Attention and Drift

by Prasanta Chakravarty

[An excerpt from Attention and Drift: Santayana and Cavell in the Present (New Delhi, London, Oxford, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2025).]

In this book, we shall read attention differently: as a zone of immersion and a field of creative tension – in everyday practice, forging relationalities, being painstakingly and actively political, and attending to art and literature as practices of living circumstance and as a celebration of particularities. Attention is also a wandering of a kind. In this book, we come close to reading attention as Iris Murdoch has done: ‘just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (Murdoch, 1999).

Toril Moi takes forward Murdoch’s generosity most vivaciously. She reminds us: 

[Attention] comes from the Latin ad + tendere: to reach or stretch toward something. To attend to something is to direct the mind or the senses toward something, to apply oneself; to watch over, minister to, wait upon, follow, frequent; to wait for, await, expect. In this concept, the idea of caring for or serving others converges on the idea of listening, waiting, and watching. (Moi, 2017) 

Uplifting as these ideas are, in the pages that follow we shall read attention as an aesthetic-political captivation rather than look into questions of what is just and proper in forging relationality. We shall also not detach our capacity to deliberate and not keep it wholly outside of the attentive spirit and domain, perceptual as it is. Living is mostly dazzlingly beautiful, complicated, liberating and unjust. 

Besides, knowledge is partial. Our primary objective is to get a better handle on the eroticism of living. But in order to do so, we shall have to take a detour through doubt, so that the joy of living and savouring art may eventually find more immersed dimensions. We shall also try to figure out how being attentive has a lot to do with being tentative, playful, vacant and distracted. Self-seriousness is the bane to attention. Turning towards life is a tortuous and troubled process of conversion. Attention is a digression, and then a return to the wondrously familiar: a situation John Donne finally captures in the final line of Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward: ‘That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face’ (Donne, 2007). 

Prasanta Chakravarty, Attention and Drift: Santayana and Cavell in the Present (New Delhi, London, Oxford, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2025)

At the philosophical level too, a certain conversion takes place: a change of station from epistemological concerns to encountering phenomena. But the turning of face here too is not all settled, as we shall see. Attention to the world around us has to be earned. To acknowledge our gradual turn to the object of attention is especially necessary since we often tend to hear that distraction and drifting are lamentable disorders. Indeed, to hover around and have an extremely low sense of immersion in the world around us can arise out of pure self-interest. A sense of smart fleet-footedness marks the canny one; the one who has made glee his vocation. He uses deflection as a technique towards success. 

We argue the obverse: that, in fact, drift is the opposite of being hasty and cleverly nimble. Distraction and deflection may arise out of an intense love for life. It is a way of desiring freedom from the busy cacophony that drowns us all the time. Distraction is a sense of the circumambient non-thing, an essential background to what seems foregrounded as the familiar. Drifting is necessary to feel certain connections between events, people and things. To live beyond immediate interests or be cloudily available to the world is to set oneself free and appreciate other wavelengths and certain uncanny orbits in the world itself. 

The hypothesis that the book proposes is that instead of being antonyms, in fact, attention and drift are part of the same continuum. The awareness of such coexistence situates beings and objects in a zone of magnetic indetermination. The zone of undetermined overlap lies in awed apprehension under which we are not sure whether, in attention, the catcher is being taken captive. But within this zone of juxtaposition between attention and drift, there is also a tension. There is the enticement. And there is waiting. This tensed, dragging meeting point is essential to discover in order to appreciate acts of creativity and criticism. The fundamental basis of a creative endeavour (and creative criticism) is about developing a sense of attention that is not about empirically delineating one object so that it can be distinguished from others. 

To look directly and imaginatively at a vignette of life is hardly about fine-tuning perception in relation to events, problems, entanglements, movements, relationships or things of ‘interest’. The idea of ‘right input’ from or about the object of interest does not give us much understanding of anything. Art is an inflection. Therefore, we try to make a case for attention as the opposite of prioritizing, of being focused or fixated. Schopenhauer had conceived attention in terms of ‘a magic lantern, in the focus of which only one picture can appear at a time; and every picture, even when it depicts the most noble thing, must nevertheless soon vanish to make way for the most different and even most vulgar thing’ (Schopenhauer, 1818/2021). Considering attention as a lantern rather than a searchlight takes us to a completely different vantage point to look into life and creative ventures. If we put the same idea in terms of sound: attention is like our gradual opening up to the peals of temple bells as twilight falls or to the chugging sound of a train engine about to appear at the railway station, which we cannot yet see. 

