Attention as a Site of Resistance. Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Inner Origins of Freedom

In the last decade, the impact of social media on the public sphere of democratic societies has encouraged a debate on emerging new forms of manipulation of the public opinion. In a digital “regime of visibility”, what counts is not the ability to fabricate and disseminate claims, which is widely available, bur rather the capacity to orient the public’s attention towards specific claims over others. The social media are, in this sense, grand technologies of attention that train the gaze of an immense public and then resell it for commercial and political purposes. Populist movements, authoritarian leaders and conspiracy theorists have been particularly effective at exploiting these systems worldwide. Their communication is convenient to the inner workings of social media, as the populist style of simplification, emotionalization, and negativity operates in tune with the dopamine driven feedback mechanisms upon which these platforms rely and performs very efficiently in the kind of “attention economy” where experts and traditional information providers struggle. The concept of attention has a significant presence in Hannah Arendt’s and Simone Weil’s works, and it is noteworthy that in both authors it appears substantially, although differently, related to the origins of free agency. In Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God, Simone Weil famously presents the education of individual attention as a renunciation to the superficial illusions of will and choice to connect with a solitary and purified form of desire, a selfless and receptive disposition towards truth, beauty, and goodness. Attention thus generates a “non-acting action”, an elevated kind of individual agency that is detached from the fatal mechanisms of social idolatry and eludes the prejudices and reactions of the multitude. In Hannah Arendt’s thought, the concept of attention is less prominent, but nonetheless finds its way into late writings, especially The Life of the Mind. According to her analysis of Augustine, attention is the result of a special interaction between will and intellect through which the self comes to properly connect sensations and reality and to jointly understand past, present and future, thus escaping the incessant flow of fleeting impressions and desires. Significantly, this exercise of attention, envisioned by classical authors as best realized in thinking solitude, shapes the capacity of judgment that is crucial to resist the threat of thoughtlessness and the banality of evil it produces. In Responsibility and Judgment, Arendt observes that what Eichmann specifically lacked was, indeed, a “thinking attention”. Although the two perspectives differ in some relevant ways, I suggest they both frame a meaningful connection between the exercise of attention and the ability to resist against the evilness of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. For Weil, freedom is a form of supernatural love that delivers us from the pulls and fixations of superficial choice and reaction. For Arendt, freedom stems from the active exercise of our capacity of judgment. But for both, a suspension of attention coincides with the triumph of un-freedom and constitutes the premise of moral collapse and political tyranny. A lesson for our times, as it was for theirs.