Perhaps the most provocative chapter so far. Lanham establishes four matrices that might be construed as dimensional coordinates for the economics of attention.

1. Signal: this is already familiar in the text, and looks like this:
   Through<——–>At
   That is, some signals are intended to be immersive, to be looked through to the message/content  "within" (see my previous post on this). Other signals call attention to themselves as signals. They are more highly stylized, asking us to look at them, at their constructedness. Still others are, obviously, somewhere in between.
2. Perceiver: this follows alone the same line:
   Through<——–>At
   Just as signals sometimes ask to be read in certain ways, so readers sometimes adjust their readings along the same dimension or spectrum. A movie may ask us to immerse ourselves in its world, but movie critics (and like-minded audiences) may choose to look at the movie, the actors’ choices, the direction, the special effects, and so on. This is the difference.

   Lanham notes that the traditional work ethic promotes looking through (perhaps as part of the Puritanical moralizing against considerations of style). However, contemporary work practices increasingly value an ability to look at how work is being done. Lanham suggests, "one might almost define managerial skill as the ability to understand and work at any point on the spectrum of perception."

   From here Lanham moves into two more problematic dimensions.

3. Motive: though I would prefer the more difficult concept of desire, here the spectrum looks like this:
   Game<—->Purpose<—->Play
   Basically, at the game end is competitiveness, the will to win, which Lanham largely naturalizes as a function of our being social/hierarchical primates. At the other end, play denotes our pure pleasure in undertaking an activity simple for the sake of itself ("the play’s the thing"?). Practical purposes exist somewhere in-between and participate in a recursive relationship with the two extremes.

   Lanham writes, "in an economics of attention, markets trade motives rather than goods. Their great virtue is making human motive fungible." Now some will clearly object to this characterization! No doubt, postmodern consumerism attempts to sell us affects (motives) that they attach to their material products. I’m not sure how "virtuous" it is, however, to attempt to sell people their own feelings. Not the word I would choose.

   Anyway, I agree with Lanham’s next point, which is that management is about productively mixing these motives. Sometimes one requires entrepeneurial spirit; other times pure experimentation is necessary. We can see this in academic life where researchers alternate between thinking about their research in terms of competition with their colleagues and burying themselves purely in the research for itself, without thought to practicality.

   Overall, Lanham’s concept of motive is helpful in illustrating an element of the rhetorical process that intersects the oscillations between style and substance. However, I find it a somewhat impoverished notion of desire and subjectivity. Clearly though this book is not the place where a more subtle theory could be developed, so I’m not sure what could be done about it, except to build on this notion elsewhere.

4. Reality: as if tackling desire was not enough, Lanham ends by attending to "reality" itself:
   Life as information<—->Life as stuff<—->Life as drama
   On the left, information becomes the "stuff" of life informing the world, whether in the form of Platonic ideals, divine intention, or DNA. On the right hand side is self-consciousness, self-awareness: life as a theater, psycho- and sociological life stages, life as story and so on.

As a theory of "reality," this last doesn’t amount to much; neither does the theory of motive tell us much about desire. However, that’s not really their purpose. Instead, they are an attempt to develop a "more capacious theory of communication" than our traditional notion of CBS (clarity-brevity-sincerity). This matrix asks us to examine a communication system– sender-signal-receiver–in terms of the aesthetics of the signal, the motives of sender and receiver, and a sense of how they are approaching reality.

For example, this blog. For the most part, the signal asks you to look through to the content of individual posts. However, I’ve also obviously made stylistic choices that signify some sense of my self and my purpose here as they might relate to my professional work (of which the blog is in some sense a part).

As a reader, you may come here to get information, to look through, but you may also come to look at, to try to figure out what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Maybe you want to figure out if you should start a blog or design yours like mine or not like mine.

Motives are clearly at stake here. On one level, I recognize blogs don’t count for much in academic life, so I just do this for play, for the sake of doing it, out of an interest and joy in the act of this kind of writing. On another level, I wouldn’t mind being successful in the world of blogging, at least within the community of folks who blog on the subjects I do. Maybe I could win sometime at the game of blogging.

Along the reality spectrum, part of this presents information, but I may also oscillate toward the dramatic. The choices I make along these lines might inform the way I balance choices between valuing substance (asking readers to look through) and style (asking them to look at).

In the end, while I am certainly at issue with some of Lanham’s claims here, it certainly is an ambitious, grand theory and a useful movement in a direction rhetoricians might continue.

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