On the other hand, the book posits that drift is not the antithesis of concentrated action, but actually is the true antonym of busyness. Distracted attention means taking a certain flight and being drenched in the phenomena that surround us and in the new ones that are about to welcome us. Drift is repeated stumbling. Brought together, drift and attention help us immerse ourselves in our surroundings and make us appreciate the contingent relations of the cosmos, which are lived, material and beautiful hallucinations. The base temptations of the world are real, wondrous and passing. So, by investing in the life-world, digressive fantasies challenge self-interested focus and nimble smartness alike. Before everything else, being able to be attentive and distracted simultaneously is the key quality to be honed by the creator, the critic and the connoisseur of art. 

The Wager 

The chief protagonists of this book are two immersed readers of life – George Santayana (1863–1952) and Stanley Cavell (1926–2018), whose works and ways of living highlight an involved bringing together of continuities and contingencies of life, appreciation of multiple dimensions of art and a calm display of involved critical faculties. Both seek to assess the relationships between literature, philosophy, art and religion. 

In each of these domains the two of them celebrate attentive wandering and distractive engrossment at once. In this book we celebrate their passion, involvement, wit, no-nonsense critical acumen and, most of all, their ability to love the serendipities of life and creation. In short, we drink a toast to their extracurricular energy and synthetic minds. Santayana and Cavell are separated in time, cultural upbringing and political social viewpoints, though both of them have taught in the same institution – Harvard University – for a period of time. But they share remarkable and uncanny similarities in their breadth of vision, aesthetic sensibility, joy of living, nurturing unacademic temperament within academia (professors per accidens, though both were popular teachers) and shunning trivial and narrow pursuits. 

In this context, Paul Jenner has written about how placing Santayana and Cavell side by side ‘proves to be a matter of contrasting both surface similarities with underlying differences and surface differences with underlying similarities’ (Jenner, 2013). It is evident that both of them moved away from logical positivism in order to respond to the immediacy of experience and ordinary language. Many commentators have also noted their common concerns with certain legacies of Ludwig Wittgenstein: forms of life, ordinary language, acknowledgement of uncertainty and so on. One of the major concerns that troubled the two savants is that analytical and positivist approaches to philosophy had made the practitioners of social sciences and humanities in general suspicious of aesthetic content and the wider problems of human culture as such. The more technical and method-oriented disciplines became, the more they moved away from the primary concerns of the human creature. 

This was not an anti-intellectual anxiety, but rather a test of how intellect worked together with the senses, embodied experiences and, most importantly, with imagination. Reflection itself can turn into a passionate affair and deepen life. The question is: how to make analysis more imaginative and involved? To that end, Santayana and Cavell refuse to settle into established methodological paradigms. As we know, Santayana eventually moved away from the academic world altogether, while Cavell continued to question its assumptions from within academia. 

In this book, we use notions of attention and distraction not as methodical tools, but as a temperament and as intuitive and intelligent ways to approach the world and the enchanted realms of the arts. One central point of disagreement between the two was over the legacy and influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the world of culture in general. The Hispanic-materialist mind of Santayana relegated Emerson to the genteel tradition in American philosophy, while for Cavell, Emerson’s naturalism and perfectionism are of tremendous import to the continuities of a cultural journey that he feels to be carrying forward. Santayana thinks refinement of taste, a sense of creation’s largeness and philosophical breadth are impossible to nurture in a culture that is absorbed in such material exertions. In other words, being an atomist at heart, Santayana is too ominous for the optimist continent. Cavell, on the other hand, looks for expressions and a way of writing itself in Emerson and Thoreau that is philosophical in temperament. Jenner points out that to the materialist Santayana, the American intellectual tradition seemed to be unable to move beyond an overemphasis on the self. To Cavell, however, humans and the world are never discontinuous. He seeks realignment and an attunement between the two realms. Certainly, Cavell’s tone is far more conversational and humane compared to Santayana’s ironic and more definitive pronouncements. We shall see, though, that the sense of dark miscommunication among humans is also a constant concern for Cavell. 

The realm of their common concerns is too pronounced to disregard, though. First, the entirety of their respective oeuvres is geared towards easing off human pretensions without scorning the human creature as such. The two of them also come together on a core common concern: that while individualist pursuits can lead to egotism, rampant worship of nature can only become idolatrous. We must conceive life and the creative world outside of this oscillation between egotism and idolatry. The other important aesthetic-political interest that Santayana and Cavell share is their rejection of formalism, but by having the deepest of engagements with lines, colour, tone, taste and continuities of form in creation and creativity alike. The deeper affinity between the two lies in the realization that human beings are vulnerable, limited by finitude, and yet capable of miraculous achievement if only they are able to be truly attentive to the world – especially to what seems unfamiliar, but are actually patterns and variations of creation itself. Above all, politically and culturally speaking, both are pluralists in the most nuanced sense of the term. 

