pointingandvaluing

pointing and valuing

There is a close connection between what we value, and what we pay attention to. Not necessarily that we only value what we pay attention to, but at least that we could not know if we value something unless we pay attention to it, unless we notice it.

Paying attention is not a simple act. We use devices to focus our attention: we give things names that allow us to pick them out, we use our hands to shield our view, and we run our fingers along the page under a line of words. This last device can be used to characterize the public aspect of the process: pointing. Once a thing is noticed by one person, this device can be used to show it to others. Having something pointed out to us draws our attention to it. We might even make the stronger claim, that without having a thing pointed out to us – whether by a label, or a word, or by the arrangement of words on a page so that we can follow them in sequence, each one pointing to the next, or by gesturing with a finger, or being implored to look (as in a frame), by ourselves or others – we could not pay attention at all.

If paying attention is critical to our ability to know what we value, then so is the figurative act of pointing – of having our attention drawn. Knowing what we value is conditional upon paying attention to that thing, and paying attention to that thing is conditional upon that thing being pointed out to us, by ourselves, or by others.

But, we might wonder why we would be concerned to know what we value. Valuing something does not always seem to depend on knowing that we value that thing. Often, we experience the realization that we valued something deeply without knowing – and we find this out when it is gone. So our valuing it, and its value for us, do not depend on our knowing anything. Nonetheless, it would seem that knowing what we value matters. Not knowing what we value, after all, sets the stage for what we call tragedy: destroying or abandoning something, without realizing its value.

It is extremely important to us of course to be able to react properly, appropriately, to what we value. This may involve protecting it, not allowing it to be destroyed, or simply engaging with it before it disappears. In fact, we might say that ‘properly’ valuing something would include reacting properly to it – treating it as something we valued. Properly valuing will therefore depend on knowing what we value. If so, then this is where the connection lies. Properly valuing something, which requires knowing what we value, will depend on having our attention drawn to that thing: on its being pointed out for us, figuratively, or literally.

Interestingly, there seems to be no limit to the range of things we are happy to have pointed out to us … look how fast that violinist plays – look how much detail is in this painting – look at the emotion on that old man’s face – look how big that tree is – look how dark that color red is – look how complex that design is – look how simple this design is … these things that we find artists pointing out to us do not seem to have any one thing in common, apart from the fact of our attention being paid to them.

Why would we care to have such an unlimited range of things pointed out to us? Perhaps we can explain what is going on here when we consider that if we value anything, then presumably, we value just as much the conditions, or mechanisms, that allowed that thing to come about – whether we are aware of them or not. But of course, that doesn’t seem to leave much, if anything, out (necessarily, it doesn’t leave anything out). The details of our environment, then, would be as important to us to discover as the things that we are constantly reminded of by our language and our community as being valuable to us. Recognizing the value we might place on these details, however, depends upon having our attention drawn to those details. And this depends on the act of pointing those details out.

Of course, with the pointing devices already available to us, and the interpretation we have already placed on our environment, we are only likely to see what we have already seen. The structures and devices that we use to point out the features of our environment have features themselves (our fingers, our eyes, arrows on street signs, flashing lights, alarms sounded at a pitch that our ears can hear), which cloud as much as the devices reveal (the shape of a lens, which focuses the center, and blurs the edges; the emphasis that our community, for purposes of efficiency, places on some issues and not others; the light shed by the sun at only some times of the day, so that we never get to see the earth in daylight at night). So, if left to our own devices, so to speak, we would be unable to observe swathes of the intricacies that surround us, that fall between the cracks where those devices meet, what those devices leave unobservable.

Expanding the range of what we can pay attention to, that is discovering all of what we value, or averting tragedy, therefore depends on appealing to new structures, or forms, of pointing devices, developed by others, and having those devices used to point out the hidden details to us. This seems to be what artists do: pointing out for us what we would not otherwise see. It may explain why we value them, too.

Appeared in Directions, catalog to Anthony Kelly's exhibition of the same name, Triskill Design, Dublin, 2007