At age 90, Jane Miller relates her ongoing battle with a self that wants to “indulge my lurking wish to spend longer in bed in the morning reading the Guardian and listening to the Today programme than I already do,” and the one that obsessively logs steps and reads classics in their original Russian, to make the most of her physical and mental abilities.
I am freer than I’ve ever been, yet I quite often feel edged out, and it’s clear that I have become actually and metaphorically deaf to significant contemporary sounds. My spectator’s view of it all doesn’t fail to remind me that other people are not so lucky or so detached, that some of them are sad beyond hope, that there are young people who don’t want to stay alive and people who worry to distraction and despair or who suffer all kinds of untreatable pain. I became an adult just after the end of the Second World War, and I think of the 1950s, so often described by younger generations as bleak and impoverished, as a time of idealism and optimism. I find it difficult to detect that sort of faith in the future now, though I hope against hope that it’s there in some form I’m simply too old to recognise.
To start, three short vignettes on attention:
These three stories seem to me to point in a similar direction — toward the collapse of a certain regime of attention. In all three cases, we are dealing with a classically modern genre that is conceived as a kind of paradoxical mass solitude. We all file into the concert hall or movie theater, we all buy the mass-produced novel everyone is talking about — and we enjoy it alone, together. Western classical music has made high claims for itself over the centuries, but one area where it is surely an outlier among world musical traditions is in its near-total prohibition of audience participation. It contributed its full range of techniques for emotional manipulation to Its bag of tricks for emotional manipulation was selectively looted by cinema, which is now the dominant venue for orchestral music, and its successor artform also inherited the expectation — though not always the reality — of a passive, endlessly attentive audience. The horror and disgust that some filmmakers have expressed about the idea of watching a film on a phone (a prospect I also find unappealing) surely is not solely about the diminished screen size, but also about the expectation of attention.
As an educator and simply as a human being, I mourn for the loss of a cultural expectation of this kind of sustained attention. Truly great artworks and monuments of thought are becoming inaccessible in a way that will become increasingly difficult to overcome. That is a loss to humanity, full stop. But the entire regime of attention — deployed in obviously positive ways by Eliot and Akerman, and in an enjoyably harmless way by Rachmaninoff — was much more ambivalent than contemporary jeremiads against social media and mass distraction want to admit. There is obviously an authoritarian element to the high modern demand for endless attention, and it’s not clear to me that an easily-distracted population is easier to control than one disciplined by habits of sustained attention — I would compare my virtually non-existent discipline problems in the college classroom with those of a grade-school teacher, for instance.
This is not to say that it’s subversive to constantly look down at your phone or whatever. Yet we might observe that contemporary media effectively demand just as much sustained attention as the classic modern genres — social media doomscrolling and especially video games are intensely immersive and often transfix their users for many hours at a time. Meme culture certainly has its own complexity, including a (self-)referentiality that could put T.S. Eliot to shame, and people make high claims for the storytelling power of video games. What the user is supposed to do with this sustained attention is obviously different from the classically modern demand to cultivate subjective inwardness, above all in the expectation of audience participation (in the form of contributing content, rating others’ content, and, well, playing the game). The greater interactivity and user control has also, paradoxically, meant that I could easily get my wish of a four-hour film — but instead of Jeanne Dielman, it would be The Batman.
My empathy for those trapped in the new regime — including, at least in part, myself — is not oriented toward surrender, much less celebration. I really do want to find a way to usher at least some of my students into the best experiences of the old regime. Surely part of that means finding points of contact between the two regimes, but that always risks feeling like the classic Steve Buscemi meme. More than that, I wonder if the key is to model enjoyment — which might mean cutting down or changing the “canon” of works we highlight, for instance, so that the hypnotizing Jeanne Dielman replaces the “I guess you had to be there” Citizen Kane. One benefit of the passing of the old regime is that we no longer have to pretend that it fulfilled its promises all the time — the waning hegemony of the genre undercuts a certain amount of “affirmative action” for its less distinguished practitioners.
Ultimately, the true greats are going to be fine. They will find their audience. As someone whose professional calling turns out to be the curation and transmission of the cultural heritage, though, I want to find as many ways as possible to welcome people into that audience — in a non-patronizing, non-judgmental way. And my God, no Bruckner! What is he even thinking? There is no musical reason for all that repetition! Agony, pure agony!
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