WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.060 Okay, everybody. Hi, I'm Maggie Corst. I'd like to welcome you to this session 2 00:00:06.060 --> 00:00:14.800 with Professor Stephen Muecke on the art of paying attention. So just to introduce Stephen, 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:20.840 Professor Stephen Muecke is the Jury Chair of English Literature and Language and Literature 4 00:00:20.840 --> 00:00:25.140 at the University of Adelaide. He's a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. 5 00:00:25.140 --> 00:00:30.700 Stephen has long worked with Indigenous people and his current research involves ethnographic 6 00:00:30.700 --> 00:00:40.280 documentation of the Gullaraboo Baloo country north of Broome, Western Australia. I have had 7 00:00:40.280 --> 00:00:46.460 the privilege of looking at a paper that basically describes the talk that Stephen will give and it's 8 00:00:46.460 --> 00:00:52.320 incredibly interesting. It's the art of paying attention, so I know that you'll be paying close 9 00:00:52.320 --> 00:00:55.120 attention to his talk. So can I introduce you to Stephen? 10 00:00:57.740 --> 00:01:03.220 Thanks, Maggie. I'm working on this topic with colleagues at the University of Adelaide. 11 00:01:03.720 --> 00:01:11.840 And the other day I was walking to work on this very project and I looked down at my feet and I 12 00:01:11.840 --> 00:01:18.040 had one green shoe and one black shoe. So now you're wondering why has a dingbat like this got 13 00:01:18.040 --> 00:01:24.160 a spot at the Festival of Ideas? With my colleagues we're looking at various ways in which the 14 00:01:25.140 --> 00:01:30.720 idea of paying attention crosses different fields. So it could be the ways in which people 15 00:01:31.300 --> 00:01:37.600 closely read a poem or the ways in which they attend to animals, if they're an animal wrangler 16 00:01:37.600 --> 00:01:42.340 for the movies or something, or the way Indigenous people pay attention and care for country. 17 00:01:42.600 --> 00:01:46.680 So we can't cover all those topics but this is just to say that maybe I should have called 18 00:01:46.680 --> 00:01:51.200 the talk the arts of paying attention because they're all different sets of techniques. 19 00:01:51.860 --> 00:01:53.640 Here we have Heather Heyer. 20 00:01:55.140 --> 00:01:56.580 As you've heard from the talk, Heather was very outraged you're not paying attention. 21 00:01:56.900 --> 00:02:03.080 This was her last post on FB. Apparently the last post before going out to the Charlottesville 22 00:02:03.080 --> 00:02:08.020 rally in Virginia where she was mown down and killed by that white supremacist. 23 00:02:08.220 --> 00:02:12.500 Her boss Alfred A. Wilson at the law firm where she worked paid tribute to her. 24 00:02:13.340 --> 00:02:17.520 Heather was a very strong woman, he said. She stood up against any type of discrimination. 25 00:02:18.120 --> 00:02:19.740 That's just how she's always been. 26 00:02:20.440 --> 00:02:23.460 He often used to find her at her computer crying. 27 00:02:23.460 --> 00:02:27.780 crying. And he said, Heather being Heather has seen something on Facebook or read something in 28 00:02:27.780 --> 00:02:34.100 the news and realised someone has been mistreated and gets upset, he said. So Heather's a very strong 29 00:02:34.100 --> 00:02:39.780 woman, but she cries a lot. She was paying attention and she was outraged, but maybe because 30 00:02:39.780 --> 00:02:45.360 she paid too much attention, she couldn't protect a little corner of bliss in her soul. Her mother, 31 00:02:45.440 --> 00:02:51.480 Susan Brough, B-R-O, understanding the media, vowed that her death would not be in vain because it 32 00:02:51.480 --> 00:02:56.900 would be amplified. And it was, in the usual manner of young white deaths sucked into a powerful 33 00:02:56.900 --> 00:03:04.820 political vortex. A foundation was set up. Now, a strong language warning. It goes on. Spike Lee has 34 00:03:04.820 --> 00:03:11.080 made the event into the coda of his new movie, Black Klansman. Black Klansman is based on the 35 00:03:11.080 --> 00:03:16.680 unlikely but true story of a black police officer who managed to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. 36 00:03:17.440 --> 00:03:19.940 So this is Spike Lee speaking at the 37 00:03:20.580 --> 00:03:21.140 Khan 38 00:03:21.140 --> 00:03:21.460 Festival. 