Sensoria. Маккензи Уорк

us into our selves through the act of attention. The feelings I have of a self are cut from the flow of transindividual affect that may be the main thing media are actually for and about.²¹²

      A view which sees an ecology—rather than a more restricted economy—of attention might wonder if it is working quite as it should. Even assuming we are all the rational actors of economic folklore, one can wonder if we can really attend to what might matter and decide accordingly. Such an optimistic view depends on us having access to useful information to attend to in the first place. “The rationality of our behavior is constantly jeopardized by the deficiency of the information we have about the environment. In other words: we never have the means to pay enough attention.”²¹³ Our behaviors are irrational because our actions are constrained by the surreal spectacle to which we are supposed to constantly attend.

      An economy attending only to a metrics of attention has no way of measuring or even really knowing what is needed to reproduce the conditions of attentiveness themselves. Bernard Stiegler has a usefully counterintuitive argument about this: the problem is not that we are narcissistic, but that we are not narcissistic enough.²¹⁴ The dominant attention economy is too impoverished to enable us to individuate ourselves from it. We don’t go through Freud’s stage of primary narcissism, from which one might return and get some perspective on the world. Instead, we remain within an undifferentiated and pre-individual state, a group narcissism, in which state we get a bit crazy, trying to both belong and be separate without a primary separation to secure either. For Stiegler, mass shootings are symptoms of this failed media ecology. Citton’s diagnosis is a little different but not incompatible.

      Citton channels Paul Valéry: attention is the struggle against entropy. It’s the effort to direct oneself to what matters and in the process both preserve and adapt the forms of the world. Like Paolo Virno, Citton is interested in clichés, proverbs, habits of speech—what he calls schemas.²¹⁵ These are the collective reserve of accumulated experience that we test and hopefully can modify when they come in contact with new perceptions of the world. I would connect this to what Bogdanov called tektology, which one could see as the organization of collective attention through a self-aware practice of filtering and modifying the schemas or worldviews that our collective labors have inherited from our predecessors.²¹⁶

      Like Bogdanov, Citton is interested in something that is at once a politics and an aesthetics of attention. There are four different regimes of attention, of acquired schemas or habits, perhaps even genres. One could call the four regimes alertness, loyalty, projection, and immersion.²¹⁷ Alertness attends to warnings and threats, to what has to be excluded. Loyalty is the opposite pole; it is about trust, mutuality, solidarity, community, what “binds” us through the long term. Projection is looking outward from the familiar, looking for what is mine or ours. Immersion is allowing the strange or the new to come in.

      Immersion fascinates, projection bedazzles, loyalty hypnotizes, alertness excites. One might have need of all four, but the current attention economy privileges some over others. Certain kinds of games, for example, highlight alertness. So does Fox News. A certain kind of art and a certain kind of pedagogy, on the other hand, might try to counterprogram with loyalty and immersion, with an acceptance of others and a joint project of new sensation, negotiated through what Ngai calls the interesting, in which the artist eases us toward the new sensation by securing our trust with formats that hold and repeat the strange or overlooked elements of the work. Warhol’s Empire might be an example here: repeating the one thing, but gently on the eye.

      But what’s more common, when it’s not the alert, is projection. Attention economies like us to feel at home, as if the world is no more than our living room with brighter colors. It’s a way of working with the constraint: that our attention is limited but information is abundant. We’re encouraged to see a handful of what in media industry parlance are called “properties” as an extension of home, a landscape onto which to project, populated by a handful of stars and characters.

      In Guy Debord or Vilém Flusser there’s the beginnings of a critique of the political economy of stardom.²¹⁸ As Debord said, stars model the acceptable range of desires to which one might look. As Flusser saw, the attention paid such objects increases their value. Here I might put more stress on how attention both adds value but may also exhaust it. Jean Baudrillard thought seduction ran a fine line between exposure and concealment.²¹⁹ Dominic Pettman thinks we may be overexposed and have reached peak libido, falling into diminishing returns on visibility.²²⁰

      Citton: “from the moment we start living off visibility, everything that lifts us out of obscurity is worth having.”²²¹ Attracting attention even starts to appear as an ethical goal. One is supposed to “raise awareness” of worthy goals and to oneself in the process. As Baudrillard already saw in the seventies, the logic of visibility has its evil side.²²² Acts of terrorism and shooting sprees exploit this same visibility. They are the hideous other side to Debord’s motto of the spectacle: “that which is good, appears; that which appears, is good.”²²³

      Citton usefully connects the logic of media as value to finance. The culture industries now work less like manufacturers and more like banks. Their market capitalization is a derivative of the attention value of a portfolio of the “properties” they claim to own or claim to be able to keep extracting from the information commons and privatizing. The culture industry is the finance industry whose financial instruments monetize the unconscious. I think we could extend this by connecting Citton to the work of Randy Martin. Perhaps it is not just that media becomes finance, but finance becomes media.

      Financialization might then be just one piece of a transformation of the commodity economy under the control of information. Matteo Pasquinelli draws our attention to prevalence of ternary structures, inserting themselves between information providers and receivers, parasites channeling off a surplus of the flow generated by attention,²²⁴ which then shape attention in the interests of generating their surplus. This might give rise to whole new categories of political and cultural struggles about the geopolitics of what is visible and not visible, or about what Nick Mirzoeff calls the right to look.²²⁵

      Besides our day jobs, if we have them, we have a whole other job these days, doing free labor for Google, Facebook, and others. The culture industries at least let us relax while they did the job of entertaining us. What I call the vulture industries of social media outsource that to us as well. The vulture industries might form a component, alongside finance and some other curiously information controlling businesses, of a distinctive kind of ruling class. Citton uses my term for it: the vectoralist class. This ruling class concentrates power by controlling stocks, flows, and protocols of information and keeping an information surplus for itself.

      In Citton’s reading, the vectoralist class is more than a power over information. It is a power over attention and visibility—even knowability—as well. Its rise is premised on the digital as the latest wave of what Stiegler calls grammatization.²²⁶ For Stiegler the invention of writing, the seriality of the production line and digital tech are all part of the same, long, historical phenomenon of grammatization. It reduces the sensory continuum to digital bits, imposing a grammar on their order. It standardizes the world, now including everything from software (Manovich) to urban design (Easterling).

      Grammatization leads to information abundance, channeled in vectors of control, but then subject also to ternary forms that interpose themselves between ceaseless information and limited attention spans. One example is Google, whose PageRank algorithm is modeled on academic citation ranking procedures.²²⁷ Another is Facebook, modeled initially on the look-books of elite American universities. They might between them crudely cover the two ternary procedures most common: ranking and rating. The former uses an algorithm to choose what humans want; the latter uses humans to choose what algorithms want. In both cases the attention of the humans is for sale to advertisers.

      What results is a fairly novel kind of cultural inequality. Citton:

      What counts … is not whether something gets included (or not): it is being at the height of visibility, right at the top of the first page