Tiziana Terranova – The Bios of Attention

Some notes from Tiziana Terranova’s keynote:

Attention has started to figure prominently in debates around the ‘digital’ economy and it is clear from the various essays being published around various inter-related discourses that ‘attention’ has become a key theme.  There is an argument that there is a new ‘abundance’ that is derived and produced by the ‘digital’, by virtue of the ability to (re)produce without extra labour and to trade without loss, which has been figured as the basis of a new economy.  However, this constructs problems.  If information is abundant then it can be reduced to being ‘valueless’.  The solution to this problem apparently came in the guise of the ‘digital’ responses to the international credit crisis through the harnessing of the labour potential of the ‘user’ and the surplus value which users produce in ‘web 2.0′.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

This has become a ‘regime of truth’ following Foucault, which is ‘the types of discourse it [a society] accepts and makes function as true’.  Attention has started acting as a counter-force to labour power.  Goldhaber suggested that the sum total of human attention is intrinsically limited and thus becomes scarce.  The ‘Attention Economy’ is thus a system that revolves primarily around paying, receiving, and seeking what is most intrinsically limited and not replaceable by anything else, namely the attention of other human beings.  Accordingly, attention has been figured as a ‘good’, a commodity, which can be traded.  By attention economy we are talking about the system of exchange.

One of the ways in which the attention economy impacts as an economic force is because it effects motivation – ‘the patterns of effort and motivation that shape of our lives’, according to Goldhaber.  These patterns and motivations are changing.  Following Foucault, this modern Homo Economicus is a ‘subject of interest’ – an inherently calculative being, always assessing and calculating the worth and value of information.  For Terranova, the corollary to this is recent neuro-scientific research into how new technics are emerging as biological affordance, which ties together neuro-science and economics.

Before the 1960s attnetion was nmeasured through easy-to-measure senses like vision and hearing, however modern scientific research into the brain has developed new techniques for measuring the activity of the brain.  This has been characterised by three elements. The Bios of Attention for neurosciences is:

a) Neuroplasticity – or the changing brain

b) Brain imaging – or the brain in action

c) Mirror cells – or the the mimetic brain

This has been addressed by a number of commentators. Nicholas Carr weaves together neuroscientific arguments around the brain with discourses about the value of attention.  Carr argues that the use of new media rewires the neurological pathways of the brain, such that multi-tasking and browsing enscribes a shift of activity in the brain.  Exposure to new media implies a remodelling of activity in different types of brains, for Carr.  The use of new media shapes indivudual brains, making them faster at multiple tasks but poorer at ‘deep’ attention.  For Carr, new media has a cost for the brain.  Following this arguement, every time there is a shift in attention there is a biological cost for the brain.  According to Carr’s argument therefore, there is a sense in which the industry consumes the consumer.  Following Stiegler, these forms of attention is the third limit to the capitalist economy the ‘libidinal’ limit, as the limit of biological potency. In the web 2.0 economy there is a need to revitalise the consumer/producers’ attention, but there is an ambivalence to its value.

The idea of the mirror brain challenges the economic subject figured in the previous argument.  The idea of paying attention makes you vulnerable to the ‘outside’, following Goldhaber your attention can be driven and mediated.

The attention eoconmy is older than ‘new’ media, according to Beller, cinema was an early ways of entraining the means of production – following arguements from the Franfurt school.  Beller called this the ‘attention theory of value’, elaborated in Marx’s theory of value – the prototype of the newsr soruce of value production inder capitalism: value-producing human attention.  This is the translating mechanism between ‘attentional bio-power’ (its conversion into value and surplus value) to capital (Beller – The Cinematic Mode of Production).  This element of subjectivity has become the focus of economic discourse.

We can, however, shift focus to the perspective of Maurizio Lazarrato on immaterial labour, following Gabrielle Tarde.  Tarde is used by Lazarrato:

‘Tarde’s theory proposes a positive construction of a general theory of the creation and constitution of values from which economic value depends… Tarde wants to integrate use value (economic value), truth value (cognitive activity), beauty value (aesthetic activity) within a new social science in order to extract political economy “from its majestic and discouraging isolation” (Puissances de l’invention)

Tarde critiqued Marx’s theory of production such that attention is theorised in the context of value being produced through association, such that humans produce associations by sharing.  Attention is figured as the ‘will’ of the brain, it is an expression of an ontological force expressed through the brain and its memory.  Its genealogy is material since its needs nothing more than the brain and the memory – its labour is nothing less than the labour of attention.  Tarde also distinguishes between three different types of actions carried out by the brain-memory, such as willing, believing and feeling, that produce what Tarde defined as social quantities, that is desires, beliefs and affects.

Attention has been figured as a scarcity that can be exchanged but also as a biological capacity.  It has been addressed both economically and neuro-scientifically. It cannot be detached from its subjective source.  We need to attend to the life of the brain to revitalise the value of culture and the social such that it is not on the periphery of the understanding of the attention economy but at its heart.

Attention is an opening to the outside.  This encounter is managed in relation – the subject is co-constitutive of attention between brain, body and the myriad of connections in which we are networked.

In conclusion, Tiziana Terranova suggests attention does not simply indicate the effort by which the individual brain works – as neuroscience seems to suggest – neither can it be reduced to a tradeable commodity.  Instead, and following Stiegler, attention is the process by which the production of value is inseparable from the production of subjectivity.  These are produced from the invention and diffusion of common desires, beliefs and affects.