When we talk about attention we tend to speak as if this faculty had no particular relationship to the activities of the body. This is not altogether surprising if we think about attention as the capacity to focus our thinking on a particular object. In this mode, attention is a strictly mental activity. We might even try to shut off sense experience—by closing our eyes, for example—in order to do it well. In this sense, attention becomes nearly synonymous with the activity of thinking itself. Or, alternatively, with prayer. It was Simone Weil who claimed that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

But this is not the only mode of attention. When we attend to the world beyond our head, to borrow a line from Matthew Crawford, we are doing so through the mediation of our perceptual apparatus: We are looking with our eyes, smelling with our noses, listening with our ears, feeling with our fingertips, or tasting with our mouths. In other words, attention discourse tends to make a mental abstraction out of an ordinarily embodied practice. This accords with how most of us think about attention. I’m not suggesting that attention is anything less than this, only that we might improve our understanding of what is happening when we attend to the world if we also attend to what our senses are up to when we do so. And, Ivan Illich can help us think more clearly along these lines.

Let us consider a proposal Illich wrote for David Ramage, who was then president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. What I’m calling a proposal, Illich titled “ASCESIS. Introduction, etymology and bibliography.” The short seven-page document, written in 1989, details a plan for a five-year sequence of lectures that Illich wanted to deliver on the role ascetic disciplines might play in contemporary higher education. The proposed courses would each take up a focal point of bodily sense experience. To my knowledge, these lectures were never delivered. Nonetheless, the proposal remains instructive.

Illich was not calling for a return to the old ascetic disciplines we might associate with earlier monastic traditions, for example. “The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century,” Illich explained, “is something profoundly different from any previously known.” Nor is it a specifically religious mode of asceticism that Illich has in mind. In his view, the tradition he is reviving and re-working includes pagan philosophers as well as monastic scholars.

“Learning presupposes both critical and ascetical habits; habits of the right and habits of the left,” Illich claimed. He added: “I consider the cultivation of learning as a dissymmetrical but complementary growth of both these sets of habits.” It wasn’t immediately obvious what Illich meant by habits of the right and the left, but in the same paragraph he goes on to mention “habits of the mind,” or the critical habits celebrated and cultivated in the humanist tradition of learning, and the consequent neglect of the “heart’s formation.”

“I want to explore the demise of intellectual asceticism as a characteristic of western learning since the time it became academic,” Illich went on to explain. “In this historical perspective,” he continued, “I want to argue for the possibility of a new complementarity between critical and ascetical learning. I want to reclaim for ascetical theory, method and discipline a status equal to that the University now assigns to critical and technical disciplines.”

Illich’s proposal from 1989 seems all the more relevant thirty years later. Confronted with the challenges of information superabundance, a plague of misinformation and digital sophistry, the collapse of public trust in traditional institutions, and algorithmically manipulated feeds, the “solutions” proffered, such as increased fact checking, warning labels, or media literacy training, seem altogether inadequate.

From Illich’s perspective, we might say that they remain exclusively committed to the habits of the mind or the critical habits. What difference might it make for us to take Illich’s suggestion and consider the ascetic habits or habits of the body, holistically conceived? Might we do better to think about attention not as a resource that we pay or squander at the behest of the attention economy and its weaponized digital tools but rather as a bodily skill that we can cultivate, train, and hone?

To explore these questions, let’s walk through parts of two other pieces by Illich, “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show” and “To Honor Jacques Ellul.” The former is one of the last things Illich wrote just two years before his death in 2002. It is a 50-page distillation of his research in the cultural history of visual perception or the ethics of the gaze. The latter was, as the title suggests, a brief 1993 talk given in honor of the great critic of modern technology whose work had deeply informed Illich’s perspective. During this period of his thinking, Illich had grown concerned with the way the gaze was captured or trapped by what he termed “the show.” Illich used “show” to distinguish the object of perception from the image, which had played such a critical if evolving role in traditional western philosophy and religion. At one point, he puts the question he wants to address this way:  “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?”¹ A question that, I suspect, still resonates today.

So what exactly was the show? I’m tempted to say that we can think of it simply as what we take in when we glance at any of our screens. I don’t think Illich would disagree with that assessment, but that’s obviously not a very helpful definition, and it’s clear that Illich thought the show was a broader phenomenon. The truth is that it is difficult to precisely pin down what Illich had in mind, but we can at least fill out the concept a bit more.

