Consensual attending

Solicited attention

William James (1890/1950), in the waning years of the 19th century, wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind” (p. 403) That might well have been the case then, but it hardly rings true now. Now is incessantly loud: “[The gods] have long since fled our deafening world,” writes Michel Serres (2009, p. 86). ¹ The din impinges upon us, wounds us, and our agreement feels increasingly irrelevant. Our attention is not simply sought; it is captured and capitalized upon. “Attention theft” is now a thing that people lament and actively work to protect themselves from. Beyond the suspect truthiness of James’ claim, however, there is additional trouble. It is trouble that, perhaps ironically, leaves us less than ideally situated to respond to the din. Within James’ formulation, we are individually on the hook for that which engages our solitary attention: experience here answers to the individual will, and so the individual must answer for how and to what they attend. If we find now ourselves overwhelmed, we have no attentional resources beyond our own will to sense and sort through the deafening world.

James’ formulation of attention resounds through how collective, rhetorical life is thought. To persuade first requires getting someone to pay attention: “If rhetoric is an art of persuasion,” writes Henry W. Johnstone (1990), “it practices this art by soliciting attention” (p. 334). He likewise views rhetoric as “shifting attention”: moving it from one object to another (p. 334). From where or from whom is this attention solicited? From the I whose agreement we seek, of course. Now that I have your attention, let me direct it over yonder. Implicit here is the assumption that an act of agreement or assent that remains yoked to an understanding of people as autonomous, atomized beings. Participation in rhetoric is sometimes understood as (or reduced to) individual expressions of acceptance or resistance. ² This is particularly true when ethics are under consideration: are people aware of what is happening to them? In this mode, ethical persuasion ought to be explicit—respecting the individual’s capacity to self-determine. Assent is wrapped up in the field’s anxiety surrounding agency. When rhetorical situations are at their most fraught, the need for discrete rhetorical agents is at its highest. The rhetor as a sovereign subject is topically most necessary when and where human subjects are at their most vulnerable. When danger looms, rhetors and rhetoricians batten down the hatches and keep things from leaking in and out. But this need to protectively seal the subject cuts us off from the worlds we live in now and the worlds we might need to compose otherwise.

I complicate this supposition by prying open and exploiting the etymological distinction between assent, which denotes an individual thinking or feeling toward something, and consent, which denotes a thinking and feeling together. ³ Most importantly, I address the trend of reducing consent to assent: to imagine consent as an individual act rather than a collective one with consequences for particular individuals. I argue that consent is not an act undertaken by individuals, but is a relational endeavor that individuates. Any solitary act of assent—of thinking, perceiving, feeling—is predicated upon prior and ongoing consensual acts.

Consensual attending addresses the ecological and relational conditions in which any act of assent or dissent materializes. The terms of consensual attending modulate one another: consensual distributes attention beyond the individual and attending intensifies the consensual in marking how our joint and collective attention individuates us as sensing beings. Consensual attending is predicated not upon individual rhetorical acts of assent but ambient formations in which rhetorical capacities emerge. To arrive at such a consent, I retune James’ articulation of attention as a function of agreement by looking toward ecologies of attention. This retuning necessarily entails thinking through the ethical and political implications of consensual attending in our present political moment, wherein the virality of #resist and #metoo registers anxiety about our individual and collective (in)capacities to dis/agree. I engage feminist scholarship on consent in the context of sexual relations in thinking through the contextual composition of consent. Thinking through scholarship on sexual consent complicates consensual attending, and addressing sexual consent itself serves as an example of the trouble lurking in the reduction of consent to assent. Such a reduction leaves unaddressed the ecologies in which such collective capacities are composed. I conclude by returning to attention to speculate how such consensual capacities might be composed.

(Un)wanted attention

James’ attention resonates across the development of both psychological and philosophical treatments of attention, which ubiquitously quote James. ⁴ I push on James’ attention here both on account of its ubiquity and because it is the tightest, most compelling articulation of attention as selective interest. Indeed, it is his particular articulation of attention, rather than the entirety of James’ body of work, that is the jumping off point here because of its influence on how we configure attention today: attention shapes experience and attention is a function of selective interest, which expresses itself in individual agreement.

