Attention, Openness and Ecological Attunement

Abstract

This chapter translates Whitehead’s metaphysical results into existential implications, with Deleuze and Guattari’s work considered as one example. Attention is implicated in both of Whitehead’s forms of passage: the concrescence of actual occasions and the global passage of nature, thus arguing that attention is ontological in consequence and function. This requires further exploration of Whitehead’s conception of “society”. For Whitehead, societies as repeatable patterns of events tend either towards creative response to changing conditions (open) or limiting responsiveness to such conditions in the interest of conformity (closed). The chapter reads Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous “lines of flight” as closely resonant, though they additionally consider potential prescriptive recommendations towards intensifying affective capacity. However, the structure of becoming renders efforts to extract stable normative representations of such recommendations paradoxical. The chapter concludes with critical discussion of this paradox in the context of statistical norms and algorithmic data-mining, arguing that one stake of attention is resisting such closed loops in the interest of creative alternatives.