Scenes of Attention - by D Graham Burnett & Justin E H Smith (Paperback)

About the Book

This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature.

Book Synopsis

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness--to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?

This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying--and often failing--to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.

Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of "surveillance capitalism," and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.

Review Quotes

Burnett and Smith invite us to sit in our seats and silence our cell phones so that our full attention can be given to the increasingly relevant work on what attention is, how it has changed, and how society, business, and more are grasping the shifting landscape.-- "British Society for Literature and Science"

A wonderfully eclectic examination of attention, Scenes of Attention illuminates this central aspect of mind through different vignettes and rich theoretical perspectives that reveal the diversity of how we attend, how attention is shaped, manipulated and transformed. Accessible and engaging, it will provide ample material for productive reflection.--Wayne Wu, author of Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action

Scenes of Attention is, in all the best ways, scholarly, inspiring, and unsettling. Its diverse contributors address this most urgent of topics so wisely, and articulate the results of their thinking with such readable lucidity, that one feels as if the complexities of attention had been brought freshly before us, in higher definition than before, and with a depth that had previously been foreshortened.--Christopher Mole, author of Attention Is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology

These vivid and varied essays are a much-needed antidote to the flattened attention of the click economy. Here are the many dimensions of attention we've been missing: historical, philosophical, psychological, anthropological, and, yes, technological. This timely collection broadens and deepens current debates about the future of attention--and distraction.--Lorraine Daston, author of Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

This book brings together beautifully written and diverse perspectives on attention: as phenomenon, scholarly practice, memoir, meditation, metahistory, and art. Required reading in an era of exponential financialization and attention deficit disorder at civilizational scale.--Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google Research

A very stimulating volume, Scenes of Attention revolves around the question of how best to approach, understand, and respond to the 'crisis of attention' that we all feel, to varying degrees, in the age of hypermediated multitaskery. These essays provide an interdisciplinary inquiry into the most pressing (and enduring) issues around the attention ecology.--Dominic Pettman, author of Infinite Distraction

About the Author

D. Graham Burnett is a professor of history and the history of science at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the IHUM interdisciplinary doctoral program. His scholarly books on cartography, empire, optics, and the oceans have examined the changing understanding of nature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Burnett is associated with the research collective ESTAR(SER) and the activist coalition "The Friends of Attention," with whom he coauthored Twelve Theses on Attention (2022).

Justin E. H. Smith is professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité and a member of the SPHERE Laboratory for Research in the History of Science. He is the author of five books, most recently The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning (2022), and a frequent contributor to a number of popular publications. In 2015 a main-belt asteroid, 4.5 kilometers in diameter, was named after him: 13585 Justinsmith (1993 TC20).