstyne, Rick Wash, “An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication,” Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy, 2006. Another bond: Prior to pricing the time of information, Van Alstyne, along with Geoffrey Parker, depriced the templates of its delivery, in “Information Complements, Substitutes, and Strategic Product Design,” Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Information Systems, 2000. “A firm can rationally invest in a product it intends to give away [free] in perpetuity even in the absence of competition.” This was enabled by “a complem
entary goods market”: businesses distributing a format or platform at no cost to customers, in order to profit from the sale of media itself.

  14. TRANSITIVE/TRANSACTIONAL, SPEED, COMPUTERS ON SPEED, SURVEILLANCE DREAMING

  CHIROGRAPHY, TYPOGRAPHY, AND THE PRINTING press inscribe a malleable surface. In such technologies the page, which does not flicker, is struck and imbued with markings. This process is analogous to the making of money. A coin is minted by mold, metal is poured into it, and an image is stamped on the surface. Given that nickels are only 25 percent nickel, it’s the image that coins the worth: glyphs of gods and portraits of kings, now kitschy graphics of livestock and wheat. Bills are likewise receptive to scripting—paper authenticated by the reproduced signatures of presidents or prime ministers, treasurers, reserve-chiefs. Pecuniary inscription is a residuum of the regent’s seal or signet, the guarantor of authorship and so, of “authority.” Sphragides, sigilia, specie, and fiat currencies, printing’s movable type screwed to pages, all recorded writing systems to date—in each instance an arbitrary materiality is forcibly impressed with transitory value.

  Enter the computer—ENTER or RETURN—a device by and on which no mark is made, no enslaving gashes or incisions. With the digital the finger definitively gives way to the digit, turning the writing eminently editable, deletable. The wit of Benjamin Disraeli—no hyperlink, you’ll have to search him out yourself—can now be incorporated into my own with nothing more than a negligent click: “Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.”

  But with the recently enabled immortality of data—through server autonomia, and the clouding of storage—preservation has become a type of nonpreservation: Just because information is stored, safe and secure, doesn’t mean it exists or has value.