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Essay The eclipse of attention is a compendium of articles and interviews coordinated by Amador Fernández-Savater and Oier Etxeberria. Its reading brings us closer to one of the main factors of contemporary malaise that affects the development of people. It is the discomfort that originates when one realizes that one is paying attention to issues that are alien, minor, and distracting, and, at the same time, perceives that one is no longer in a position to control one’s time to focus one’s mind. attention on what could be beneficial for him.
The question that emerges transversally in most of the contributions of intellectual personalities such as Yves Citton, Franco bifo Bernardí, Isabelle Stengers, Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, Diego Sztulwark, Andrea Soto Calderón, José Ramón Ubieto, Marino Pérez Álvarez, Marta Malo and Sílvia Duschatzky, is that they all emphasize the idea that it is necessary to go from seeing to looking, from hearing to listening, from wanting to cultivating pleasure, from distracting oneself to becoming aware of the value of attention.
One of the most relevant aspects of the essay is to highlight that one of the evils of our time is how neoliberalism has managed to develop a dense spider web where people’s attention falls prey, thanks to the control of social networks, the management of algorithms or data control. The manipulation of attention, self-exploitation or the impossibility of disconnecting from an information and communication system that seeks to enslave people’s attention, causes men to perceive that they have freedom to think and act when, most likely, they have already lost it. . Fernández-Savater and Etxeberria state the purpose of the essay “not only to understand a problem, but to intervene in a battle”.
⁄ Neoliberalism has managed to develop a dense spider web where people’s interest falls prey
The battle to which he refers focuses on how to regain control of attention so that it has an impact on mobilizing to understand what is happening around us and acting to change everything that seeks to absorb all the attention. The authors move in the same areas of claim that the philosopher Jacques Rancière made in his essay/interview The division of the sensible . They pay attention to a basic aspect to understand who can and is willing to participate in the debate on the common, what affects everyone, and who does not.
People who do not have time for work reasons, or because of their economic situation or education are prevented from being able to participate in common life. It could be said that they can only attend to their needs and face problems that distance them from the territory where their future is truly decided. The lack of space-time, which has been deprived of people who need to spend all their time strictly at work, inevitably causes their exclusion from participating in the common.
If Rancière proposes to become aware of the importance of recovering the time to act in common, the reality is that most people cannot do it, and they do not know how to do it either. In his contribution to The eclipse of attention , the philosopher and artist Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua proposes/observes that an option for freedom of attention implies “organizing ourselves in unions that fight to regulate the attentional work that we do for free for many hours to meet the interests of corporations. Unionize to influence the design of the technologies we use in a way that favors us, such as demanding regulation of the dynamics and rhythms of content…”
What is proposed to the reader is not only to delve into the central aspects of care, which Simone Weil considered to be related to the need to “wait” in order to attend to ourselves and the world, and to be ready, as indicated Fernández-Savater, of “being on the lookout”. It is not just an essay to warn of the “subsidence of attention” or the “suspension of attention” that Yves Citton exposes. It is not just highlighting the fact that the power of the “attention economy” is the engine of capitalism. It is also a penetrating proposal to warn, as Bifo Berardi does, that “there is a generation that is learning more words from a machine than from the mother’s voice.”
⁄ “There is a generation that is learning more words from a machine than from the mother’s voice”
This essay seeks to pay attention to what happens at school, in feminism and in the “attention deficit” derived from excessive stimuli in young people. Its reading points the way to “recover presence, rehabilitate care and challenge the domain of the automatic”.
Amador Fernández-Savater and Oier Etxeberria (ed.) The eclipse of attention NED editions 211 pages 19.85 euros
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