39 00:03:21.480 --> 00:03:51.460 I was at the Khan Film Festival fairly recently. Right away, I knew that this had to be the coda for the film, but I had to do something first. I was given Susan Brough's phone number. She's the mother of Heather Hayer, who got murdered when that car came crashing down the street. I was not going to put that murder scene in the film without her blessing. Mrs Brough said, Spike, I give you permission to put that in. Once I got permission, I said, fuck everybody else, that motherfucking scene is staying in the motherfucking movie, because that was a murder scene. 40 00:03:51.460 --> 00:04:20.460 And we have this, we have a guy in the White House, I'm not going to say his fucking name, who defined that moment not just for Americans, but for the world. And that motherfucker was given the chance to say, we are about love, not hate. And that motherfucker did not denounce the motherfucking Klan, the outright, and those Nazi motherfuckers. It was a defining moment. And he could have said to the world, not just the United States, that we were better than that. Spike Lee is focusing attention on, I'm not going to say his fucking name. 41 00:04:21.460 --> 00:04:31.960 A figure also analysed as the great distractor from what is really going on. A perfect distractor for those of us who like to season our political analysis with a pinch of paranoia. 42 00:04:32.380 --> 00:04:46.840 Anna Tsing. I like this book of Anna Tsing, where she has the phrase, patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages. It's kind of obscure, but it's in a chapter called The Arts of Noticing, which of course I took notice of. 43 00:04:47.080 --> 00:04:51.340 And yet, Trump again, only a couple of weeks after he clowned around shooting. 44 00:04:51.460 --> 00:04:55.820 Shooting with his fingers at an NRA rally. There's yet another school massacre. 45 00:04:56.260 --> 00:05:03.380 I shouldn't be talking about these things that are so far away, but even in Australia, we're part of the assemblage that Anna Tsing's talking about. 46 00:05:03.640 --> 00:05:09.920 I could also apologise for being a white middle class person with the privilege of responsibility. 47 00:05:11.040 --> 00:05:16.860 Many others without pathways to responsibility have no choice but indifference to these kinds of events. 48 00:05:17.260 --> 00:05:20.480 Fancy that. Not entitled enough to be outraged. 49 00:05:20.480 --> 00:05:25.740 No right to pay attention. Draw too much attention to yourself and you might get deported. 50 00:05:26.180 --> 00:05:28.640 But let's go to Paris, because I want to give you another example. 51 00:05:29.280 --> 00:05:31.640 I'm going to jump from one thing to another in this talk. 52 00:05:31.880 --> 00:05:38.180 You won't get the linear arc of the long overall argument, because I've been thinking about attention from a number of angles. 53 00:05:38.360 --> 00:05:48.320 I'll attend to it with stories, anecdotes, always conscious that specific ecologies of attention are composed of much more than the mere thread of language. 54 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:49.760 Anyway, Paris. 55 00:05:49.760 --> 00:05:49.940 Paris. 56 00:05:50.320 --> 00:05:52.080 With John Berger. 57 00:05:52.440 --> 00:05:55.540 Who strikes me as an artist with intense paying attention skills. 58 00:05:56.200 --> 00:05:59.820 Listen to him describe this scene in his last book, Confabulations. 59 00:06:00.360 --> 00:06:04.120 Eight o'clock on a summer evening in a metro train heading for a Parisian suburb. 60 00:06:04.620 --> 00:06:08.200 There are no empty seats, but the standing passengers are not crammed together. 61 00:06:08.780 --> 00:06:14.540 Four men in their mid-twenties are standing in a group near the sliding doors on the right hand side of the coach. 62 00:06:14.720 --> 00:06:17.980 The doors which don't open when the train is running in this direction. 63 00:06:18.680 --> 00:06:19.740 One of the group is back. 64 00:06:19.760 --> 00:06:20.580 The other is black to a white. 65 00:06:20.640 --> 00:06:22.560 And the fourth is perhaps Maghrebian. 66 00:06:22.840 --> 00:06:25.080 I'm standing at quite a distance from them. 67 00:06:25.460 --> 00:06:30.980 What first caught my attention was their very visible connivance and intensity of their conversation and storytelling. 68 00:06:31.280 --> 00:06:35.680 The four, virile masculine, are casually but scrupulously dressed. 69 00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:40.880 What they look like, their appearances, would seem to matter to them even more than to most men of their age. 70 00:06:41.360 --> 00:06:42.860 Everything about them is alert. 71 00:06:43.160 --> 00:06:44.520 Nothing is hangdog. 