Twelve Theses on Attention

The Twelve Theses on Attention emerged out of a week-long retreat at Mildred's Lane in the Summer of 2019.  They represent the work of more than two dozen Friends, all of whom shared in days of debate, drafting, and discussion. The Theses were the basis of a set of short films cut together in 2020 for the Glasgow International. Click here to listen to the Glasgow International's podcast episode about the work of the Friends of Attention generally, and the Twelve Theses in particular.

“True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable.” So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, written by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics—one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend.

It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously “frack” our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer.

The book is richly illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.

ISBN: 9780691239828

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Editors: D. Graham Burnett

Other Editors: Stevie Knauss and The Friends of Attention

Reviews:

Cooperman “How to Get Our Attention Back - Common Reader.” Common Reader, 6 Sept. 2022, https://commonreader.wustl.edu/how-to-get-our-attention-back/.