As I just mentioned, oscillation is a central figure in this text. The primary oscillation is between "stuff and fluff:" material objects and the information we create about them; the surface of objects (what we see when we look at objects) and how we interpret them (when we look through objects).

One of my first reactions to Lanham’s text was to think of it in the context of the Zen Buddhist notion of the "beginner’s mind." Basically, the beginner’s mind is a way to approach the fundamental practice of Zen Buddhism, zazen: breathing meditation. One tries to strip away any preconceptions about meditation and purpose. In zazen one focuses on breath as a way to quiet the mind and ultimately to become conscious as the emergence of thought, to have a more conscious (i.e. "top-down") understanding of unconscious (bottom-up) processes.

The focus on breath makes zazen a focus on oscillation, and so for me the connection was obvious. As I continued into the text, I could see how the ethos of the beginner’s mind reflected some of Lanham’s central values regarding rhetoric:

The rhetorical educational system taught a way to hold knowledge: tentatively, aware of your motives in holding it, aware of your audience and the arguments that oppose your own. Aware, above all, that under different circumstances, you might be arguing the opposite case. Such training in rhetoric as has survived into our time usually justifies itself by arguing that you need to learn the methods of argument to defend yourself against your opponents. But, more improtant, it allows you to defend yourself against yourself, to cultivate an interior countercheck. The more odious you might find that opposing opinion, the more you should seek to know what would make someone hold such an opinion. And the more you should examine the grounds on which you hold your own. This self-examination is, and ought to be, a humbling experience.

This final point is also the purpose of zazen: to examine the grounds of one’s own thinking; to become aware of the structures that create your habits of mind (samsara–the subjective worlds we create and inhabit in each moment).

In chapter two, the connection between Lanham and beginner’s mind becomes more resonant. Here Lanham is discussing Dadaism as an archetypal attention structure. Dadaism repudiates meaning making, the looking through portion of this oscillation, only looking at was allowed. Lanham explains:

What happens when you do this? Two things, and the audience at the Cafe Voltaire demonstrated both right away. You get mad and you start to laugh. Both the anger and the laughter remind you that human respiration means both breathing out and breathing in.

Lanham’s point is that at some point Dadaists recognize meaning their chance operations. As Dadaist Hans Richter noted, "We wer all fated to live with the paradoxical necessity of entrusting ourselves to chance while at the same time rembering that we were conscious beings working toward conscious goals."

Now obviously these themes of duality are philosophically familiar to us, as is the deconstructive response to such binaries. In fact, that is the point here. The Platonic-cum-Hegelian top-down approach. The Marxist/Nietzschean/avant-garde bottom-up response: to turn the world on its head. Here though we are moving beyond these humanist/anti-humanist dialectics. The attention economy and Lanham’s oscillation ask us to toggle between these two states: conscious apprehension of the world and emergent becoming/composing thought. Rhetoric and composition.

Attention economists function through a rhetorical understanding of this osciallation.

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