72 00:06:44.720 --> 00:06:48.560 The Maghrebian is wearing loose blue shorts and spotless Nikes. 73 00:06:48.560 --> 00:06:52.060 The black man has cornrows the colour of sandalwood. 74 00:06:52.380 --> 00:06:54.200 All four are virile and masculine. 75 00:06:54.660 --> 00:06:56.720 The train stops and a few passengers get out. 76 00:06:56.980 --> 00:06:59.000 I can move a little closer to the quartet. 77 00:06:59.880 --> 00:07:02.660 Each intervenes frequently in the recital of each of the others. 78 00:07:03.120 --> 00:07:06.280 There are no monologues, but equally nothing seems to be an interruption. 79 00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:09.100 Their fingers, very mobile, are often near their faces. 80 00:07:09.580 --> 00:07:11.720 Suddenly it dawns on me that they are stone deaf. 81 00:07:12.480 --> 00:07:15.300 It was their fluency which prevented me from seeing this before. 82 00:07:16.260 --> 00:07:18.280 Curious, isn't it, that he profiles race. 83 00:07:18.280 --> 00:07:18.640 Literally. 84 00:07:19.320 --> 00:07:22.560 Others, maybe much younger people, might register race, 85 00:07:22.720 --> 00:07:26.940 but not seek to express racial difference because it's supposed not to matter. 86 00:07:27.420 --> 00:07:30.120 Then, suddenly, something happens and it matters. 87 00:07:30.280 --> 00:07:34.740 When an unintentional coordination sets something in motion. 88 00:07:35.320 --> 00:07:38.380 But Berger, writing, sketching, thinking, always thinking, 89 00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:40.800 pays attention intensely without judgement. 90 00:07:41.260 --> 00:07:44.040 It's like a fine-tuned ethnographic attitude 91 00:07:44.040 --> 00:07:46.940 in which the writing expects to be surprised 92 00:07:46.940 --> 00:07:48.580 by some new kind of real. 93 00:07:48.840 --> 00:07:52.800 New kind of real being the perception of their deafness. 94 00:07:53.120 --> 00:07:55.400 My friend Michael Taussig, the anthropologist, 95 00:07:55.480 --> 00:07:58.940 talks about the cunningly rendered detail in writing 96 00:07:58.940 --> 00:08:06.360 in his new book called Palma Africana about the oil palm. 97 00:08:06.720 --> 00:08:09.440 The cunningly rendered detail can, on occasion, 98 00:08:09.700 --> 00:08:13.800 sneak through the defences we erect so as to keep reality from disturbing us. 99 00:08:14.280 --> 00:08:16.260 So, for the writing to be attentive, 100 00:08:16.260 --> 00:08:18.900 it has to keep inventing its own vulnerability. 101 00:08:19.900 --> 00:08:22.400 This is a long way from the banal way of paying attention, 102 00:08:22.400 --> 00:08:26.580 the banal way paying attention is conceived of as declining, 103 00:08:26.780 --> 00:08:29.420 as some kind of cognitive impairment. 104 00:08:29.880 --> 00:08:31.800 We only use 20% of our brains. 105 00:08:31.960 --> 00:08:35.480 With this new technique, folks, you can mobilise 50% more. 106 00:08:36.340 --> 00:08:38.740 The snake oil salesmen of the psyche industry 107 00:08:38.740 --> 00:08:42.480 has joined forces with the time and motion productivity merchants 108 00:08:42.480 --> 00:08:45.860 in the hopeless business of trying to keep people paying attention 109 00:08:45.860 --> 00:08:47.220 to the task at hand, 110 00:08:47.860 --> 00:08:50.660 while filtering out what they think is environmental noise. 111 00:08:51.400 --> 00:08:53.160 Some call this the attention economy. 112 00:08:54.800 --> 00:08:57.620 Parents, some of them, are caught up in a moral panic 113 00:08:57.620 --> 00:08:59.640 about their kids and screen time. 114 00:08:59.920 --> 00:09:02.920 They try to joke about the difficulty of getting the child 115 00:09:02.920 --> 00:09:05.620 to break suction and come to the dinner table. 116 00:09:06.120 --> 00:09:09.380 Others, more sanguine, bring the iPad to restaurants 117 00:09:09.380 --> 00:09:12.200 to distract their kids while they attend to their own enjoyment. 118 00:09:12.560 --> 00:09:13.740 In this case, chips. 119 00:09:14.060 --> 00:09:15.720 And, of course, you know about the ADHD. 120 00:09:15.860 --> 00:09:18.940 The ADHD epidemic taking off in the 1990s. 121 00:09:18.960 --> 00:09:20.140 What was that all about? 122 00:09:20.400 --> 00:09:22.760 It might have kicked off as a perfect little storm 123 00:09:22.760 --> 00:09:24.200 generated by a number of factors. 124 00:09:24.540 --> 00:09:27.940 A narrowing of the bandwidth of acceptable classroom behaviour. 125 00:09:28.800 --> 00:09:30.440 Distractions of new online media. 126 00:09:30.880 --> 00:09:34.240 Feedback swirling in and among school psychologists 127 00:09:34.240 --> 00:09:35.620 and medical institutions. 