A conversation on attention

Henry Cowles: Caleb, I so enjoyed immersing myself in Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. The way you weave your experiences with discipline together with those of authors who disciplined others or pushed back against attempts at being disciplined has me thinking about my own work on mental health. I can do something similar by including a personal history alongside the one I’m telling about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thank you for the inspiration!

With that in mind, I’d like to start our conversation on a personal or biographical note. You tell us early on about growing up in a college town in the Ozarks. You or your friends rebelled in ways that are both familiar and foreign to me. What you point out is that you all resisted some forms of discipline—school, Bible camp, part-time jobs—by adopting others like anti-capitalism or veganism. “We were,” you write, “mimicking discipline, trying to adapt it to some other purpose.” You’re critical of many disciplinary practices and yet you pursue others, passionately. I feel this paradox too, in a life that seems to mirror yours: at my desk with my manuscript, at home with my kid. Discipline runs deep.

There’s an ambivalence here. That’s the affect I want to ask about. When you think back to high school, did you feel this ambivalence, the paradoxical truth of pursuing discipline in order to resist it, or did you think you were up to something else? In other words: Was the discipline of a math teacher or a pastor the same as that of a saxophonist or an activist? At least for me, I feel like I see those similarities now but would’ve absolutely rejected them then. The same question might apply to your nineteenth-century authors, including Thoreau. Would he reject an analogy between these disciplinary practices or an account that pulled them under the same umbrella? To put it another way: Who wasn’t disciplined in the 1990s or the nineteenth century and what did that look like? Was it even possible to evade discipline?

Caleb Smith: Well, thank you for these generous questions. You have really read me carefully, and you are getting at the heart of my book. But your questions are a little bit sharp, too, since you go right to the tenderest places, where I write from my own experience—the kinds of intimacies that matter to me, the kinds of work and art I value. You’re right to say that there’s an affect of ambivalence in the book. On the topic of discipline, I didn’t find that I could really stand with either a thorough critique or a clean affirmation.

When I started writing Thoreau’s Axe, my intuitions were mostly critical. Ours is a culture of constant distraction, as everybody seems to agree. We are always plugged in as workers and consumers. There is a moral panic about smartphones and social media. We hear constant exhortations to slow down, seek more authentic connections, and pay attention. In my professional habitat, the academic humanities, some critics have really fixated on this aspiration—to become a sanctuary for careful reading and sustained aesthetic experience. Our critical methods are being reimagined as disciplines of attention.

I have an allergic reaction to that pastoral style of discipline, especially when it takes a moralistic turn. It takes me back to the old feeling that I used to have in the pews of the Methodist Church in Arkansas, where I was just inconsolably twitchy with boredom. And that’s the affect that I’m going to ask you about, my old friend boredom, but first let me try to deal a little bit with this ambivalence you put your finger on.

Most of my work before Thoreau’s Axe was in a more or less Foucauldian mode, thinking about penitentiaries and other scenes of coercive discipline. So I was prepared to deal with attention in the same way. Mindfulness training, consumer self-care, and academic disciplines of attention—these practices promise to save us from distraction. They come to us packaged in the language of autonomy and authenticity. But they are also forms of discipline in Foucault’s sense. They keep us on task at work. They enlist us in monitoring ourselves, correcting our own wayward thoughts and inefficient behaviors. They reek of paternalism, if not piety. And in the end, they reinforce the whole system that is causing distraction, namely the economic compulsions of constant productivity and endless consumption.

But when I started making these arguments, they rang half-true to me. I had a strong criticism of attention’s disciplines, but I couldn’t live without them. I definitely couldn’t read my sources or write my book without them. I had to summon myself to the table; I had to try to focus. And everything I care about—love, work, and beauty—takes some kind of discipline to make. So I got restless with my own polemic. And I get restless with other people’s polemics, too, sometimes, when they talk about “undisciplining” their academic work. What they really mean is changing the discipline, adopting a different set of norms. Not undiscipline but an alternative discipline, a counter-discipline.

And that’s what I think we were getting up to in the hardcore scene I joined as a kid—my real congregation. When I say we were mimicking discipline, I mean it. In the church of Fugazi, we wore combat boots and cropped our hair close. We rejected consumerism and the prevailing kinds of high school popularity. You could say that, in the old ascetic way, we tried to disconnect ourselves from “worldly things.” Now, there were some people who really slipped the yoke of discipline: the slackers. Dudes who just dropped out, smoked a lot of weed, ate a lot of Doritos. Maybe they played a video game, but they didn’t really care about getting good at anything, not even Sonic the Hedgehog. I think that’s what a real undisciplining ends up looking like—pretty harmless but also pretty lame. As for me and my friends, to make music and build a community, we had to do some discipline.

