Welcome!

The Empty Cup: Dispatches on the Politics of Attention

Friends!

We are proud to announce the launch of The Empty Cup, the new flagship publication of the international coalition of “Attention Activists” known as the Friends of Attention, together with everyone at the Strother School of Radical Attention, our vanguard bricks-and-mortar home in Brooklyn, NY.

Who are we? Well, the Friends of Attention emerged back in 2018, in the wake of the “Practices of Attention” symposium at the opening of the Sao Paulo Biennial. There, several dozen artists and activists from around the world found common cause in what felt like an increasingly urgent mission: to fight back against “Human Fracking,” our expression for the heedless and destructive exploitation of the attentional resources of living persons.

And we have pursued that program ever since, in an expanding array of creative, critical, and collaborative projects: we drafted a manifesto, published a book, made a film, and, about two years ago, founded a full-on SCHOOL (where we have classes, free workshops, a gallery, and lots of other stuff). All of this, and other things too (like our regular summer “Politics of Attention” intensive, and our monthly organizing meetings, and our curricular initiatives), are run as NON-PROFIT activities, coordinated by the 501(c)(3) that supports our work: the Institute for Sustained Attention.

Over the last months, as we’ve expanded our programming and felt the lift of so many new collaborators and allies, we’ve realized we needed a new way to spread the word about all the good work that is being done by so many diverse and dedicated Attentionauts. We’ve realized there are so many of you out there with important things to say about our shared ambitions, tactics, and strategies. We want The Empty Cup to serve this fast-growing network, and function as a bulletin board, a newsletter, and rallying point for new ideas — not to mention classic texts and images that help us keep learning from our forefighters in the revolutionary resistance to the wholesale commodification of the essence of personhood and community, ATTENTION.

Why The Empty Cup? The title of our dispatch draws on a beloved passage from Henry James' novel, The Wings of the Dove. Scene: a busy doctor visits a bedridden woman sorely in need of care. What he offers her: "So crystal clean the great empty cup of attention he set between them on the table…” This lovely and open-ended metaphor — attention as an empty cup, between persons, waiting to be filled — has served our coalition as a sort of riddling provocation. What is attention, exactly? What does it consist of? How does it connect us? And what does it have to do with care?

These questions have deepened and widened our understanding of attention's powers, and have led us further into the sorts of shared inquiry that we believe are so urgently necessary at this uncertain moment. It's our hope that this publication will advance these conversations, and help us to share them… with you!

We hope you like the first issue, and do please send along your tips, your topics, and even your texts! We have to keep the revolution rolling!

D. Graham Burnett & Peter Schmidt