Following Tuesday’s class, I wanted to come back to the idea of ‘making attention’. Professor O’Gorman introduced the concept of ‘faire attention’ and referenced Isabelle Stengers. In an interview, Stengers explains the term as “it is a matter of learning and cultivating, that is to say, making ourselves pay attention (faire attention)”. The French is important as it translates to ‘making attention’ and not ‘paying attention’. The process asks one to actively create attention rather than to give an existing attention as a levy of sorts.
The process of ‘making attention’ requires a different engagement than paying attention; in making attention there is a more active dialogue between the person and the object that attention is being directed towards. The activeness in making attention demands a critical perspective towards an object as to make attention with an object you have to find aspects of the object to engage with. So by asking us to ‘make attention’, Stengers and O’Gorman are asking for a more critical, and possibly reflective, relationship between an individual and an object or whatever it may be.
By asking for an intentionally critical relationship with a piece, there is also the suggestion that the work should be interpreted. This suggestion, that we should interpret and criticise, is in tension with a claim from Susan Sontag. She writes “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.” Sontag’s tension with interpreting art is that it deprives the “active surrender”, the sensory experience art can have on a viewer.
Would the process of making attention violate art as Sontag suggests interpretation can violate art? It seems that making attention relies on interpreting a piece of art, so it would in some way violate the art by Sontag’s suggestion. I wonder if interpretation would still be a violation of that sensory experience if the intention of the piece is interpretation. If a piece, a game, or an object is created with the idea of faire attention in mind, and its intention is for that process to occur, then would it still be a violation? Or would it not matter as there is still a diminished sensory experience by searching for parts of a piece to criticise?