So when I went from the church to the underground club, I was not getting away from discipline. But you’re onto something here, too: We probably would not have called it discipline. The paradox of discipline was not really our problem. We would have seen it in political terms, them against us, the conservative Reaganite “society” against our rag-tag club of nonconformists.

Anyway, one thing that we almost always felt at church and almost never felt at a rock show was boredom. Reading your chapter about attention and boredom, I was reminded of that familiar, spastic feeling. When I came to your descriptions of scientists closing themselves up in tiny closets, trying to shut out every stimulus but one, it made me claustrophobic enough to scratch the walls. How did you come to the topic of boredom, and what are your own experiences with it? Is there a distinct flavor of boredom in scientific research, different from the kind that I am used to in the humanities?

Cowles: I’ve been thinking about boredom a lot! As you know, it’s everywhere lately. We’re being told we should be bored—or at least that we should give ourselves the opportunity to be. And not just ourselves but those we care for. There’s so much anxiety about whether we’ve let our kids down by never boring them. And along with that anxiety comes nostalgia, which borders on sanctimony, about how “back in the day” we were bored in ways that benefited us. Just like my question about whether and how we remember our own discipline, I think we’ve rewritten our childhood and (especially) adolescent boredom to cast it in a better light.

That’s why I got interested in the history of boredom in the first place. Having spent time doing menial lab work myself, I know just how boring it can be—and how a lot of scientists react to it in ways I found, and find, alienating. Some say they never get bored, that heaven is a full day of pipetting in the lab. Others, maybe even the same people, celebrate their boredom as if being bored was a sign of their objectivity. I balked at both. Talk about ambivalence!

So I don’t know whether scientific research is distinctly boring, but it might be distinct in the way its practitioners celebrate boredom or pretend never to be bored. Both seem like attempts to prove Weber’s self-hating thesis about science as a vocation. To me, such moves seem like protesting too much, and they’re clearly related to the conflation of objectivity and self-denial that became so important to the scientific ethos at the turn of the twentieth century.

This is where I think our projects and our perspectives come together. If you read today’s celebrations of boredom, what you find is another paradox, another form of ambivalence: a call to be disciplined about being undisciplined. We want regimens in order to be unregimented or work really, really hard to take it easy. Once again, the only option seems to be a form of discipline; all we have to choose is which one we want to pursue.

So let me put it back to you: Isn’t that at least potentially a bad thing? I’m trying every day to find slackers I admire or to imagine a way of being truly undisciplined. The stakes are high. It seems like constantly pursuing projects—turning leisure activities into self-improvement—is just as toxic as working too much, just as conducive to burnout. Are there any prophets or misfits in your archive (or from your youth) I can follow down another path to undiscipline?

Smith: Thoreau gets into this in one of my favorite passages from his journal. He has been spending time in the woods, making himself really look at the natural world, trying to reawaken his senses. But all this self-discipline is a lot of work. It hurts. And he lets himself complain: “I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain.” He’s talking about habit, specifically about his self-imposed habit of attention, in ways that resonate with your work. You describe the pain and anxiety that come along with an effort to exclude all distractions, to stay focused on just one detail in the laboratory. And in this moment Thoreau has a similar intuition about how his spiritual exercises might be damaging his mind, not repairing it. You could say he has gone so deep into self-help that he is burning himself out.

So what does he do? He comes up with a program. He starts giving himself a bunch of orders: “Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you.” He hopes to achieve what he calls “a true sauntering of the eye.” It’s a beautiful phrase, and sauntering is one of Thoreau’s sweetest ideas. But the funny thing about the passage is the sense of having made a mistake and needing to correct it. Thoreau is trying to get to sauntering by scolding himself and submitting himself to more self-training. He hasn’t quite found a way out of discipline.

True slackers don’t feel a need to put themselves through a regimen. That’s how I imagine them anyway: just vibing. But that also means that slacking is not an ethical program. It does not reflect on and choose and affirm its way of being in the world. In my part of the critical humanities, it is common to critique “the subject” and “the will,” these putatively violent kinds of agency; there is a lot of talk about embracing a different, more porous, more entangled relation to the world. But who can choose to surrender the will? When you propose an ethical project, even a project of self-abnegation, you presume a self with the freedom and power to pursue it.

