Chapter 10

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Attention and assemblage in the clickable world

J. Macgregor Wise

 

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We are enamored of our devices. Occasionally, we become afraid of them, in seemingly brief irrational moments of panic (sometimes justified, and sometimes not). And, from time to time, we become concerned with their impact on our lives, livelihoods, environment. In praise or blame, we single out particular devices: the iPod, the nuclear power plant, the spinning Jenny. But as the late philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it in one of his last interviews, the machines themselves tell us nothing (1995: 175). We have to realize that the machines are part of assemblages – multiple and diverse collections of objects, practices, and desires functioning across a broad landscape of devices.

We are at such a moment when our love or criticism of our devices needs to recognize that we are entering into a new assemblage. This assemblage has been identified most obviously with our portable devices for communication and computing (the iPod, the PDA, the BlackBerry, the cell phone), but including developments in ambient and ubiquitous computing as well [what Adam Greenfield (2006) has called “Everyware”]. Any assemblage we enter into puts us in a particular relation to the world – promises us particular powers, redefines who we think we are or could be. This new assemblage I have been calling the Clickable World because, I argue, that its defining characteristic is a particular relationship it places us in vis-à-vis the world. It presumes that the world is responsive and information-filled, clickable, like icons on the computer. It presumes or posits an agency on the part of humans that the world is, once again, a standing reserve, now of information, at our beck and call. Agency, however, is much more distributed and uneven in this assemblage. It resides not just in individual will, channeled through the devices which have become the remote controls of our everyday lives, but in the devices, networks, and spaces themselves. To call this an assemblage is to identify it as a dynamic, contingent, and expressive articulation of objects, affects, properties, and meanings (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Wise 2005).

The concept of assemblage (agencement) is drawn from the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986, 1987).¹ As Pheng Cheah writes, “(f)or Deleuze, materiality is nothing other than the plane of immanence” (2010: 86). Deleuze and Guattari describe the plane of immanence as follows:

Deleuze and Guattari’s work is an influential part of what Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have called the “New Materialisms” (2010), a growing body of scholarship marked by its “insistence on describing active processes of materialization of which embodied humans are an integral part, rather than the monotonous repetitions of dead matter from which human subjects are apart” (8). That is, “the human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities” (10). Communication, in such a materialist framework, is more about resonance than representation, about forms and substances brought into relation. For example, Deleuze and Guattari talk of milieus, blocks of space time constituted by a repetition, a vibration. Milieus are not self-enclosed: “not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating” (1987: 313; 1980: 384–385).² As a coming together of heterogeneous elements, assemblage is a rich concept for understanding communication from a materialist perspective.

An assemblage is always stratified (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Wise 1997). On the one hand is a stratum they call the collective assemblage of enunciation, a semiotic system, characterized by incorporeal agency. Incorporeal agency is the ability to act at a distance, symbolically. A judge declares one guilty and one’s status changes. Pressed up against this stratum is what they call the machinic assemblage, or technology, a plane of corporeal agency. To talk of an assemblage is always to consider both these strata.

But to speak of assemblage is also to recognize the dynamic nature of these stratifications and articulations. Assemblage is always in process. In English, the word, assemblage, provides the connotation of a static and achieved structure, which is how the term is used in art, archeology, and other disciplines. However, agencement, the original French term regards a process – it is the assembling, not the assemblage.

Let us take the example of a new portable video device, like the iPod Touch. On one hand, we have the usual elements: iPod, screen, software, hardware, earphones, and so on. But an iPod assemblage is more than just its physical components but includes aspects of the attached human: ear, eye, hand. Besides noting the elements, there are other dimensions to this assemblage: its qualities, affects, and effectivity. So we can start talking about grasping, attending, lightness, being cool, shining, becoming private in public, and so on. We talk about what an assemblage does: how it shapes the space around it, transforms behavior, molds attention, distracts, focuses. The person attending to an iPod shapes their body in gesture and attitude, their perceptual field bends as if toward points of gravity; they have their own pattern of rest, speed, and slowness.

Assemblages create territories that shape space and express, but again these territories are always in process: deterritorializing and reterritorializing. We can enter assemblages locally: I pick up my mobile phone, sit down at my computer, scroll through my email on my iPod. My body changes speed and consistency. I enter into an assemblage of language that makes some statements possible and others not, and an assemblage of technology. Think of the act of picking up and holding a pen, versus holding a mobile phone to text or view the screen. A shift of the hand, twist of the wrist, reterritorializes the hand, reshapes it, embodying some aspects with intensity (the thumb). Each gesture brings us into relation with a stratification of discourse, expression, and with bodies and technologies.

