ANTHROPOCENE Attention and phenomenological politics of landscape

ATTENTION AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE
Attention and the phenomenological
politics of landscape
by
Matthew G. Hannah
HANNAH, M. G. (2013): ‘Attention and the phenomenological politics of landscape’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human
Geography 95 (3): 235–250.
ABSTRACT. This article argues that the inherent directedness of
attention is a central and pervasive condition of politics across a
wide range of social fields. The subfield of landscape geography
serves as an occasion to illustrate what can be gained by attending to attention. The argument begins by reflexively placing the
problematic of attention within a brief genealogy of constructions
of modern perception. Within this frame, the article takes a closer look at the ambivalent and hesitant response to the problem of
attention in phenomenology. This field is best positioned to give
a foundational account of the political character of attention and
to explain the sense in which its relevance transcends the era in
which it was first clearly formulated. However, a strong upsurge
of phenomenological interest in attention has only appeared in recent years. A review of this work, particularly in the writings of
Bernhard Waldenfels, shows how attending to attention can deepen
critical analyses of capitalism and spectacle offered by Benjamin,
Debord, Rancière and Beller. The final section of the article illustrates key points by staging an imaginary trip through the corporate
agricultural landscapes of California.
Keywords: attention, capitalism, landscape, phenomenology,
spectacle
Attention is like the salt in the soup, which is
indispensable, but which one scarcely notices
(Waldenfels 2004, p. 15).1
Meaning is there to be discovered in the landscape, if only we know how to attend to it (Ingold
1993, p. 172).
The inescapable attentionality2 of concrete, embodied life is a crucial if hitherto under-theorized
“meshing point” that allows longstanding problems of necessity and contingency, structure and
agency, domination and resistance, and determination and freedom to be grasped in new ways. This
article seeks to lay some conceptual groundwork
for this claim, and to illustrate it through an engagement with the critical political analysis of landscape.
Understanding landscapes, so I will argue, requires
not only accounts of their material production
(Mitchell 1996, 2012), genealogies of political traditions submerged in concepts of landscape (Olwig
1996, 2013), and ideological analyses of landscapes
as texts (Cosgrove 1998) but also the elaboration of
a political-economic analysis of embodied attention.
A number of writings in critical social theory already
include some key insights that sketch the rudiments
of a political economy of attention. However, the
emphasis in this work tends to be placed either upon
how well or poorly we attend, the “intensity” of attention, the degree of focus vs dissipation or “distractedness”, or upon the value-generating work of
“paying attention” as a hitherto unremarked pillar of
capitalism. The argument here seeks to supplement
such accounts by highlighting the finite embodied
availability and the directional selectivity of attention. Directional here includes but is not limited to
the literal, geographical sense; it also describes processes of attending to intangible matters (thoughts,
memories, affects, etc.). Distasteful though it may
be to think of it in these terms, our attentional “resources” are ineluctably finite. The disproportion
between ever-­expanding demands on attention and
our static (or at best, much more slowly expanding)
capabilities to meet these demands has arguably become more acute in the neo-liberal ‘information
age’. This sharpening helps explain both the recent
re-blossoming of academic interest in attention (see
below) and more popular writings identifying a “crisis of attention” (Gallagher 2009; Jackson 2009). To
make sense of such issues, a full political economy
of attention must itself attend, first, to the issue of
who or what controls what it is we pay attention to
(and crucially, do not pay attention to), and second,
how the ongoing invisible entourage of unattended
matters that accompanies our selective paying of attention underlies social reproduction. Closely linked
to these core issues is that of paying attention as a
passive vs an active matter. The political approach to
attention taken here suggests that, like other human
activities, attending to something can be done in a
more or less deliberate, reflective and self-directed
way. Some of the core questions at stake here can be
illustrated with reference to concepts and practices
of engaging with landscapes.
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MATTHEW G. HANNAH
Despite a general interest among cultural geographers in the space- and place-related aspects of
being-in-the-world, it is striking how little explicit
attention is paid to attention (though see Schmid
2009; Anderson and Adey 2011; Jones et al. 2011;
these authors have undertaken work that clearly
raises the issue of political dimensions of attention).
This relative neglect is all the more remarkable in
view of the fact that the language of many human
geographers, like scholars in other disciplines, is utterly saturated with “calls” to address this or that issue, with exhortations to attend to, focus upon or turn
to a matter of purported urgency. In fact, we describe
large-scale shifts within human geography and other
disciplines primarily as turns: the cultural turn, the
spatial turn, and so forth. Beyond such strongly attentional language, we sprinkle our debates liberally
with a more subtly attentional vocabulary of foregrounding, emphasizing or highlighting. All such
language presupposes the selectivity of, and thus
the need to compete for, individual and collective
attention, with the aim of causing certain issues to
“stand out” for their readers against a background
temporarily receding into latency. In short, attention
is very present in our everyday discourse about what
we are, or should be, doing, but largely absent from
our theories about the practices we study (more on
this below).
If attentionality is as basic as I claim it is,
however, why has it not been given the attention granted other key features of our embodiment
which organize social life? As architectural theorist Georg Franck (1998, p. 15) puts it, ‘How has
it come to this odd aversion of the scholarly gaze?
Why is the professionally curious attention [of academics] so uninterested in itself?’ The philosopher
Bernhard Waldenfels (2004, p. 11) makes a pertinent suggestion:
It might be that attention has been treated so casually and negligently, not only in the tradition
but in many ways up to the present day, because
it so insistently escapes the spectacular polarities
of true and false, of good and evil, of justice and
injustice, of utility and uselessness, of freedom
and dependency – which in no way rules out [the
possibility] that it is at work precisely there in a
subterranean and behind-the-back way.
In his important study of the ‘cinematic mode of
production’, Jonathan Beller (2006, p. 6) perceptively argues more broadly that ‘a generalized
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blindness with respect to the economicization [sic]
of the senses’ is in fact ‘a constitutive element of
hegemony’.