If there’s a slacker saint, I guess it’s The Dude from that Cohen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski. He has managed to unplug himself from “the anxiety economy.” And by the end of the movie he has arrived at something like an affirmation of slackerhood as a way of life. But it doesn’t require any self-transformation. He was already a slacker. He just “abides.” The rest of us are likely to end up in something like Thoreau’s cycle, trying to improve ourselves by trying to stop trying to improve ourselves.

Speaking of saints, I want to pick up on your references to “heaven” and “self-denial.” You’ve engaged with Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s work on the scientific ethos of objectivity, which entails a kind of self-monitoring on the part of the observer. And you’ve brought out the austerity in experimental practice. You mention Weber’s notion of “vocation” as a quasi-spiritual calling. What do we learn from thinking about science through these religious metaphors? Maybe it has something to do with scientists claiming the authority that used to belong to the clergy. But maybe it also has something to do with the pleasures of asceticism. When the experimenters say that they love the emptiness of the lab, what if they mean it?

Cowles: This is a great point and a great point of convergence for our interests. There are a ton of echoes of religious and spiritual language in scientific discourse during the nineteenth century, especially when scientists are talking about methods and norms. In the case of the denial or defense of boredom among psychologists, they’re clearly borrowing from a long tradition of asceticism—and maybe even taking pleasure in it. You’re spot on there.

I’m reminded of a great book by Jamie Kreiner called The Wandering Mind, which is all about how often medieval monks worried about distraction—and all the practices they had in place for dealing with it. Part of what she’s doing there is exploding the myth that “monk-like” means that attention or calm comes naturally. She shows how anxious monks were about their ability to stay focused and how distracting monastic life actually was—or was perceived to be.

If we apply Kreiner’s perspective to the laboratories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I think we’ll find something similar. Lots of worrying about distractions, and lots of practices and physical apparatus for limiting them. But I also think there’s something different going on in the sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. Right then, science was becoming much more collaborative; big laboratories functioned almost like factories. Issues of distraction, attention, and boredom take on new meaning as scientific work becomes more social.

This is where you and I might turn to the topic that is our ostensible overarching theme: sensing the social. Not all scientists are social, of course, and neither science nor religion was as solitary as our stereotypes suggest. But as the laboratory ideal takes over and “Big Science” emerges, it does seem like new challenges emerge in the twentieth century. If research increasingly means talking, you have to try harder to stay on task. Talk about experiments quickly bleeds into talk about weekend plans. The same goes for the act of writing. In the sciences, coauthorship is the norm; it’s done online in tabs that neighbor other distractions. Even scribbling is social.

The twentieth-century world feels so different from the solitary one Thoreau sought out. And it also feels different from our world as faculty in the humanities. While there are those among us who try to collaborate more than we were trained to do, both research and writing—the things we get paid and promoted for—are still pretty solitary. Even teaching is different for us: My friends in the sciences can blur their teaching and research together—getting classroom credit for doing work that leads to publications. Almost every minute I spend teaching is one lost for writing.

Does this feel right to you? I know the degree to which Thoreau was actually solitary is a point of contention, but how do you think this equation of solitude and attention works across lines of time and discipline? Your mention of The Dude might be apt here too: He seems so calm when he’s alone in his apartment, soaking in the tub or listening to tunes, until he’s assaulted. Even at Ralph’s, wearing his robe, he’s laid back. But for much of the movie, he’s stressed out—mostly by Walter, his friend and co-conspirator, whose energy is anything but calm. I guess I’m wondering if our ideals of attention and distraction are drawn from some forgotten possibly invented time in which we could be alone in a meaningful sense. Is Thoreau to blame for that myth?

Smith: It’s a big question: How does “the social” relate to attention? I do think that our culture tends to feel a tension between those two terms. Let me try to describe two versions of this tension. First, there is the very obvious problem, from authority’s point of view, of how to keep your students or your workers on task. You bring them together in an institutional setting, for a purpose, but then they get interested in each other, drawing each other’s attention away from the business at hand.

In Thoreau’s Axe I looked into how some nineteenth-century classroom teachers and Sunday school teachers approached this problem; they came to believe that the science of education began with what one reformer called “the art of securing attention.” Meanwhile there was the new industrial system of commodity production. Capital was gathering big groups into large-scale workshops where the laborers were supposed to do their jobs rapidly, rhythmically, in sync with the machinery and with each other. And so, the science of management, like that of education, had both a social situation and an attention problem.

