Capitalism can be understood as an irresistible dynamic pushing human societies to self-consume their mental, social and environmental resources to exhaustion. Instead of asking what will come next, we can attempt to understand what already exceeds capital from the inside of our entangled relations with each other and with our environments. This lecture will briefly sketch a contrast between (capitalist) “extractivist attention” and (post-capitalist?) “collapsonaut attention”, before reflecting upon the need to understand their complementarity as much as their opposition. Another attention ecology is possible, and it is already taking shape here and now, but we should be aware of its limits as much as of its promises.

Yves Citton (b. 1962, Geneva) is a professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, and director of the EUR ArTeC. He is co-editor of the journal Multitudes, and recently published Faire avec. Conflits, coalitions, contagions (Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021), Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020, in collaboration with Jacopo Rasmi), Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard, 2018), The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016). His next book, Altermodernités des Lumières, will be published by Le Seuil in February 2022. His articles are in open access on his website yvescitton.net.