Four key concepts characterize the assemblage of the clickable world: reduction, disappearance, control, and attention. I will touch on these briefly, but wish to focus on the dimension of attention in this essay. Reduction refers to the reduction of experience and the environment to information. I use this term as a way of considering how an assemblage of information helps shape everyday social space in the clickable world.

Speaking of ambient computing, Greenfield writes,

Augmented reality systems seek to overlay the world with information attached to people, places, and objects. Though the goal is to add to experience, the danger is that the information itself stands in for the object (just as data selves take priority over physical selves; see Lyon 2007). In addition, these devices are seen as helping manage information overload, selecting and reducing experience to target our attention on salient features.

Disappearance refers to the tendency of these technologies to disappear either literally, into the surrounding environment, or phenomenologically, by falling into habit. As ubiquitous computing pioneer Mark Weiser put it, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear” (1991: 94). Their disappearance from conscious thought means that they are no longer regarded critically (Schaefer and Durham 2007). Technological disappearance is not a new feature of this assemblage. As tool-use falls into habit, as they become what Heidegger called “transparent equipment” (cited in Clark 2008), they fall from our attention. What’s new here is the scale of the disappearance, and the power the attenuating technologies potentially have over our lives.

Control is the third dimension, referring to the integration of these systems into systems of surveillance and governmentality. As Deleuze argues, “[w]e’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication” (1995: 174). Control is about the constant subtle structuring of social life, the ways that we are sorted, tracked, cajoled, and tempted. We are not told to stand still and shut up, but to be mobile and to communicate. We are forced to speak and to move through our days faster and faster.

The element of the assemblage that I will pursue in this chapter is attention. Note that attention has been a feature of many of the other elements as well. Consider the ethic of mobile communication that Katz and Aakhus (2002) termed perpetual contact. The ethic of having a mobile phone is to be not only available to be called, but also to actually maintain a near constant co-presence with select others through voice and text, which places us experientially in multiple locations at once. Iconoclastic French urbanist and cultural theorist Paul Virilio refers to such devices as “simulators of proximity” (2002: 41). These include text messaging, IM’ing, social network status updates on MySpace or Facebook, Twitter, and other services. While we can certainly see constant contact as a dimension of control, these practices of constant co-presence are part of a transformation of our attentive behavior. As art historian Jonathan Crary has argued, attention is “deeply historical” (1999). The ways we pay attention, the ways we attend and disengage from particular objects or visual or experiential fields, is the product of a historical moment. Transformations in attentive behavior usually accompany transformations of subjectification and power more generally. Practices of constant contact accompany a constant low-level attention throughout everyday life (Crary 1999). Simulators of proximity provide an ever-present potential for communication.

Attention becomes a key feature of the discourse regarding this new assemblage in two ways. The first is in terms of distraction, and the second is in terms of the formation of an attention economy. Let me address these briefly before proposing a different model to understand the working of attention within the clickable world.

Distraction

Distraction has become a common element in recent popular discourses about new media. A state of distraction is a state of scattered, shattered attention. Something poses a distraction if it acts as a gravitational point, tugging our attention here or there. In the clickable world, we are surrounded by such competing gravitational points, and flit from one to the next.

Linda Stone (2009) describes what she calls continuous partial attention, which she says is “motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network,” to continuously pay partial attention to one’s peers as well as the broader mediascape. In addition to constant contact, continuous partial attention also exhibits the ethic of information seeking. Stone writes, “we pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis” (2009).

Speaking recently at the graduation ceremonies at Hampton University, President Barack Obama said,

This crisis of distraction has been the subject of a number of recent popular accounts over the past few years (Gallagher 2009; Jackson 2008). The argument goes that the particular formation of this distraction – around technologies of socialization, entertainment, and self-obsession – is part of what is contributing to the downfall of youth (see also Bauerlein 2008) – not to mention the crisis of democracy noted by the President. Without sustained attention, they argue, even in a sea of information unprecedented in human history, we lack the capacities to think deeply and creatively (Jackson 2008).

N. Katherine Hayles contrasts hyper attention with deep attention. She writes that “Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (which is akin to Stone’s continuous partial attention) while deep attention “is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods …, ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times” (2007: 187; see also Hayles 2008). While deep attention has been culturally valued, especially in higher education, it is specific to certain developed societies that can provide the luxury of time and specialization. She argues that hyper attention came first (as a primitive survival mechanism), but is now increasing in a hypermediated age: “there is little doubt that hyper attention is on the rise and that it correlates with an increasing exposure to and desire for stimulation in general and stimulation by media in particular” (2007: 191).

