How to Do Nothing
Page 12
Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.
Occupying the “third space” within the attention economy is important not just because, as I’ve argued, individual attention forms the basis for collective attention and thus for meaningful refusal of all kinds. It is also important because in a time of shrinking margins, when not only students but everyone else has “put the pedal to the metal,” and cannot afford other kinds of refusal, attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw. In a cycle where both financially driven platforms and overall precarity close down the space of attention—the very attention needed to resist this onslaught, which then pushes further—it may be only in the space of our own minds that some of us can begin to pull apart the links.
In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes sleep as the last vestige of humanity that capitalism cannot appropriate (thus explaining its many assaults on sleep).65 The cultivation of different forms of attention has a similar character, since the true nature of attention is often hidden. What the attention economy takes for granted is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform and interchangeable. “Units” of attention are assumed undifferentiated and uncritical. To give a particularly bleak yet useful example, if I’m forced to watch an ad, the company doesn’t necessarily know how I am watching the ad. I may indeed be watching it very carefully, but like a practitioner of aikido who seeks to better understand her enemy—or for that matter, like Thomas Merton observing the corruption of the world from his hermitage. My “participation” may be disingenuous, like Diogenes rolling his barrel industriously up and down the hill to appear productive. As a precursor to action, these drills and formations of attention within the mind represent a primary space of volition. Tehching Hsieh referred to these kinds of tactics when, speaking of the year he spent in a cage, he said that nonetheless his “mind was not in jail.”66
Of course, attention has its own margins. As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.
But besides showing us a possible way out of a bind, the process of training one’s own attention has something else to recommend it. If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. As I’ll show in the next chapter, this process enriches not only our capacity to resist, but even more simply, our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.
Chapter 4
Exercises in Attention
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
–JOHN CAGE1
There’s a funny detail about Cupertino that I discovered as a teenager. Growing up there in the early 2000s, there wasn’t much to do except visit one shopping center after another in what I experienced as a mind-numbing sprawl with no obvious center. The one I ended up at the most often was called Cupertino Crossroads, and it sat at the intersection of two six-lane roads with a stupefyingly long traffic light. Cupertino Crossroads contained the usual retail suspects at the time: Whole Foods, Mervyn’s, Aaron Brothers, Jamba Juice, Noah’s Bagels. The funny detail was this: the location of the shopping center was actually of some historical importance. It had once been a “crossroads” that included Cupertino’s first post office, general store, and blacksmith. No sign of them remained, however. It was actually unclear whether the name of the shopping center referenced this site or whether it was a coincidence. I remember finding either option equally depressing.
People usually associate Cupertino with Apple, which was founded there and which recently inaugurated a new, futuristic-looking campus not too far from Cupertino Crossroads. While it’s true that Cupertino is a city with a reality like any other place, it felt to me like the technology it produced—something that existed outside of space and time. We barely had seasons, and instead of landmarks we had office parks (where my parents worked), manicured trees, and ample parking. No one I met seemed to particularly identify with Cupertino more than any other place, because, I thought, there simply wasn’t anything to identify with. There wasn’t even a clear beginning or ending in Cupertino; instead, like Los Angeles, you simply kept driving until at some arbitrary point you were now in Campbell, now in Los Gatos, now in Saratoga. In excess of normal teenage angst, I was desperate for something (anything!) to latch onto, to be interested in. But Cupertino was featureless. It’s perhaps telling that when I meet other people who grew up in Cupertino, the one thing we have to bond over is an empty husk of consumer culture: Vallco Fashion Park, a defunct and almost entirely empty nineties-era mall.
What I lacked was context: anything to tie my experience to this place and not that place, this time and not that time. I might as well have been living in a simulation. But now I see that I was looking at Cupertino all wrong.
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IN 2015 I was asked to give a lecture on David Hockney to docents at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The pretext was that they were showing his digital video piece, Seven Yorkshire Landscapes; as someone who worked in digital art, I was expected to provide some perspective. But I wasn’t sure if I would have anything to say. Hockney was not only a painter, but really a painter’s painter. Like most people, I associated him with his flat, supersaturated Los Angeles scenes—like the 1967 painting A Bigger Splash, of a pool, diving board, and peach-colored California bungalow. But as soon as I started researching his evolving interest in technology—not just media but technologies of seeing—I realized I might have more to learn from Hockney than from any other artist.