This question cannot be resolved definitively
here, but the strange paucity of pre-existing treatments explains the time spent in this article on basic
conceptual issues. The primary goals in what follows
are, first, to explore the ways in which a phenomenology of embodied being-in-the-world can strengthen
our sense of the selectivity of attention as a ubiquitous and important mediating factor in social life,
and second, to suggest how capitalist landscape-asspectacle works precisely through processes of embodied attention, how the ‘lie of the land’ (Mitchell
1996) actually lies. The argument will begin with a
historically reflexive genealogy of the problem of
attention, followed by a partial review of phenomenological writings on embodied attention. This review must be somewhat detailed, as a key burden
of the argument is to show how a phenomenology
of attention actually points to a political economy
of attention. Having established this connection, the
subsequent section plugs the account of embodied
attention into pre-existing writings on capitalism as
spectacle. The final section attempts to illustrate the
kind of insights that might emerge at the junction of
phenomenology of attention and Marxist landscape
studies through an attempt to politicize the notions
of affordance and solicitation. The basic idea is illustrated at the end by imagining a road trip through
the landscapes north of Bakersfield, California, if
you like, the prowling grounds of Don Mitchell,
through lenses of affordance and solicitation provided by John Wylie and Tim Ingold. It will be interesting to see what Bakersfield does to these lenses,
and at the same time how an appropriately politicized phenomenological approach can enrich our
sense of Bakersfield as a produced landscape.3
The emergence of attention as a problem
Jonathan Crary’s rich genealogy of modern attention pinpoints the period beginning in the late nineteenth century and crossing into the early twentieth
as the era within which attention was initially constructed in scholarly and popular discourse as a field
of potential problems and crises, and thus also a field
meriting study and intervention (Crary 1999). Citing
Foucault and Debord, among others, Crary explores
the emergence of attention and its companion “distraction” in the crucible of a capitalism just then
consolidating models and norms of the individual
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ATTENTION AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE
subject as producer and consumer. Crary (1999, p.
287) argues that the problem of attention was born
of the same malaise scholars have tied to a crisis of
epistemology at the time:
attention emerges as a discursive and practical object at the historical moment when vision
and hearing have become progressively severed
from the various historical codes and practices
that had invested them with a level of certainty, dependability, and naturalness. The more the
senses are revealed to be inconsistent, conditioned by the body, prey to the threat of distraction and nonproductivity, the more a normative
individual is defined in terms of objective and
statistical attentional capacities that facilitate the
subject’s functional compatibility within institutional and technological environments.
Peter Merriman (2012, p. 82) notes that attention
also became a focus of discussion around this time
as the rise of the automobile began to make novel
demands on the visual capacities of drivers. These
shifts also meant the problem of attention was constructed in relational terms (Crary 1999, pp. 44–45):
Attention implied that cognition could no longer
be conceived around the unmediated givenness
of sense data. To use Piercean terms, it made a
previously dyadic system of subject-object into
a triadic one, with the third element constituted by a “community of interpretation”: a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated
psychological functions, institutional imperatives, and a wide range of techniques, practices,
and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time.
This perceptual experience is in broad terms a
framework we still inhabit (Crary 1999, pp. 29–30):
Part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands
that we accept as natural switching our attention
rapidly from one thing to another. Capital, as accelerated exchange and circulation, necessarily
produced this kind of human perceptual adaptability and became a regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction.
Not surprisingly, it was early experimental psychologists who began to pursue the observation of attention in a systematic fashion, and to ask the practical
questions whose answers were so potentially valuable to factory managers as well as to early marketing
specialists (Crary 1999, p. 24):
How did attention screen out some sensations
and not others? What determined how attention
operated as a narrowing and focusing of conscious awareness? What forces or conditions
caused an individual to attend to some limited aspects of an external world and not others?
How many events or objects could one attend to
simultaneously and for how long (i.e., what were
[attention’s] quantitative and physiological limits)? To what extent was attention an automatic or voluntary act; to what extent did it involve
motor effort or psychic energy?
In more refined and sophisticated forms, these and
related questions remain central to the psychological study of attention today (Posner 2004; Styles
2006). The famous figure–ground structure so central to the work of early Gestalt psychologists, for
example, remains fundamental to much experimental work (Arvidson 2006). This is not accidental.
Crary (1999, pp. 30–31) acknowledges that:
even as the global functioning of capitalism
has mutated in the course of the twentieth century into postindustrial and information / communication-based phases, attention as a subjective and social problem retains some enduring
features.
A key point to note is that it has often been psychological research, more than phenomenological work,
which most clearly problematizes the directionality
of attention in the flow of embodied experience.
Crary’s genealogy is crucial in that it places the
emergence of the problematic of attention within a
historically (and geographically) specific constellation of capitalist modernity, and this helps us avoid
a transcendental, essentializing account of attention. Yet he does not see the durability of the problem of attention since its initial emergence as an
occasion to question his genealogical commitment
to framing attention merely as a contingent construct (Crary 1999, p. 23). This is the point at which
I would like to diverge from Crary, and to interpret
differently some of the valuable groundwork he has
laid. In short, I would like to argue that, although
only “discovered” a little over a century ago, embodied human attentionality is a far more durable,
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more “viscous” feature of our corporeal organization than an undifferentiated commitment to historical contingency would suggest. To support this
assertion, it will be necessary to explore the twentieth century phenomenological discourse on attention that emerged within the historical problematic
whose inauguration Crary traces. Although this discourse is fully historical, its encounter with the historically more viscous structures of attentionality
indelibly tied to our corporeal organization as biological beings (Fracchia 2005) allowed it to produce insights valid beyond the context in which they
emerged. The problem of attention remains relevant
in the twenty-first century, and is not likely to be
overcome anytime soon.
The directedness of engagement-in-the-world
Early phenomenologists were already aware of the
centrality of attention as a feature of human experience (Depraz 2004). However, they did not devote
much energy to unfolding an account of it, subordinating its importance to the concept of “intentionality”, the general fact that consciousness is always “a
consciousness of something” (Husserl [1931] 2012,
p. 67). As John Wylie notes, intentionality has generally been associated in the phenomenological literature with activity, whereas attention is more likely to
be associated with passivity (Wylie, personal communication). This will prove to be an important issue in the politics of attention sketched below. The
relation between the two concepts was itself political from the beginning. Husserl, also writing at the
time of the first flush of psychological interest in attention, characterized attention as ‘a species of remarkable transformations of consciousness which
cut across all other kinds of intentional occurrences,
and constitute therefore a quite general structure of
consciousness sui generis’ (Husserl [1931] 2012,
p. 192). Elsewhere he summarizes the embodied
movement of these ‘remarkable transformations’ as
‘turning-oneself’ and ‘becoming salient’ (quoted in
Depraz 2004, p. 10). Husserl did not develop these
thoughts very far, however, and this neglect set the
tone for many of his prominent inheritors. Natalie
Depraz (2004) links Husserl’s reluctance to pursue
the issue to the politics of his discipline-founding
ambitions, his insistence on distinguishing phenomenology as clearly as possible from the ‘merely empirical’ work of psychologists (see Husserl [1931]
2012, pp. 337–338, note 4).
Heidegger, following Husserl, noted that
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intentionality, our fundamental relatedness-to-theworld, is always directional, and his concepts of
directionality, deseverance and fallenness all hold
potential for helping to understand attention existentially (Heidegger 1962). Nevertheless, like Husserl,
Heidegger did not discuss these concepts in such a
way as to provide a detailed analysis of the attentional character of the flow of engaged action. In
his account of human spatiality, where a careful description of the processes of attention would have
fit quite well, his emphasis lay primarily on the conditions of possibility for what he called ‘one’s factical orientation at the time’ (Heidegger 1962, p.