128 00:09:35.980 --> 00:09:39.260 The aggressive marketing of Ritalin by pharmaceutical companies. 129 00:09:39.780 --> 00:09:41.820 The belief that for humans, 130 00:09:41.940 --> 00:09:44.740 the brain carries out executive functions. 131 00:09:44.800 --> 00:09:45.460 I kid you not. 132 00:09:45.860 --> 00:09:46.300 I don't use those words. 133 00:09:46.640 --> 00:09:50.000 Another belief that medicalising individual brains 134 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:51.860 is a good way of keeping that classroom behaviour 135 00:09:51.860 --> 00:09:53.340 within manageable limits. 136 00:09:53.700 --> 00:09:57.900 In 2014, 11% of children in the US were diagnosed 137 00:09:57.900 --> 00:10:00.740 with this condition that didn't really exist two decades before. 138 00:10:01.160 --> 00:10:04.100 And now the marketing of the drug globally ensures 139 00:10:04.100 --> 00:10:06.160 that millions of other children will be caught up 140 00:10:06.160 --> 00:10:09.540 in this weird machinery that's a configuration and assemblage 141 00:10:09.540 --> 00:10:12.240 of these heterogeneous factors. 142 00:10:12.540 --> 00:10:15.100 Industries, institutions, concepts, 143 00:10:15.100 --> 00:10:17.120 beliefs and cultures. 144 00:10:17.440 --> 00:10:20.020 Did anyone ask if the deficit of attention in classrooms 145 00:10:20.020 --> 00:10:21.780 might have something to do with a lack of interest? 146 00:10:22.120 --> 00:10:26.440 Or that a classroom is an ecosystem that's much more than 147 00:10:26.440 --> 00:10:30.360 just 30 odd brains in 30 active bodies? 148 00:10:30.920 --> 00:10:32.320 I'll come to ecology later. 149 00:10:32.480 --> 00:10:33.920 But first the question of interest, 150 00:10:34.020 --> 00:10:35.640 which is not just a glib, you know, 151 00:10:35.660 --> 00:10:38.260 why can't the teacher be more interesting and less controlling? 152 00:10:38.760 --> 00:10:40.780 The generation of interest is itself interesting. 153 00:10:41.280 --> 00:10:44.940 Any good teacher knows that you can't get the attention of students 154 00:10:44.940 --> 00:10:47.940 with force and it can't simply be turned on. 155 00:10:48.440 --> 00:10:52.300 The capacity for pupils to pay attention is amplified enormously 156 00:10:52.300 --> 00:10:55.420 if they already have some interest in the matter at hand. 157 00:10:55.680 --> 00:10:58.040 The first great psychologist on the subject of attention, 158 00:10:58.240 --> 00:10:59.740 William James, wrote in 1890, 159 00:11:00.440 --> 00:11:03.140 the more interest the child has in advance of the subject, 160 00:11:03.300 --> 00:11:04.620 the better he will attend. 161 00:11:04.980 --> 00:11:06.500 Attention is mediated. 162 00:11:07.220 --> 00:11:10.480 Interest, which the word interest comes from the Latin 163 00:11:10.480 --> 00:11:13.540 inter-esere, to being in between. 164 00:11:14.360 --> 00:11:14.920 Interest is mediated. 165 00:11:14.940 --> 00:11:15.820 Interest is about relations. 166 00:11:16.060 --> 00:11:17.060 But what kinds of relations? 167 00:11:17.600 --> 00:11:19.600 I want to try to reconfigure the landscape, 168 00:11:19.680 --> 00:11:23.200 the conceptual landscape that gives us our understanding of attention. 169 00:11:23.740 --> 00:11:26.420 This involves taking it away from brains and psychology 170 00:11:26.940 --> 00:11:28.820 and towards environments and ecology. 171 00:11:29.580 --> 00:11:33.320 My argument will be that being able to attend to our own survival 172 00:11:33.320 --> 00:11:35.660 or just getting by with some kind of enjoyment 173 00:11:35.660 --> 00:11:38.760 is all about caring for our own nurturing environments. 174 00:11:39.080 --> 00:11:42.660 And these are complex, delicate and multi-species things. 175 00:11:43.340 --> 00:11:44.360 Consider two examples. 176 00:11:44.940 --> 00:11:48.220 An indigenous tracker sees things in the environment 177 00:11:48.220 --> 00:11:49.720 that the rest of us fail to notice. 178 00:11:50.280 --> 00:11:53.800 And I don't think this is at all a matter of a specialised psychology, 179 00:11:54.360 --> 00:11:58.680 but a matter of intergenerational attunement in a particular world. 180 00:11:59.100 --> 00:12:03.080 Noticing one thing may also depend on being attuned to many others. 181 00:12:03.200 --> 00:12:07.040 The sun, the wind and the way finches flock in that part of the country. 182 00:12:07.460 --> 00:12:10.320 So what interests me and my colleagues at the University of Adelaide 183 00:12:10.320 --> 00:12:12.580 is the challenge to describe this kind of skill 184 00:12:13.120 --> 00:12:14.160 and what makes it, 185 00:12:14.160 --> 00:12:17.240 and find out what makes it actually still surprisingly useful 186 00:12:17.240 --> 00:12:18.280 in the current world. 