‘ <i>We’re Still Inside the Fucking paradigm</i> !’: Flagging the Crisis of Attention in Eleanor Catton’s <i>Birnam Wood</i>

This article analyses Birnam Wood as a transmodern narrative of the limit under the lens of attention ethics. It argues that the contemporary permacrisis is rooted in a crisis of attention, manifesting in the novel in two primary forms: the excessive surveillance of US billionaire Robert Lemoine and a deficiency in deploying attention as care among the guerrilla gardeners of Birnam Wood. The novel pivots on the encounter between Lemoine – a kleptocrat secretly mining rare-earth elements – and Mira, the head of the environmentalists, exposing the destructive logic of surveillance capitalism. Lemoine instrumentalizes attention as a tool of control, contrasting with an ethics of attention grounded in vulnerability and presence. Birnam Wood, however, resists a simplistic dichotomy: the activists, whose name is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, share their own measure of ambition, revealing that their ideology, unmoored from care, is insufficient to navigate crises. The novel’s tragic denouement warns that the path out of the current succession of crises requires a paradigm shift. By unveiling the failure of the billionaire and the activists to genuinely care, Birnam Wood ultimately resonates with transmodernity’s call for a relational ethics of attention as the only viable response to instrumentalization, systemic exploitation and environmental ruin.