146). Merleau-Ponty, most attuned among twentieth century phenomenologists to spatial aspects of
embodiment, likewise relegated this ‘factical orientation at the time’ to a lower order of significance than the existential structure of intentionality
making it possible. It is worth dwelling for a moment upon Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in his 1962
Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty
1962), as it brings to light core issues for the argument proposed here.
In an early section of this study (Merleau-Ponty
1962, pp. 30–31), he explicitly dismisses the investigation of attention as necessarily based upon the
empiricist ‘constancy hypothesis’, the notion of
the prior stability of the world, over which attention simply plays like a searchlight, merely illuminating but not co-creating the things of the world.
The constancy hypothesis clearly violates a fundamental premise of phenomenology after Heidegger.
Interestingly, though, and crucially for my argument here, there is no necessary link between the
constancy hypothesis and the directional play of
attention. The directional selectivity of momentary attention is independent of assumptions about
the inertia or animation of the engaged world. To
jump ahead historically for a moment, the current interest among human geographers in the performativity and mobility of our engagements in the
world might even suggest that a view of the world
as actively involved in embodied perception (e.g.
Whatmore 2006; Wylie 2006) would foreground the
ongoing, directional flow of this mutual animation.
However, for the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology
of Perception, this path is blocked by the characteristic phenomenological emphasis on intentionality
as a condition of possibility.
Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the moving momentary relation between field and object that characterizes perceptual attention is always relativized and
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rendered less interesting by the fact that it presupposes an indissoluble intentional link between body
and environment. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 150) illustrates this link, for example, by insisting that
‘[m]­y flat … remains a familiar domain round about
me only as long as I have “in my hands” or “in my
legs” the main distances and directions involved,
and as long as from my body intentional threads
run out towards it.’ Thus the paying of attention is
a secondary and derivative momentary activation of
some “intentional threads” at the expense of others:
‘In normal vision … I direct my gaze upon a sector of
the landscape, which comes to life and is disclosed,
while the other objects recede into the periphery and
become dormant, while, however, not ceasing to be
there’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 78). The confidence
Merleau-Ponty has in the stable availability of the
world in which we are corporeally embedded is well
captured in his explanation of ‘strange mode of existence enjoyed by the object behind our back’. He
contrasts the experience of the normal adult to that
of the ‘hysterical child who turns round “to see if the
world behind him is still there”’. Normal adults do
not suffer from such anxieties because of ‘that original structure which ensures that … [the world’s]
hidden aspects are as indubitable as its visible ones’
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 29). The constancy hypothesis may have been rejected, in other words, but
the primacy of intentionality ends up functioning in
a similar way, in continuing to downplay the importance of the more dynamic play of attention.
Why has it been necessary to explain all of this
at such length? Because the marginalization of attentionality pinpoints a core sense in which phenomenology has unnecessarily de-politicized itself.
In emphasizing the general availability of the world
via intentional threads that can be activated or not at
any given time, Merleau-Ponty effectively obscures
the issue of the unavoidable selectivity of any and
all particular engagements, and thus also the necessarily political issue of exactly which engagements are in fact activated. The political economy
of attention is ignored. In his later work, MerleauPonty would radicalize his scepticism regarding the
constancy hypothesis, understanding the world as a
fully active and co-creative partner in embodied life
(Merleau-Ponty 1969; Wylie 2002, 2006; Anderson
and Wylie 2009). Here, too, there is no a priori reason to assume this would cause him to continue to
dismiss the momentary play of attention. However,
it would fall to other phenomenologists to demonstrate that attention could be studied as an inherently
embodied and constitutive phenomenon not necessarily beholden to the constancy hypothesis.
Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of the will, originally published in 1950, represents a more promising engagement. Ricoeur (2007) gives attention a
central role as a cornerstone of his description of the
phenomenon of decision or choice. In a subtle account of willing as a process structured by the three
moments of decision, effort and consent, Ricoeur
(2007, pp. 4–5) rejects the tendency in psychological discourse to treat the will and involuntary needs
or impulses as external to each other:
the initial situation revealed by [phenomenological] description is the reciprocity of the involuntary and the voluntary. Need, emotion, habit, etc.
acquire a complete significance only in relation
to a will which they solicit, dispose and generally affect, and which in turn determines their significance, that is, determines them by its choice,
moves them by its effort, and adopts them by its
consent. The involuntary has no meaning of its
own. Only the relation of the voluntary and the
involuntary is intelligible.
Will as an entangled process of volition, in other
words, should not be confused with a voluntaristic notion of disembodied autonomy. Within this
inseparable relation of the voluntary and the involuntary, Ricoeur (2007, p. 149) argues that ‘decision advances and lives as process from hesitation
to choice’ (see also Waldenfels 2004, pp. 111–112).
The vehicle of this advance is embodied attention,
which directs thought or activity on the basis of the
complex results of the interaction of voluntary and
involuntary, cognitive and affective, motivations.
This conception of attention is useful for my argument because it begins to provide an anchor for a
political analysis of attention in terms of autonomy
and heteronomy. However, Ricoeur does not venture any specific claims about the historicity, much
less the politics, of configurations of the voluntary
and the involuntary.
More recent authors have called for phenomenology to overcome its longstanding hesitancy and
to take up the problem of attention in closer analyses of who and what is at work in the concrete
flow of attention (Depraz 2004; Steinbock 2004a,
2004b; Waldenfels 2004; Arvidson 2006). Bernhard
Waldenfels, also one of the foremost interpreters of
Foucault in Germany, approaches the problematic of
attention from precisely the sort of perspective that
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MATTHEW G. HANNAH
can historicize and develop Ricoeur’s basic insights.
Waldenfels’s account brings together more durable
or viscous and more fleeting dimensions of historical change, and links the phenomenological to the
political. He argues that, because attention has continued to be so marginal to philosophical inquiry, a
whole series of its features remain to be examined in
depth (Waldenfels 2004, p. 9):
Among these is the scenic character of experience, whose open edges don’t let themselves be
closed off in a rule-bound or system-conforming
way. There is also a singular mobility, which expresses itself in the fact that something emerges and sinks away, that something or someone
comes toward us before we move toward it, that
arrival and origin [Ankunft und Herkunft] interlace … But at the same time the phenomenon of attention teaches us that everything that
takes place between us and things, between me
and others, works through manifold intervening
institutions and practices [Zwischeninstanzen].
The arsenal made up of techniques, media, social practices, which shapes attention and allows
an economy and a politics of attention to emerge,
is the work of inventions that reach far back into
our individual and collective prehistory, and in
which culture and nature blend into each other.
The core of Waldenfels’s account is an exploration
of this mediated character of attention, in the course
of which he reveals traditional dualistic conceptions
in terms of “active” and “latent” attention or “figure” and “ground” to be not wrong but merely too
simplistic and a-historical. Like previous authors,
Waldenfels (2004, p. 117) sees attention as stratified.
