ACADEMIA Letters

It comes in waves
Stephen Muecke

In lockdown, I find I can multitask with ease. My home desk opens onto multiple realities.
Madame Magpie comes to my window and will eat sunflower seeds from my hand.1 I scatter
them on the ground and she picks them up with her beak tilted at an angle, because her upper
mandible has the tip broken off. Did she fly into a window once? On one of my desk mon-
itors the Vice-Chancellor is speaking quietly because I have turned down the sound. He is
talking about COVID-related opportunities, but we will all have to work hard because of the
competition. Distracted, I use my other monitor to check email and Facebook: an ecology of
attention, as Yves Citton would say.2 This ecology incorporates distribution and distraction
at the same time. Today, I learn, commodities are no longer scarce, it is human attention that
is the rarest of resources. Huge amounts of money are turned into the arts of capturing it.
These days Madame Magpie captures my attention easily, because nature, says Mick Taussig,
has become re-enchanted in this era of meltdown, a veritable ‘renaissance in planetary self-
awareness, even if couched in crabby secular language’.3 He is referring to standard academic
writing. Hence the importance, he and I agree, in catching waves of mythic force using a
more poetic language, just like those attention-seeking advertisers, and especially when they
use ‘concepts that cut across nature and culture so easily’.4
It comes in waves. Many things do. Certainly the capacity to pay attention. I’m reading
Mick Taussig writing up his ‘Sun Theater’ on diurnal rhythms, and especially the ‘magic hour’
of the setting sun, performed with Anni Rossi at the piano, with all its arpeggios. ‘This is the
1
Gymnorhina tibicen, not related to the European magpie which is in the corvid family.
2
Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, London: Polity, 2017.
3
Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery in the Age of Meltdown, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2020), 56
4
Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery, 49

Academia Letters, November 2020 ©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephen Muecke, stephen.muecke@flinders.edu.au

Citation: Muecke, S. (2020). It comes in waves. Academia Letters, Article 11.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL11.

1
signature music of mastery of non-mastery’, he says.5
I’m immersed in his Mastery of non-mastery book while the Vice-Chancellor is quietly
saying that our provincial university is in a good position because last year’s restructure left
us with a bank of available resources. This is good news. No-one will be retrenched. I find I
can attend to his tone, more than to his words, taking his message closer to a magpie chorus.
What we call tone relates to Taussig’s idea of ‘the bodily unconscious’, cutting across nature
and culture, so that in the end ‘you are no longer able to separate the metaphoric from the
horrific because there is no nature anymore because it’s all nature now’.6
The other day the Magpie family came for their sunflower seeds together. They sing their
presence with their oboe cadenzas, and I come to the window, greeting them with my own
sing-song affection. Madame is the only one who will eat from my hand. I know she knows
me. The father, Fatso I call him, keeps his distance. Then there is Junior, who used to trail
after them squeaking plaintively, asking to be beak-fed. At his age, not even in the nest! But
today Fatso drives him away whenever he tries to eat. And Junior rolls over on his back, feet
in the air, like a cartoon dead bird. Nature mimicking art mimicking nature, as Taussig would
say in his thesis about mastery of non-mastery. Junior’s spectacular tactic certainly worked.
Fatso waddled off leaving him alone, thinking he had mastered that situation.
’Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages’, says Anna Tsing in ‘Arts
of Noticing’.7 I think she means agencement , as in Deleuze and Guattari, natural-cultural and
multispecies assemblages that provoke rather than signify. This might be an example of what
she means: Only a couple of weeks after Trump clowned around shooting with his fingers
(‘Get over here! Boom.’) talking at an NRA rally about the Paris Charlie Hebdo massacre,
there was yet another school shooting. Trump uses his fingers (nature) to mimic a gun (culture)
and the ‘unintentional coordination’ is yet another ‘copy-cat’ killing. Instead of slow creative
collaborations, we now have PowerPoint. Taussig: ‘The name says it all’.8
I think, with a fond memory that I shall retain forever, of a creative intellectual with a fierce
attentiveness. John Berger, on Boxing day in 2000 in his village of Quincy in Haute-Savoie,
giving us huge strong bear hugs, and signed books, and little shot glasses of gnole. His de-
scribing, sketching, thinking—always thinking—pays attention intensely without judgment.
It is like a fine-tuned ethnographic attitude, one in which the writing expects to be surprised
by some new kind of real: ‘…the cunningly rendered detail’ (says Taussig in Palma Africana)
‘can, on occasion, sneak through the defenses we erect so as to keep reality from disturbing
5
Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery, 171
6
Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery, 159
7
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist
Ruins, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015, 23
8
Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery, 41

Academia Letters, November 2020 ©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephen Muecke, stephen.muecke@flinders.edu.au

Citation: Muecke, S. (2020). It comes in waves. Academia Letters, Article 11.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL11.

