"Attention's depth has less to do with duration than with the length of the circuits of transindividuation it activates, which can be very rapid even if duration is often a prerequisite, required precisely at the moment of learning, for this depth. Each circuit (and its length) consists of many connections that also form a network, as another constituent of depth, a kind of texture, and like some material, a resistant (even thick [consistant]) fabric. These connections operate according to rules that are also networks, forming 'stiches' [points] in the sense of the word as it is used in knitting: when it is a matter of weaving a critical and rational attention, these stiches are the forms or motifs defining the rules of the transindividuation process that construct the object of attention, thus defining the rules of process by which this attention is constructed, but also that this attention constructs in return: by paying attention." [80]

"There are sedimented layers of grammatization that must be considered in any organological rethinking of the education system. Every kind of attentional device created by these varying grammatizational forms must be systematically indexed and defined in terms of its psychotechnical and psychotechnological effects, but also in terms of its possibilities for linkage with other older or more recent layers. And most important of all would be to identify various forms of attention according to the kinds of retentional and protentional flux brought about in them by psychotechniques and psychotechnologies, each one of which is quite specific." [83]

"the audiovisual object is the principal object with which the programming industry [. . .] forms a kind of attention [. . .] (attention seen as the flow of channeled consciousness, concentrated on and captured by the flow of the temporal object); this audiovisual object and the efficacy of the attention capture it implements exist only because of the grammatization of the audiovisual, in which one no longer sees nor hears the world but rather its reproduction through various devices. These devices tightly control the flow of consciousness where the time of consciousness is subverted by the time of psychotechnology.

Yet with the book - which also reproduces the world, literally, through a grammatization of speech that becomes logos but does not require any apparatus, since the equipment required for reading has already been interiorized in the form of synaptic circuits in the brain itself, which require that the reader can write as well as read - the time of the text, which is a spatial object, is controlled by the projection of the time of consciousness itself since text-time is produced by the time of consciousness that, without needing any mechanical control over the unfolding of a text or over consciousness itself, flows on throughout the course of a reading - which itself then forms deep consciousness." [83-4]

"I count the musical score among the number of spatial objects, since it places music outside time: written (diasthematic) notation enables musical temporality and its vocal and instrumental flow to transform into linearity, that is, spatiality, through the Guido d'Arezzo notation that, strictly speaking, brings music (which is also a psychotechnique of the first order) into 'the age of composition.' But there are many other kinds of nonlinguistic textuality that are recognizable by their spatiality, such as the paintings registering the neoclassical episteme according to Foucault, the language and formulae of mathematics according to Derrida, and so on.

The writing down of speech, originally a purely temporal object in the course of which discourse is formed, spatializes this spoken temporality just as a musical score spatializes the time of music. The reader then retemporalizes this spatiality, but this can take place only because it was detemporalized, this is, materialized, given the form of a tertiary retention. An audiovisual object, which is temporal and not spatial, is certainly also capable of being a tertiary retention, and in this sense it is also spatial (e.g., a reel of film, a cassette, a DVD, etc.). But the projector or player that reads it, and without which it is inaccessible, retemporalizes it technologically, by short-circuiting the temporality of attentional consciousness of which it is the object, then conferring on it a temporality that is not at all simple: it can only show itself audiovisually as the incessant flow of retentions.

Obviously, I do not mean that an audiovisual temporal object does not allow for the creation of deep attention. On the contrary, I mean that as a pharmakon, it has characteristics that have currently, within the context of the programming industries, been put to the service of a set of attention-capture devices that are fundamentally destructive, like the hypersolicitation of attention that gives rise to attention deficit, even though by all evidence the cinema is indeed an art and that like all art it solicits and constructs deep attention and is thereby both poison and remedy. Because it can anamnesically temporalize this temporal object, consciousness must understand it spatially, thus reconquering the motor machinery through which it is a function of time." [84-5]

"this is not simply a question of the education system. It also concerns the political milieu constituted by the state of minds that are themselves nothing other than diversely structured attentional flux, more or less attentive and thoughtful, composing this milieu either as critical, rational consciousness (maturity) or as an agglomeration of gregarious behaviors and the immature brains of minors, artificial crowds whose consciousness has been enucleated by a regressive process of identification. This means that the matter of the ecology of mind is also that of the ecology of the political milieu." [85-6]

"Many obstacles still stand in the way of correcting our course: in the first place, a veritable conspiracy of imbeciles against which, moreover, none among us - we weak, pharmacological beings, weak and imperfect - can really escape: we can never become completely mature, such as we are [. . .]. This conspiracy of inattention, sloth, and cowardice is not solely the product of short-sighted economic and industrial interests: it is also the combining of political, intellectual, and artistic elements, plus those of corporations and public services, and, more generally, th egenerations that were formed in the era of the book - they (we) have also tended to become indolent." [87]

"And this is not just a matter of ecology (of the mind and, as a result, via natural environments in which we pharmacological beings are currently living) but of hygiene, that is, of care in the truly classic sense. And as such it is a matter that raises the issue of what Foucault calls biopolitics - but that also extends it, introducing into it a dimension closer to philosophy's first questions as techniques of the self and the role of hyponemata in individual and collective existence, that is, 'the governing of the self and others'; in Foucault's study of them he lays out the first genealogy of psychotechnics, which will serve here as the basis for constructing a new critical apparatus for thinking through evolution of the episteme. Foucault will later call this apparatus an 'archaeology' - mechanisms of tertiary retention." [93]