Now, distraction is not a new phenomenon by any means – perhaps what makes it new is the seeming ubiquity of technologies of distraction. In any case, distraction has been seen as being an important feature of both modernity and postmodernity. However, while Walter Benjamin felt that distraction “held forth the possibility of new modes of perception” (Crary 1999: 50; see also Highmore 2010), and, indeed, had revolutionary potential, Jackson fears that we cannot be creative in that milieu – we need sustained attention for creativity. But as Jonathan Crary points out, the idea of sustained creative attention is a product of the same formation which is producing the means of distraction.

Attention economy

The economic costs of such distraction have begun to be totaled up. An article in the Guardian newspaper cites, “a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard report[ing] that the IQ scores of knowledge workers distracted by email and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points – twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana” (Hemp 2009). Another study cited in the same article showed that workers were interrupted or switched tasks every 3 minutes, and it took workers an average of 24 minutes to return to the first interrupted task. And Intel calculates that these interruptions cost it nearly a billion dollars a year.

But, on the other hand, in an age of distraction just described, gaining attention, laying claim to a piece of our attention, becomes more valuable. The economics of the new assemblage is the economics of attention. A handful of writers have sketched out some dimensions of this new economy over the past decade (Goldhaber 1997; Franck 1999; Beller 2006; Lanham 2006).

All of these attempts to theorize attention respond to the growing prominence of celebrity and micro-celebrity especially online and the radically new levels of competition for our attention not only between proliferating media (TV, internet, films, and cell phone) but within media themselves (hundreds of cable channels, thousands of iPhone apps, etc.). These theories are also responding to the way our attention has been capitalized, the intensification of marketing and monitoring practices going back a century which Mark Andrejevic (2007) has termed the work of being watched.

Rethinking attention

If we really want to explore assemblages of attention, these accounts are missing something. What I want to hone in on is their assumptions of what attention is in the first place and then propose, as a thought piece, something else.

First, in these accounts, attention gets reduced to being simply about perception. Indeed, for most, attention defaults to visual attention. For Jonathan Beller the attention economy and the visual economy become synonymous. But we can attend to things (meaning orient towards, focus on, note) that are not only not visual but also not perceptually based (like a train of thought). As Crary points out, this emphasis of the visual is not unique by any means. There is a long history of the dominance of the visual in terms of the understanding of attention even in psychology (see, e.g., Pashler 1998; Raz and Buhle 2006).

Second, the argument that attention is a limited resource presumes a particular model of attention based on an information processing model of the brain. In this model, the brain acts like a computer.³ Multiple inputs compete for dominance in the central processor (executive attention) which can only select one at a time. This model of attention – as perceptual and based on an information processing model of the brain – is one where attention is a locatable property of the brain. This is a quite common model and indeed is the dominant way attention is studied by mainstream psychology, at least in the United States.

But some radical philosophers of cognition (Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, George Lakoff, Alva Noë, and others) have challenged this model of cognition. What they challenge are the notions that our brains are like computers and that our minds are merely properties of our brains responding to stimuli from outside. They challenge as well what others might call the folk psychology model of attention (Pashler 1998): executive attention sits like a homunculus in our heads, juggling competing stimuli, tugged by a growing number of forces in many directions. Current models of attention in cognitive psychology and neuroscience are actually more complex, of course. One popular model by Michael Posner posits three different networks of attention (alerting, orienting, and executive) with different neurological sites of activity and an unclear degree of relation and autonomy (see Posner 2004; Raz and Buhle 2006). But this model still contends that attention is primarily an operation of/in the brain.

What I want to do in this section is to follow this branch of the philosophy of cognition and see how attention comes along, recognizing that attention and cognition are different, yet deeply entangled, phenomena. I recognize that this way of approaching cognition is not without controversy (indeed, there are numerous responses to Clark, Dennett, et al.; see, e.g., Adams and Aizawa 2008), but I think that it is a generative way of thinking about the relation of the subject to the environment, not as an autonomous subject embedded in an environment but the co-construction of subject and environment. And it is a generative way of thinking about attention as plural (attentions) and distributed across brain, body, and environment.

