Abstract
This chapter argues that democratic political attention (PA) has always been embedded in socio-economic relations and observable through historically shifting communication practices and moralized habits. It considers democratic PA on as collective attention to a common object whose status as political is rhetorically contingent; and as individual cognition. Both forms of PA are the object of second-party and third-party strategies to transform it into distraction for political and commercial ends. It focuses on Greco-Roman origins, its displacement into anti-democratic spectacles of power as well as technologies of self; its rebirth in eighteenth century and then twentieth century American refigurings, which eventually are subsumed by consumer cultural monopolies on collective attention. Finally, it considers contemporary bio-political co-optation as digital post-PA; and as resistant insurgent PA.
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- 1.
For example, a search of the electronic version of the Encyclopedia of Political Theory (over 1500 pages long) turns up a few dozen uses of the term “attention” and about five uses of “distract” or “distraction”. Only two instances treat attention and distraction as topics in their own right (the others are in passing: “X draws attention to the growing interest in Machiavelli”): one on distraction for the Frankfurt School and one on attention with regard to political participation. They appear in one sentence and then are abandoned (Bevir 2010).
- 2.
Neither of these recent ground-breaking political theories of attention privilege pay much attention to communication and media. Despite playfully appropriating the clinical term “attention deficit disorder” in their titles, they do not at all engage with cognitive science or philosophy’s debates about how the brain and/or mind functions in attention formation and distraction. They do not begin to theorize political attention with regard to these cognitive scientific advances and scholarship on attention in the economically embedded digital media environment. In fact, the term “capitalism” appears but once in the full text, “consumer society” appearing only in the bibliography. Nor is there any consideration of the Frankfurt School theory about the culture industries and distraction, and Walter Benjamin’s influential claim about modern entertainment forms consumed in a “state of distraction”. In addition, recent critical theoretical approaches to attention and digital media emphasize governmentality and control, without considering a longer tradition of theorizing political agency, freedom and attention (e.g. Crogan and Kinsley 2012; Citton 2017). While I demonstrate that changes in public philosophy of political attention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had much to do with the anti-democratic influences of French crowd psychology and social theory. These influences are not explored by Breger or Bovard. Finally, Jonathan Crary, one of the foremost contemporary theorists of attention and culture history, assigns significant importance to shifts in consumer capitalism, but does not explore the changing habits of attention with regard to democracy or politics generally. Bovard and Breger do not engage at all with Crary’s landmark work. These silences and disconnects are what I aim to redress here.
- 3.
For example, Robert Hariman writes, in his excellent treatment of political style, discusses Machiavelli and Isocrates as exemplars of intellectuals rhetorically competing for the ruler’s attention (Hariman 1995, 23).
- 4.
High global levels of internet access and smartphone ownership, along with globalization of political marketing, despite lingering digital divides in some places more than others, and national or regional (EU) regulatory policies towards telecommunication or social media companies (e.g. fake news legislation; privacy), render the political attention economy quite generalizable.
- 5.
The main inspiration is Foucault: “I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present” (in Garland 2014, 367). Or: “Genealogy is … ‘effective history’ because its intent is to problematize the present by revealing the power relations upon which it depends and the contingent processes that have brought it into being” (Garland 2014, 372).
- 6.
Importantly, the emphasis on the individual or subject’s attention is extended into technologies, the social and natural environment. The “extended mind” refers to an intersubjectivity, both social and non-human. See, for example, Smart (2017).
- 7.
Time and attention being inextricable in the ethical conditions of de-naturalized, social attentional regimes, as in: How did you spend your time today? Did you get everything accomplished? Did you fritter away your time? And so forth.
- 8.
Some parts of the historically-attentive theory of political attention I am proposing can be read as a parallel account to Habermas’ rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere. However, my focus is clearly not the bourgeois public sphere, though aspects of Habermas’ account— especially the transfer of publicity functions to mass media, public discussion almost exclusively to parliamentary spaces, and public opinion formation to mediatized top-down administrations from polling, and public activity and belonging from the political to the consumer culture—are integral to my account of political attention.