He distinguishes between “primary” or “creative”
and “secondary” or “repetitive” modes of attention,
where the former,
[t]he originary form of attention, in which experience moves beyond itself, signifies a form
of making possible, that makes something other
and further possible and does not merely realize
what is already potentially there [angelegt]. As
a key moment it opens up certain possibilities in
that it closes off others.
Secondary attention, by contrast, can be understood
more adequately via the image of a spotlight illuminating different regions of a landscape already present (Waldenfels 2004, pp. 117–118).
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In partial alignment with calls by John Wylie,
Ben Anderson and others (Wylie 2006; Anderson
and Wylie 2009), Waldenfels (2004, p. 100) argues
for a more fundamental acknowledgement of the
role played in soliciting attention by what is external
to the embodied individual: ‘No more than becoming obtrusive [das Auffälligwerden] … is simply
an objective process, is turning towards or turning
away to be seen as a purely subjective act of knowing or willing. There is a two-sided constellation,
but a broken one’. What “breaks” it is a whole suite
of “intervening events” [Zwischenereignisse] that
tie processes of attention to changes in the way matters become obtrusive or sink into obscurity again,
the way expectation and memory modulate attention, or the way movements towards and away from
matters of concern facilitate or hinder attentiveness
(Waldenfels 2004, chapter IV).
The mutual implication of “subject” and “object” of attention is further complicated by the
Zwischeninstanzen mentioned above, the intervening social institutions and practices, and it is here
that Waldenfels (2004, p. 235) crucially recognizes
the inherently political importance of attention:
‘The event of power [das Machtgeschehen] stands
in close relation to the event of attention, where
something becomes noticeable to me and not rather
something else. This unavoidably selective “rather”
repeats itself in [the act of] drawing attention [im
Aufmerksammachen]’.
Waldenfels (2004, pp. 273–274) contrasts the
core politics of attention to more familiar political
dichotomies of refusal or affirmation of existing orders, building a bridge in the process to a more genealogical understanding of politics:
Looking away and “hearing away” [Weghören]
can be understood as partial seeing and hearing,
so that they would only be another expression
for the selective effect of attention. Attending to
something would then mean eo ipso leaving other things unattended-to. Husserl takes this constitutive thus and not otherwise into account in
that he distinguishes between actual and potential attention. If this field of possibilities which
Husserl also calls a “field of freedom” … is
transferred from the level of consciousness to
the history of being or of discourses, as we know
these from Heidegger or Foucault, it would become a back-and-forth of revealing and hiding,
of closure and openness, or of truth and error.
The Yes/No no longer attaches to the seen, the
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heard or the said, but rather enters into the conditional constellation [Bedingungsgefüge] of the
visible, audible or sayable. The No inherent in
the Yes would be a sign of our finitude, which
rules out an “everything-at-once”.
This is a crucial point: ‘[t]he No inherent in the Yes’.
A critical politics, however, can unfold not only in
this overall economy of turning towards-and-away
but more specifically also in the project of attending
to politics, especially where it appears to be absent
(Waldenfels 2004, p. 228):
[There is] not only a power of attention, but also,
to turn things around, an obtrusiveness or unobtrusiveness of power. Attention gains a practical
dimension when it comes to the training of attentional practices, and a politics of attention, as
well as an economy of attention is developed.
At this point there is a dovetailing between an historicized critical phenomenology of attention and
writings in the Marxist tradition, based around the
core issues raised by Ricoeur and fleshed out in more
historical terms by Waldenfels: the autonomy vs heteronomy of attention and the critical analysis of the
intervening institutions and practices that shape the
possibilities for autonomy and heteronomy.
A politics of attention
Writers drawing on Marx have approached attention and distraction as collective phenomena important primarily in determining the historical
consciousness of the working class (Debord 1994;
Benjamin 2008). Put somewhat simplistically,
Walter Benjamin’s discussion of attention centres
on the ways in which modern reproducible, “postauratic” art forms, particularly film, subtly train the
mass of workers to absorb and accept capitalist reality in a state of ‘distraction’ (Benjamin 2008). With
the terms attention and distraction, though, he means
what could be termed focused and dissipated attention. His purpose is to highlight the usefulness to
capitalism of mass distraction (in his sense) as a matter of the debilitation of critical faculties, but also to
explore possibilities for new forms of working-­class
consciousness emerging from historically changing cultural experiences. What is useful for my argument in Benjamin’s account is his diagnosis of how
film continually disrupts viewers’ attempts to fix and
control attention by introducing new sensations at
a rate that always threatens to overwhelm the audience’s capacities. This fixation and control in effect
forces the paying of attention to become more passive than it otherwise might be.
For Debord (1994), the “society of the spectacle” is one in which the working class becomes fascinated by a partial, superficial image of reality and
thus loses a clear view of the full, historical capitalist reality that underlies and produces this image. As
with Benjamin’s essay, Debord’s argument can be
seen to concern distraction primarily in a qualitative
sense. Also like Benjamin, Debord sees one of the
main effects of distraction in the inability to achieve
a unified grasp of the world. However, whereas the
contrast to Benjamin’s distraction is “immersion” or
focused contemplation of a work of art (Benjamin
2008, XV @Location 487–497 in e-reader edition),
contemplation for Debord (1994, para. 1–3) signals
the debilitation of working class consciousness under capitalism:
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything
that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation. The images detached from every
aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which
the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in
its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart,
an object of mere contemplation … As a part of
society [the spectacle] is specifically the sector
which concentrates all gazes and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived
gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.
This perspective is also useful in pointing to the dangers of a distanced passivity adopted in relation to
the spectacular environment of capitalism. Despite
their differences of focus, Benjamin and Debord
together highlight the critically important fact that
a politics of attention must be centrally concerned
with the control of individual or collective attention.
Jacques Rancière (2007) can be brought in
here because he introduces a category that can further specify the landscape-related issues at hand.
Rancière (2007, p. 12) identifies the politically crucial patterning of produced fields of attention as
‘the distribution of the sensible’, the ‘system of
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MATTHEW G. HANNAH
self-­evident facts of sense-perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in
common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’. Rancière
(2007, p. 13) thus locates aesthetics at the core of
politics, as a
delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible
and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes
of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said
about it, around who has the ability to see and the
talent to speak, around the properties of spaces
and the possibilities of time.
This focus upon “properties of spaces” and “possibilities of time” supplements the more abstract, less
body-specific aspects of distraction highlighted by
Benjamin and Debord, by emphasizing the detailed
textures of what occupies us. The “edges” implicit
in Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible can suggest a political reading of some of the
so-called post-phenomenological claims regarding
“distributed agency”, that is, the ways ‘[t]extures
and densities, liquidities and radiances … act as
sets of imperatives within and through which movement and sensation are inspired and performed’
(Anderson and Wylie 2009, p. 326). Distributions
of the sensible can be thought of as the spatio-­
temporal-perceptual complexes that invite and encourage some attentional engagements and inhibit
others, that shape our attentional performativity.
