2024-2025 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Amit Rai's seminar: How to do things with Attention?

SEMINAR 1: DECEMBER 7 & 8 2024

In this initial seminar, we will begin our historical materialist and molecularly intensive encounter with the political economy of attention. We begin by stretching and doing some free writing. Then we proceed with contextualising Walter Benjamin's notion of the aura in relation to contemporary creative labour and new forms of the monetisation of the aura in platform capitalism. We will link the critique of capitalist labour regimes to a particular mode of attention that moves from product to process. We will watch two short films, take a walk on the beach, and get to know each other. We will discuss how we de-attend as we continue to care for our ecologies of attention.

[Suggested background reading: Benjamin, W (1938) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]

Day 1:

Marx, Fragment on Machines, from the Gründrisse (1858) in The Accelerationist Reader

Chapter 7: Fragment on Machines in Pitts FH (2017) Critiquing capitalism today. London: Springer.

Day 2:

Pedersen, M.A., Albris, K. and Seaver, N., 2021. The political economy of attention. Annual Review of Anthropology, 50(1): 309-325.

Texts we will refer to / read passages from in class (not necessary to read in advance):

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Gleeson J J and O’Rourke E (2021) Introduction to Transgender Marxism. London: Pluto Press.

Selections from Valeria Graziano, Pirate Care (forthcoming)

Selections from Lotz C (2016) The capitalist schema

To screen Day 1:

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

To screen Day 2:

Handsworth Song (1986)

Podcasts:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0BidLsUQh1N6ZWftW3R5lt?si=jbt-hTMyTiWkbEJBNGG43A

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ESHZcBEsp9IGO7ceGGqQI?si=-SPNTVIuQTGj1XL-gfsK7A

https://open.spotify.com/show/6AgoGYQkbSJLB2rP7fT4gP

SEMINAR 2: January 10, 11, 12 2024

In this second seminar we will pursue the vectors diagrammed in our first session, and we will continue composing well posed questions of the political economy of attention and its historically specific field of affordances in racial-caste capitalism. We will freewrite, take walks, watch short and long films, we will listen to podcasts, listen to music, read outloud, recite poetry, and with each activity we will ask how is it we are doing things with our attention? We will return to Pitt's critique of 'fragment' thinking in post-Adornian Marxist critiques of the cognitive capital thesis, and situate the relation of technology to living labour through Starosta et al (2023) situating of intellectual labour and intellectual property with a broader on going crisis and primitive accumulation necessary for racial-caste capitalist accumulation and extraction. We will then consider the neurology of attention as an optimal grip on a field of affordances and its relation to machine learning, data as probabilistic measure of a presumptive whiteness will be linked to Wynter's and Amaro's bioepistemic capture of the human and to the entanglements of race, technology, and anti-Blackness. We will end our time in Nida with Saidiya Hartman and with walks discussing the wayward lives of queer Black women in the Northeast of the USA from around 1920 to 1950.

10 January:

Pitts: Chapter 7: Fragment on Machines in Pitts FH (2017) Critiquing capitalism today. London: Springer.

Chapter 7: "Cognitive commodities and the growing role of intellectual labour in value-production" in Starosta, G., Caligaris, G. and Fitzsimons, A., 2023. Value, Money and Capital: The Critique of Political Economy and Contemporary Capitalism. Taylor & Francis.

11 January:

Bruineberg, J. and Rietveld, E., 2014. Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, p.599.

Conclusion to Amaro, R., 2019. Machine learning, sociogeny, and the substance of race (Doctoral dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London).

12 January:

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward lives to page 150.

SEMINAR 3: March 21, 22 & 23 2025

In our online February seminar, we discussed Sarah Ahmed’s (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (intro, conclusion, chapter 3). I think we all agreed that the text needs to be read and re-read, especially when we are amidst a practice of ‘politicizing’ attention, as we are in this seminar. In your piratepad comments you pointed out that for Ahmed there is a definite importance placed on lived experience. We discussed phenomenology’s commitment to as ‘scientific description’ of the intentionality of consciousness. People noted the significance of nearness, the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds, the timing of apprehension, you marked the departing/moving away from neutrality and the universal subject necessary for a queer phenomenology. The fugitivity (Moten) in the line of flight of queer writing was seen to be expanding the volume of thought, both as aesthetic quality and political purpose. You asked, ‘How can we meet in our phenomenologies, how can we repair the perception to arrive to a connection?

In Cypress March, 2025, we will continue to stay with the troubles of producing an emancipatory diagram toward a freedom/resistance-aesthetics of damaged attention. We will follow critically cognitive neuroscience’s framing of attention as a maximal ‘grip’ (Merleau Ponty) on a field of affordances (Simondon), considering on the way the function of repetition and drill, structure-sign of play, which ecology of practice matters, and the development of bodily skill in action readiness in a field of affordances; past experience plays an important role in action readiness; different account of cognitive function; giving up on the discrete brain . . .

This is our proposed itinerary:

March 21:

Freewriting

Stretching

Morning: Merleau-Ponty, 2012. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge. Chapter 3, pp. 28-51: 'Attention and Judgment'

Afternoon:

Somers-Hall, H., 2009. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics of Difference. Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, 64, p.123.

suggested reading:

Kiverstein, J. and Miller, M., 2015. The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Frontiers in human neuroscience. Vol. 9, pp. 237-]

Film: Please watch: A Night of Knowing Nothing 2021, P. Kapadia, dir.