187 00:12:18.840 --> 00:12:20.300 Another quite different example. 188 00:12:20.600 --> 00:12:24.100 A visitor to an unfamiliar city bent over her smartphone 189 00:12:24.100 --> 00:12:26.680 to use an app to find a well-reviewed café 190 00:12:26.680 --> 00:12:28.980 nearly steps in front of a moving car. 191 00:12:29.380 --> 00:12:32.700 Attention in this case might be impractically distributed 192 00:12:32.700 --> 00:12:35.120 between worlds that are near and far. 193 00:12:35.680 --> 00:12:37.740 It's a complex network of attention 194 00:12:37.740 --> 00:12:41.360 crafted by both human and non-human agents, 195 00:12:41.660 --> 00:12:43.760 including computer programs and algorithms. 196 00:12:44.340 --> 00:12:47.200 So we're also interested in understanding the new skills 197 00:12:47.200 --> 00:12:49.660 that are needed to navigate the different kinds of attention 198 00:12:49.660 --> 00:12:52.220 distributed through these new modalities. 199 00:12:52.560 --> 00:12:53.980 Now I want to tell you a story about, 200 00:12:54.660 --> 00:12:59.080 a story that illustrates attention in a more multi-species environment. 201 00:12:59.740 --> 00:13:03.260 Imagine you're reading by the fire in an isolated farmhouse 202 00:13:03.260 --> 00:13:05.060 with only your dog for company. 203 00:13:05.300 --> 00:13:08.900 He's lying at your feet on the rug, perhaps sleeping. 204 00:13:09.280 --> 00:13:11.840 Then he growls softly and you say to yourself, 205 00:13:11.840 --> 00:13:13.940 ah, there must be a car coming up the drive. 206 00:13:14.300 --> 00:13:16.980 Then he gets up, goes to the window and starts barking urgently. 207 00:13:17.180 --> 00:13:18.200 And you speak to him. 208 00:13:18.500 --> 00:13:20.260 Nero, Nero, who is it? 209 00:13:20.380 --> 00:13:21.720 A car you don't recognise? 210 00:13:23.100 --> 00:13:24.920 Then you start to hear the sound of the motor, 211 00:13:24.980 --> 00:13:26.700 something he'd heard a good minute earlier. 212 00:13:27.140 --> 00:13:30.860 You part the curtains and see headlights flashing against the dark trees. 213 00:13:31.140 --> 00:13:34.060 You start to wonder who could be visiting this late at night. 214 00:13:34.280 --> 00:13:35.420 We're not expecting anyone. 215 00:13:35.920 --> 00:13:37.560 It's starting to become a horror story. 216 00:13:38.760 --> 00:13:40.900 But that's not what interests me. 217 00:13:42.180 --> 00:13:46.060 I'm interested in the particular multi-species configuration that's enacted. 218 00:13:46.360 --> 00:13:50.700 The human capacity to hear is extended by the dog's sharper hearing, 219 00:13:50.880 --> 00:13:55.500 and in this case by his acute capacity to distinguish familiar sounds from strange ones. 220 00:13:56.000 --> 00:13:57.800 By enlisting the help of animals and plants, 221 00:13:57.900 --> 00:14:02.200 humans extend their capacities to hear, see, smell, even think. 222 00:14:02.420 --> 00:14:06.960 A walk in the bush with a dog is more enjoyable because of what he might notice, 223 00:14:07.680 --> 00:14:10.400 and it's safer because he could easily find his way home 224 00:14:10.400 --> 00:14:11.760 should you lose your way. 225 00:14:11.840 --> 00:14:16.080 There are large numbers of examples of animal-specific capacities being used 226 00:14:16.080 --> 00:14:19.080 to extend the envelope of the human sensorium. 227 00:14:19.640 --> 00:14:22.240 Canaries' greater sensitivity to poisonous gas, 228 00:14:22.660 --> 00:14:25.340 sniffer dogs in discos or minefields, 229 00:14:25.380 --> 00:14:29.860 flocks of finches telling Wollmagerry people in the Western Desert where water lies, 230 00:14:30.120 --> 00:14:31.440 falconry for hunting, 231 00:14:31.640 --> 00:14:34.240 the famous horse, Clever Hands, 232 00:14:34.580 --> 00:14:38.500 Paul the octopus, who could predict the results of the Football World Cup. 233 00:14:39.440 --> 00:14:41.400 Where is Paul when we need him today? 234 00:14:41.400 --> 00:14:47.000 So there's a field of animal studies that's been very busy reviving such stories 235 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:49.400 of multi-species and intersubjective coexistence, 236 00:14:50.180 --> 00:14:52.380 including the whole history of domestication, 237 00:14:52.460 --> 00:14:54.540 where words like harnessing and husbandry 238 00:14:54.540 --> 00:14:59.120 kind of might lose their metaphorical association and go back to their function. 