Hockney valued painting because of the medium’s relationship to time. According to him, an image contained the amount of time that went into making it, so that when someone looked at one of his paintings, they began to inhabit the physical, bodily time of its being painted. It’s no surprise, then, that Hockney initially disdained photography. Although he sometimes used it in studies for paintings, he found a snapshot’s relationship to time unrealistic: “Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of
a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second,” he said. “But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.”2
In 1982, a curator from the Centre Pompidou museum came to Hockney’s LA house to document some of his paintings with a Polaroid camera and happened to leave behind some blank Polaroid film. Hockney’s curiosity got the better of him, and he started walking through his house taking photos in every direction. Developing a technique he would use for years afterward, he joined the photos into a grid whose overall effect is like that of a disjointed fish-eye lens—photos pointing forward are in the center, photos pointing to the left are on the left, etc. Lawrence Weschler contrasts these early pieces with Eadweard Muybridge’s grids of photographic motion studies, in which the grid functions as a sequence, like a comic strip. Hockney’s grids contain no such sequence. Instead, Weschler writes, the grids depict “the experience of looking as it transpires across time.”3
In Gregory in the Pool, a landscape-orientation grid of photographs of a single swimming pool, Hockney’s friend Gregory (or some part of him) appears in almost all of the squares, always in a different position. More than anything, he appears to be swimming through time. When Hockney used this technique for seated portraits, the grid had an even narrower field of focus but the same roving eye: a shoe or a face might appear twice (once from the front, once from the side). Hockney’s subjects were recognizable but discontinuous. In that sense, Hockney was trying to use a camera to undo the very essence of how we traditionally understand photography, which is a static framing of certain elements in an instant of time. More specifically, Hockney was after the phenomenology of seeing:
From that first day, I was exhilarated…I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not at all once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world…There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful.4
In this pursuit of a “living impression,” Hockney took influence from Picasso and cubism in general. He referred to paintings such as Picasso’s 1923 Portrait of Woman in D’Hermine Pass—in which we appear to see a woman’s face from the side but can somehow see the other eye that should be hidden from us, as well as several possible noses—saying that there was actually nothing distorted in such a scene. To him, cubism was quite simple: three noses meant you looked at it three times.5 This comment attests to his preoccupation not just with the subject of depiction but with the relationship between representation and perception. Comparing Jean-Antoine Watteau’s fairly straightforward painting The Intimate Toilet to Picasso’s Femme Couchée—both being intimate interior scenes of a woman—Hockney said that the viewer in the Watteau picture is an alienated voyeur who may as well be looking through a keyhole. In the Picasso painting, however, we are in the room with her. For Hockney, this made the Picasso piece the more realistic of the two, since “[w]e do not look at the world from a distance; we are in it, and that’s how we feel.”6
Though he was using a camera, Hockney did not consider his cubist representations of people and moments to be photographs. Instead he considered what he was doing to be closer to drawing; indeed, he compared his discovery to only using pencils to draw dots and then finding out that you can draw lines. These “lines” evoked movements of the eye as it takes in a scene, and they’re especially evident once Hockney forewent the grid altogether. In The Scrabble Game, Jan. 1, 1983, the photos sprawl out unpredictably from the Scrabble board, overlapping in a way that inadvertently evokes the photo-merging capabilities of Photoshop as much as it does the organic growth of a Scrabble game. Following one trajectory we find one player’s several facial reactions (serious, laughing, about to speak); following another, we see a woman’s face from several angles, resting on her hands in different pensive moments; on the other side, a lazing cat uncovers its face and becomes interested in the game; and looking downward we see the hand of the photographer, which appears to be our own, resting next to the letters we have yet to play.
The most famous of these “joiners,” as Hockney called them, is Pearblossom Highway, 11th–18th April 1986. As the title makes clear, it took Hockney eight days to make the hundreds of photographs, and he would later take an additional two weeks to assemble them. From far away, the general composition looks like a familiar landscape, but we soon notice that the STOP AHEAD letters on the road balloon toward us in an odd way. Bits of roadside refuse seem out of proportion; the Joshua trees that are far away are somehow as detailed as the ones that are close to us.