Andy Clark (2003) argues that cognition is distributed. It does not occur just in our heads but happens in conjunction with our activities and our technologies (which he refers to as our scaffolding). Following Daniel Dennett, he critiques the notion of a central self [“a small-but-potent internal user relative to whom all the rest – be it neural, bodily, or technological – is merely a toolkit” (2003: 138)]. Rather than thinking of the self as self (brain) and supplementarily body and technology, we should think of the self as “a rough-and-tumble, control-sharing coalition of processes – some neural, some bodily, some technological” (138). Cognition is distributed across “a hybrid, extended architecture.” Explaining an example he gives about working on a presentation in one’s office, he writes,

We are, he states, natural-born cyborgs always seeking to dovetail our thinking with extrasomatic trinkets and processes. While there are occasions where our augmentations are more permanent, “in most other cases, we confront only soft-assembled, temporary medleys of information-processing resources comprising a dovetailed subset of neural activity and bodily and environmental augmentations” (2008: 116). The problem with Clark is that he does not take seriously enough his idea that ourselves are these coalitions of processes; he too easily falls back into the formula of mind plus. And in this Clark is in line with others who study distributed cognition, that human cognition ends at the skin or sensory contact and cannot extend into the world (the world is only how it is sensed) (see Dror and Harnad 2008). As Alva Noë argues, for Clark, “[c]onscious experience would seem to be detachable from and independent of the world without” (2009: 196). Noe argues that, rather than consciousness being the articulation of these elements, consciousness is the expression of these articulations, it emerges with the assemblages of cognition Clark is exploring. Noe puts it succinctly: “Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make. Better: it is something we achieve. Consciousness is more like dancing than it is like digestion” (xii).

Consciousness emerges alongside of the brain, body, and environment. “Meaningful thought arises only for the whole animal dynamically engaged with its environment” (8). Thought does not occur on its own, as if the brain were functioning in a vat like in some old horror film. This does not mean that thought occurs without the brain. “[T]he brain’s job is that of facilitating a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body, and world” (47).⁴

Neither Clark nor Noe explicitly address the question of attention. Clark mentions attention, but takes it for granted. But let me explore a bit by means of implication. Attention is generally considered purely cognitive. It is the choosing of the homunculus – which cognitive module is activated, which stimuli is addressed. Attention is not only directed and intentional but also driven by habits of cognition, the nature and intensity of stimuli, and so on. Alternatively, attention is the result of neural processes of alerting or orienting or resolving “conflict between computations in different neural areas” (Raz and Buhle 2006: 374). Or attention is the three different networks described by Posner (alerting, orienting, and executive). However, we attend to much more – what we could call subattentional processes (Dror calls these “vegetative”). Some of these processes are part of what psychologists call attenuation – things we have paid attention to so many times that they become habit – we do not pay attention to the way we pay attention (e.g., writing) (Pashler 1998). Included in attenuation are those stimuli noted, but not recognized by executive attention.

What I want to propose here, as a speculative and hopefully generative model to begin to think through how attention works in this new assemblage, is to think all these types of attention on a continuum – from nerves attending to the environment or to physiological processes such as acid levels in the stomach; to proprioception; to posterior parietal subsystems which allow us to move and act without attending and controlling each motion (the hand attends to the cup, even though I am attending to a volume on cognitive science). What if, to parallel the preceding discussion of cognition, executive attention is what is emergent alongside these processes, expressed and produced with these processes? Jackson, echoing Posner, writes that “[a]ttention is an organ system, akin to our respiratory or circulation systems” (2009: 14). But if, for Noë, cognition is more like dancing than digestion, perhaps attention is more ballet than breathing. Attention is then not a site and function, locatable and isolatable. It is not an organ system, dedicated to a particular function. It is the expression of all of these different systems. And cognitive and corporeal attention are not the only forms of attention germane to the assemblage. Attention is distributed and such distributed attention extends beyond what Andy Clark likes to refer to as the “good old biological skin-bag.” We are distributions and dovetailings not just of cognition, but attention. We delegate agents to pay attention for us (to use actor-network theory language), or to filter or enhance our attention.

New assemblages of distributed attention

If we take Clark’s image of our cognitive scaffolding – thinking as a process that brings in brain, physical gesture (counting on fingers), and external components (sticky note reminders, laptop computers) – we see clearly the parallels and implications of projects of distributed computing. Distributed computing, also called ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), or sometimes ambient computing, is about the dispersal of computing function across our everyday environment. Our scaffolding, meaning our expanding means of cognition and sense of self, proliferates.

But more than just a model of distributed information processing (which limits cognition once again to a computing model), these developments include a proliferation of attentional and subattentional processes, some of which loop back through our individual brains, but others play out across the environment. Attention in the new assemblage cannot just be about distracted youth and their mobile devices; that is, it cannot just be about the particular configurations of our individual cognition (e.g., deep or hyper attention), but about attentional processes scattered across our devices. Perhaps this is what’s new here – this contemporary assemblage (beyond brain, skin, and human), more than others, is one that attends.