239 00:15:00.180 --> 00:15:03.440 Anyway, all that just to say that humans were never on their own. 240 00:15:03.780 --> 00:15:08.640 But the history of modernisation is also a story of humans trying to be on their own, 241 00:15:08.700 --> 00:15:10.980 and a kind of machine versus animal, if you like. 242 00:15:10.980 --> 00:15:13.400 People, for instance, in an early motor car, 243 00:15:13.520 --> 00:15:18.680 laughing at the farmer in a cart when his horse bolts after the car backfires. 244 00:15:18.980 --> 00:15:22.520 And the counter story as the farmer deigns to stop and help 245 00:15:22.520 --> 00:15:24.920 a few miles down the road after the car had broken down. 246 00:15:25.600 --> 00:15:30.760 Modernisation was an enthusiastic effort to strengthen the culture-nature division, 247 00:15:30.980 --> 00:15:35.640 what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the great bifurcation of nature, 248 00:15:35.800 --> 00:15:39.180 so that humans could do everything on their own, or so they thought. 249 00:15:39.380 --> 00:15:40.960 So when it's a case of seeing the future, 250 00:15:40.980 --> 00:15:44.960 it's better telescopes and microscopes are developed as extensions of the eye. 251 00:15:45.380 --> 00:15:46.180 And they work. 252 00:15:46.600 --> 00:15:48.740 The results have been those breathtaking achievements 253 00:15:48.740 --> 00:15:52.460 that are the very pinnacle of Western civilisation, as they say. 254 00:15:52.860 --> 00:15:55.640 But I want to stress that these achievements are not just the results 255 00:15:55.640 --> 00:15:58.360 of a process of extraction from nature, 256 00:15:58.980 --> 00:16:02.000 from the raw materials that are refined, machined and recomposed 257 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:03.840 to produce a beautiful telescope, 258 00:16:04.020 --> 00:16:06.760 so that the telescope can sit there on its pinnacle 259 00:16:06.760 --> 00:16:09.980 and tell us about our position in the universe forevermore. 260 00:16:10.980 --> 00:16:13.500 If you shift your attention from what the object is 261 00:16:13.500 --> 00:16:16.740 to what the process of maintaining it as it is, 262 00:16:16.900 --> 00:16:19.720 then its apparent autonomy begins to falter. 263 00:16:19.820 --> 00:16:24.680 Its continued existence as an object is dependent on its immediate and extended environment. 264 00:16:25.100 --> 00:16:28.920 And the continued existence of the facts that it demonstrates 265 00:16:28.920 --> 00:16:32.400 is also dependent on its immediate and extended environment. 266 00:16:33.200 --> 00:16:37.600 Climate scientists who used to celebrate their neutrality from politics 267 00:16:37.600 --> 00:16:40.720 have found this out the hard way over the last few years. 268 00:16:40.980 --> 00:16:44.480 And have to take to the streets to defend their institutions, 269 00:16:44.820 --> 00:16:46.500 their environments that keep their facts alive. 270 00:16:46.940 --> 00:16:51.180 In other words, the simplest and most complex things are embedded in ecologies 271 00:16:51.180 --> 00:16:54.080 which can enhance their life trajectories or not. 272 00:16:54.700 --> 00:17:00.860 A telescope in this sense is almost not unlike a rabbit or a tree. 273 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:03.900 Its existential logic is reproductive. 274 00:17:04.300 --> 00:17:05.500 It wants to keep going. 275 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:08.980 It's a precondition for giving birth to better telescopes. 276 00:17:09.240 --> 00:17:10.500 But it can't do this. 277 00:17:10.980 --> 00:17:11.280 It can't do this by itself. 278 00:17:11.840 --> 00:17:14.140 Let's go back to the classroom for a moment 279 00:17:14.140 --> 00:17:15.780 as I switch to another topic 280 00:17:15.780 --> 00:17:20.400 so that I can tell you another story told to me by Coral Umara Edwards 281 00:17:21.040 --> 00:17:24.740 in a discussion of her Aboriginal Solutions project a few years ago 282 00:17:25.280 --> 00:17:28.560 where she told me a story outlining a particular Aboriginal philosophy 283 00:17:28.560 --> 00:17:31.620 she calls goyangu, a way of being. 284 00:17:31.940 --> 00:17:33.560 I'll paraphrase what she said. 285 00:17:34.440 --> 00:17:38.160 She said, I've developed a program for Catholic education for little children. 286 00:17:38.280 --> 00:17:40.100 It's based on the principle that we have 287 00:17:40.100 --> 00:17:43.400 a connection with places, with any kind of place really. 288 00:17:43.700 --> 00:17:47.540 We go through these places we're used to visiting. 