But as we have said before, our attentive relationship to the world has to be earned. That is the reason Santayana and Cavell begin their search at the other end of the spectrum – in realism and in doubt. This is of vital importance to the book. One of the lessons of involved interaction with another being, event, object or artwork is to keep the rigours of criticality alive. There is a period of waiting until one reaches the stage of involvement with creation that is attentive to the lyrical tones of imagination and living itself. The gestation period is important to pass through. It is not that once the best of attentive creators and critics reach a certain stage of involvement, doubt is wholly removed and they begin to genuflect to the new and the unfamiliar. There are moments of back and forth between appreciation and judgement. But the relation turns lucid, even in moments of doubt. 

This book looks at how such a difficult lucidity can be achieved. And we work with the trope of attentive drift in order to accomplish the detour. Bernhard Waldenfels has reminded us of the ancient expressions which come closest to the contemporary sense of attention: ‘holding toward and directing toward, like a ship sailing toward the shore’ (Waldenfels, 2011). Like the ship, the spirit, inclination or intuition turns towards the object of attention. Indeed, attention is about orientation. Where and how should one turn around? What is the right way or moment to make that turn? Is putting one’s senses or being into an attentive endeavour a craft or an innate or involuntary act? Looked closely, we shall see that there are, in fact, two distinct components in attention. They overlap. The allure of the object attended, to which one is ‘pulled under’, stands at one end of the act of attention. 

On the other side, a motion is set into action as soon as one’s soul or inner gaze is energetically turned towards the attending object (attendere animum). The field of attention is the intermediary zone. Attention is not admiration, for it is not an act of will. The obverse is also true: attention withers the moment it turns into habit. Attention is also not an automatic act of goodwill, like keenness, for instance. It is also not craving a transitional or comfort object – in the way that Donald Winnicott understands being and ‘holding’, for instance (Winnicott, 1971). One of the main points of this work is to show how attention makes us free, not how it comforts or secures us into woolly care. There is nothing therapeutic to be rummaged in life and artworks. Besides, attention arrives prior to desiring, and certainly before any active thought process begins. It is an arena unto itself; a kind of dawning of awareness. The zone of indeterminacy in being attentive lies in the fact that as the object of attention begins to impose upon our spirit or psyche, we can feel that we are crossing a threshold but regardless have oriented ourselves towards it. The object of attention at once attracts and confuses us – but once the zone of attention is illuminated, the whole scene is awash with trepidation and hope for welcoming a crucial feature into our lives. This is a zone of anticipation without any representation. 

Let me lay a wager here, which is also the wager that the book makes: two people, during one of their initial dates, decide to take a late evening walk. As they walk around the lanes and by-lanes of the city, they see children playing in the adjacent parks, cross past homeless people, and kick some pebbles here and there. Bicycles and evening joggers pass them by. Haltingly, they speak to each other, trying to savour each other’s presence. Periods of silence follow. Anticipation, attraction, apprehension and occasional detachment – all are enmeshed. They realize that they do not agree on certain things, and yet this walking-moment seems to have transformed the evening. The street lights have just come alive, and the sound of chiming bells wafts across from the nearby temple. The magic in the air, the entire tableau seems to have been arranged for them by some strange alignment of stars. Presently, a street vendor beckons, and as if in a trance, the two of them sit down to have the loveliest of food. They resume the walk, and in a while, realize that they have come a long way down and have to find their way back. The meandering of the lanes, their sauntering, the aftertaste of the food, the blurred destination – everything is stitched and tied up in a beautiful muslin case. Bidding goodbye to each other, they trudge back to their individual homes. Everything is pell-mell. Something has changed. 

As I delineate such a common and loving human interaction, I think of Wittgenstein’s and Cavell’s interest in drawing analogies between thinking and walking as ways of gathering attunement to the world. This is akin to wording the world, filling it up with presences. We shall come back to rambling and walking at the end of this note with Ramchandra Gandhi’s inclusion of circumambience within philosophy, as recounted by V. Sanil. Suffice it to say here that in the Indian subcontinent, there is a name for such a stage that we have just portrayed, as far as love is concerned – purva-raga. Our living is a series of purva-raga moments. It can happen with another person, with a new musical piece, a dish or with a pattern of greeting in some new cultural setting. Are we ready to give in to such illuminations, open ourselves up to such aboutness of aesthetic experience?

Works Cited:

Donne, John. 2007. John Donne’s Poetry. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

Jenner, Paul. 2013. ‘Attachment and Detachment in Cavell and Santayana’. Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film. Eds. Andrew Taylor and Aine Kelly. New York and Oxford: Routledge, pp. 152–74.

Moi, Toril. 2017. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Murdoch, Iris. 1999. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1818/2021. The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2. Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books and Media Llc.

Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien. Trans. Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston, IL Northwestern University Press.

Winnicott, Donald W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

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Prasanta Chakravarty teaches English Literature at the University of Delhi, and is the editor of the web journal Humanities Underground.