by Eli Zaretsky, Sidecar/New Left Review (12/06/2026)
In recent years the concept of attention has garnered considerable – well – attention. It has become, we are told, a commodity within the ‘attention economy’, a limited resource over which advertisers, social media companies, streaming services and the like struggle. Though the idea has become increasingly prominent in the age of the internet and smartphones, our interest can be traced back further. Especially since the 1960s, the hypertrophy of images and screens, taking place against the backdrop of an ever-expanding market, has been eroding, or at least transforming, our collective life – familial and communal relations, the natural and built environment, cultural production and reception. Today we are faced with a further leap in the form of AI. According to a recent article by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, this heralds ‘an age of extinction’.
‘The digital age’, Douthat writes, ‘takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen’. Once we were absorbed by novels and great dramas; today we have Netflix. Once we had face-to-face conversations; today we text. Once we had liberal arts universities; today we have ‘smart’ classrooms. Perhaps most telling, once sexuality was arguably the closest we came to the sacred in secular life; today we have pornography and dating apps. In every case, we have replaced something more difficult and satisfying with something more titillating, accessible and often stupefying. As with climate change, it sometimes seems we have passed the point of no return. In the search for new and ever more exciting forms of distraction, we may be destroying the bases for meaningful life.
To comprehend a cultural explosion of this magnitude we must look more closely at what attention is. A classic definition was provided by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890):
It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James’s definition is brilliant, but it is not adequate to our contemporary predicament, and the study of attention since has been largely quantitative and utilitarian. For an alternative, we might turn to the thought of Walter Benjamin. Unlike James, Benjamin did not theorize attention in general, but developed a historical account which assumed that psychological capacities like attention, as well as the stimuli to attention, change as technology and other forces of production change. He did all of this as part of a theory of capitalism, and with a view of its relevance for the Left.
Benjamin first became interested in attention as a young man through his reading of Pascal, who argued that the ills that beset the modern world could be traced to the inability of men and women to sit alone, calmly, in their rooms. The cause of their restlessness, their need for entertainment (divertissement, generally translated as ‘distraction’), was that they were not comfortable with themselves, not at home in their own nature. Pascal had a remedy for this: Christianity, or rather Jansenism, a Puritan version of Catholicism. Since Pascal’s time, however, the need for divertissement, far from being remedied, has become the driving force behind fashion, entertainment, social media and consumerism – and in easy coexistence with Christianity.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin’s first book, drew deeply on Pascal. Benjamin claimed that the medieval communal order presented suffering and transience as stations on the road to salvation, while early modern Trauerspiel was taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition. The plays exemplified divertissement: forgettable melodramas, marked by violent bombast, theatrical props and machinery, and crude rhetorical fireworks. Benjamin, however, interpreted them not as diversions but as allegorical messages left behind from a time of catastrophe. This was a precursor to the account of attention found in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935), as well as his various essays on the storyteller, Kafka, Dada, photography, surrealism and hashish.
In these writings, Benjamin distinguishes three forms of attention, which might be termed absorption, hypnotic attention and free-floating attention. Absorption rests on the concept of ‘aura’ or emanation, defined as ‘the unique appearance or semblance of a distance’. Familiar to anyone who has studied the visual arts, as he did, the idea draws on two parameters that are at the centre of painting: distance and light. This has ancient roots. Benjamin called aura the ‘wellspring of poetry’, ‘an archaic element in our present selves, a forgotten trace of our material bond with nonhuman nature’.
The prerequisite for aura is something concrete, unique and located at a particular point in space and time. Benjamin uses the term in relation to idols, relics, cathedrals and works of art. The authenticity of a unique object, he wrote, ‘is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’. Stories and wisdom might also possess aura in the sense that they are retold person to person and thus possess the traces of the tellers, just as pots retain the handprints of the potter. Even nature can command absorption in the sense of aura. ‘What is aura actually?’, he asked:
A strange weave of space and time: singular appearance of distance, however near it may be. Resting on a summer afternoon, following the line of a mountain on the horizon, or a twig, which casts its shadow on the viewer, until the moment or the hour takes part in its appearance – that is to breathe the aura of these mountains, of this twig.
Our attention to these objects, he claimed, is dialogic. ‘Inherent in the gaze . . . is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed’. The aura establishes distance, not to precipitate awe but to make contemplation or self-reflection possible. Prayer is an example of this form of attention. When we pray, we surrender, as captured in the Arabic word Islam, but at the same time God answers us. There is an expansion of inner space.
