[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

[Frazer Ward]

Bravo to Judith. As someone whose partner is pregnant, I can only add that in the particular circumstances the whole domestic/reproductive process generates a scattering of attention that is not at all productive in standard “work” terms.

Aside from that, I’m also struck by an aspect of the relation between participation and continuous partial attention. Briefly, participation is typically seen, in a positive light, as contributing to the generation of community or a sense of community. Belonging is a good thing – right?—even if you can only attend to it partially (reading or skimming, say, rather than posting: you are nonetheless “there”). But what if it isn’t? Isn’t the invitation to belong deployed almost universally across the media, and across the poitical spectrum? (Community in a bloodily archaic version is apparently about to be invoked, if it’s true that the Bush administration is about to ask “us” to “sacrifice,” in Iraq.) Perhaps continuous partial attention is actually the condition for  our witting and unwitting participation in a fractured and incoherent range of “communities” (or, in the worst case, niche markets). Which might mean that when we get a chance to think slowly about participation, we might have to conclude that participation needs to be rendered somehow structurally ambivalent about the invitations to which it responds. (Or, after the other Marx, we have to beware of any club that would have us as members.)  

Frazer  


Frazer Ward
Department of Art
Smith College
413 585 3124