Displaced attention: Bergson, attentive habits and Tony Conrad's drone music

Abstract Attention has emerged as an important issue in the social sciences and humanities in recent years. Much influential work characterises our era as one in which our attention is increasingly placed under stress, seeking to unpack the consequences of such a state of affairs for our capacities to think. This paper turns to the work of Henri Bergson to offer a distinctly geographic perspective on such debates by emphasising the intimate links between attention and the material environments of everyday life. Thinking through Bergson, the paper suggests that some environments enrol a greater degree of our attention in routine actions, leaving us more in thrall to the repetitive sensory and cognitive solicitations of each present moment, while others are more amenable to a displacement of attention away from such demands, prising open time and space for creative thought and action. As a way of exploring the latter, the paper explores the potential of music—specifically, the drone music of Tony Conrad—to create environments of displaced attentiveness. Through the use of single tones sustained over long durations, often at high volumes, Conrad's performances aimed to create a space in which an audience's everyday habits of attention were suspended. Approaching Conrad's music through Bergson suggests that what emerges in the displacement of attention through drone music is a feeling for the powers of time that the teeming activity of each present moment requires we habitually ignore.