III

Notes on Attention

 

I The Politics of Attention

‘Nothing,’ Mark Fisher writes, ‘is inherently political; politicization requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs.’ It seems to me that it is essential we politicize attention. One way of looking at our culture, is that it has made an assault on our ability to maintain our attention; one thing that many of us feel, is that our attention – so fundamental to the ways we experience our lives, our bodies and each other – is in a constant state of distraction. It is tempting to understand this as technologically determined; it is far harder to understand the political dimension of this deterioration of our attention. I hope to show how psychoanalysis might stand in opposition to this waning of our ability to attend, that it might be political for exactly this reason. As Stephen Frosh writes, 'Psychoanalysis stands for something serious, slow, thoughtful, uncertain and complicated. This does not always go down well in rushed societies demanding instant solutions, and characterized by short attention spans and a tendency to want to control dissent and disagreement.' Attention is about taking things seriously, about discerning between competing ideas and about calmly taking a position that is in touch with the real.
 

A useful way to start thinking about attention is to refer to Marion Milner’s thoughts. In the 1930s, Milner tried to record her impressions in a search for happiness. What she recorded in A Life of One’s Own – the book that emerged – is a discovery that there are two types of attention: narrow and wide. The first is ‘blind to the wider surroundings.’ This first type ‘saw items according to whether they served its purposes, saw them as a means to its own ends, not interested in them at all for their own sake.’ Wide attention, on the other hand,

seemed to occur when the questing purposes were held in leash. Then, since one wanted nothing, there was no need to select one item to look at rather than another, so it became possible to look at the whole at once. To attend to something and yet want nothing from it, these seemed to be the essentials of the second way of perceiving.

The politics of the first form of attention are amply illustrated in a remarkable passage from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia in which he points out first how ‘[…] the capacity to perceive the other as such and not as a function of one’s own will […] withers away’ in the conditions of late capitalism:

It is replaced by a judgmental knowledge of human beings, […]. This manner of reaction however, the schema of all administration and “personnel policy,” already tends, before any political formation of will and commitment of exclusive political tickets, towards fascism. Whoever has once made it their business to judge acceptability, views the person being judged, to a certain extent out of technological necessity, as an insider or outsider, one of one’s own people or a foreigner, accomplice or victim. The stiffly scrutinizing […] gaze, which is typical of all leaders of horror, has its model in the appraising one of the manager, who tells the applicant to take a seat and illuminating the latter’s face, so that it pitilessly disintegrates into the light of usefulness and the dark of what is objectionable or unqualified. The end is the medical investigation, according to the alternatives: assignment in the labour-force or liquidation.

The narrow attention that is, in Blake’s words, ‘to everything but interest blind’, or, in Milner’s words is a ‘questing beast’, is the attention that inevitably points to fascism; are you fit for promotion or the sack, the labour camp or liquidation? Attention is offered to an object (including the human object) under these condition, which are so close to our own now, as far as it can serve the subject’s needs. Fisher argues that ‘the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy.’ He is talking about the relentless auditing, the inspection regimes, the Professional Development Reviews, the Foucauldian measure of the self-assessment. All of these apply the law of narrow attention, or as Adorno names it ‘the apprising [gaze] of the manager’.
 

In Paddy Chayevsky’s prophetic film Network the Übermensch who heads up the corporation who owns the TV channel for which Peter Finch’s psychotic newsreader works delivers a marvellous speech which ends:

our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

We need to understand what Chayevsky is saying about our current conditions. We are the children Jensen prophesied. Though we may not feel that all necessities are provided, we in the West are progressing towards a state in which ‘all anxieties are tranquilized, all boredom amused.’ Though Fisher is right that the internet ‘can generate new discourse networks that have no correlate in the social field outside cyberspace’ it is also true that our smartphones tap us into purchases, entertainments, orgasms that are as instantaneous and repeatable as they are unsatisfying to our true selves. Boredom is increasingly impossible. Yet, Milner points out its necessity in the approach to wide attention: ‘… if by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens.’ The “magic thing” is to “make boredom and weariness blossom into immeasurable contentment”.
 

A project for the left, as well as diminishing the narrow attention of the audit, is to make the conditions of a culture that might tolerate boredom and value wide attention.

