Restructuring the Attention Economy: Literary Interpretation as an Antidote to Mass Media Distraction

International audienceIf human attention is our scarcest resource, as we are told by prophets of the attention economy, then the capacity to "receive" (cultural) goods matters even more than the capacity to produce them. In the age of scarce attention, literature appears simultaneously as luxury (who has the time to read 700 page novels nowadays?), as resistance against the alienation of our attention by market-driven media forces (doesn't the poetical line provide a vital alternative to the bottom line?) and as a source of deeper knowledge about the fundamental mechanisms of valuation (what is valorized except that to which we pay attention?). A considerable amount of articles, conferences, monographs or collective publications have been devoted, over the past 20 years, to the relations between economics and literature. Most of them have focused on the economic content of literary works, answering the general question: how authors X or novel Y represent economic relations? While this remains a stimulating way to have economics and literature cross each other's path, I will suggest another approach to set them into dialogue, by taking stock of the new developments of what is increasingly called "the attention economy". Poets, playwrights, novelists and artists did not wait for economists to realize that attention was a scarce resource. As Richard Lanham eloquently stressed, what is rhetoric, but attention economy practiced and taught more than 2000 years before Herbert Simon, Dallas Smythe or Richard Serra explicitly theorized it in the 1970s? Even before modern art competed for mass audiences, the notion of "style" has often been elaborated as an attention-catching device (Lanham 2006). But if it is accurate to say literature preceded economics in paying attention to attention, this article hopes to suggest that literature may still be ahead of the game, now that attention has been widely recognized as being our most scarce and most precious resource. Were we to conceive of the literary experience primarily as an attentional practice, we might find in it a possibility to overcome some of the dead ends in which our commercially driven mass media have trapped our collective attention