Circle of Presence

Most of us have been annoyed by someone who was unable to give another human being their undivided attention for more than seconds at a time. And perhaps more significantly, most of us have felt the pull to do the same: We have struggled to keep our attention focused on the person talking to us as we know we ought to because some shred of our humanity remains intact. We know very well that the person in front of us is more significant in the moment than the text that just made our phone vibrate in our pocket. We have been on both ends of the kind of distractedness that the mere presence of a smartphone can occasion, and we are alive enough to be troubled by it. We begin to feel the force of Simone Weil’s judgment: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

So Turkle’s piece, and others like it, resonate despite the theoretical shortcomings that make some scholars cringe. What difference does it make that some study showed that a statistically significant portion of the population reports feeling less lonely when using social media if I can’t get the person standing two feet away from me to treat me with the barest level of decency?

The recurring question remains, however, “Are smartphones at fault?” Is Google making us stupid? Is Facebook making us lonely? But that’s not the best way of stating the question. Rather than begin with a loaded question, perhaps it’s better to try to clarify the situation. What is happening when cell phones become part of an environment that also consists of two people in conversation?

Of the many possible approaches to this question, I want to take up philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “intentional arc.” (...)

The “intentional arc” describes the manner in which our experience and perception is shaped by what we intend. Intending here means something more than what we mean when we say “I intended to get up early” or “I intend to go to the store later.” Intention in this sense refers in large measure to a mostly nonconscious work of perceiving the world that is shaped by what we are doing or aim to do. Our perception, in other words, is always already interpreting reality rather than simply registering it as a pure fact or objective reality.

This work of perception-as-interpretation builds up over time as an assortment of “I cans” that are carried or remembered by our bodies. This assortment becomes part of the background, or pre-understanding, that we bring to bear on new situations. And this is how our intentional arc “projects round about us our past, our future.”

The insertion of a tool like a cell phone into our experience reconfigures the “intentional arc.” The phenomenon is neatly captured by the expression, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” How we perceive our environment is shaped by the mere presence of a tool in hand. And this effect is registered even before the tool is used.

Merleau-Ponty might analyze the situation as follows: The feel of a hammer in hand, especially given prior use of a hammer, transforms how the environment presents itself to us. Aspects of the environment that would not have presented themselves as things-to-be-struck now do. Our interpretive perception interprets differently. Our seeing-as is altered. New possibilities suggest themselves. The affordances presented to us by our environment are reordered.

Try this at home: go pick up a hammer or, for that matter, any object you can hold in hand that is weighted on one end. See what you feel. Hold it and look around you and pay really close attention to the way your perceive these objects. Actually, on second thought, don’t try this at home.

by Michael Sacasas, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Altered photograph of Murray Kempton, via