 

II Attention as Prayer

 

Simone Weil was gifted with a powerful feeling of intense solidarity with others. This feeling gave rise to what many consider the central element of her thinking encapsulated in the almost magical word she coined: decreation. The word manages to explain her grasp of God’s relation to humanity, to the world, to the universe, and her understanding of what humans must do. Weil suggests that God created the world through an act of vacation. God plus the universe and its creatures is less than God alone. He is pure plenitude, pure freedom; in order to create others who owned an image of that freedom He needed to vacate a space in which gravity, entropy, the laws of physics and determinism could exist. God can do anything; he used this power to create a universe in which everything is constrained by necessity. We are free in the human sense of having real choice because we are exiled from God who is authentic freedom; we are more than his mere pets. But we must use our partial freedom to make a gesture that mirrors God’s act of decreation. We must vacate ourselves. We must give up our individuality, our egos, hollow ourselves out, attain an abject state.
 

How is this achieved? Through intense acts of attention. ‘Attention,’ Weil writes, ‘consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object … waiting [en attente], not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.’ There are obvious echoes of what we saw above in Milner’s idea of ‘wide attention’. Weil’s original French emphasises the way attending and waiting overlay one another. What is the effect of this intense self-negating act of attention? It is the ethical valorisation of the other: ‘The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention. The attention is creative. But at the moment when it is engaged it is a renunciation. This is true, at least, if it is pure. The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him.’ She concludes that ‘Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’
 

This phrase might pass by as sonorous but not particularly arresting until it is read in the context of our contemporary, Kathleen Jamie, whose short memoir, ‘Fever’, returns it to us renewed and powerful. Jamie begins, disconcertingly, with a beautiful and detailed description of cobwebs, before commenting, ‘In the bedroom in the house behind me, my husband was ill and rapidly becoming worse.’ Soon he is in hospital with life-threatening pneumonia. She presents the journey to hospital and the process of her husband being assessed by doctors; Jamie precisely notes every detail. The style is detached but the effect is curiously replete with love. Towards the end she recalls being asked by a friend ‘Whom do you pray to?’ and continues,

I carried this question around with me for a while. Really I carried it around until Phil was so ill, then berated myself for not praying. Could I explain to Phil that - though there was a time, maybe 24 hours, when I genuinely believed his life to be in danger - I had not prayed? But I had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s slim feet. Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?

Attention comes to seem almost magically restorative as an act of prayer might be. It arrests the busy egoism of the mind, empties the internal and replaces it with the outside, with reality.

The ethical effect of waiting and of attention is to allow another to exist. We renounce ourselves, in the sense of our ideas about things and people, in order to allow the outside into our minds. A beautiful description of this ethical dimension of attention comes from a careful reader of Weil, Iris Murdoch: ‘What is needful is inner space, in which other things can lodge and move and be considered; we withdraw into ourselves and let other things be. … We might think here of spatio-temporal rhythm; a good person might be recognised by his rhythm. An obsessed egoist, almost everyone sometimes, destroys the space and air about him and is uncomfortable to be with. We have a sense of the ‘space’ of others. An unselfish person enlarges the space and the world, we are calmed and composed by his presence.’ It is worth noting that we can all be the ‘obsessed egoist’ who eats up the world around them, including any human others who happen to come too close. In this condition, the other is invisible, camouflaged behind a thicket of our own tangled projections. We might add that to be with a person whose rhythm enlarges and calms the world is relatively rare.

Perhaps most of the time we are lodged somewhere in between, in the to and fro of conversation, where listening and speaking are commonly imperfect. The Zen writer Katsuki Sekida points out that pure attention cannot be attained simply by willing it to be so: ‘In zazen we effect it not by a simple change of mental attitude, but by hard discipline of body and mind.’ The self-renunciation Weil recommends is perhaps only the prize of a life’s pained ascetic contemplation. 

 

III Attention and Psychoanalysis

Though the West has failed to crystalize a spiritual practice around this notion, there is a situation in which such space is a necessity and which is designed to allow it to occur. From its inception, psychoanalysis has focused on types of waiting and forms of attention not dissimilar to those described by Weil, designed to allow otherness to exist beyond our projections. The moral aim, however, is somewhat different; here the specific intention is the bringing into consciousness of unconscious mental experience. Freud offered the following advice to doctors who considered offering psychoanalysis:

The technique ... consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’ (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears. In this way ... we avoid a danger which is inseparable from the exercise of deliberate attention. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is precisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows his inclinations he will certainly falsify what he may perceive. It must not be forgotten that the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on. ... 'He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his 'unconscious memory.' The doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing the concealed unconscious material without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has forgone.

