Taking Attunement Further

Abstract

Attunement has been widely discussed across the post- and environmental humanities. However, might its common conflation with attention inadvertently reiterate humanist norms? This article explores three different artistic approaches to attunement — that of Philip Samartzis, AM Kanngieser, and Jenna Sutela — to elaborate differences between attentional and attunement modes of sensory relation. Attention is often understood as a kind of filter or interface for consciousness, preventing the external world from overwhelming the mind, or as a kind spotlight, cast outwards from internal consciousness. Both models reinstate the humanist notion that ‘the perceiver and the object of perception are discrete entities’ (Chiew, 2017: 48). Recent scholarship on attunement has been helpful in underscoring sensation’s situatedness, reciprocity and relationality. Yet its close association with attention means it inadvertently falls back on notions of mind/world, sensor/sensed, and cause/effect. How might attunement be otherwise understood as a non-subjective epistemological event in situ