This short collection of essays by Phillips plays around with the theme of attention and examines what exactly it means to be seeking it (or not). He begins by describing how attention relates to the notion of Self. “This assembling of our selves through what we notice, through what, as we say, attracts our attention—both consciously and unconsciously—and just how surely we limit the repertoire of what we do notice, smacks of addiction (‘we get hooked’); and of a fundamental unknowingness about how we make ourselves up.” What we attend to becomes our own subjective world and, therefore, forms our own notion of our Self. Especially when young, we play with what we attend to. We challenge our conception of our Self and often even strive to transform it. “Attention and interest are always themselves experimental, even when—or perhaps particularly when—we are unaware of the risks being taken; curiosity never comes with a guarantee…. It is always worth wondering what our interests are a way of not being interested in…. The kinds of interest we take, the forms of attention we prefer, seem to be the best ways we have so far of trying to get the lives we think we want.”
Attention is also a social phenomenon. Our culture seeks to direct our attention in prescribed ways. “If rules, like teachers, are by definition attention-seekers, they also try to define the attention they seek.” Tradition and culture are guides to what is worth attending to, passed down through the generations. “Acculturation means getting your attention-seeking right.” Attention is also intimately related to love and, particularly, reciprocal love. “Attention-seeking, whatever else it is, is always a love test, and should be treated as such…. In our attention-seeking it could be assumed that we know neither what we want nor what we expect; and so we are in our starkest dependence on others.” In fact, attention-seeking is often the act of grasping in the dark. “We might assume that we don’t always know beforehand what the attention is that we seek.”
The notion of shame is also bound up with attention. “A shameful relation to anything is, by definition, a determined narrowing of attention…. In an uncanny narrowing of the mind, shame forecloses one’s attention…. It is only possible to have a shameful relation to the things that matter most…. By being ashamed of ourselves, we reveal what we value about ourselves…. When we are ashamed of ourselves there is something we have failed to be, or to do, that is deemed essential; and this failure to be or do something or other has been exposed.” Shame is also related to our conception of our Self. “Shame measures the distance between who we experience ourselves being, and who we would like to be—the distance between our ego and ego-ideal that is the source of our suffering…. A lot of work goes into the attempt to conform to a preferred model of oneself.”
Phillips ends by directly relating attention-seeking to psychoanalysis. He writes that Freud discovered “a new kind of attention, psychoanalytic attention; an interpretive attention that is in the service of telling and useful descriptions of unconscious motivation.” Phillips suggests an insight of psychoanalysis is to pay attention to what you are not paying attention to. He continues, “Freud is suggesting that attention is primarily, if not essentially, already thoroughly censored (or selective, as we more blandly say). That looking is a way of stopping us seeing; that talking is a way of stopping us speaking; that listening is a way of stopping ourselves hearing. That what we call attending is a process of motivated exclusion…. Attention evaluates, prohibits, and pre-empts.” In the realm of attention, the most important things are most often, actually, the unattended.
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