James’ articulation of attention is also a larger argument about the shape and shapers of experience. James wants to see experience as actively composed by the individual will. James was, after all, only a soft determinist. We are not still bodies upon which the universe imprints itself. The case for selective interest was and remains a compelling and necessary one. Indeed, Carolyn Dicey Jennings (2017) writes, “in my picture, the self is only as strong as its powers of attention [emphasis added]. While this might be an uncomfortable idea to some, I take it that it is preferable to losing the self altogether” (para. 32). If we are the arbiters of our gaze, then we retain some measure of autonomy. We are not tossed about by the world but act within it, shaping it as we selectively attend to it. But with this articulation of attention, James links perception to agreement and agreement to assent: an individual act of perceiving, thinking, and feeling that grants the individual control of their worldly experience at the expense of bracketing off more collective, distributed influences.

Agreement is not simply suggested by or merely prominent in the discourse of attention; agreeing to attend undergirds much of the thinking about what attention is or ought to be. Tim Wu, in his Merchants of Attention, the first epigram of which is James—“My experience is what I agree to attend to”—engages the thorny question of consent in our current economics of attention, wherein our attention is a commodity that we either sell or have stolen from us. Indeed, T. Wu (2016) uses consent as his primary term as well as his assessment mechanism. “Every time you find your attention captured by a poster,” Wu writes, “your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent” (p. 23). Much hinges on this moment of capture. “Something more” raises the stakes: it is not just your awareness, which Wu treats a synonymous with attention, but something about yourself. Wu, following James, posits that awareness, a process which ought to be a function of selective interest, bespeaks autonomy, freedom, and self-determination.

To have your attention stolen is to thus have yourself stolen as well:

What an irony it is that the lamentably scattered state of mind arises not from our own lack of drive but rather from the imperatives of one peculiar kind of commercial enterprise that is not even particularly profitable much of the time. (T. Wu, 2016, p. 352)

Ours are minds broken into and then broken apart. In the contemporary scene of our economics of attention we become, as James (1890/1950) wrote against, “absolutely passive clay, upon which ‘experience’ rains down” (p. 403). This was perhaps presaged by Marshall McLuhan (1964/1994) talking about the television: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left” (p. 15). Exploitation and violation are the real risks embedded in an attention not of our own making. “Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime” (T. Wu, 2016, p. 350). So, Wu’s solution, echoing James, is for us to recapture our own attention:

we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention [emphasis added] and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so redeem ownership of the very experience of our living. (p. 353)

There is much to commend here. No one can deny the pernicious and unsustainable effects of what Wu and others call “attention theft.”

We are indeed bombarded, and peace and quiet get more expensive each year. In particular, attention theft adversely affects those living in economic precarity: they are in no financial position to opt out of or skip adds, for example. Attending is how they pay to participate. The person purchasing the cheapest Hulu package assents to attend to the ads (the more expensive version is ad free), but they find themselves in an attentional economy that exceeds but also implicates them. They must pay with their attention. Damien Smith Pfister (2019) pointedly connects this attentional economy to the operations of neoliberalism in which

attention to others is valued only insofar as it is useful or monetizable, relations with others are seen as zero-sum and competitive, friends and family are to be preferred over strangers, and time is just another commodity that should be efficiently spent. (p. 183)

What is troubling in this neoliberal arrangement is the composition of individual agreement—of assent. Neoliberalism does damage twice: turning attention into an individual commodity both monetizes and individualizes it. Wu’s case for redeeming “ownership” reinscribes the very problem he has so painstakingly diagnosed. The game is up when we treat attention as a personal possession that one parts with either cheaply or not. Pfister (2019) succinctly captures this trouble as well:

When dominant institutional rhetorics lionize individual empowerment instead of public goods, civic attention is steered away from a collective self-understanding that acknowledges mutual interdependence with strangers and toward an understanding of the self as a market actor seeking to maximize individual power. (p. 184)

We need to uncouple attention from assent and its emphasis on individual feeling and thinking, and instead think of attention in terms of the consensual, wherein both feeling and thinking are collective phenomena that (in)capacitate assent. The neoliberal attention economy—both in its treatment of attention as a commodity and its emphasis upon the individual—mediates against collective life and the “sensing-in-common” (Pfister, 2019, p. 185) that composes it—undermining its efforts and forestalling its possible futures.