289 00:17:47.660 --> 00:17:48.620 We pass through. 290 00:17:48.780 --> 00:17:53.660 We camp in the lee of a hill, always going to the same place for fishing or whatever. 291 00:17:54.120 --> 00:17:58.140 All this presence modulated by absence establishes a sense of connection. 292 00:17:58.380 --> 00:18:01.560 Eventually we might address these presences in the place 293 00:18:02.100 --> 00:18:04.540 with the places we've become familiar as we approach, 294 00:18:04.760 --> 00:18:08.220 saying something like, hello, only us mob coming up. 295 00:18:08.320 --> 00:18:09.980 Okay, if we camp here again, 296 00:18:10.100 --> 00:18:14.120 so this is a way of establishing relations with a place 297 00:18:14.120 --> 00:18:17.300 that could be extended to other kinds of places, even classrooms. 298 00:18:17.960 --> 00:18:20.440 Children might be encouraged to perform a little ceremony 299 00:18:21.100 --> 00:18:22.740 to change each time they enter a place, 300 00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:25.240 to modify their behaviour at the threshold. 301 00:18:25.480 --> 00:18:27.560 They might be induced to address the room. 302 00:18:28.020 --> 00:18:31.460 Hello, my name is Tommy. Is it okay if I spend a year with you here? 303 00:18:31.700 --> 00:18:35.660 The point being that this is long before the didactic element is introduced, 304 00:18:35.820 --> 00:18:38.600 long before the child is introduced to the word respect. 305 00:18:38.600 --> 00:18:42.360 And then she imagines that what if all children were brought up in this way 306 00:18:42.360 --> 00:18:47.160 or if they have the same attitude when, as teenagers, they get into cars. 307 00:18:47.700 --> 00:18:50.420 So in Coral's example of the approach to place, 308 00:18:50.620 --> 00:18:54.000 the children keep in mind that the place has a prior existence 309 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:56.300 and history of its own long before they show up. 310 00:18:56.740 --> 00:19:00.080 Their arrival and its impact are considered as additions to the place. 311 00:19:00.480 --> 00:19:03.720 In establishing a relationship, they acknowledge the prior existence 312 00:19:03.720 --> 00:19:06.360 of a context they now seek to become part of, 313 00:19:06.420 --> 00:19:08.320 and perhaps this performed ethic, 314 00:19:08.600 --> 00:19:12.800 opens into sensations such as seeing the place in a different way, 315 00:19:12.940 --> 00:19:15.000 which is another way of attending to it. 316 00:19:15.260 --> 00:19:18.440 This is reinforced by anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, 317 00:19:18.600 --> 00:19:20.560 who wrote a paper called Taking Notice, 318 00:19:20.780 --> 00:19:24.220 talking about Aboriginal cosmologies incorporating 319 00:19:24.220 --> 00:19:27.000 a non-human being-centred view of the world, 320 00:19:27.140 --> 00:19:29.200 which of course tends to be ecological. 321 00:19:30.160 --> 00:19:34.360 Man is not just one living thing among plants, animals, 322 00:19:34.500 --> 00:19:36.240 even the inanimate environment. 323 00:19:36.240 --> 00:19:40.040 They are all established through connection, through kinship. 324 00:19:40.240 --> 00:19:43.200 So in the narrow skin of atmosphere that the Earth provides, 325 00:19:43.560 --> 00:19:45.760 humans and non-humans are all in it together 326 00:19:45.760 --> 00:19:48.660 and attending to each other more or less. 327 00:19:48.960 --> 00:19:51.900 We're all on the alert, like this goalkeeper, 328 00:19:52.040 --> 00:19:53.840 for danger and opportunities. 329 00:19:54.280 --> 00:19:55.780 That's what our senses are for. 330 00:19:56.160 --> 00:19:58.000 But not just physical senses. 331 00:19:58.200 --> 00:19:59.560 There are also intelligent calculations 332 00:20:00.240 --> 00:20:02.080 and strange things we call intuition. 333 00:20:02.560 --> 00:20:05.200 The Ngarrindjeri down south call it miwi, 334 00:20:05.200 --> 00:20:06.700 a kind of gut feeling. 335 00:20:07.220 --> 00:20:10.700 This may be more of a, actually a kind of social feeling, 336 00:20:10.940 --> 00:20:12.220 a collective attunement. 337 00:20:12.380 --> 00:20:14.300 And it may be an art that can be cultivated 338 00:20:14.300 --> 00:20:16.960 by paying attention to one's elders, 339 00:20:17.140 --> 00:20:18.480 not pestering them with questions, 340 00:20:18.620 --> 00:20:21.000 but just being there and seeing lives unfold 341 00:20:21.000 --> 00:20:22.820 in their mutual entanglements. 342 00:20:23.240 --> 00:20:24.620 Now I have to get a bit critical. 