For Benjamin this is very different from the hypnotic attention we pay to mass reproduced images. The spread of reproducible images typically takes place as part of a process that is destroying traditional institutions and objects; substituting for them some newly exciting, fascinating or captivating objects; and centralizing and coordinating the substitutes into new, unexpected forms of anonymous power, such as surveillance and the panopticon. In Benjamin’s words, ‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence’. Hypnotic attention to this profusion is addictive, as we know from algorithms that leverage visual hooks, use emotional triggers and optimize images based on prior usage. Hypnotic attention destroys absorptive attention.
This second type of attention characterized fascism. Fascists manufactured a kind of ersatz aura: branding the leader or Führer as an artist, redefining the state as a work of art, and launching aestheticized spectacles, parades, monumental architecture, ceremonies, newsreels, posters and staged folk events. By instrumentalizing ritual values, they engineered a new form of mass psychology: ‘the mass looking itself in the face’. In the rapture of parades, warrior images and other spectacles, they gave the masses not their rights, noted Benjamin, but the chance to express themselves. Trump, today, is another obvious example of a highly developed generator of images – tweets, gold leaf, public works, wars – who insists we pay attention only to him, and who offers no answering gaze.
Given that absorption enriches our inner world, and hypnotic attention eviscerates it, one might think that Benjamin valued the first form of attention and denigrated the second, but that is not the case. In fact, he welcomed the destruction of aura as the distinguishing mark of the modern world. During the Renaissance, he claimed, the aura had been reborn as the cult of beauty and thereby became linked to such concepts as ‘genius’, ‘eternal value’ and ‘mystery’. To dispel such concepts was to dispel bourgeois superiority. His model, in this respect, was Brecht, whose aim was to transform the theatre from a temple into a political rallying point. Benjamin also lauded ‘destructive’ artists such as the Dadaists, who sought to degrade the artistic aura and with it the ‘traditional image of humanity – ceremonious, noble, decked out’.
The consequences of technical reproducibility, furthermore, were by no means predetermined. The printing press, which superseded unique, hand-copied books, led to the rise of the novel, which is exemplary of absorption, but also to what Benjamin called ‘information’ – meaning fragmented and decontextualized news, exemplary of Erlebnis, disassociated or transient sensation. In his essay Benjamin was defending the avant-garde against the cultural politics of the French Popular Front, which held that culture was more important than material progress and that communism was breaking down the barriers that had cordoned off the aura, reserving art to a privileged elite. In other words, Benjamin was seeking emancipatory possibilities, not following a schema.
In the disintegration of the aura, Benjamin discerned Zerstreung, generally translated as ‘distraction’ but better thought of as ‘dispersal’ or ‘scattering’. Rather than the opposite of attention, as James suggested, Benjamin saw it as a third type of attention: ‘the ability to register stimuli, to think and act in non-linear, associative ways, to process information casually, in a state of free-floating attention’. One expression of free-floating attention was the flaneur who takes in the cinematic montage of the passing city. Another, Benjamin thought, was the spectator of film (in his time, silent) – the first truly aura-less art, democratic and experimental, like sport in that it made everyone an expert. Free-floating attention is not the ‘confused, dazed, scatterbrained’ state of which James wrote. Most likely, the phrase is taken from Freud’s writings on analytic technique where it is also translated as ‘evenly suspended attention’ or ‘evenly hovering attention’. Freud’s idea was that the therapist or analyst must drop all preconceptions and ‘listen’ with his or her unconscious. This is free association, which also occurs in daydreaming, while doing crossword puzzles, or when trying to remember where we left something. Benjamin was looking not for his keys but for poetic images, images that present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and he took from Freud the idea that these images formed when experience entered the mind by bypassing consciousness, in other words, without attention – a possibility James missed.
Benjamin’s typology of attention helps complicate the idea of the attention economy, arguably the leading phenomenal form of capitalism in our day. It allows us to distance ourselves from the relentless onward march of artificial intelligence without nostalgia or Luddite prejudice. It allows us to appreciate the achievements of the past without deferring to its authority. It opens us to the new forms of consciousness that have emerged with modern science and technology. It opens us, in other words, to the unconscious understood in its collective dimension, which includes a storehouse of images. It is notable, in this regard, that Benjamin is often described as a Jewish thinker, but while the heart of Rabbinic Judaism is the distinction between religion and magic, Benjamin took the notion of aura from the Kabbalah, a heterodox version of Judaism marked by belief in magic. The word has the same root as ‘image’, meaning to influence or exert power.