Ontological monsters

My own provocation here is to strongly suggest that attention is not something that individuals possess and then dole out selectively. Rather, attending is that which individuates us in the first place. The I who attends is an I already shaped by attending. Yves Citton (2017) argues that attention is not simply something individuals deploy, but is rather a collective and joint activity that individuates. What reaches us and reaches into us shape how we attend, and this attending composes us as individuals: there is an irreducible complexity to the argument that we are what we attend to. What marks this as individuating rather than individual is that our attention is likewise joint attention—where we look I look—and collective attention, which Citton also calls collective enthrallment: “human attention tends to fall on objects whose forms it recognizes, under the spellbinding influence of the direction taken by the attention of others” (p. 33). He continues, “All attention, therefore, is ‘collective,’ in the sense in which it collects characteristics whose common feature is that they help us to prosper in our environment” (p. 34). Out of these collective and joint attentions, our own attention is carved—we are carved. With Citton, we can begin to tease out this important complication to (but not dismissal of) James. Citton writes, “Attention is individuating to the extent that it chooses what I will be tomorrow by getting entangled in what I see, hear, smell and touch today” (p. 174).

As a parent, perhaps the most compelling example of consensual attending is a screaming infant. The un-ignorable sounds my daughter Scarlett makes do much much more than get my attention. Her cries and screams and coos (there are some good times) compose my attention so as to direct me in ways helpful to her. One does not simply pay attention to Scarlett; one engages her attentively. This distinction matters. Parenting is not the intentional operation of a spotlight but an attentional responsiveness to alarm bells. An infant’s cries individuate us as caregivers. Cries make of us someone who (at)tends to the crier. My attention is vibrated by sound waves that play upon my body, and so assent here is complicated: caregiving is consensual as a thinking and feeling together. ⁵

When my children would cry as infants, they did more than merely excite and capture my attention; they made me different by changing where, how, and why I attended—stretching me into new positions, new relations that were sounding out through me. This is what Citton calls “joint attention.” Whatever capacities I have as a caregiver emerge consensually. They are capacities after the fact of Scarlett and I feeling, perceiving, and thinking together. A noticing of that which discloses itself as noticeable. What defines the care evoked by my children’s cries is the relational context they are heard in. It is not as simple as “I am a great dad,” which I would certainly like to be true. It is my contextual capacity to respond, which has been cobbled together from innumerable re/sources. As Stormer and McGreavy (2017) put it, focusing on capacity rather than agency shifts our focus “from abilities inherent to humans to the ecology of entanglements between entities” (p. 5). Attention requires time and energy: resources that are increasingly rare for many. We are attending jointly and collectively, and so those joint and collective dynamics come to matter.

We can here understand distributed consent in a rhetorical register. Thomas Rickert (2013) writes,

rhetoric is a responsive way of revealing the world for others, responding to and put forth through affective, symbolic, and material means, so as to (at least potentially) re-attune or otherwise transform how others inhabit the world to an extent that calls for some action. (p. 162)

Scarlett is rhetorical when she screams at me and I am rhetorical in being yelled at. In The Economics of Attention, Richard Lanham (2006) writes, “rhetoric has always persuaded people [. . .] to share a beautiful attention structure. To cherish eloquence” (p. 58). I cherish, more-or-less, the cries of my children, which are something not unlike eloquence. As we complicate attention, we expand eloquence past what might even be tolerable. Scarlett’s is an eloquence that bespeaks of Citton’s collective enthrallment: “the spellbinding influence of the direction taken by the attention of others” (p. 33). Or, as Rickert has it, “Attention attends to the salient, but the bringing forth of salience is itself a complex activity that has ambient dimensions” (p. xi). Whatever I might agree to notice, my selective interest in it, my assent, has already been shaped.

The claim that children “demand” our attention is to miss them for the ontological monsters that they all really are. Children demand of us to become other than who we already are, and this cultivation happens through joint attention. In stretching toward them we become something else: not the same person noticing something new, but someone altered and primed to attend otherwise. Their cries reconstitute those shaken by them. A caregiver’s attention is never entirely their own.

Consensual relations

My argument, couched in the context of caregiving, is not without troubling resonances. I proceed cautiously as I complicate consent and with it the idea of unwanted attention. The pressing troubles connoted by the clamor for/of consent emerge in environments already silent with respect to the collective—to the shared experience of attention. When individuals are pitted against each other in social contexts overwhelmingly defined by market logics and inequity, appeals to consent as assent become our only way of addressing and arresting unwanted attention. The problem with consent, however, is not only whether or not we give or get it but also whether or not we are part of the collective that is thinking and feeling together. Caregiving can be understood as a way beyond assent/dissent because it is defined consensually. There is an ethics and politics of attention, and so marking attention’s joint, collective, and individuating components demands a reckoning with the ethical-political.