2
us.’9 So, for the writing to be attentive, it has to keep inventing its own vulnerability.
Vulnerabilities are spaces into which what we call creativity can flow. This is a long way
from attention as a resource that can be mined, because you can pay to have it improved. They
set it up as necessarily declining, as cognitive impairment, as the brain not carrying out its
proper ‘executive functions’: We only use 20% of our brains! With this new technique, folks,
you can mobilise 50% more … the snake-oil salesmen of the ‘psy’ industries join forces with
the time and motion productivity merchants in the hopeless business of trying to get people to
‘pay’ more attention to the task of extracting value from our very natures, ‘mimicking nature
so as to exploit it,’10 while filtering out what they think is environmental noise. Attention
economy, rather than attention ecology. Why not go one further, eliminate sleep itself to
improve productivity? Now, says Taussig, ‘just about everyone has a “sleep disorder” and
cruises through life jet-lagged on Ambien in neoliberal insomnias clutching a styrofoam coffee
cup.’11 But the cosmos is proving resistant; it may even be fighting back.
As Spring is approaching and the days are getting a bit longer, Madame and Fatso are
coming less often. Perhaps they are nesting again. Junior comes on his own, but he is skittish
as I try to coax him to eat out of my hand. Or at least take a peck. And then one day he does,
he pecks hard and breaks the skin of my palm. There is a drop of blood.
Patience takes delight in showing me around our spring garden. ‘Look at the buds on our
little almond tree!’ La montée de la sève, she says with a smile, reminding me of our time in
the little village of Lavau in the Yonne. In the village square, the old ladies cackling about
their husbands’ ’rising of the sap’, for the first time after winter. It is remarkably amusing
because it isn’t a metaphor. The increasing warmth of the sun draws upwards the essence of
both men and trees. And on May Day snowdrops would suddenly appear in the meadows.
Meanwhile killer pathogens are out looking for opportunities. ‘…the real-life mimesis
of bugs morphing into killer version of themselves’ writes Taussig, ‘such mimetically savvy
pathogens fool not only nature but the humans who thought they could profit from the latest
domination of nature.’12 And the journalist interviewing James Lovelock for The Guardian,
asks, ‘Is the virus part of the self-regulation of Gaia?’
‘Definitely’, replies Lovelock on the eve of his 101st birthday. ‘This is all part of evolution
as Darwin saw it. You are not going to get a new species flourishing unless it has a food
supply. In a sense that is what we are becoming. We are the food. I could easily make
you a model and demonstrate that as the human population on the planet grew larger and
9
Taussig, Palma Africana, 27
10
Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery, 5
11
Taussig, Mastery of Nonmastery, 160
12
Taussig, Mastery of Non-mastery, 44-45

Academia Letters, November 2020 ©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephen Muecke, stephen.muecke@flinders.edu.au

Citation: Muecke, S. (2020). It comes in waves. Academia Letters, Article 11.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL11.

