The unchecked parody of the present
Surviving the attention economy
A rare series of snowstorms left our yard blanketed in white for more than a week of February and then spring arrived, thawing the soft sparkle like an eraser. Frogs started singing and buds began to burst. Along with the snow melt, a scant puddle formed on our back porch—not a good sign. Directly above it: a soft spot in the deck roof, paint beginning to peel and bubble, like a soggy, warped, wooden moon reflected in the tiny pool below. A mirror image of dampness. The other day a contractor we’re working with came by to check out the leak. As soon as his saw bit into the wood, a torrent of brown-tinged water came gushing out, hitting the deck with a satisfying thump. I ran off to get a bucket and the waterfall was still flowing when I returned, wood tea with little bits of sawdust.
Later that night I felt light, almost giddy. I hopped around the kitchen while Ethan and I cleaned up, and asked him why that was so satisfying. The problem was still there—a shitty, poorly-sealed and structurally unsound roof extension our contractor pal had just diagnosed. But it was like popping a pimple, Ethan said. Anything pent-up wants to be let out. I keep picturing those gallons of water pouring out, and even on repeat this image is refreshing, a visceral relief. There’s also something satisfying about exposing a mess, getting to finally poke your head into it.
I started teaching college again (though this time inside a prison, which is itself interesting but describing its specificity will be for another time). What I mean is that I’m busy in a particular way, jumping into a class right when the quarter started and every week just getting my bearings, barely making the runway for the following week. I wrote a draft of one of these newsletters in January and then got swept up in another school-wave before I finished it. I wrote another little essay a few weeks ago, this one you’re reading right now, except there wasn’t this part about the roof-gush. After drafting it I had more teaching puzzles to solve and also turned my attention to another writing project (which at first felt awful and then I started having fun with it again, touching in on what I actually care to say). But then there was this essay lingering in an un-sent state. It still doesn’t feel finished but somehow seeing all that water pour out from a raw square hatch seemed like reason enough to let it out—a missing opening that is here now.
What I’m really writing about is trying to absorb the news, which is also feeling like more of a build-up than an absorption or release—water dammed by porous wood. What has been happening for the past six weeks? A literal and performative trashing of what I want to call the “social welfare state,” though I’m not sure that term fully captures what’s being slashed—anything that smacks of generosity? It is bizarre to witness the government being eaten away from the inside, its non-homogeneity on full display—the government as a series or collage of institutions, and some of them are being framed as cartoonish scapegoats for real and fictional problems their destruction will never actually solve. The executive mood is a toddleresque temper tantrum and high school bully. It’s pure asshole (sometimes a fumbling asshole). Assholeness as politics preys on a wounded craving for something or someone to blame, a promise of renewal through cruelty. I don’t know how to square the humor and the horror of such a violent, dangerous, hateful display of power that is also so petty, absurd, and tacky—an unchecked parody of itself.
What feels clear is that, among all the kinds of fucked-with we are right now, we are being emotionally fucked with. I think that’s probably true for both sides of the great political divide, but by “we” I mean those who recognize themselves and/or their loved ones in the categories of human life whose care is being officially disavowed. I was hanging up my towel in the bathroom the other day when I realized that this cluttered, heavy fog of cognitive and emotional disarray was actually something distinct—something to work with even if I couldn’t make sense of its contents. “Flooding the zone” is a deliberate political strategy, and one of its effects is an affective (emotional) atmosphere of being out of control/powerless. It is weather designed to wear one down, to make one feel marginal to the world’s onslaught.
I don’t know that bullying is a accurate analogy for what’s happening politically, but being bullied feels accurately descriptive on an emotional level. Wikipedia tells me that a distinguishing characteristic of bullying (as opposed to social conflict) is a “perceived presence of physical or social imbalance” by the bully (or others involved): “[b]ullying is a subcategory of aggressive behavior characterized by hostile intent, the goal (whether consciously or subconsciously) of addressing or attempting to ‘fix’ the imbalance of power, as well as repetition over a period of time.” I can’t really know what’s going on psychologically for the men holding the mic, but they radiate an inflated sense of victimization—petty righteousness that motivates and justifies repetitive abuse and symbolic displays of power. Those displays of power are part of the overall political strategy, not just side effects of concrete political decisions/outcomes. And whether or not I’m the direct recipient of a torrent of abuse, I know in some way that I’m meant to hear it.