Read on: Walter Benjamin, ‘By the Fireside’, NLR 96.
Forms of Attention
by Eli Zaretsky, Sidecar/New Left Review (12/06/2026)
In recent years the concept of attention has garnered considerable – well – attention. It has become, we are told, a commodity within the ‘attention economy’, a limited resource over which advertisers, social media companies, streaming services and the like struggle. Though the idea has become increasingly prominent in the age of the internet and smartphones, our interest can be traced back further. Especially since the 1960s, the hypertrophy of images and screens, taking place against the backdrop of an ever-expanding market, has been eroding, or at least transforming, our collective life – familial and communal relations, the natural and built environment, cultural production and reception. Today we are faced with a further leap in the form of AI. According to a recent article by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, this heralds ‘an age of extinction’.
‘The digital age’, Douthat writes, ‘takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen’. Once we were absorbed by novels and great dramas; today we have Netflix. Once we had face-to-face conversations; today we text. Once we had liberal arts universities; today we have ‘smart’ classrooms. Perhaps most telling, once sexuality was arguably the closest we came to the sacred in secular life; today we have pornography and dating apps. In every case, we have replaced something more difficult and satisfying with something more titillating, accessible and often stupefying. As with climate change, it sometimes seems we have passed the point of no return. In the search for new and ever more exciting forms of distraction, we may be destroying the bases for meaningful life.
To comprehend a cultural explosion of this magnitude we must look more closely at what attention is. A classic definition was provided by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890):
James’s definition is brilliant, but it is not adequate to our contemporary predicament, and the study of attention since has been largely quantitative and utilitarian. For an alternative, we might turn to the thought of Walter Benjamin. Unlike James, Benjamin did not theorize attention in general, but developed a historical account which assumed that psychological capacities like attention, as well as the stimuli to attention, change as technology and other forces of production change. He did all of this as part of a theory of capitalism, and with a view of its relevance for the Left.
Benjamin first became interested in attention as a young man through his reading of Pascal, who argued that the ills that beset the modern world could be traced to the inability of men and women to sit alone, calmly, in their rooms. The cause of their restlessness, their need for entertainment (divertissement, generally translated as ‘distraction’), was that they were not comfortable with themselves, not at home in their own nature. Pascal had a remedy for this: Christianity, or rather Jansenism, a Puritan version of Catholicism. Since Pascal’s time, however, the need for divertissement, far from being remedied, has become the driving force behind fashion, entertainment, social media and consumerism – and in easy coexistence with Christianity.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin’s first book, drew deeply on Pascal. Benjamin claimed that the medieval communal order presented suffering and transience as stations on the road to salvation, while early modern Trauerspiel was taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition. The plays exemplified divertissement: forgettable melodramas, marked by violent bombast, theatrical props and machinery, and crude rhetorical fireworks. Benjamin, however, interpreted them not as diversions but as allegorical messages left behind from a time of catastrophe. This was a precursor to the account of attention found in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935), as well as his various essays on the storyteller, Kafka, Dada, photography, surrealism and hashish.
In these writings, Benjamin distinguishes three forms of attention, which might be termed absorption, hypnotic attention and free-floating attention. Absorption rests on the concept of ‘aura’ or emanation, defined as ‘the unique appearance or semblance of a distance’. Familiar to anyone who has studied the visual arts, as he did, the idea draws on two parameters that are at the centre of painting: distance and light. This has ancient roots. Benjamin called aura the ‘wellspring of poetry’, ‘an archaic element in our present selves, a forgotten trace of our material bond with nonhuman nature’.
The prerequisite for aura is something concrete, unique and located at a particular point in space and time. Benjamin uses the term in relation to idols, relics, cathedrals and works of art. The authenticity of a unique object, he wrote, ‘is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’. Stories and wisdom might also possess aura in the sense that they are retold person to person and thus possess the traces of the tellers, just as pots retain the handprints of the potter. Even nature can command absorption in the sense of aura. ‘What is aura actually?’, he asked:
Our attention to these objects, he claimed, is dialogic. ‘Inherent in the gaze . . . is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed’. The aura establishes distance, not to precipitate awe but to make contemplation or self-reflection possible. Prayer is an example of this form of attention. When we pray, we surrender, as captured in the Arabic word Islam, but at the same time God answers us. There is an expansion of inner space.