A curated walk

March 22:

Early morning (?):

Another curated walk?

Morning:

Bueno, C.C., 2016. The attention economy: labour, time and power in cognitive capitalism. Rowman & Littlefield.

Introduction

Afternoon:

Moten, Fred. "The Case of Blackness." Criticism, vol. 50 no. 2, 2008, pp. 177-21

Conclusion of our discussion of Hartman's Wayward Lives.

Film: Please watch "Edouard Glissant one world in relation, M. Diawara dir."

March 23:

Morning:

Bueno, C.C., 2016. The attention economy: labour, time and power in cognitive capitalism. Chapter 1. [In the drive folder.]

Afternoon: With Dina

Bueno, C.C., 2016. The attention economy: labour, time and power in cognitive capitalism. Chapter 2.

Film: Please watch "The Last Angel of History"

Other Media:

Reassemblage (1983), Trinh T Minh-Ha

A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), P. Kapadia

Black Power Mix Tape (2011)

Édouard Glissant: one world in relation (2010), Manthia Diawara

I am not your Negro (2016), Raoul Peck

Daughters of the Dash (1991), Julie Dash

Podcasts:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0BidLsUQh1N6ZWftW3R5lt?si=jbt-hTMyTiWkbEJBNGG43A

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ESHZcBEsp9IGO7ceGGqQI?si=-SPNTVIuQTGj1XL-gfsK7A

https://open.spotify.com/show/6AgoGYQkbSJLB2rP7fT4gP

SEMINAR 4: May 24 & 25 2025

We gather for the last time this year in Middelburg. We have come far, travelled so much, and we come back in our conceptual itinerancy to re-pose the spiritual-materialist problem of attention…within and against fascism. Have ryou e-learned how to do things with embodied, solidary, collective attention within and against colonial fascism? We have taken walks, we have stretched, checked in (mindfully?), we have remembered the ecology of genocide and the war of resistance of the people of Gaza, anti-Blackness, necropolitics, and the Middle Passage, theRebel Queer Black women, and the Occupations of Palestine, Kashmir—as we salute the Houthis living in solidarity with a Free Palestine. We have linked the rise of fascism in Europe, South America, South Asia, North America, and elsewhere to qualitatively new modes of social domination in and through forms of labour exploitation, financial speculation, assetisation, surplus value extraction, AI algorithms, and media assemblages, and to the re-emergence of organised fascist violence. We will do a workshop together. We have diagrammed together. We have strained to hear each other and often heard each other. We have been concerned for each other and for the world in qualitatively new ways through discussions of Marxists' theories of technology and machines, and to an extent, Adorno’s negative dialectic; we have attempted a diagram of doing philosophy as specifically the creation of attentional propositions, of what Deleuze called a dynamic Idea. We have begun to question how to tarry with the negative (with and against both Hegel and Adorno) through diagrams of specifically rhythmic attentional flows and tendencies, linking perception to bodies to work to technologies to bacteria to algorithmics to derivatives to the racial capitalist gamer atopia and to forms of prefigurative emancipatory practice and revolutionary space-times (cf Wark, Gamer Theory). . . . We all come with our trajectories (eachtrajectory, each of us has our own virtualities, opacities, minority becomings,b ecomings woman, becoming revolutionary, potential and actual multiplicities)and we have studied together at the intersections of our positionalities, inour yearnings for emancipation and justice, what have we come to attend to? Non-binary attention (ten Zaldam), rebel attention (Nada), surface attention, border attention (Echo), raw attention . . . What can we attend to, how, that is in its way a dehabituation and re-composition of attention beyond good and evil, what is an untimely attention? What is a post-phenomenological, para-dialectical attention [to the clinamen]? To what are we to bear witness in this straight time of genocide? What does an unreserved diagrammatology of attention bring to the question “How to do things with Attention?” Is the diagram an attentional map or a perceptual/conceptual circuit? The diagram is not the territory but it is of the territory’s plane of immanence as vectors, basins of attraction/entropy, and thresholds of conceptualisation/becoming are charted in complex non-linear dynamical entanglements through a queer, anticolonial, post-phenomenological political philosophy of relation—see Noam’s work on diagrammatology. We will discuss whether we can identify what trajectories emerge for people and how we might think of moving this attentional feast toward other horizons.

Day 1:

Seigworth G J et al (2025) Capacities To: Affect Up Against Fascism, [Gregory J. Seigworth, Mathew Arthur, Wendy J. Truran, Chad Shomura, eds.] Vancouver: Imrbicate

Introduction,

Chapter 6: Cassie Thornton The Incapacity to Stay in Your Lane: On Gaza, on Emergency, on Extinction, Murder, Erasure, Loss;

Chapter 8: Randall Johnson Capacity to Know the Enemy, Within and Without

Lunch

Chapter 9: Brian Massumi Capacities to Reaccess Potentials for Anti-Fascist Life? Chapter 14: Jason Read 103 Capacities to, or What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Fascism

Chapter 15: Jack Z. Bratich 111 What Can a Body Do(om)?: Fratriarchy’s Affects and the Capacities to Break Together

Afternoon:

Bishop, C., 2024. Disordered Attention: How we look at art and performance today. Verso Books, Intro, and chapter 1, and 3

Day 2:

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned,

Intro, Chapter 1-3, pages 1 - 40

Walk to the water

Film: Please watch "The Last Angel of History"

Other Media:

Reassemblage (1983), Trinh T Minh-Ha

A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), P. Kapadia

Black Power Mix Tape (2011)