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The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations

I found this argument by L.M. Sacasas that ‘Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention‘ immensely compelling. He’s one of the most interesting voices helping us escape from the panicked banalities of the digital distraction debate, by reconstructing the existential stakes which tend to get lost amidst the moral panic. I couldn’t agree more with this, nor could I express it with the clarity he does:

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

But increasingly I’d insist on recognising their psychic foundations. Recognising the moral force of attention is preciously, particularly when it helps us recognise the existential stakes of our daily habits and the choices we make (or fail to make) in relation to them. But I find the implicit ontology of the person underpinning these accounts increasingly implausible, at least in the sense of lacking an adequate account of the psychic foundations of moral attention. There’s so much to explore here but, as one suggest, we could connect the argument Sacasas makes to the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald, which I summarise here from an earlier blog post:

Loewald was concerned with the possibility of “deadening insulation from the unconscious where human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by its fire” (quoted on pg 181). This leads to “an adult reality that has been wholly separated from infantile fantasy” existing in “a desiccated, meaningless, passionless world” (pg 194). This conceives of language as the “life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality” (pg 181). Following Heidegger Loewald sees language in terms of what Taylor calls world-disclosure, with the capacity to “generate and link domains of experience” (pg 185). The quality of this link is the “difference between a present that is haunted by the past and a present that is enriched by the past” (pg 194).

For Loewald we need “links to the affective density of the unconscious, without which ‘human life becomes sterile and an empty shell’” (pg 195). He conceives of transference as a resource for change in this respect, rather than an obstacle to analysis; in transference there is a “revitalization, a relinking of the past and the present, fantasy and reality, primary process and secondary process” (pg 195). To talk of ghosts becoming ancestors isn’t just a matter of making peace with the past, it’s working with the power of the past to enrich the present, as Mitchell quotes Loewald on pg 194:

In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects.

Such a ghost is, as Mitchell describes it, “a piece of the past filled with passionate intensity, that was split off, through repression, from her present experience” (pg 197). Repression for Loewald is a failure of this link, a rigidity in differentiation which collapses the space in which resonance is possible.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/01/27/making-ghosts-into-ancestors/

This opens up the possibility of a subtle relationality in which the integration of our past experience (or lackthereof) shapes how we relate to present external experience. The richness and the vibrancy, the “sheer entertainment value” of the world’s “views, sounds, and smells” to use Arendt’s phrase, only shows up for us through the integration of the past experience into the present reality. I think this fits well with the argument Sacasas is making and opens up an additional horizon through which we can understand our propensity to get caught in deadening loops:

Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

The risk is that without this we lapse into a moral athleticism, in which only those who have cultivated themselves (with the time, energy, cultural resources and confidence to do so) can really experience the incipient beauty which can be found in each moment. There might be some truth to this as an empirical generalisation which we need to grapple with, but introducing the psychic dimension complicates the analysis so it’s no longer a matter of cultivation vs habituation. Overcoming that dichotomy opens up a very interesting sociotechnical & existential terrain to explore.

Claude Opus has questions 🧐

  • How might we cultivate practices and design environments (both technological and physical) that support the kind of patient, invitational attention Sacasas describes? What individual and collective habits could help keep us vitally linked to the “affective density of the unconscious”?
  • In an age of pervasive digital mediation, how do we balance the benefits of new connective technologies with the need to preserve space for unstructured, open-ended engagement with the world and with our own interiority?
  • What role might practices like psychoanalysis, meditation, artistic creation, and immersion in nature play in re-enchanting our experience and rekindling the “passionate intensity” of the past in the present moment?
  • How can we democratize access to the time, space, and resources needed for cultivating enchantment, so that it doesn’t become an elite pursuit? What social and political changes might be necessary to make this possible?
  • What new language and conceptual frameworks do we need to articulate the existential stakes of attention in a hypermediated age? How can we translate these often abstract-sounding ideas into compelling visions and practical agendas for change?
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