Just as Weil recommends suspending our knowledge in the act of attention and Milner asks us to keep the ‘questing beast’ on a leash, so Freud recommends not employing ‘deliberate’ attention, which has a filtering effect. The Freudian consulting room is a space designed for the purposes of a special form of attention in order to become attuned to a quiet voice; there is only one expert present in the room: the unconscious. Though this comes from within, it is not something accessible through willed self-reflection, at least not in any conventional sense. It can only be accessed by being listened to by another in the right way. The person-in-therapy opens herself to the flood of memories, dreams and associations that her mind brings forth, while the analyst listens in such a manner that the unconscious is revealed.
 

Many psychoanalysts after Freud have tried to explain or re-conceptualise his idea of ‘evenly-suspended attention’ but the one who is most influential, and also the one who comes closest to Weil’s stringent criteria for attention, is the English analyst, Wilfred Bion. In his enormously influential late paper ‘Notes on Memory and Desire’ he comments:

The psychoanalyst should aim at achieving a state of mind so that at every session he feels he has not seen the patient before. If he feels he has, he is treating the wrong patient. This procedure is extremely penetrating. Therefore the psychoanalyst must aim at a steady exclusion of memory and desire and not be too disturbed if the results appear alarming at first.

Bion’s attitude to analysis intersects with Weil on attention in that to avoid memory (the past) and desire (the future) is to wait: attention and waiting are the same thing.
 

Bion’s ideas were forged in an unlikely early experience. In 1933 Samuel Beckett had been forced to return to Ireland from a long stay in Paris (and an exciting academic career) and, soon after, his father died. Towards the end of the year he developed a range of symptoms: colds and flu, cysts and boils, night sweats and panics, insomnia and constipation. In conversations with his friend, the physician, Geoffrey Thompson, he had released torrents of venom against his mother; Thompson thought the symptoms psychosomatic and diagnosed severe anxiety and depression. He recommended psychoanalysis. In early 1934 Beckett made his way to the Tavistock clinic in London and began analysis with a trainee: Wilfred Bion.
 

As Steven Connor puts it: ‘the meeting between Beckett and Bion was a coincidence of prospects, as the path of the man who still had it in him to be Samuel Beckett converged with that of the man who had yet to become Wilfred Bion.’ Bion never referred directly to his work with Beckett, and Beckett seems rarely to have spoken about the experience. However, in the last year of his life Beckett gave an extraordinary account of his analysis to his biographer Knowlson:

I used to lie down on the couch and try to go back in my past. I think it probably did help. I think it helped me perhaps to control the panic. I certainly came up with some extraordinary memories of being in the womb. Intrauterine memories. I remember feeling trapped, of being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out but no one could hear, no one was listening. I remember being in pain but being unable to do anything about it. I used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had happened, on what I'd come up with. I've never found them since. Maybe they still exist somewhere. I think it all helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing and what I was feeling.

 It is impossible to read this and not notice the similarity with the following passage from Joan and Neville Symington’s work on Bion which was published before Knowlson’s work on Beckett: ‘[Bion] often quoted Freud’s statement, ‘There is much more continuity between intrauterine life than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe.’ He imagined it possible that the foetal mind at some point was capable of becoming aware of unpleasant experiences, some of which might feel so intolerable to a mind not yet capable of dealing with this degree of pain that it might be capable of splitting off its awareness of it in order to get rid of it.’
 

In October 1935, Bion took Beckett to dinner, and, in what amounts to even greater transgression of traditional analytic boundaries, to a talk given by C G Jung at the Tavistock in which the Swiss analyst said: ‘Recently I saw a case of a little girl of ten who had some most amazing mythological dreams. Her father consulted me about these dreams. I could not tell him what I thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis. The little girl died a year later of an infectious disease. She had never been born entirely.’ In the second act of Waiting for Godot, Pozzo returns as the abject fool, blind and traumatised, led by his former slave, Lucky. Vladimir is convinced they met yesterday when Pozzo was blustering and dominant: when did he go blind? In sudden fury, Pozzo yells,

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

If there is a self in the world, going blind or deaf, who was never properly born, born only astride a grave, for Beckett there is a part of him, split off, as Bion puts it, that is forever unborn. Beckett, as he said in an interview in 1970, had an ‘unconquerable intuition’ of ‘a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self that might have been but never got born, an être manqué’.
 

