New Argonauts of Attention - Jonardon Ganeri

Geophilosphy Lecture Ours is an age of attention. While the economies of past societies were built around the extraction of mineral resources and the appropriation of land, our modern economy is an attention economy, the most precious resource being neither material nor manpower but mind. Attention is the name we give to everything that makes us present to the world as well as making us presences in the world; and so to all that makes us human subjects in a world of other subjects. The mining of our attention is thus the undermining of our very being. The need of the time is to retake control over how we make sense of, and make use of, our attention, to become again free in the way we shape ourselves as presences in the world.“I’m the Argonaut of true sensations,” says the European modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, “I bring to the Universe a new Universe, Because I bring to the Universe its own self.” What we can do is make ourselves into Argonauts of a new sort: Argonauts of attention. The voyage of attention I will set sail on asks us fully to engage our capacities of imagination, feeling, sensation, and empathy—our essential humanity. The idea is clearest in the case of attention to the written word, and I’ll agree with Italo Calvino in professing the heteronymic possibility of identifying oneself with an implicit reader who lives only inside the text: “This book so far has been careful to leave open to the reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the reader who is read.” For it is only as homo heteronymicus that we shall, as Pessoa demands we must, “realize in oneself all humanity at all moments.”