Habitus (Bourdieu 1990), the “unacknowledged
conditions” of action (Giddens 1979) or the repetition of system-maintaining performances (Butler
1990; see Nelson 1999; Nash 2000) are all to a significant extent products of the ways in which distributions of the sensible channel or solicit attention, as
well as the way attentional autonomy can sometimes
disrupt such channelling. Such a political economy
of attentional performances is, for example, implicitly at the heart of writings on the “Disneyfication”
of urban environments through deliberate configuring of “front spaces” and “back spaces” (Sorkin
1992; Zukin 1993).
The politics of our attentional performances in
the context of distributions of the sensible acquire
a sharper edge when set in relation to Jonathan
Beller’s (2006) compelling attempt to theorize
what he calls the “cinematic mode of production”.
By “cinema” Beller intends much more than the
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restricted sector of filmic and television production:
‘“Cinema” means the production of instrumental
images through the organization of animated materials. These materials include everything from actors to landscapes, to populations, to widgets, to
fighter-planes, to electrons’ (Beller 2006, p. 14).
Capital accumulates, according to Beller, not only
through the familiar mechanisms outlined by Marx
but also through enlisting spectation or looking itself as a form of value-producing labour. Not only
strictly filmic production but many other kinds of
social production require from us a relentless labour
of “montage”, suturing together fragments into organized wholes (physical products, narratives, etc.)
in exchange for pleasures and diversions whose cost
to capital is lower than the value realized in our assembly-work (Beller 2006, pp. 9, 39). Effectively,
or so Beller argues, through the cinematic mode of
production, capital has, from the early twentieth
century onward, colonized human faculties in a successful if unrecognized bid to extend the workingday in absolute terms. While Marx, in passages of
the Grundrisse about capital’s need continuously to
expand the “periphery of circulation”, ‘is thinking of
geographical extension and urban intensification …
I am suggesting here that capital presently throws its
network of control over bodies and masses of bodies’ (Beller 2006, p. 204, cf. p. 205). The ‘economy
of attention’ that results from this phase in the history of capital’s long project of ‘mining … human
bodies of their power’ (Beller 2006, p. 20) is perhaps
easiest to illustrate with Google’s pioneering methods of marketing, which literally and directly capitalize the movement of our attention. Beller indeed
re-casts the labour theory of value as but a special
case of a broader ‘attention theory of value’ (Beller
2006, pp. 201–202), and argues persuasively that
current forms of capital are ever more exclusively
focused upon the development of new ‘attention-­
siphoning technologies’ (p. 206).
Ultimately, however, Beller, too, fails adequately to theorize the finite availability and inherent directional selectivity of embodied attention,
despite the fact that his ‘attention economy’ presupposes these features. The finitude of attentional
resources pops up in arresting phrases around the
edges of his narrative, as for example when he asks
what ‘the legacy of the human body’ is if it is ‘occupied by cinematic consciousness’ (p. 139), when
he notes that under the cinematic mode of production ‘the image … sucks up solidarity time’ (Beller
2006, p. 5), or again, in his fascinating, if perhaps
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rhetorical, proposal for the development of a ‘saturation coefficient’ that would measure ‘the number of sites and intensities of capital’s occupation of
the human faculties’ (p. 236, note 14). All of these
passages clearly acknowledge the limited character
of attention, and the inescapability of opportunity
costs whenever we are “occupied” with something.
This finitude is the most basic reason that there can
be either an “economy” or a “politics” of attention.
But like many cultural theorists, Beller is more interested in how the cinematic mode of production
has altered “the human faculties” than in the fact
that no amount of alteration can eliminate the relative scarcity of attention. Thus he dwells on the
ways in which visual technology ‘continues to train
us to interface with the environment’ (Beller 2006,
p. 107) or ‘tools the body for new labor processes’
(p. 207).
Of course there is no disputing the historical
malleability of human bodies and their faculties, including our attentional capabilities. However, this
malleability is not infinite, and as the review of phenomenology above should have made clear, it is
unlikely to allow any sort of “escape from selectivity” in the near future. It is not surprising, for example, that psychological studies have found the scope
for so-called multi-tasking, notwithstanding all the
hype in recent years, to be quite limited (Styles
2006; Gallagher 2009; Jackson 2009).
Landscape, power and attention
Against the background of the foregoing politicaleconomic phenomenology of attention, we can finally turn to the study of landscape. Landscapes in
the senses that term has been understood in human
geography is only one of a much wider array of elements involved in the distribution of the sensible.
The work of channelling that landscapes do has been
described in part as a matter of the “affordances”
they offer. Referring to writings in environmental
psychology by James Gibson, Ingold (2000, p. 166)
explains affordances thus:
[i]f perception is a mode of action, then what we
perceive must be a direct function of how we
act. Depending on the kind of activity in which
we are engaged, we will be attuned to picking
up particular kinds of information. The knowledge obtained through direct perception is thus
practical, it is knowledge about what an environment offers for the pursuance of the action in
which the perceiver is currently engaged. In other words, to perceive an object or event is to perceive what it affords us.
Politically, this raises two questions. First, what are
the relations of congruence or disjuncture between
the purposes of people in landscapes and the affordances offered (or not) for those purposes by distributions of the sensible? Second, does the concept
of affordance subtly obscure the fact that different
landscape elements often either are deliberately designed and placed so as to manipulate people or, at
the opposite end of the spectrum, are so indifferent or
hostile to human life that nothing is really afforded?
Affordance, in short, has an unmistakable undertone
of innocent availability that belies the politics built
into produced landscapes under capitalism. It might
be useful to see the concept of affordance as anchoring one end of a spectrum whose other end could
be termed (rather awkwardly) “withholdance”, an
absence of practical, perceptual or affective connection points in a landscape. Landscape elements,
objects, scenes, atmospheres, and so on, may thus
“solicit” our attention but also repel or discourage it
(see Wylie 2009). Thus, in addition to the politics of
fetishism and naturalization of the produced world
around us, revolving at its core around the qualitative mis-recognition of dead labour (Kirsch and
Mitchell 2004), we can also identify a directional
politics of attention.