For Benjamin this is very different from the hypnotic attention we pay to mass reproduced images. The spread of reproducible images typically takes place as part of a process that is destroying traditional institutions and objects; substituting for them some newly exciting, fascinating or captivating objects; and centralizing and coordinating the substitutes into new, unexpected forms of anonymous power, such as surveillance and the panopticon. In Benjamin’s words, ‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence’. Hypnotic attention to this profusion is addictive, as we know from algorithms that leverage visual hooks, use emotional triggers and optimize images based on prior usage. Hypnotic attention destroys absorptive attention.
This second type of attention characterized fascism. Fascists manufactured a kind of ersatz aura: branding the leader or Führer as an artist, redefining the state as a work of art, and launching aestheticized spectacles, parades, monumental architecture, ceremonies, newsreels, posters and staged folk events. By instrumentalizing ritual values, they engineered a new form of mass psychology: ‘the mass looking itself in the face’. In the rapture of parades, warrior images and other spectacles, they gave the masses not their rights, noted Benjamin, but the chance to express themselves. Trump, today, is another obvious example of a highly developed generator of images – tweets, gold leaf, public works, wars – who insists we pay attention only to him, and who offers no answering gaze.
Given that absorption enriches our inner world, and hypnotic attention eviscerates it, one might think that Benjamin valued the first form of attention and denigrated the second, but that is not the case. In fact, he welcomed the destruction of aura as the distinguishing mark of the modern world. During the Renaissance, he claimed, the aura had been reborn as the cult of beauty and thereby became linked to such concepts as ‘genius’, ‘eternal value’ and ‘mystery’. To dispel such concepts was to dispel bourgeois superiority. His model, in this respect, was Brecht, whose aim was to transform the theatre from a temple into a political rallying point. Benjamin also lauded ‘destructive’ artists such as the Dadaists, who sought to degrade the artistic aura and with it the ‘traditional image of humanity – ceremonious, noble, decked out’.
The consequences of technical reproducibility, furthermore, were by no means predetermined. The printing press, which superseded unique, hand-copied books, led to the rise of the novel, which is exemplary of absorption, but also to what Benjamin called ‘information’ – meaning fragmented and decontextualized news, exemplary of Erlebnis, disassociated or transient sensation. In his essay Benjamin was defending the avant-garde against the cultural politics of the French Popular Front, which held that culture was more important than material progress and that communism was breaking down the barriers that had cordoned off the aura, reserving art to a privileged elite. In other words, Benjamin was seeking emancipatory possibilities, not following a schema.
In the disintegration of the aura, Benjamin discerned Zerstreung, generally translated as ‘distraction’ but better thought of as ‘dispersal’ or ‘scattering’. Rather than the opposite of attention, as James suggested, Benjamin saw it as a third type of attention: ‘the ability to register stimuli, to think and act in non-linear, associative ways, to process information casually, in a state of free-floating attention’. One expression of free-floating attention was the flaneur who takes in the cinematic montage of the passing city. Another, Benjamin thought, was the spectator of film (in his time, silent) – the first truly aura-less art, democratic and experimental, like sport in that it made everyone an expert. Free-floating attention is not the ‘confused, dazed, scatterbrained’ state of which James wrote. Most likely, the phrase is taken from Freud’s writings on analytic technique where it is also translated as ‘evenly suspended attention’ or ‘evenly hovering attention’. Freud’s idea was that the therapist or analyst must drop all preconceptions and ‘listen’ with his or her unconscious. This is free association, which also occurs in daydreaming, while doing crossword puzzles, or when trying to remember where we left something. Benjamin was looking not for his keys but for poetic images, images that present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and he took from Freud the idea that these images formed when experience entered the mind by bypassing consciousness, in other words, without attention – a possibility James missed.
Benjamin’s typology of attention helps complicate the idea of the attention economy, arguably the leading phenomenal form of capitalism in our day. It allows us to distance ourselves from the relentless onward march of artificial intelligence without nostalgia or Luddite prejudice. It allows us to appreciate the achievements of the past without deferring to its authority. It opens us to the new forms of consciousness that have emerged with modern science and technology. It opens us, in other words, to the unconscious understood in its collective dimension, which includes a storehouse of images. It is notable, in this regard, that Benjamin is often described as a Jewish thinker, but while the heart of Rabbinic Judaism is the distinction between religion and magic, Benjamin took the notion of aura from the Kabbalah, a heterodox version of Judaism marked by belief in magic. The word has the same root as ‘image’, meaning to influence or exert power.
Read on: Walter Benjamin, ‘By the Fireside’, NLR 96.