Short Attention Spans: two essays on attention & resistance in the digital landscape

Julia Bell | Radical Attention | Peninsula Press | 2020 | 128 Pages

Legacy Russell Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto | Verso | 2020 | 192 Pages

Julia Bell’s Radical Attention is a text rooted in lockdown thinking. While it doesn’t explicitly focus on the events of 2020, its approach — especially in its examination of attention in the digital age — constitutes an apt response to a year in which experiences of time and routine were shattered like no other. A year in which many of us had the time and space to consume information in a more sustained way, but little of the mental capacity to do so. 

In her wide-ranging but concise book-length essay, Bell opens up critical pockets of anxiety, love, and violence and allows the reader to form her own (mis)connections. Published by London-based Peninsula Press, “Radical Attention” is the latest installment in a series of pocket essays (named for their physically small proportions) by the outfit, who also run East London’s influential Burley Fisher bookshop. Focusing mostly on academic and non-fiction texts, the series has also produced works by Olivia Sudjic and Katherine Angel. “Exposure,” by the former, focuses on the intersection of feminism and anxieties surrounding the public self. The latter’s “Daddy Issues” is a critical look at the pop-cultural figure of the father. Leaning heavily on gender and new technologies, Radical Attention feels like a complimentary fit.

Throughout Radical Attention, Bell understands that there is an anxiety in gaps. In fact, the text is rife with them. Opening with an epigraph by Iris Murdoch calling for “a new vocabulary of attention,” Bell then takes us to San Francisco in the present day, describing an incident that later went viral: a man is fatally shot while nearby passengers stare blankly at their phones. In under 150 words, Bell has already set up a framework in which the imaginative coincides with the catastrophic. You get a sinking feeling that you know where this is going next.

What follows is an essay written as if in adjacent browser tabs, made up of short vignettes from all facets of digital culture. They refer to and away from each other with the fervour of obsessive but distracted browsing. From a Wikipedia page which documents the accidental deaths that have occurred while people take selfies, to the sinister depths of Incel forums, the online locations where Bell sources her information are of as much importance as their content. Drawing heavily on writer Simone Weil's theory of love as a form of attention, she depicts this love in a multitude of ways: sometimes personal and intimate, sometimes possessive and toxic.

Much of what Bell details we might feel we have read before: that Google knows too much about how we spend our time, that we are unhealthily obsessed with rolling news, that toxic masculinity is bad. What is critically different about Bell’s approach is how she triangulates the contemporary moment with the personal conditions of attentiveness and love. There’s a passage which illustrates her approach:

Incels have a strange relationship with love. On the face of it, they seem like disaffected Marxists. They have decided they are actors in a dating market and the distribution of resources has been unfairly stacked against them. However hard they labour, they will always be undone by their lack of capital. The question is: how have they come to the idea that dating is a market? They are so thoroughly indoctrinated by free market capitalism that they can’t understand a relationship between two people that isn’t transactional. By definition, love — and by extension via Weil, attention — is labour, and looks are capital. Once we’ve been sold the idea that our attention is labour, how can we learn to love in any other way?

This is a powerful passage that might leave us wanting to pursue this line of conceptual thinking, but of course Bell’s is a text of fragments and gaps. It moves laterally through subject matter, onto the racism inherent in artificial intelligence and Chinese state censorship of LGBT forums. Again, as readers, we feel we may be tab-browsing.

Legacy Russell’s text Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto dwells on similar themes, reimagining the “error” of the glitch as a space in which to imagine alternative ways of being; Russell suggests that “liberation can be found in the fissures between gender, technology and the body.” Like Bell, Russell is deliberately leaning into her form, but instead of the long-form essay, she uses the tropes of the political manifesto to bring to light narratives of marginalised digital identities. Like “Radical Attention,” “Glitch Feminism” is an internet text, bringing together references and anecdotes from visual art, cultural theory, and popular culture, creating a commonplace of resistance.

“fuck / the whole muthafucking thing” is one such artifact. It’s an extract from a 1986 poem by Etheridge Knight called “Feeling Fucked Up” and it’s one of a series of literary and visual epigraphs to the text. The poem is a desperate cry of longing, in which a heartbroken speaker calls for the destruction of “the sea and trees and the sky and birds” as well as “democracy and communism” and “god jesus and all the disciples.” The speaker, in their anguish, reduces the physical, spiritual, and political worlds to the same thing — something which only serves to remind them of their torment. In this place of desperation, the speaker feels the need to literally rip up everything and start again. Glitch Feminism has a similarly dismissive attitude to the AFK (“away from keyboard,” or “real life”) world as is.

Russell uses a vocabulary of virtual and absent bodies, viruses, things which permeate. “As glitch feminists, we want to ghost the binary body,” she writes, using “ghost” in the contemporary sense: a disengagement from all communication. “Glitch is anti-body,” Russell explains in a later chapter, “resisting the body as a coercive cultural and structural architecture.”

At times, it feels as if the idea of the glitch is nothing more than a catch-all for adjacent ideas about digital identity and resistance. For example: “The glitch-becoming is a process, a consensual diaspora toward multiplicity that arms us as tools, carries us as devices, sustains us as a technology, while urging us to persist, survive, stay alive.” Russell’s manifesto feels most engaging when it is dealing with the digital ephemera of the sort of feminism it describes. Passages analysing the virtual social media influencer Lil Miquela, “foundational refusal” within the work of contemporary artist E. Jane, and the “embodied criticism” of radical art critics The White Pube, for instance, feel like righteous celebrations of the glitch.

Both Radical Attention and Glitch Feminism are responsive texts, in the truest senses. Physically pocket-sized and deliberately punchy in style, they cut through the white noise of a year spent, for many, over-exposed but under-engaged. The two texts circle each other as they consider, uncompromisingly, who gets ignored first when we begin to lose focus, and how best we can exploit those blind spots as a means of reclamation.