The critical approach to affordances advocated
here can be further enriched by bringing in the work
of scholars in critical media studies (Herman and
Chomsky 1988; McChesney 1999), who have made
a great deal of progress in understanding how collective attention is constructed and manipulated. At
a more fine-grained level, some recent work in nonrepresentational theory focuses on what Nigel Thrift
and Shaun French (2002, p. 309) term ‘new landscapes of code’ embedded in our physical surroundings, an inconspicuous complex of programming
both reliant upon and designed to serve our selective
inattention. Finally, the newly influential “nudge”
strategy of governance aims to hard-wire rational or
socially beneficial decision-making into situations
where people are not attending to the implications
of their actions (Jones et al. 2011). These developments are examples of Waldenfels’s category of ‘intervening institutions and practices’ (see above), and
form the context as well for Georg Franck’s (1988,
2005) sociology of attention. Franck focuses above
all on how individuals and events accrue the power
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MATTHEW G. HANNAH
to attract attention, and elaborates a detailed sociology of attention as a scarce commodity on the way
to becoming as important a currency as money in the
mediatized world of twenty-first century capitalism
(see Schmid 2009 for a geographical application of
Franck’s conception).
The foregoing section should give a sense of
where to look for a political interface with phenomenological work on landscape: in the detailed
directional movement of embodied attentional engagement with surroundings that can in turn rarely
be understood as innocent in the arrangements of
affordances and solicitations (as well as withholdances and discouragements) they offer. It is tempting to illustrate the politics of attention by focusing
upon the kind of intense urban commercial landscapes, epitomized by Times Square or Bryant Park
in New York City, that are in fact designed precisely
to solicit attention through strategically placed affordances. Yet I think it may be more illuminating to
consider a situation somewhere between the sleepy,
picturesque rurality that is so often the setting for
phenomenological descriptions and the feverish urban spectacle evoked by Benjamin and Debord.4
I take cues from Tim Ingold’s (1993) transplantation of his readers into the landscape depicted in a
Pieter Brueghel painting, from John Wylie’s (2002)
account of ascending Glastonbury Tor, and from
James Sidaway’s (2009) “alternative”, geopolitically informed walk along an urban section of the
South West Coast Path, to transplant a phenomenological perspective into the productive landscapes of
California, the scene of Don Mitchell’s (1996, 2012)
rich political analyses. How do these working landscapes interact with the attention of people in them?
Don Mitchell (2012, p. 46) vividly describes
California agricultural landscapes as “produced”:
Actors – particular growers, operating individually or collectively, state agents, workers, families seeking to make a comfortable home in an unincorporated shacktown at the edge of Stockton
or Bakersfield – seek to reshape the land and
embed in the physical landscape all manner of
things commensurate with their needs, ranging
from irrigation ditches to tent platforms to power lines to massive warehouses.
How might we experience the landscape evoked
here? As Ingold (1993, p. 166) notes, ‘movement is
the very essence of perception’, so I will conjure a
brief road trip, premised on my having already flown
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to Los Angeles, rented an (air conditioned) automobile, and made my way to Bakersfield. To establish some comparative resonance, passages from
Wylie’s (2002, pp. 446–449) account of the drive
from Bristol to Glastonbury Tor, and from Ingold’s
(1993, pp. 164ff) discussion of the Brueghel painting, will provide way-markers with which to frame
hypothetical snippets from the journey through
California landscapes. These passages are chosen
partly for the dramatic contrasts they suggest between different ways of approaching similar aspects
of landscapes, and to that extent they are admittedly
a bit unfair to these authors. Nevertheless, my hope
is that these passages will provoke reflections on
each of the three basic elements of mobility identified by Cresswell (2010): physical movement, representations, and embodied practice.
Ascent and descent on the road
Into soft hilly country. A series of peaks and
troughs, the course of road through north
Somerset is an affordance. As the car alternately
climbs and plunges, so vistas loom and sink …
And these vistas slide around the sides of the car,
into the narrowing funnel of the visible passed,
as the road begins to assume a more definite
southerly track (Wylie 2002, p. 447).
I head northwest out of Bakersfield on Rte 99, the
Golden State Highway. It is high summer, so the
heat shimmers off the road and the fields in what
would be a desert were it not for irrigation. I am glad
to have AC, but a bit uncomfortable after the overstuffed sandwich I ate for lunch (I certainly feel like
my body has done its part today as an “accumulation strategy”; see Harvey 1998). Although there are
impressive mountains off to the right, the agricultural landscape ahead is very flat. I know it looks
geometrical from above, having studied the area on
Google Earth beforehand, but the processes of ascent and descent so typical of British landscapes are
not afforded here. Wylie (2002, pp. 443–446) argues that the process of ascent is an important way
in which the impression of autonomous subjectivity
is precipitated. One is fated here to maintain one’s
subjectivity through other devices (memory, anticipation, the experience of durability of embodied
awareness), and to live the bird’s-eye geometry in
the form of straight lines running parallel, perpendicular, or at various angles to the direction of movement. Because of the heat, distance is also indexed
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in the sharper or more shimmering outlines of features closer or further away. The straightness of the
open road beckons my vision onward, but at the
same time the symmetrical screens lining the roadway in the form of fruit orchards engender a bit of
uneasiness that, in effect, the landscape is conducting me too quickly beyond itself. I look for a convenient turn-off that might afford a slower point of
entry.
Beckoning
Beyond here, the road takes on a gaudy holiday
feel. At Green Ore crossroads a forest of brown
tourist signs and B&B premises advertise the
proximity of Cheddar Gorge and Wookey Hole
Caves. All these urge away from the A37, which
hurries forward into a forest (Wylie 2002, p.
447).
Through a gate in the campsite, a gravelled,
manicured track leads to a densely hedged and
brambled public footpath (Wylie 2002, p. 449).
The difficulty is that few signs actually “urge away”
from Highway 99 north of Bakersfield. There are occasional billboards, but they tend to plug destinations (such as the Delano Best Western) still many
miles ahead, so they are urging me along the road
rather than off it. In Tim Cresswell’s (2010, p. 26)
terms, these signs do not generate a sense of “friction”. This reinforcement of “moving along” is
probably one symptom of the fact that these are indeed landscapes devoted above all to producing material goods, not (local) experiences. That there is
less immediate “beckoning”, though, is also a matter of the audiences for the signage I do see. Still
in Bakersfield itself, I had poked around some of
the back alleys on the edge of town and had been
confronted with whole neighbourhoods of signs in
Spanish catering to the 45 per cent of the Bakersfield
population who are Hispanic/Latino, as well as to
the migrant workers who descend upon the area
in a rhythm determined by the needs of the crops.
Although not hostile to my presence, these signs
would scarcely be affordances for me even had my
fifth-grade Spanish not decomposed so badly. On
the road now, the experience of not being addressed
seems to continue in a different way: most of the
language I see embedded in the landscape takes the
form of crop variety signs posted at the edges of the
fields (both to promote seed brands and to remind
growers, sprayers and other workers which fields
were planted with what). More pointed are the no
trespassing signs. These block my entrance into
many off-road landscapes, marking private property
as inviolable.
