Attention as the 'Light of the Soul'

a round-up of my favorite readings from attention class

This post is for paid slugscribers, who get access to my ongoing Critical ADHD Studies project, where I discuss academic readings and half-formed thoughts, inviting you to think through them with me. Follow along and support my work here:

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This month I took a class at the Strother School of Radical Attention, a non-profit founded by a group of artists, academics, and ‘attention activists’ who are focused on questioning the commodification of attention, developing practices for attending together, and creating ‘sanctuaries’ for what they call true attention. I want to touch on a few of my favorite readings from the class, and some thoughts I had about how they relate to ADHD.

These Friends of Attention, as they’re called, have outlined their thought so far in their Twelve Theses on Attention, a short document collectively created at an artists’ retreat in 2019 which defines true attention as something that ‘reveals the presence of others’ (very much vibing with Citton’s ‘learning to look where the other is looking’ that I wrote about recently).

They write:

“An attentional path is the trace left by a free mind. To submit to the attentional path of another, to retrace it, is a form of attention. Retracing the attentional path of a free mind is one of the keenest pleasures we can take in each other and in the world.”