Illich says at one point that “the distinction between image and show in the act of vision, though subtle, is fundamental for any critical examination of the sensual ‘I-thou’ relationship. To ask how I, in this age and time, still can see you face-to-face without a medium, the image, is something different from asking how I can deal with the disembodying experience of ‘your’ photographs and telephone calls, once I have accepted reality sandwiched between shows.”²

Here, two things are clear. Illich is striving to preserve the possibility of “seeing” the person before our eyes, and the show, as he understands it, the pervasive field of technological mediations that shape our perception of the other threatens to obscure our ethical vision. Further on in the paper Illich writes, “I argue that ‘show’ stands for the transducer or program that enables the interface between systems, while ‘image’ has been used for an entity brought forth by the imagination. Show stands for the momentary state of a cybernetic program, while image always implies poiesis. Used in this way, image and show are the labels for two heterogeneous categories of mediation.”³

My sense, deriving from the passing reference to cybernetics, is that the distinction between the image and the show tracks with the distinction, critical to Illich’s later work, which he drew between the age of instruments and the age of systems. While I don’t think that Illich rigorously developed this distinction anywhere in writing, one key element involved the manner in which the system, as opposed to the mere instrument, enveloped the user. It was possible to stand apart from the instrument and thus to attain a level of mastery over it. It was not possible to likewise stand apart from the system. Which may explain why Illich concluded, “There can be rules for exposure to visually appropriating pictures; exposure to show may demand a reasoned stance of resistance.”⁴

Elsewhere he says that in our present media ecosystem our gaze is sometimes “solicited by images, but at other times it is mesmerized by show.”⁵ The difference between solicitation and mesmerization seems critical. It is in this context that he also writes, “An ethics of vision would suggest that the user of TV, VCR, McIntosh and graphs protect his imagination from overwhelming distraction, possibly leading to addiction.”⁶ Extrapolating a bit, then, and even taking the word show at face value, we might say that there was something dynamic and absorbing about the show that distinguished it from the image. Fundamentally, however, the danger posed by the show was that it abstracted human experience from the human body. Speaking of the emergence of the scopic regime of the show in the early nineteenth century, Illich concluded, “New optical techniques were used to remove the picture of reality from the space within which the fingers can handle, the nose can smell and the tongue can taste it, and show it in a new ‘objective’ isometric space into which no sentient being can enter.”⁷

“Guarding the Eyes in the Age of Show” is a long and scholarly article. Illich’s comments in honor of Jacques Ellul, delivered a few years earlier, cover much of the same ground in a more direct, urgent, and prophetic style. In one of the clearest statements of the concerns that were animating his work during this time, Illich declared that “existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality.”⁸ And, what’s more, “it is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.”⁹ What is evident here is that Illich wanted to defend a way of being in the world that took the body as its focal point.

As he made clear at the outset of “Guarding the Eyes in the Age of Show,” Illich undertook his examination of the history of visual perception in order to explore the ethics of the gaze and how “seeing and looking is shaped by personal training (the Greek word would be askesis), and not just by contemporary culture.”¹⁰ Or, as he also put it, “My motive for studying the gaze of the past is a wish to rediscover the skills of an ocular askesis.”¹¹ In other words, Illich invites us to consider what it might mean to discipline our vision, and I’m inviting us to consider whether this is not a better way of framing our relationship to the digital media ecosystem. The upshot is recognizing the additional dimensions of what is often framed as a merely intellectual problem and thus met with laughably inadequate techniques. Perceptual askesis would involve our body, our affections, our desires, and our moral character as well as our intellect.

The first step would be to recognize that vision is, in fact, subject to training, that it is more than the passive reception of sensory data. Looking, after all, can be distinguished from seeing. I might look at a painting, for instance, and fail to see it for what it is. The same is true of a landscape, a single tree, a bird, an elegant building, or, most significantly, a person. If my vision is trained by the show, will I be able to see the person before me, who may not match the show’s dynamic, mesmerizing quality? And, from Illich’s perspective, it is not only that I would fail to accord my neighbor the honor they are owed but that I would lose myself in the process, too. Eyes trained by the show would be unable “to find joy in the only mirror in which I can discover myself, the pupil of the other.”¹²

In fact, our vision is always being disciplined. Either it happens unwittingly as a function of our involvement with existing cultural structures and patterns, or we assume a measure of agency over the process. Illich’s historical work, then, denaturalizes vision in order to awaken us to the possibility of training our eyes. Our task, then, would be to cultivate an ethos of seeing or new habits of vision ordered toward the good. And, while the focus here has fallen on sight, Illich knew and we should remember, that all the senses can be likewise trained.

Illich’s call for an askesis of the senses becomes all the more urgent as technology companies, Facebook (Meta) most prominently, begin to push their vision of a metaverse, a realm in which human perception is submerged in layers of virtual representation, further detached from the immediacy of bodily experience. In these corporate metaverse fantasies, we float free from our bodies, all of our actions already pre-rendered as data with a view to a potentially infinite expansion of the commercial realm. In this realm, we surrender our common world to one all the more thoroughly mediated by proprietary technologies. As Marshall McLuhan warned nearly sixty years ago, “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”¹³ Perhaps we may resist this surrender by engaging in perceptual askesis, the new asceticism Illich describes.

Notes

1. Illich, “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” (2000), 3.
2. Ibid., 8 (footnote 23).
3. Ibid., (footnote 24).
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 22.
8. Illich, “To Honor Jacques Ellul” (1993), 4.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 3.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. Ibid.
13. McLuhan, Understanding Media (MIT Press: Cambridge Massachusettes, 1994), 68.