These disjunctures and discrepancies in size undermine any sense of continuity or punctum. Without the familiar framework of a consistent vanishing point, the eye roams across the scene, dwelling in small details and trying to add it all up. This process forces us to notice our own “construction” of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world. In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception.
Hockney once called Pearblossom Highway “a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective.”7 One-point perspective was worth assaulting because, as the opposite of something like cubism, it was associated with a way of seeing that Hockney didn’t like. In a 2015 lecture at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Hockney showed a Chinese scroll painting as an example of a way of seeing he was more interested in. The scroll was so long that what he showed was actually a tracking shot, a journey across a multifarious scene that is less an image than a collection of small moments: people lining up to enter a temple, people crossing a river in a small boat, people conversing under a tree. Behind them, the land recedes, but to no particular point. The scroll’s narrative is excessive, open, and without direction. It recalls the text from a tourist plaque in Zion Canyon that forms the center of one of Hockney’s sprawling photo collages. The plaque reads: YOU MAKE THE PICTURE.
In 2012, after experimenting with early Macintosh computers, fax machines, and the earliest version of Photoshop, Hockney found yet another way to “make the picture.” He mounted twelve cameras to the side of a car and drove slowly down different country roads in Yorkshire, near where he grew up. Each piece in Seven Yorkshire Landscapes is displayed as a three-by-six grid of screens displayed edge to edge. Because the field of view and zoom level of each camera is intentionally misaligned, the effect is like that of a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory Google Street View. Like Pearblossom Highway, the slight disconnection between individual “pictures” tricks our eyes into looking closely, suggesting that there is something to be seen in every panel—and indeed there is.
But in these video pieces, Hockney augments his usual disjointed technique with the video’s ant-like pace—one more “trick” to get you to look more closely. One casual viewer’s YouTube video of the work, in which young children run back and forth across the screens, pointing and jumping and stopping to stare at certain leaves, seems to bear out Hockney’s description of his own project: “The composition stays the same and you just slowly go past a bush. There’s so much to look at that you don’t get bored. Everybody watches because there’s a lot to see. There’s a lot to look at.” Comparing it to TV, he says that “[i]f you show the world better, it’s more beautiful, a lot more beautiful. The process of looking is the beauty.”
When I talked to docents at the de Young about Seven Yorkshire Landscapes, they mentioned something interesting. Some museumgoers who had seen the piece came back to tell them that afterward everything outside had looked different from what they were used to. Specifically, the de Young is not far from the San Francisco Botanical Garden, and those who visited it directly afterward found that Hockney’s piece had trained them to look a certain way—a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures. They saw the garden anew, in all its
kaleidoscopic beauty.
Hockney, who defines looking as a “positive act,” would have been pleased. For him, actual looking was a skill and a conscious decision that people rarely practiced; there was “a lot to see” only if you were willing and able to see it.8 In this sense, what Hockney and countless other artists offer is a kind of attentional prosthesis. Such an offering assumes that the familiar and proximate environment is as deserving of this attention, if not more, than those hallowed objects we view in a museum.
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I HAVE NO trouble believing the accounts of these museumgoers because, a few years prior, I’d had a very similar experience—with sound instead of sight. It was at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, which I would occasionally visit alone after work for the comfort of old favorite pieces, an overpriced plastic cup of wine, and anonymity among an older crowd. This particular night, I had come to see the symphony perform pieces from John Cage’s Song Books. Cage is most famous for 4′33″, a three-movement piece in which a pianist plays nothing. While that piece often gets written off as a conceptual art stunt, it’s actually quite profound: each time it’s performed, the ambient sound, including coughs, uncomfortable laughter, and chair scrapes, is what makes up the piece. This approach is not that different from Eleanor Coppola’s in her Windows piece, but with sound instead of visual activity.
At the time, I was somewhat familiar with Cage and his philosophy that “everything we hear is music”; I had seen the interview where he sits by an apartment window, rapt at the sound of traffic outside. In my class, I sometimes show a video of him performing Water Walk on the 1960s TV show I’ve Got a Secret, where the audience grows mystified and then titillated as he waters plants in a tub, bonks a piano, and squeezes a rubber ducky. I knew that his pieces were procedural, full of chance operations, so I was not surprised that in the section of the liner notes that lists duration, it simply said it would last “anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, depending on what happens.”