Feminist scholarship on consent in the context of sexual relations has already been thinking in similar directions. ⁶ As Kate Lockwood Harris (2018) writes, “the complexity of consent is already well established” (p. 159). Within this area of scholarship, consent is imagined not in a vacuum populated by atomized persons, but as a capacity constructed contextually (spatially, ideologically, legally). One’s capacity to consent is fostered and fettered collectively. “Consent does not, therefore, simply reside within a particular utterance,” write Allison Moore and Paul Reynolds (2004), “but in a narrative in which the contextualizing of the particular sexual relationship allows a greater understanding of the meaning of consent decisions and therefore their validity” (p. 40). Here, we move from a treatment of consent as a function of individual action to a contextual consent as it comes to be in sexual relationships.

Rethinking consent through scholarship on sexual consent proves particularly productive when pursued through the work of Lockwood Harris (2018, 2019), whose careful challenges to and un-packings of the discourse of consent provide insights into my focus on attention. Lockwood Harris (2019) writes, “prevailing understandings of sexual violence rely on atomistic frameworks” (pp. 4–5). Lockwood Harris’ argument, which she makes alongside many other feminist scholars, is that sexual consent is mediated by any number of externalities. To treat consent simply as an event or transaction that occurs between two isolated and autonomous subjects is to court disaster. She writes,

Stripped of broader context, people pay attention only to the immediate moment. When public discussions of violence are patterned by this myopia, society cannot think in more rigorous ways about how individual humans who enact violence are continually embedded in histories prior to themselves and, most importantly, how those histories implicate multifaceted power dynamics. (p. 122)

These dynamics include how women, for instance, are (still) collectively attended to. Sarah Walker (1997) has investigated “how compliant sexual behavior may be rooted in gender-role socialization, which provides a normative context for sexual behavior” (p. 157). Consent emerges in scenes of collective attention: in particular, the media enthrallments that saturate our expectations and experience of sexual desire. Lockwood Harris (2018) adds, “the ‘public’ is already there in bed, even if only two people are present” (p. 167). The concept of consent already presupposes a set of attentional relations that are neither neutral nor automatically present. “[C]ontext is where history, culture, difference, and power connect to ‘yes’ and ‘no’” (Harris, 2018, p. 161).

The contextual composition of consent is disturbingly performed in the misanthropic situation comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In the episode, “The Gang Buys a Boat,” two of the main characters, Dennis and Mac, bemoan the expense of owning a boat and its attendant lifestyle (Day et al., 2010). Dennis, who grows increasingly sociopathic over the run of the show, talks about needing a mattress for the boat. Mac, ever hapless, is confused as to why:

This scene, which hinges on the word “implication,” performs the limitation of atomistic formulations of consent. Dennis imagines a scene wherein he runs roughshod over a woman’s desires by constructing a context that renders them mute. Any agreement or articulation of desire emerges from a scene shot through with implicit threats of harm. It also gives lie to notion that sexual violence can be mitigated by clearer communication. Dennis is not confused about the wants and desires of women; he simply does not care. In other words, what the woman might want is not germane on the boat. Assent is here purposefully rendered inconsequential by the implication: that in which they are folded. Later on in the episode, the show attends to the construction of consent beyond the confines of a ship at sea. Dennis explains to Mac,

Think about, like, all the movies and the books and all the stories of all the terrible awful, awful things that have happened out in the middle of the ocean. You know, that’s the stuff that’s, like, rattling around in her head, informing her decision as to whether she sleeps with me or not.

These are the media enthrallments that shape individuating attention. Surrounding and informing any “immediate moment” are collective attentions. The utterly devastating phrase “informing her decision” exposes the necessity of thinking consent beyond discrete moments of assent and dissent. ⁷

Sexual consent is an act of joint and collective attention. Individuals attend together in ways shaped by the collective attentions in and around them. Trouble at the register of collective attention cascades through joint and individuating attention. In the fraught, desire-saturated moments of sexual activity, our experience is being shaped by what we agree to notice, but that agreement exists not in a vacuum of individual desire but of collective desires and expectations (e.g. media enthrallments). Resonating with Citton’s ecology of attention, feminist work on sexual consent focuses not only on individuals attending to one another but also upon the individuating attention that emerges through joint and collective attending. We need to recognize consent prior to the moment when an individual assents or dissents. The more we grasp for a subject whose sovereignly and autonomy are at stake, the less we tend to the world that moves through and around them: the world that gives rise to the threats they face. As Lockwood Harris (2019) demonstrates, presumptions of autonomy are as much shields for perpetrators as they are protection for their victims. “To focus merely on individual perpetrators,” Lockwood Harris (2019) argues, “blunts effective critique of sexism, racism, homophobia, and other axes upon which unequal power is conferred upon social groups” (p. 5). A person cannot be one thing on the streets and then another thing in the sheets.