What Kenneth Olwig writes of early modern
Dutch landscape painting, including the Brueghel
scene evoked by Ingold, is equally true of representations of the landscape of California today: ‘It
was imbued with meanings, etched by custom in
the land, that were at the heart of the major political, legal and cultural issues of the time’ (Olwig
1996, p. 635). Throughout the twentieth century and
up to the present, the problem of labour in agricultural capitalism has been one of the defining issues
of California politics, and of California landscapes
(Mitchell 1996, 2012). Strictly bounded parcels of
private property, in which owners or growers exercise absolute authority over who can be present and
what those present are doing, have been the core infrastructural scaffolding for capital’s long-­running
project of organizing the landscape for reliable
profit. This is in marked contrast to the glorious custom of public footpaths in the UK. This Landschaft
custom has literally underwritten and made possible
some of Wylie’s (2002, 2005) most striking work on
the South West Coast Path as well as on Glastonbury
Tor. Generally speaking, the experience of landscapes in the UK, while still patterned fundamentally by property-based exclusions, thus involves a
mitigating dimension of invitation and hospitality
lacking in many other parts of the world.
Working people
More than any other feature of the landscape, the
golden corn gathers the lives of its inhabitants,
wherever they may be, into temporal unison,
founded upon the communion of visual experience. Thus whereas the tree binds past, present
and future in a single place, the corn binds every
place in the landscape within the single horizon
of the present (Ingold 1993, p. 168).
What you hear is a taskscape. In the performance
of their particular tasks, people are responsive
not only to the cycle of maturation of the crop,
which draws them together in the overall project
of harvesting, but also to each other’s activities
as these are apportioned by the division of labour
… (Ingold 1993, p. 170)
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MATTHEW G. HANNAH
Having pulled off briefly onto a dusty side-road, I
try to project my imagination, from a point level
with the nearest no trespassing sign, into the distant
reaches of a citrus orchard. I imagine that it would be
disorienting to experience every view therein at the
crossroads of two long, straight alleys of trees. Each
crossroads would on the one hand seem to focus
the entire plantation on the viewer, but this conceit
would be ruined immediately by the very repetitive
indistinguishability of each from every other such
junction. This endlessly identical illusion of centrality can still be seen as a parable for the production
of human subjectivity under capitalism, however
many things the more privileged among us might
do with our lemons in the process of inventing ourselves as unique (see Read 2003).
Despite my lack of physical access, I drive
slowly enough along the side of a great plantation to
peer quickly down each row. The sudden opening up
of each long vista solicits my gaze very strongly. But
it reveals no workers that I can see (in addition to
making my neck sore in the almost “digital” rhythm
of keeping an eye on the road while turning quickly
to look down each alley of trees). As Don Mitchell
(2012, p. 46) explains, the rhythms demanded by
many of the crops of California’s gigantic industrial
agricultural system pose complex logistical problems of coordination:
Unlike many other forms of commodity production, crop production is highly temporally uneven – as growers across the state never tire of
asserting … [L]abor demands during the growing season are often slight … By contrast, harvest periods are often short and intense, demanding large inputs of labor. Importantly, different
crops have different maturation periods, harvest
lengths, and harvest intensities. Therefore, the
degree and scale of monocropping in a region
(and across regions) … will be a crucial determinant of labor demand and labor circulation in
the landscape.
Mid-summer in a citrus orchard is thus chiefly a time
when the stationary army of thousands of genetically identical trees are doing all the work. Labour
is absent as living labour, but still present as “living dead” labour in the form of plants: now, as in the
early twentieth century, ‘[t]he pattern and color of
the California landscape are mortgaged on the backs
of an endless stream of workers’ (Mitchell 1996, p.
15).
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Even at times of year when the large workforce
is present, the aggressively signed private property regime repulses direct attention to the details
of the processes through which the landscape is produced (see Mitchell 1996). The barring or withholdance of embodied attention from spaces of capitalist
production can be seen as the complement or counterpart to the ceaseless clamour for attention more
typical of spaces of consumption: both together institute a comprehensive selectivity of our engagement that powerfully undergirds the naturalization
of capitalist landscapes.
Centrality and orientation
The tower indexes a visible spectacle, yet it also
performs the work of gathering which the very
idea of a “spectacle” pre-supposes. To see it is to
be pulled toward it, to feel that one has entered
a landscape that coheres of itself, to be drawn
into a pattern of activities and postures. The
landscape sweeps towards the tower, revolves
around it, and a destination has emerged, the terminus of an intention one is carried upon (Wylie
2002, p. 448).
Rising from the spot where people are gathered
for their repast is an old and gnarled pear-tree,
which provides them with both shade from the
sun, a back-rest, and a prop for utensils … But
this is not just any tree. For one thing, it draws
the entire landscape around it into a unique focus: in other words, by its presence it constitutes
a particular place. The place was not there before the tree, but came into being with it. And
for those who are gathered there, the prospect
it affords, which is to be had nowhere else, is
what gives it its particular character and identity
(Ingold 1993, p. 167).
Back out on Highway 99 North, the only centring
feature of the landscape for many miles is the road
itself, which runs arrow-straight, paralleled by railroad tracks. Many of the surrounding fields are low
crops, leaving unimpeded views of the vast distance ahead. Mono-cropping does not seem to be
the rule here, despite the huge size of the individual
fields. The dirt lanes segmenting the fields, and the
crops themselves, run true to the cardinal compass
directions, so the NNW angling the highway takes
for a few miles means that when there are orchards
on each side, my gaze can move down the arborial
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alleys without a full 90-degree twist of the neck.
The highway then turns due north, though, towards
Delano, and my neck is called back to more strenuous duty. Every few miles a warehouse or processing centre punctuates the flat, dusty progress of the
road, some buzzing with the arrival and departure of
eighteen-wheelers, others quiet and seemingly deserted, doubtless following the staggered rhythms
noted by Mitchell.
The elephant in the room
Yet somehow the Tor contrives to lose itself
amongst these skirting folds. As Ashe (1979, p.
12) says, ‘optically speaking, the landscape does
not make sense. It is a monstrous refraction. The
Tor, so obvious for so many miles, vanishes in
the town and hides behind objects far too small
to conceal it’ (Wylie 2002, p. 448).
Eventually I pull into Delano, California, where the
Holiday Inn Express offers the comfort of standardized hospitality to strangers like me. Delano is
steeped in the history of industrial agriculture. There
is a César Chávez Park downtown, and the Yellow
Pages are full of fruit and vegetable companies, agricultural labour contractors and equipment suppliers. My eyes are tired from the glare of a Central
Valley summer day, despite the sunglasses, and
from the effort of keeping up with the angled vistas
snapping into and out of view along the drive from
Bakersfield. My shirt and hair are dusty from the few
times I opened the window or stepped outside.