Mark Weiser calls it awareness, one of the founding principles of ubiquitous computing – at least one of the principles one can distill from his generative account, “The Computer for the 21st Century” (1991). Ubiquitous computing is not just the integration of computing potential into everyday objects, but those objects’ awareness of their location, the context of their use, the identities and preferences of the users nearby, and other situational factors. These do not have to be spectacularly intelligent machines to accomplish this, they must simply pay attention. For example, collaborative ubicomp systems allow one to attend to the work of one’s scattered colleagues and collaborators by tracking their activities (such as what document they have up). Paul Dourish calls these “awareness technologies” (2001: 174).

For Weiser, the computers become attentive of and for us, and for the people involved the best computer is one that does not dominate our attention; a computer that is invisible so that we only attend to the task and not the machine. Steve Mann, an iconoclastic computer engineer, performance artist, and pioneer of wearable computing, rejects the goals of ubicomp, arguing that they are simply the extension of surveillance schemes which empower structures over individuals (Mann with Niedzviecki 2001).

Mann’s project is to create individually tailored and controlled wearable computing systems that will allow individuals to wrest back control of their environment and attention. Mann’s systems allow him to filter what he sees through his computer, manipulating the images and projecting them back on his eye, so that, for example, he can program it to erase all billboards from his sight.

Mann’s wearables were just an early precursor of developing projects of lifelogging – those utilizing wearable technologies to capture the experiences of their day so that this data can become a memory aide or can be mined for self-knowledge (see, as a recent example, Bell and Gemmell 2009). Basically these are schemes to have technologies pay attention to everything we see, hear, say, encounter, and so on, creating a quite intimate surveillant assemblage. The idea of a surveillant assemblage was one mapped out years ago by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2000), who describe how differing surveillance systems are becoming integrated and how different aspects of the body (DNA, facial configuration, etc.) are taken up by these different systems in varying ways.⁵

A focus on assemblages of attention means that we need to draw the line, make the connections, between devices which pay attention to us (the surveillant assemblage), devices which seek to manage our attention (to both attract/distract us and also track our attention so as to better attract/distract), and our own cognitive and habitual attentional processes. That is, to speak of attention today is to speak of the contingent aggregation, articulation, and expression of all of these processes.

Even without the development of full-fledged ubicomp (the Minority Report scenario), we do see shifts in our attentional assemblage. Writing a decade ago, Jonathan Crary notes that

And we could add, even as they become mobile, they still fix and striate. Crary talks of our loss of reverie, of daydreaming:⁶

Deleuze once referred to such moments as “vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (1995: 175).

Conclusion

If we think of these new assemblages as assemblages of attention, we see the distribution and formation of attention across body, brain, tool, and environment. We have a plane of attention, with gravitational points of intensity and valuation, that is a product of power, experience, habit, chance, and desire. It is a plane of attention not centered around just the perceptual field of an individual, but in devices scattered across our bodies and environments which note, recognize, and attend. What we experience as attention – executive attention – is an expression accompanying some of these processes, but it is only a part of a broader assemblage. Attention is cognitive, habitual, and machinic, undergirded by affect which can never be fully channeled.

Pressed up against the strata of attention is not a plane of distraction, but that of inattention. Inattention is not simply the absence of attention but has its own gravitational points. For example, Jonathan Beller (2006) in his work on the economics of attention laments the invisibility of the Third World from much of our attention in the West. And I think of Steve Mann’s wearable computers, filtering his environment and structuring his attention and inattention.

If we return to the idea of the stratification of the assemblage, on the one hand we have the linguistic dimension of the assemblage: the communicative capacities of attention. And there are two types of communication germane here, communication-with and communication-about. There are multiple elements of communication-with in the assemblage: objects provide the user with information or utilize signs to catch our attention, devices enable and encourage perpetual communication with a network of friends and acquaintances, and numerous elements of the assemblage are in active communication with each other, often behind our backs: mobile phones communicate with cell towers whether or not we are actively calling, wifi devices connect with local nodes, bluetooth devices seek out other bluetooth devices, and so on. There are also multiple elements of communication-about: the gathering of information about you, your communications, and your connections. This is the burgeoning surveillant assemblage. In the linguistic strata of the new assemblage we find types of language particular to the assemblage, types of information available, codes of texting and programming, and so on. On the other hand, we have the strata of technology: the collection of devices and networks surrounding us, and our own habits embedded in flesh and machine.

Whereas this description of the assemblage of attention seems all pervasive and encompassing, it is always in process, incomplete. There are always opportunities for noncommunication and reverie.

Notes

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