Attenderness

Attending to the constructed and in/capacitating qualities of consent does not solve the problem of something like sexual consent as it redistributes it. If the capacity to consent (as in to give assent) is already constructed through and by consent (as in the thinking-feeling together), then we are seemingly in a bind. Any work done to shift the contexts of consent in more amelioratory directions, it must be admitted, will happen outside the bounds of the individualistic framework supposed by the assent/dissent dynamic. What we all do adds up (always unevenly) to what we can all do—what we should and should not do. Anything we do may or may not in/capacitate someone, and that includes the very capacity to assent or dissent to what we might be doing. Any act of assent is predicated upon consent, which necessarily operates in excess of that assent. Ethical precarity necessarily abounds here, and more so for some than others. So, what is to be done? What available means of persuasion might be available to address the very capacity by which those means become available?

We cannot resolve this conundrum with unthinking appeals to sovereignty, which are just as likely as not to mitigate against a more satisfactory articulation of (sexual) consent. “But some may want to continue using the concept [of sovereignty],” writes Lauren Berlant (2007), “because of the history of investment in it as a marker for a liberal sense of personal autonomy and freedom or because of the association of democracy with the legal protection of the body politic and subgroups within it” (p. 756). Berlant links sovereignty and attention: “In this habit of representing the intentional subject, a manifest lack of self-cultivating attention can easily become recast as irresponsibility, shallowness, resistance, refusal, or incapacity” (p. 757). Each of these re-castings get awfully close to much of what Wu critiques and fears in his defense of attention, which is rooted in James: individuals robbed of their attention or individuals who give it away on the cheap become less than. This kind of intentional and attentional sovereignty, taking place as it does in world that is bleeding ordinary life dry, is exhausting. Berlant recognizes the same dangers as Wu, but she also sees that his elixir might very well be more of the same. Simply asking people to pay better attention is an economic burden added to the already overwhelmed.

Thinking about the ecology of attention and what that does for how we attend to and with one another, Citton promotes “environmental wisdom”: “In terms of environmental wisdom [. . .] and awareness of the polyphonic properties of our attentional dynamics [. . .],” Citton writes, the question of how we attend calls

forth a double task. On the one hand, establishing (physical, social, legal) environments that will allow the greatest number of us to modulate our attention according to our own desires and communal needs [. . .] And, on the other hand, learning to adapt our attention in new ways so as to make other figures and other values appear in the common ground by which we are constituted. (p. 194)

What other collective enthrallments are possible, and how can we activate them knowing that we do so in excess of assent and dissent, and that we might be activating them accidentally, incidentally and coincidentally? We feel more than we immediately agree to. We consent beyond ourselves and as selves already consensually individuated.

Attention marks such consent. That is, we can think of care through attending. “The essence of care,” Citton (2017) writes, “is fundamentally rooted in joint attention: be attentive to what preoccupies others” (p. 113). The root word of attention is tendere: to be precise, the present active infinitive of tendō: “I stretch, distend, extend” (Attention, n.d.). Attention is to stretch toward. Attention is likewise related to tend. We tend to crops and to one another, especially when we are ill or have suffered an injury, which can in turn be described as tender. The word tender thus marks a vulnerability—a soft or wounded spot—while also suggesting a course of action and attitude. Tenderness denotes care. We can act tenderly or with tenderness. Does it then make sense to speak of attenderness: of becoming attenderly toward one another?

This work of attenderness will not be solitary. We attend with care jointly and collectively along not simply a course of individual acts but along environments we will build together. Careful attention structures, to paraphrase Lanham (2006). If we engage attention as collective enthrallment, we might begin to think consensually. “By helping people to notice the influence of these broad societal discourses on everyday interactions,” writes Lockwood Harris (2019), “educators and organizational members can cultivate systemic thinking that enlarges the circle of concern beyond the rapist” (p. 138). Rhetoric is attentional, which is something other than intentional (while not being its opposite). Attending is always consensual, and consent is always contextual. Attention can no more be a resource for successful persuasion than consent can be a hermetically sealed scene in which autonomous subjects tend to one another or not. There is a need for invention here, for those thinking rhetorically to imagine not simply ways of capturing the attention of others (as some kind of bought-and-paid-for personal possession), but of attending together so as to disclose other possible ways of becoming together.