The landscapes between Bakersfield and Delano,
wide open though they often look, comprise a distribution of the sensible, an arrangement of spaces,
times and activities, that feels above all indifferent to
my traverse. The only thing I felt “invited” to do was
to keep driving through it. Anything else I attempted
bumped up against a lack of affordances geared to
my needs and interests, or against outright prohibition of access. This landscape doesn’t need me, in
contrast to agricultural workers, whom it confronts
with sharp, juddering rhythms of invitation and
(minimal) accommodation, the requirement of disciplined attention to the relentless demands of harvesting machinery, then summary ejection back out
onto a new migration as soon as they have “saved
the crops”. My embodied attention is not required
as a labourer, and scarcely even as a tourist, for this
is an economy not strongly dependent on the local
image it gives of its productive places. The vistas
along the highway may be attractive in the sense
that some people find techno beat compelling: hardedged rhythms distinctive mainly for their relentless
monotony. Precisely this kind of firm structure may
be just the beat on which to hang reveries of all sorts.
As someone who made the trip in order to attend to
my own paying of attention, though, I found it difficult to stick to the task. The pace of solicitation coming at me was either too slow or, punctually, too fast,
unlike the more continually shifting, measured pace
of change Wylie reports in his account of the drive to
Glastonbury Tor.
Tentative and brief though this imagined trip has
been, it at least suggests a way for those of us not
involved in the sort of intense and life-­threatening
class struggles lived by agricultural workers to recognize the pulse of a capitalist productive landscape. It is an indifferent landscape neither put there
nor operated in a way that seeks to meet the needs
and capabilities of individual human bodies passing through. It is not easy to attend to, because it is
not meant to be attended to by non-participants. The
attempt nevertheless to attend to its affordances revealed that little is afforded to, and much is withheld
from, someone in my position, apart from the ease
of passage through the landscape. Perhaps most fundamentally, the struggle to attend to it, the attempt
to see into distances or move into spaces other than
those offered by the road itself, accentuates the impression of solidity and permanence. In my halting
efforts to pay what Waldenfels terms “secondary” or
momentary attention it became clear that the landscape’s distribution of the sensible made it hard to
establish the prerequisite for this, a primary field of
possibility in which attention could move.
One could try to make a primary attentional
field possible by slowing down, pulling off into a
side road and stopping, as I did a few times. But because of the size of the fields and the general absence of variety in landscape features available from
any one spot, this solution wasn’t a solution at all: to
the extent that I could stabilize a point of view giving me time to attend more deliberately, the range
of matters to attend to diminished. The range of affordances, such as it was, was in any case not directed to someone in my “third party” position. I
could either have an attentional field appropriate to
my embodied capabilities, or I could have a variety
of things to attend to looming jaggedly into and out
of a field kept shredded by speed. Unable to establish this field in the face of inhuman rhythms, I could
hardly help but naturalize this capitalist landscape
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MATTHEW G. HANNAH
even more deeply as something entirely independent of the perceiver. The fact that we cannot attend to
all aspects of even the most hospitable surroundings
at once already tends to fetishize those surroundings; if on top of that there is little ambient invitation, this effect is only accentuated. There is, in
other words, a directional aspect to landscape (and
other kinds of) fetishism, one that can reinforce the
qualitative problem of mis-recognizing dead labour
(Kirsch and Mitchell 2004).
Conclusions
The red thread running through the entire discussion
is a repeated insistence on the directional selectivity of active attention and thus on a political conception centred upon the question of what it is that we
turn our attention towards and away from, as well as
who or what it is that determines this turning. It is a
question of attention as a fundamental and ineluctable dimension of performance, one that explains
quite straightforwardly an important but hitherto little remarked way in which performance stabilizes
the world. It does so because even in the most sustained and intense critical focus on matters at hand,
our attentionality always means we must leave most
things unattended. Thus, for example, the reproduction of structures does not depend generally upon
agents acting as “dupes”, nor merely upon so-called
unintended consequences of action (Giddens 1979),
but rather quite simply upon the fact that our directional paying of potentially critical attention can
only ever be selective. To adapt Waldenfels’s elegant phrase, there is always a ‘Yes inherent in the
No’ (Waldenfels 2004, pp. 273–274).
The thought-experiment at the end had a more
modest illustrative goal, namely to suggest the ways
in which the political effects of produced landscapes
also involve the co-creation of embodied experiences
that contribute in a different way to naturalizing the
scenes of capitalism. There is a phenomenological
path to a critical awareness of inhumane aspects of
life in capitalist societies, a path that moves, first,
by examining how the inherent selectivity of our attention is addressed, ignored, manipulated, or channelled, and second, by reflecting upon the extent to
which the range of affordances offered to or absent
from the immersed experience of landscape matches
at all with the embodied capabilities or needs of human beings. This is but one area of human geographic
research in which a more direct and sustained “turn”
to the issue of attention is overdue.
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Acknowledgements
This article is dedicated to the memory of Heiko
Schmid (1972–2013). The author would like to
thank Don Mitchell for the invitation to participate
in the Symposium out of which this article grew, and
Tomas Germundsson and Tom Mels for shepherding it through the editorial process. Don Mitchell,
Ken Olwig, Bernd Belina and Tomas Germundsson
all offered useful comments, encouragement and/or
critical questions. Tom Mels made some keen observations and suggested crucial additional sources.
John Wylie provided a discerning and insightful
commentary. Audiences at Swansea University and
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt made helpful comments on earlier, very different versions of the argument, as did reviewers of an earlier written version
of this article. All errors are mine.
Notes
1. This and all other passages from Waldenfels (2004) and Franck
(1998, 2005) translated from the German by the author.
2. As will be explained below, attentionality needs to be carefully
distinguished from another, closely related anthropological
feature identified and explored by phenomenologists: intentionality, the fact that consciousness is always ‘a consciousness
of something’ (Husserl [1931] 2012, p. 67, italics in the original). Phenomenologists have argued persuasively that intentionality is a more basic phenomenon, and attention a modality
of it. However, in the flow of practice and in the understanding
of power relations, I will argue that attentionality is actually the
more important issue.
3. Ingold’s and Wylie’s ways of understanding landscape are not
identical. In particular, Wylie has advocated what he terms a
“postphenomenological” radicalization of some hypotheses of
the late Merleau-Ponty (Anderson and Wylie 2009). These hypotheses purport to de-centre the phenomenological “subject”
to such an extent that there is no longer an identifiable perspective for vision (and other embodied modalities). Whatever the
fortunes of this notion, in practice Wylie continues to perform
and write landscape encounters with an unusual skill for phenomenological evocation shared by Ingold. It is this common
talent for evocative description that licenses my lumping these
two scholars together.
4. The work of Peter Merriman (2006) on landscape architecture and British motorways shows that we should not take
the “sleepy” rural landscapes of the UK as they unfold before
Wylie’s gaze as completely untouched by deliberate planning
considerations.
Matthew G. Hannah
Department of Geography and Earth Sciences
Aberystwyth University
Llandinam Building
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3DB
United Kingdom
Email: [email protected]
© The author 2013
Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2013 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
ATTENTION AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE
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