- 9.
For example, they concluded that the tyrant “starts a war against a real or imagined enemy … This war serves to distract the people, preventing them from paying attention to what the tyrant is doing domestically … He divides the people among themselves by ‘sowing dissensions’ and ‘creating quarrels’ over real or imaginary issues of little or no importance, thereby turning the people against each other so that they wrongly see their fellow citizens as enemies and don’t pay attention to what the tyrant is doing … He distracts the people with spectacles and entertainments” (Ball, Dagger and O’Neil 2016, 55).
- 10.
Some variations of which are called “civic humanism” (Lovett 2018). For the uninitiated, (democratic) republicanism is a form of government by elected representatives, and thus differs from strictly direct democracy, where there would be no intermediary or representative between the citizen and the government. Contemporary “democracies” are really republics in the older sense, later qualified as “representative democracies” in some places more than others. As Przeworski notes, what eighteenth-century revolutionaries took from the ancients was not democracy itself but an idea of power sharing “where the influence of the people would be tempered and balanced, if no longer by monarchy and aristocracy, at least by the structure of representative institutions” (2010, 6).
- 11.
Yet even in the liberal model, as Berger has recently argued, there lies a residue of republican PA: a type of political attention is implied for securing political stability (a government whose job is securing rights). He writes: “We must specify liberalism because democracy by itself—majority rule—can involve illiberal coercion, excessive paternalism, or stultifying social conformity unless citizens and officials uphold legal and constitutional protections vigilantly” (2011, 7).
- 12.
Such a conception of political attention and corresponding action assumes that politics is ongoing, not limited to insurrections and revolutions, as some contemporary left thinkers propose.
- 13.
On Pascal and diversion, see North (2012).
- 14.
Even if it were meant to be more exhaustive in its treatment of particular epochs (on the seemingly endless tiers of historical exegesis—urban, rural, social, intellectual, etc.) I would identify with the perspective of Pocock: “Since all history is written selectively, all history can be accused of abstractness; each of us gores some neighbour’s ox” (1981, 52).
- 15.
The early American republican concern with threat and corruption can be understood in the context of their knowledge of Aristotle and other thinkers who posited “correct” and “deviant” government, where, without proper care, the good was likely to devolve into the bad: monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, polity (middle-class)/democracy (the poor) (see Miller 2017).
- 16.
Though he has only a footnote about Tocqueville and capitalism, I am indebted to Berger (2011) for drawing my attention to Tocqueville’s comments on civic attention in conflict with private affairs.
- 17.
See (Editors, History com. n.d). The National Endowment for the Humanities (US) site also exclaims, “Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is universally regarded as one of the most influential books ever written about America” (https://edsitement.neh.gov/curriculum-unit/alexis-de-tocqueville-tyranny-majority).
- 18.
Leach writes that, before 1880, “Most markets were local or regional, and the majority of businesses were individually owned and managed. The culture was largely agrarian, republican, and religious; and most people—white people—controlled their own property or land” (1993, 8).
- 19.
The contradictory citizenship is also reflected (without the genealogical context) in more recent cultural analyses such as Toby Miller’s (1993) The Well-Tempered Self.
- 20.
- 21.
McMahon writes, “The partnership of advertising and psychology to better control the consuming habits of Americans certainly became more formal when the International Advertising Association created a social science research program in 1927. The real consummation of the union, however, had come with the founding of the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1917 and the Psychological Corporation in 1921 under the leadership of the distinguished psychologist, J. McKean Cattell. Scott had formed a similar corporation several years earlier, but Cattell’s organization, based on the contributions of many leading psychologists, proved the more enduring” (1972, 15).
- 22.
For a more extended mainstream political theory account of the Dewey-Lippmann positions, see Berger (2011).
- 23.
Note Williams’ moralization of the structuring as “irresponsible”.
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Harsin, J. (2019). Political Attention: A Genealogy of Reinscriptions. In: Doyle, W., Roda, C. (eds) Communication in the Era of Attention Scarcity. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20918-6_7
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