Following along with the “news” already felt, in general, pretty awful—too much to absorb or grasp—before this fresh weaponization of our attention. The constant litany of catastrophic events, as Lauren Berlant wrote, are “so often an impact with no resonance, passing by the spectating public like a stock market tickertape or a gang of frolicking dogs, unconverted to causes because even the simplicity of what happens next can be overwhelming when so much is happening.”1 Overwhelm itself feels like powerlessness—a sense of being unable to keep up or not knowing where to start. This sense of distance—frozen horror, perhaps—is already constructed and contingent, not a genuine (or at least full) reflection of our place in the world or our capacity to exercise agency within it. I don’t have the academic vocabulary for this synthetic/systemic arrangement, and I don’t mean this conspiratorially, but I just know it can feel like the only thing that ties me to the world is my attention to the “tickertape” of bad news—my consumption of information.
Usually the loneliness in that onslaught of information doesn’t feel so personal, more symptomatic of a whole orchestra of factors—the alienated, global economy; digital, technological, and cultural circumstances, and so on. What’s happening now is still shaped by all of those things, but it also feels engineered by a group of emotionally fragile individuals who’ve amassed an unbelievable amount of political and cultural power. Intervening in the sense of dispossession created by that awful firehose of info feels especially important because right now it feels so targeted and personal. But it’s odd, because I also feel it is somehow more doable for that same reason—something I can pin down on a select group of people who want something from me (or want to do something to me), rather than the impersonal machinery usually driving it. I feel slightly freed from the illusion that the news cycle is a conversation waiting to be consummated, where I’m waiting for the pause in the dialogue where I can say my part or find my way in.
There’s a collective dilemma here: how to not let these guys “get away” with what they’re doing without playing into their deliberate, vampiric exploitation of public attention. I think Chris Hayes is doing some important, clear-eyed thinking/theorizing/communication about this attention economy puzzle. (See his interviews on the Ezra Klein Show (which might be paywalled?) and Volts podcast, as well as his new book The Sirens’ Call, which I’ve only read a bit of so far.) It’s also a deeply personal dilemma: how to engage with the moment without playing into a sense of powerlessness and allowing a few people to monopolize my perception of the world? How to be present with the world without falling prey to attentional bullying (bullying by way of the news cycle)?
And actually, maybe this involves strategic distance, as Italo Calvino describes of Perseus in Six Memos for the Next Millennium:
At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa. The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. […]
To cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the very lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Harvard University Press, 1988), 4.
There’s nothing noble or necessary about staring at a villain face-on, especially when doing so is directly damaging—what the villain is counting on, in fact. For me feeling frozen (turned to stone) isn’t just about a sense of deficit—too much to keep up with, etc—but also my own reluctance to add to the noise. In the face a few super obnoxious people so crudely demanding you pay attention to them, it’s tempting to retreat into a corner somewhere just to avoid adding to the buzz, the hum of more bad news, the tickertape. But I need to remember that creating things—making alternative renderings of the moment, if not also also shared modes of survival—is actually how that onslaught becomes something I can work with rather than something that just works on me. We actually need each others’ perspectives (creative shields) to look at what’s happening without being decimated by it. And in this, there’s room for lightness—finding footholds in the clouds of absurdity and humor, finding life-affirming angles where the dominance of what is domineering dissolves.
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This quote is from Lauren Berlant’s essay “Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness,” which I managed to track down as a PDF hosted on their website based on a faint memory of reading it (or something like it) about a decade ago while I was an undergraduate at Evergreen. In it, Berlant discusses Liza Johnson’s film In the Air, which you can watch here. We read it and talked about it in the class I’m teaching this quarter. I wish I knew more about the essay (and the conference which it must’ve been presented at)—so if you have any clues (or if you, too, are fascinated by Berlant’s work) please drop a line! You can just hit reply.