The prison system devised a clever solution. Auburn State Prison in Upstate New York became the model for most other industrial prisons because it supported the industrial mode of production, which was on the rise in the first half of the nineteenth century. The men at Auburn worked all day in factory-like workshops run by private contractors; this offset the cost of running a large-scale institution, and there were even some profits to be made since the labor was unpaid. But to deal with the attention problem the prison also imposed a severe disciplinary system: solitary confinement by night and a strict rule of silence during the periods of congregate activity. No talking, no passing notes. Even the exchange of glances was a punishable offense. In all these ways, a quasi-monastic or hermetic kind of solitary penitence was adapted to the industrial situation to control attention.

And here we begin to see a tension between attention and “the social” in a different sense. You mentioned Kreiner’s book on monks, a really charming study of old-fashioned spiritual concerns, which have some things in common with our own anxieties about distraction today. But there are differences too. I think something changed in the nineteenth century. People started to feel that the sources of distraction were social as in sociological—they began to blame new economic relations, new media, new technologies, and new infrastructures.

For Kreiner’s monks, distraction was perennial; the fallibility of our attention was part of our corruptible human nature. For Thoreau, by contrast, nature was never fallen. The aim of discipline was to restore us to a natural state of alertness and receptivity. Distraction comes to be understood as social in this broader, historical sense: We are distracted because of the new kind of society in which we live. It’s getting worse every day. Thoreau and some of his contemporaries were already in a moral panic about attention, and that panic has reached a fever pitch in our time.

Okay! But our conversation is helping me to align these two ways of thinking about distraction as social. I think that the first way of thinking causes difficulties for the second way. The first way says: To pay attention, it’s best to be alone. The second way says: Economic and political forces are harming our powers of attention. These two positions don’t work together very well! If you have a problem with your economic and political conditions, it is hard to change those on your own. It takes coordinated social action. It takes organization. And so, something happens, ideologically, when we describe our economic and political troubles in terms of distraction. As soon as we imagine the situation that way, we risk abandoning the social world, withdrawing into private, personal solutions. Self-help, self-care, self-discipline: These are the main remedies for distraction, and they are mostly solitary pursuits.

Just now, as we are having this discussion, the infrastructure of scientific research is coming under real threats—funding cuts and new political pressures. You have analyzed the culture of the professional laboratory very closely. I wonder how this culture enables or disables a coordinated response to the attacks. If that question interests you, I’ll give you the last word.

Cowles: You know it does! I think we can sketch a really useful history here in which nineteenth-century scientific and religious developments played a central role. While the narrative of secularization that used to dominate accounts of that period has been complicated in really significant ways, you can still tell a story about shared practices and role swapping between religious and scientific authorities and anxieties in those years.

Scientific and religious figures, as well as those with a foot in each world, have long provided fascinating answers to a question captured in the title of a brilliant book by Sheila Heti: How Should a Person Be? I read Heti’s work as engaged with discipline in much the way we are, and thus I read much of the history of self-help as bridging the exact divides we have been exploring in this conversation: How should I act, and whom do I trust to tell me?

Let me try to sum up the history we’ve woven. Humans have long been distracted. But gradually, the sources of distraction shifted until, sometime in the nineteenth century, we began to blame the world itself. Specifically, we blamed how fast that world was moving or changing. This pace made it impossible to focus. If it’s the world that’s distracting, then paying attention came to mean being alone. We retreated to cabins and into our headphones. And as we did, it became harder and harder to come together in an organized way. Solving social problems requires discipline, but discipline has become solitary. And when our problems and solutions are out of sync, cynicism reigns.

If that’s where we are and how we got here, the question becomes: Where do we go now? One option is to trust our tools, to continue defining focus and discipline as essentially solitary and to fight for the space, if not the right, to retreat into them. Religion and science alike have had their ascetics, their hermits, and they have often—though of course not always—produced amazing, life-changing works from their isolated peaks. I don’t intuitively trust this approach, which feels like a combination of defeatism and Great Man History, but I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand. At the very least, the histories of science and religion you and I read and write are dotted with examples of solitary discipline that has changed the world.

But science studies and religious studies have something else to offer: remarkable, even hopeful, examples of collective attention. From the shared ecstasies of religious ritual to the early years of truly collaborative research, there are plenty of past practices that could be reanimated for present politics. Rather than retreat into received ideas about discipline, resisting demagogues (and our devices) by turning away or turning inward, we could comb histories of the monastery and the laboratory for models of attention as a movement, as a social practice.