There’s a tendency in contemporary writing on attention to treat it as a quantity. We “have” enough or we don’t. We “spend” it, “split” it, “lose” it. The metaphor is economic, and like all economic metaphors it makes certain things visible by hiding others.1
What if attention is not a stock but a posture? Not something I have, but something I am, briefly, when conditions allow.2
Consider the shape of an ordinary day. There are stretches in which the world feels close — a sentence opens up, a face is legible, a piece of music breathes. And there are stretches in which everything is at one remove, behind glass. The difference is rarely a matter of effort. It’s more like the weather.
This is the part of attention that the productivity literature can’t reach. You cannot will yourself into a posture; you can only prepare the conditions. You can put down the phone, walk the long way home, stop trying. The rest is a kind of grace.
I want to write more about this — about the practices that make the posture more available, and the ones that quietly close it off. For now, a small claim: any account of attention that doesn’t begin with the body, the room, and the hour of the day is going to miss most of what matters.
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William James already saw this in 1890 — the metaphor of attention as a fund or resource was, even then, importing assumptions from political economy that were nowhere obvious in the phenomenology. ↩
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Cf. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (1999), on the way late-19th-century attention research absorbed and was absorbed by industrial-discipline regimes. The history is older than we usually pretend. ↩