School-Based Mindfulness Training and the Economisation of Attention: A Stieglerian View

Abstract

Educational theorists may be right to suggest that providing mindfulness training in schools can challenge oppressive pedagogies and overcome Western dualism. Before concluding that this training is liberatory, however, one must go beyond pedagogy and consider schooling’s role in enacting the educational neurofuture envisioned by mindfulness discourse. Mindfulness training, this article argues, is a biopolitical human enhancement strategy. Its goal is to insulate youth from pathologies that stem from digital capitalism’s economisation of attention. I use Bernard Stiegler’s Platonic depiction of the ambiguousness of all attention channelling mechanisms as pharmaka—containing both poison and cure—to suggest that this training is a double-edged sword. Does the inculcation of mindfulness in schoolchildren empower them; or is it merely an exercise in pathology-proofing them in their capacity as the next generation of unpaid digital labourers? The answer, I maintain, depends on whether young people can use the Internet’s political potentialities to mitigate the exploitation of their unpaid online labour time. That is, on whether the exploitative ‘digital pharmakon’—the capitalistic Web—can at the same time be socio-politically curative.

Keywords:

• mindfulness
• attention training
• digital capitalism
• new media
• social pathologies
• digital labour

Notes

1. The TEDx talk in which this comment was made can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mlk6xD_xAQ

2. http://mindfulnessinschools.org/events-media/conference-2013/

3. http://www.mindfulnet.org/page30.htm

4. http://mindfulnessinschools.org/where-is-b/

5. http://www.mindfuleducation.org/mindfuleducationprograms.html#co

6. http://www.mindfulschools.org/schools/schools-taught/

7. http://thehawnfoundation.org/mindup/

8. The ‘transindividual’ is a term he adopts from Gilbert Simondon (Stiegler, 2013a, p. 18).

9. What Makes Life Worth Living, his most recent book to be translated into English, is littered with descriptions of contemporary capitalism as ‘consumerist capitalism’ (for example, see Stiegler, 2013a, p. 75).

10. Because zero wages are paid to casual Internet users, and using wages as a surrogate for variable capital in for classical Marxian rate of exploitation (surplus value/variable capital), users are not merely exploited but hyper-exploited. For a discussion along these lines, see Fuchs (2010, p. 191).

11. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is a broad banner. The DSM-5 distinguishes between two types: Predominantly Inattentive AD/HD and Hyperactive/Impulsive AD/HD. See American Psychiatric Association (2013).

12. Stiegler does not elaborate on Facebook as a system of care; I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this point.

13. On the origins of Diaspora, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software)