Many have hypothesised that Bion’s paper ‘The Imaginary Twin’ written in the 1950s, precisely the moment that Beckett was writing his most important works, is an account of the analyst’s work with Beckett. In the case study Bion recounts a dream offered by his patient; in it the patient was in a car being overtaken, but instead of being passed, the other car parked alongside, forbidding the patient to escape his own car. The figure from the other car leered menacingly through the window. Bion interprets the figure as both himself as analyst and as an ‘Imaginary Twin’. Bion continues,

The twin was imaginary because my patient had prevented the birth of the twin… His use of a twin as a means of alleviating anxiety was therefore illegitimate and the twin was determined that he, the patient, should not now be born …

Bion’s patient feared to be born because to be born was to confront the aggression and violence held within him.
 

What I am suggesting is that Bion and Beckett influenced one another at a deep level. Their writings, their intellectual lives, were forged in what Thomas Ogden describes as the analytic third. We are used to thinking of possessing thoughts and feelings, but analysis and the attention it requires puts all this in doubt. There is no transference – the person-in-therapy bringing her former experiences into the room – nor countertransference – the analyst projecting onto the patient – but transference phenomena, shared experiences of thoughts and feelings. Beckett and Bion may be considered twins through the experience of the analysis and their joint experience of the transference where past, present and perhaps future coalesce and identity dissolves. The prominent features of the analysis reported in ‘the Imaginary Twin’, Bion commented, were ‘exhibitions of introjection and projection, splitting, and, not least, the personification of the split-off parts of his personality’. These unborn and scarcely born counterparts are shards of a single traumatised identity.
 

The features Bion enumerates are the defences put up by the psyche when it is under the sway of what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position. This is a psychic organisation characteristic of the first few weeks following birth, but which recurs throughout life at times of trauma or stress. The splitting which Bion speaks about originates in early experiences in which feelings of pleasure and love are identified with the breast that feeds (and by extension in later life all things we might idealise as purely ‘good’) and in which fears of annihilation are identified with the breast that is removed and pined for (and by extension all things that are denigrated as purely ‘bad’). As Hannah Segal puts it:

Against the overwhelming anxiety of annihilation, the ego evolves a series of mechanisms of defence … the ego strives to introject the good and project the bad. … There are situations in which the good is projected, in order to keep it safe from what is felt to be overwhelming badness inside, and situations in which persecutors are introjected and even identified with in an attempt to gain control of them.

As Bion pointed out frequently in his writings, the process of introjection and projection are mirrored, indeed profoundly intertwined with, the processes of eating and excreting. In the analytic scenario which replays these functions, it is words that are eaten and excreted. Without this process, the words merely circulate. As Beckett’s narrator in The Unnameable puts it: ‘it is they who dictate this torrent of balls, they who stuffed me full of these groans that choke me. And out it all pours unchanged. I have only to belch to be sure of hearing them, the same sour old teachings I can’t change a tittle of.’ There is a way out of this ‘position’. The poisonous words are placed in the container of the analyst in order to detoxify them. Bion quotes Keats’s idea of Negative Capability (‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason') and offers it as an explanation of attention and waiting in psychoanalysis and the means by which detoxification occurs:

In every session the psycho-analyst should be able, if he has followed what I have said …  particularly with regard to memory and desire, to be aware of the aspects of the material that, however familiar they may seem to be, relate to what is unknown both to him and to the analysand. Any attempt to cling to what he knows must be resisted for the sake of achieving a state of mind analogous to the paranoid-schizoid position. For this state I have coined the term ‘patience‘ to distinguish it from ‘paranoid-schizoid position’, which should be left to describe the pathological state for which Melanie Klein used it. I mean the term to retain its association with suffering and tolerance of frustration. ‘Patience’ should be retained without ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ until a pattern ‘evolves’. This state is the analogue to what Melanie Klein has called the depressive position. For this state I use the term ‘security’. This I mean to leave with its association of safety and diminished anxiety. I consider that no analyst is entitled to believe that he has done the work required to give an interpretation unless he has passed through both phases - ‘patience’ and ‘security’.
 

Conclusion

Negative capability, evenly suspended or wide attention, Weil’s Decreation, Murdoch’s inner space; they all seem to me to have in common the need to wait, to allow meaning to form without rushing for answers. Psychoanalysis is one place in which something serious and slow is allowed to take place. There are many illnesses of the psyche which require treatment. I am not opposed to the use of anti-depressant or anti-psychotic medication, or to those effective treatments that use techniques such as EMDR. But there is something else we need, and we need it now more than ever. We need to attend; we need a practice in which a person agrees to clear a space in themselves for the other to dwell; we need an inner place in which our words can lodge and acquire the meaning which allows them to heal.