Signature of Attention: Historical Ambiguities and Elisions in Contemporary Psychological Framings of Attending

Abstract

In contemporary contexts of digitalization, proliferating media, and generative AI, various “life hacks” are regularly recommended to disconnect and resist distraction, ranging from meditation to getting back to nature to unplugging. This paper traces contemporary concerns over “the attention crisis” into a longer signature — the frequently elided field of signification today referred to as “spiritual,” a signature which links attention to theories of deep personal transformation and technologies of the self. First, we examine historiographical issues arising in studies related to the contemporary attention crisis, exposing the challenges of attending to attending. Second, we delineate how European-based Christian monasticism developed practices for disciplining “attention” in new institutional settings. We argue that this process was simultaneously bound to projections of Othering and to the cultivation of critical attitudes. In particular, we delineate how these medieval forms of Othering (in both “spiritualist” and “demographic” terms) were involved in practices of vigilance and attending that became indelibly etched in Christian empire-building through governing souls and violent persecutions. Tracing these genealogical trajectories retrieves recent elisions of the complexities in problematizing attention. We suggest that contemporary ways of thinking about and acting on an “attention crisis” in education are still marked by signatures of spirituality and their allied binaries, Othering logics, and ambiguities.