LAUSR

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,”Henry David Thoreau writes inWalden (1854). In the century and a half since Thoreau withdrew to the Massachusetts woods, his thinking about modernity and mental life has become our common sense. Newmachines of work and play, so the story goes, are destroying our capacity to pay attention.We are always in touch but never really intimate, always moving but never in a natural rhythm. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” (W, p. 90). In his makeshift hermitage, Thoreau devised a therapy for himself, a secular asceticism to cultivate a higher wakefulness. When he walked in the countryside, he practiced what he called “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” (W, p. 108). When he read the classics, he devoted himself to “a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object” (W, p. 99). Like him, the distracted today turn to disciplines of attention, adapting the religious practices of older or distant societies to new situations that seem to have little to do with ritual or faith. Mindfulness training, transcendental meditation, regimens to sharpen our focus and extend our concentration—these are the spiritual exercises of our secular age. In the far-reaching program for the diagnosis and treatment of distraction, the critical humanities play their special part. After the triumphof newer media, under the empire of spectacle, the mode of attention associated with the study of paintings and books is said to enter a crisis. “This destruction of attention is disindividuation,” Bernard Stiegler writes, thinking of the