Are we paying enough attention? Or the right kinds of attention? We are told that people suffer more than ever from deficits of attention (a word often thought about in economic metaphors) and from an impoverishment of its range and richness. But what are we doing when we are paying attention, and how do we describe its value? This conference started from the suggestions that powerful claims about attention link criticism to political and social theory and psychoanalysis and from the speculation that the conjunction of these disciplines yield new insights into the stakes of our attentions. View full video playlist.
FRIDAY, April 7, 2017
Panel 1 [Video]
Leo Bersani, University of California/Berkeley • “The Choreographed Cure”
Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University • “Creating and Dissolving: Attention, Stillness, and the Ephemeral in Ritual Life”
Moderator: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University
Panel 2 [Video]
David Russell,Oxford University • “Ruskin’s Vision”
Sergio Delgado, Harvard University • “Lygia Clark, At Home with Objects”
Moderator: Ourida Mostefai, Brown University
Panel 3 [Video]
Toril Moi, Duke University • “Language and Attention: Morality and Literature after Wittgenstein”
Nancy Yousef, City University of New York • “Unresolved: Attention and Form in Eliot and Wittgenstein”
Helen Small, Oxford University • “Particular Attention”
Moderator: Timothy Bewes, Brown University
Adam Phillips, Psychoanalyst/Writer • “On ‘Vacancies of Attention’” [Video]
SATURDAY, April 8, 2017
Panel 4 [Video]
Rita Felski, University of Virginia • “Getting It: Art and Attunement”
Matthew Bevis, Oxford University • “On Distraction”
Moderator: Leela Gandhi, Brown University
Panel 5 [Video]
Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania • “The Natural History of Attention”
Amanda Anderson, Brown University • “The Scale of Attention”
Moderator: Jacques Khalip, Brown University
Panel 6 [Video]
Bonnie Honig, Brown University • “‘ATTENTION!’ Or, Postures of Refusal: ‘Walking,’ Antigone, and The Bacchae”
Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University • “A Tension: White Deficit, Blackness and Disorder”
Moderator: Andre Willis, Brown University
Panel 7 [Video]
Minnie Scott, Tate Gallery • “Regimes of Attention in the Contemporary Art Museum”
Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University • “Stopping in the Woods of a Blurry Newsfeed—Getting Attention on Social Media When What You Have to Offer Isn’t Pictures of Puppies or Porn”
Moderator: Benjamin Parker, Brown University
This conference was co-organized by Amanda Anderson (Brown University) and David Russel (Oxford University), and co-sponsored by the Columbia University Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Brown in the World/The World at Brown, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.