Many thanks to Emmanuel Alloa, Alejandro Alvarez, Emily Apter, Maryvonne Arnaud, Bernard Aspe, Marc Bacchetta, Thierry Bardini, Christine Baron, Sarina Basta, Jacques Berchtold, Laurent Bigorgne, Aurélien Blanchard, Jean-Pierre Bobillot, Véronique Bolhuis, Robert Bonamy, Daniel Bougnoux, Dominique Boullier, Patrick Bourgne, Sylvain Bourmeau, Frédéric Brun, Graham Burnett, Rosemary and Gilbert Citton, Jonathan Crary, Isabelle Creusot, Jérôme David, Christophe Degoutin, Xavier de la Porte, Georges Didi-Huberman, Estelle Doudet, Marianne Dubacq, François-Ronan Dubois, Cédric Duroux, Rita Felski, Georg Franck, Igor Galligo, Aurélien Gamboni, Florent Gaudez, Mélanie Giraud, Francis Goyet, Michael Hagner, Christophe Hanna, Pierre Hazan, Denis Hollier, Michel Jeanneret, Dominiq Jenvrey, Nedjima Kacidem, Deborah Knopp, Charlotte Krauss, Isabelle Krzywkowski, Jean-Pierre Lachaux, Marina and all the Kundu family, Daniel Lançon, Catherine Langle, Raphaël et Catherine Larrère, Bruno Latour, Benoît Laureau, Maurizio Lazzarato, Pierre Le Quéau, Fabienne Martin-Juchat, Jean-François Massol, Éric Méchoulan, Varinia Michalun, Bernard Miège, Rajarshi et Ranjini Mitra, Valeria Morera, Philippe Mouillon, Yann Moulier Boutang, Romi Mukherjee, the editorial committee of the journal Multitudes, Carole Musset, Frédéric Neyrat, Laura von Niederhäusern, Christine Noille-Clauzade, Charlotte Nordmann, François Noudelmann, Françoise Notter-Truxa, The Order of the Third Bird, Isabelle Pailliart, the participants in the Économie de l’attention et archéologie des media seminars at the Université de Grenoble, Matteo Pasquinelli, Jean-François Perrin, Philippe Petit, Dominique Pety, Julien Piat, Julien Pierre, Claire Pignol, Martial Poirson, Catherine Quéloz, Anne Querrien, Dominique Quessada, Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Gene Ray, Philippe Régnier, le Revue des livres, Julie Ridard, Claudia Roda, Stéphanie Roussel, Dario Rudy, Liliane Schneiter, Jean-Paul Sermain, Jean-Claude Serres, the Settembrini family, Adrien Staii, Bernard Stiegler, Henry Torgue, Isabelle Treff, Nicolas Truong, Urs Urban, Marco Venturini, Jérôme Vidal, the team of the Villa Gillet, Slaven Waelti, Guy Walter, Olivier Zerbib.

Very special thanks to Hugues Jallon and Bruno Auerbach for helping me to frame and realize this project.

A book dealing with the exhaustion of our attentional resources is a living contradiction: it explains to you why you will not have had time to read it. Our house is on fire, from minor daily emergencies to climate imbalance – and often in conflicting ways, coupling one person’s drought with the prediction of another’s flood, threatening even entire cities like Kolkata. And we look elsewhere. We fail to read the writing getting ever bigger on the wall. Burn before reading!

It would have been better to write a tweet, or a blog post for viral distribution – not a book, composed of sequential chapters and complete sentences. This either proves that we do not believe what we say: our attention is not as threatened, scattered, shattered and maimed as people claim. Or it is a futile effort: this book demonstrates that it cannot be read.

We will have to hedge our bets. Go much too quickly and much too slowly at the same time. Write incomplete sentences that are already far too long. Go into the details and ignore essential points. Be simultaneously too inflexible, too pretentious, too learned, and too cavalier.

In order to suggest different reading rhythms, the route will be punctuated by a hundred or so KEY-EXPRESSIONS, written in capitals, and accompanied on each occasion by a concise definition in italics. Readers in a hurry can gain an initial idea of the concepts discussed in the chapter, and only linger over those which are of direct interest. Through this system, the book will put forward a battery of concepts, principles, maxims and hypotheses, for which it will seek to provide rigorous initial definitions – hoping in this way to furnish a more precise vocabulary with which to explore, decipher and cultivate the surprisingly underinvestigated field of what may become an ‘attention ecology’.

Advertising, literature, artistic experimentation, television, on-line courses, credit agencies, search engines, live performance, militant gardening, political organizations: over the course of the following chapters, we will touch on all these areas. For each of them, we will try to understand better how our various environments condition our individual and collective attention, and how, from the moment we start to reconfigure these environments, we do retain a certain power over our own fate. In a certain way, our attention is the thing that is most particular to us. And yet, it is only available to us as something to be alienated – both in the capturing apparatuses in which we are immersed by consumer capitalism and in the aesthetic experiences into which we dive most passionately.

If our attention is a battlefield where the future of our daily submissions and coming rebellions is at stake, then we are at a crossroads. Each of us can learn to ‘manage’ our attentional resources better, so as to become more ‘efficient’ and more ‘competitive’ . . . Or, we can learn to make ourselves more attentive to one another, and to the relationships from which our communal lives are woven. Depending on the directions in which we turn to look and listen, depending on the beings and the problems that we notice, depending on the devices and programmes that we plug into our senses – we will continue towards a consumerist growth that draws each of us in like moths to a flame. Or we will manage to build together the shared conditions of a life that is more tenable and more desirable, which is more attentive to the quality of what surrounds it than to the quantity of its finances.