343 00:20:24.880 --> 00:20:28.740 I've argued that attention's not about a brain-world relationship, 344 00:20:28.920 --> 00:20:31.800 but is all about immersion in living ecologies. 345 00:20:32.160 --> 00:20:35.020 But it's the former that is promoted by mainstream. 346 00:20:35.200 --> 00:20:37.720 It's mainstream economies that seek to keep us on task 347 00:20:37.720 --> 00:20:39.380 to the point that attention itself 348 00:20:40.200 --> 00:20:41.640 has become the prized resource. 349 00:20:42.100 --> 00:20:43.980 In an economy that runs on scarcity, 350 00:20:44.220 --> 00:20:48.080 it isn't commodities and information that we're short of, 351 00:20:48.220 --> 00:20:49.400 it's attention spans. 352 00:20:49.880 --> 00:20:52.720 And billions are spent in the advertising industry 353 00:20:52.720 --> 00:20:55.220 on the rhetoric to capture our attention. 354 00:20:55.980 --> 00:20:58.100 This is the narrow road of attention 355 00:20:58.100 --> 00:21:00.600 that mainstream researchers also occupy. 356 00:21:01.680 --> 00:21:04.920 Matthew, reading a paper by a poet, Matthew Bevis, 357 00:21:04.920 --> 00:21:09.000 I was struck by him saying that last year, I'm quoting, 358 00:21:09.420 --> 00:21:11.920 MIT Press published The Distracted Mind, 359 00:21:12.100 --> 00:21:13.620 in which the co-authors, 360 00:21:13.660 --> 00:21:16.780 a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, 361 00:21:16.860 --> 00:21:18.940 offered strategies for changing our behaviour 362 00:21:18.940 --> 00:21:21.040 so that we might function more successfully, 363 00:21:21.280 --> 00:21:24.200 quote, in our personal lives on the road, in classrooms, 364 00:21:24.300 --> 00:21:26.460 and last but not least, in the workplace. 365 00:21:26.760 --> 00:21:30.020 The book concluded with the hope that, quote, 366 00:21:30.060 --> 00:21:34.060 a neuro-crossfit training program, whatever that is, 367 00:21:34.060 --> 00:21:36.620 might soon be developed to minimise distractions. 368 00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:40.080 But for the poet, Bevis argues, distraction is productive. 369 00:21:40.600 --> 00:21:43.120 There'll be no poetry without gazing out of the window. 370 00:21:43.420 --> 00:21:44.960 And he quotes Roland Barthes, 371 00:21:44.980 --> 00:21:46.980 Roland Barthes, the famous French critic. 372 00:21:48.520 --> 00:21:51.880 I think Roland Barthes really likes to be with his mother. 373 00:21:52.080 --> 00:21:53.160 She's the one he loves. 374 00:21:53.400 --> 00:21:55.720 Or an even earlier Frenchman, Denis Didor, 375 00:21:55.880 --> 00:21:58.160 who, back in the 18th century, said, 376 00:21:58.240 --> 00:22:01.060 distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, 377 00:22:01.260 --> 00:22:03.720 which allows the ideas to strike against, 378 00:22:04.060 --> 00:22:05.260 or reawaken one another. 379 00:22:05.660 --> 00:22:08.300 It's the opposite of that stupor of attention, 380 00:22:08.500 --> 00:22:11.120 which merely rests on or recycles the same idea. 381 00:22:11.400 --> 00:22:13.340 So it seems we might need both, 382 00:22:13.540 --> 00:22:15.440 alternating attention and distraction, 383 00:22:15.740 --> 00:22:18.040 like we alternate wakefulness and sleep. 384 00:22:18.260 --> 00:22:20.560 But attention doesn't just take one form. 385 00:22:20.800 --> 00:22:22.320 It isn't just a brain mechanism. 386 00:22:23.040 --> 00:22:26.280 I think it's a set of arts that can be cultivated, as you do. 387 00:22:26.380 --> 00:22:29.560 When students train to be, for instance, biologists, 388 00:22:30.360 --> 00:22:32.700 they learn to attend to the world in a particular way, 389 00:22:32.780 --> 00:22:34.040 sorting the relevant from the unknown. 390 00:22:34.060 --> 00:22:35.800 They can't be irrelevant for their discipline. 391 00:22:36.540 --> 00:22:38.380 It's a basic condition for knowledge production. 392 00:22:39.180 --> 00:22:41.740 If the student then specialises in botany, 393 00:22:41.920 --> 00:22:43.580 she'll pay less attention to animals. 394 00:22:44.420 --> 00:22:46.160 The zoologist does the opposite. 395 00:22:46.320 --> 00:22:48.160 But they can't afford to be too focused, 396 00:22:48.320 --> 00:22:51.280 because new knowledge will enter through the door of distraction. 397 00:22:51.940 --> 00:22:53.720 As Whitehead said about nature, 398 00:22:54.580 --> 00:22:57.620 we are instinctively willing to believe that by due attention, 399 00:22:57.880 --> 00:23:00.960 more can be found in nature than that which is observed at first sight, 400 00:23:01.060 --> 00:23:03.000 but will not be content with less. 401 00:23:04.320 --> 00:23:08.960