3
larger, the probability of a virus evolving that would cut back the population is quite marked.
We’re not exactly a desirable animal to let loose in unlimited numbers on the planet.’13 A
couple of years earlier, Bruno Latour paid a visit to Lovelock being enthusiastic about the Gaia
hypothesis which he defines as ‘the Earth is a totality of living beings and materials that were
made together, that cannot live apart, and from which humans can’t extract themselves.’14 He
thinks that Lovelock’s theory ‘holds equal place in the history of human knowledge to that of
Galileo,’ in terms of revolutionising the orthodoxy of their times. Galileo’s physics of objects
opened exploration into an infinite universe, while Lovelock and Margulis showed that we
live in a critical zone, a self-regulating system of constantly interacting agents that we are
now destabilising. It might take a while to get people out of the Galileo mindset that still has
them dreaming of escaping Earth and colonising other planets, science fiction style.
Let’s hope we are learning more about the ‘arts of noticing.’ This kind of attention is
not about relationships between the human brain and ‘the world out there’, but is all about
immersion in living ecologies. Aboriginal people I have worked with learn about it from their
elders. As children they are not encouraged to ask questions, just to be attentive. After a while
they know. It is know-how more than knowledge. When an Aboriginal tracker sees things in
the environment that the rest of us fail to notice, this is not a matter of a specialised psychology,
but a matter of intergenerational attunement in a particular world. Noticing one thing may also
depend on being attuned to many others: the sun, the wind and the way finches flock in that
part of the country. It’s an art, but not necessarily an individual one. It comes in bursts, or
in waves. You cannot be on the alert all the time, in the way that the corporate psychologists
and cognitive neuroscientist would like you to be with some kind of ‘neuro cross-fit training’
program developed to minimise distractions in the workplace or school.15
The poet cultivates arts of attention which attune themselves to bodily and environmental
(I almost said ‘cosmic’) rhythms. They try to write, then gaze out of the window. Something
comes to them. Roland Barthes: ‘To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this
is how I have my best ideas’.16 Neglect turns out to be the opposite of attention, not distraction.
So, it seems we might need both, alternating attention and distraction like we alternate
wakefulness and sleep. But attention does not just take one form. It isn’t just a brain mecha-
nism. I think it is a set of arts that can be cultivated. When a student trains to be a biologist,
they learn to attend to the world in a particular way, sorting the relevant from the irrelevant.
13
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/18/james-lovelock-the-biosphere-and-i-are-both-in-the-
last-1-per-cent-of-our-lives
14
[trans.] ‘Bruno Latour Tracks Down Gaia’, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 3rd 2018.
15
Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, Mass: MIT
Press, 2016.
16
Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 24.

Academia Letters, November 2020 ©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephen Muecke, stephen.muecke@flinders.edu.au

Citation: Muecke, S. (2020). It comes in waves. Academia Letters, Article 11.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL11.

4
This is a basic condition for knowledge production. If the student specialises in botany she
will pay less attention to animals; the zoologist does the opposite. But they can’t afford to
be too focussed because new knowledge will enter through the door of distraction. Isabelle
Stengers reminds us what A. N. Whitehead said about Nature: ‘We are instinctively willing
to believe that by due attention, more can be found in nature than that which is observed at
first sight. But we will not be content with less.’
What this means is that good scientists can’t remain with the status quo: a zoologist, by
virtue of the ‘due attention’ that she applies, will discover a new species of animal. How could
she be ‘content with less’? It also means, I think, that nature is full of surprises; perceiving
so-called natural things means being surprised by their attributes. Nature is not just ‘out there’
waiting to be discovered as it is, it surprises by virtue of attention directed towards it. The
due attention we apply is in the form of arts, methods, and know-how. Some of these are
normative, others in the process of being forgotten, and some are yet to be created, across
many fields.
It would be a nice little demographic correction if the virus, as some are saying, were to
take out the Boomers, my generation, the ones who could have done most to mitigate envi-
ronmental destruction, and instead will just have ‘SORRY ABOUT THAT’ engraved on their
headstones, if we have any. Almost as if Gaia were enacting her own speculative fantasy by
taking revenge on my generation and sparing our children and grandchildren, making them
carry somewhat less of a burden as they reconstruct, not to mention barely survive.
But this clever little Reaper is not playing fair. It will come in waves, until there is a cure.
There is no cure. A vaccine could take months, perhaps years, to develop and test. Young
people can get strokes. Four days after Junior pecked my hand I start getting the chills. I head
down to Outpatients and a nurse points a thermometer gun at my head and pulls the trigger.
I register over 38. I get admitted for observation and the chills and aches start to contort my
body, coming in waves. It is exhausting; I can’t even get up to go to the toilet. A catheter,
thanks heaps. Patience, who is distraught, can’t visit. She calls me, we try to be buoyant, we
talk about afterwards. I try a joke about opiates and the ancient mariner; all my jokes threaten
to be Dad jokes, I lose perspective. If the cough gets any worse they will wheel in a ventilator,
if they have one. What wave is this now? Can I adjust the dosage on the intravenous feed
myself, I wonder? No-one can visit. The pain subsides; I’ll just sleep a bit, going under like
a dream with light and wonder. Another wave.

Academia Letters, November 2020 ©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephen Muecke, stephen.muecke@flinders.edu.au

Citation: Muecke, S. (2020). It comes in waves. Academia Letters, Article 11.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL11.