Slow movements—across food, cities, science, scholarship and more—call attention to embodied processes of building and maintaining collective life that resist the fast-paced efficiency models, rapid rewards, and short attention spans that increasingly seem to dominant human responses to 21st century social, political, and ecological challenges. As the accelerated pace of machine and computing time collides with evolutionary, celestial, and deep time, the Center for 21st Century Studies hopes to highlight how interdisciplinary humanities research can help us understand what humans are in time with, and how human pace is attuned.
This spring, our programming will center thought leaders whose work explores our collective unmooring from, or hopeful reintegration with, the cyclical, ecological, and social forces that once structured human activity. Get ready for a scholar who writes about the impact of climate change on Indigenous ways of life, workshops designed by attention activists, park-specific poetry, quick podcasts about slow topics, and an essayist who writes about gods, humans, animals, and machines.
To get you into a slow state of mind, C21 will be releasing media recommendations now through early spring. Our weekly Slow Digest will deliver three-ish recommendations per week, curated around a particular slow topic. Some editions of the Slow Digest will feature essays, insights, and annotations from C21 staff and stakeholders.
This week, we’re focusing on a fundamental prerequisite for the act of knowing: attention. Below are a selection of cardinal texts that informed our understanding of what it might mean to know slowly, to do and act slowly, and why that matters in our seemingly endless loop of daily urgencies.
Slow Digest: Attention
Danielle Allen and Jeffery Brown, “The Humanities and the Rise of the Terabytes”
This discussion was part of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences’ 2111th Stated Meeting. It includes remarks from Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and a conversation between Allen and arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown that explored the practical uses of the humanities, strategies for demonstrating their importance, and their place within current political and cultural conflicts.
Allen’s opening remarks ground humanities scholarship in the context of Allen’s lived experience; she recounts a transformational class on Athenian democracy that she attended in her Sophomore year at Princeton. Studying ancient Greek history created a framework for Allen to better understand the broader arc of history, of human life, and the particular segment that she happened to inhabit.
Allen’s formative experience should sound familiar to anyone who works in the humanities. Paying close attention to the construction of human realities really changes the way you understand your own. It gives you perspective. It makes you a better critical thinker, equipped to parse and contextualize complex problems, and ultimately think about yourself in relation to other people. The prerequisite for this revelation, however, is the ability to pay attention to anything at all.
Allen argues it is now the task of humanities educators to help people navigate the flood of “cultural content” produced by our contemporary media environments. Her call to action is, however, a hopeful one:
“I have a hunch that if we are to put this problem of attention at the center of what we are asking the humanities to do right now, we might find a huge appetite for the work of the humanities. We might change the dynamics we see on college campuses and in other contexts, where the practice of the humanities seems to be slipping away.”
You can read a full transcript of Allen and Brown’s conversation here.
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Without offering easy answers, contemporary artist Jenny Odell explores what it means to do nothing in a milieu wherein human worth is equated with action. Odell clarifies the stakes in the book’s very first sentences:
“Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent.”
The book is well worth reading cover-to-cover, but if you’re looking for a quick introduction, you can check out Odell’s talk at the 2019 XOXO festival.
The Ezra Klein Show: Your Mind is Being Fracked
Our final recommendation is an episode of The Ezra Klein Show, a podcast produced by the New York Times. In “Your Mind is Being Fracked,” Ezra Klein interviews D. Graham Burnett, a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, about his research on the history of our understanding, and exploitation, of human attention.
Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us.
A little after 45 minutes into the podcast, as Klein and Burnett discuss how we might realign our priorities to value human flourishing over financial optimization, Burnett says something that really encapsulates Slow Knowing as a topic, especially as it relates to C21’s work as an interdisciplinary humanities center:
“I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities is a training of attention, and partially that is why we have to hold on and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education, because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. That’s part of the reason it’s getting increasingly exterminated from universities–it’s because you can’t monetize it. But I say all that because interpretation, or meaning, is so inextricable from the labor of attention.”
C21 will bring facilitators from the Strother School of Radical Attention to Milwaukee this May to explore the labor of attention and its power as the locus of meaning-making, lived experience, and shared values. You can enjoy a workshop teaser at the 55-minute mark, when Ezra Klein says, “So I bet a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity…”
Do the deep listening activity.
Then, definitely pay attention to upcoming editions of Slow Digest for recommendations for further slow reading, teaching, thinking, doing, and, of course, knowing.