Twelve Theses on Attention
Publication, The Friends of Attention, Princeton University Press, 2022
Collaborative writing workshop, Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA, 2019
Twelve Theses on Attention
Twelve Theses on Attention is a manifesto written collectively by the Friends of Attention, an international group of artists, scholars, writers, and activists that includes Ginsberg. Members gathered at Mildred's Lane, the artist-run site in rural Pennsylvania, to draft the text together, and D. Graham Burnett and Stevie Knauss edited the book. It addresses an economy built on capturing human attention and proposes ways of attending that resist being bought and sold. The project connects to a question running through Ginsberg's own work: what it takes to bring something overlooked into view, and to hold a viewer in the act of looking.
The Theses were the basis of a set of short films cut together in 2020 for the Glasgow International. Click here to listen to the Glasgow International's podcast episode about the work of the Friends of Attention generally, and the Twelve Theses in particular.
ISBN: 9780691239828
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Editors: D. Graham Burnett
Other Editors: Stevie Knauss and The Friends of Attention
“True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable.” So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, written by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics—one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend.
It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously “frack” our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer.
The book is richly illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.
Reviews:
Cooperman “How to Get Our Attention Back - Common Reader.” Common Reader, 6 Sept. 2022, https://commonreader.wustl.edu/how-to-get-our-attention-back/.