Poly and Continuous Partial Attention

So in a fairly typical manouvre, in that I'm doing this about 3 three years too late, I have been reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman. One of the interesting confluences between the two is in their analysis of contemporary capitalism's demand that we be constantly 'plugged-in', leading to what Fisher describes as ' twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.' In this post, I'm trying to think through this phenomenon in relation to the practice of polyamory. Fisher’s analysis is based on Linda Stone's notion of Continuous Partial Attention, so here is a link to it if you want take issue with any of the things I’ve written. http://lindastone.net/2009/11/30/beyond-simple-multi-tasking-continuous-partial-attention/ - Oh, and here is the MANDATORY DISCLAIMER in which I say that obviously, there are as many ways of doing poly as there are people who do it, if not more, and I don’t want to generalise about other people's relationships on the basis of my own etc etc etc. I am definitely an anarchist and definitely not telling you what to do, honest.

Stone's definition of Continuous Partial Attention, as opposed to what she calls 'simple multi-tasking', lies in her sense that in the latter we focus our attention on a primary task, but are also completing a menial job that requires little mental effort - for example, talking on the phone while stirring soup. Continuous Partial Attention, by contrast, involves a state in which we are engaging in two activities which require similar levels of intellectual engagement - writing an email and talking on the phone simultaneously is a good example. Stone suggests that Continuous Partial Attention is not an intensification of multi-tasking, but is characterised by a different productive mode - so, in multi-tasking, we understand that we are engaging in two tasks in order to free up our future time for something more interesting, whereas in Continuous Partial Attention we are constantly searching for 'scanning for other people, activities, or opportunities, and replacing the primary task with something that seems, in this next moment, more important.' She suggests that although such a mode of congnition is useful for short periods of time, we risk stress-related unpleasantness such as the inability to sleep and cravings for sugary foods if we habituate ourselves to it. Incidentally, her sense that eating sugar and consequently gaining weight are prima facie ills really irritated me. Whevs, Stone. WHERE'S MY TAZ BAR?

This struck me as an interesting concept to think through in relation to polyamory, mainly because discussions with people who don't 'do'/'get' (for which read 'approve of') poly often focus on precisely these kinds of issues. I've found a widespread belief, often only half articulated, that there is something emotionally suspect about poly; that it revolves around a kind of 'twitchy, agitated... inability to concentrate' on just one person, just one relationship. The way that Stone makes the link between this kind of intellectual engagement and the consumption of sugary foods is also relevant to the way poly is conceived of as in some way being about greed and dissatisfaction – symptomatic of the consuming desire to constantly consume. There's a pervasive sense that choosing to do poly relationships opens one to accusations of 'scanning for other people, activities or opportunities, and replacing the pirary task with something that seems, in the next moment, more important.'

I'll be honest about this: it's not an easy accusation to refute. Polyamorous relationships *do* openly acknowledge the possibility of change and flux; that there might be someone around the next corner who will be super interesting and important. Of course, this possibility exists in monogamous relationships as well, and one of the things that irritates me about comparisons between poly and monogamy is that this doesn't get full recognition. Anyway, my feeling about this is that there's an crucial difference between an acknowledgement that there might be other people in the future who could be important and different and new and exciting,  and understanding this as necessarily implying that the person that this happens with is necessarily *more* important than whoever you're currently going out with. It strikes me that one of the crucial aspects of polyamory is that it becomes necessary to understand that there are different kinds of importance in relationships. The explosive febrility of getting involved with a new person, the exciting newness and magpie shininess that this entails, functions in a completely different register to the intimacy of a long-standing relationship. In fact, I've found that getting involved with someone new can underscore the ways in which the older relationship is important and unique. This is particularly the case if you understand romantic relationships as being a part of your life that you engage with intellectually - something that you keep working at, trying to understand better, get a deeper and more functional knowledge of.

Stone characterises Continuous Partial Attention as demanding that your attention is constantly diverted towards the 'next link'. Perhaps. However, if we understand having more than one partner as in some way analgous to this, then it's important to conceptualise said relationships  as forming links to one another - between you and your partners, but also between your partners themselves, and between you and your partner's partners. It's imprtant to remember that the metaphor of 'the link' doesn't necessarily impell your attention towards abandoning your current set of concerns in favour of chasing after a constantly receding future event. As anyone who habitually has 40 tabs open in their internet browser at any one time will know, links work both ways - forward and backwards. They provide roots. They make networks. There's nothing about the 'link' metaphor that necessarily implies a superficial or shallow emotional engagement - you could equally argue that if you are in a poly relationship, you're forming a network of links around you (and your partners, and your partner's partners) that centre and ground you (and the people with whom you're in a relationship) and that this stengthens your ability to relate to other people rather than weakens it. Poly can mean that you're more involved, not less.

Of course, this way of thinking about poly relationships has some difficult implications. One of the things that I find trickiest about it is identifying the boundaries of where my relationship with them ends, and where their other relationships begin. Some people seem to prefer not to discuss their other relationships at all, some feel that there's a sense in which talking about their relationships will be hurtful, either to the person who's being talked to or the person who's being talked about, some people over-share. When I was first in a poly relationship I blankly refused to engage in any discussion of my partner's other relationship, simply because thinking about it was too painful. And then there's also always the possibility that you might just *not like* your partner's other partners (although thankfully I've never had to deal with that issue.) Equally, I'm aware that my sense of the importance of network formation might intrude on another person's need for privacy. Just because I'm seeing someone, doesn't necessarily mean that their other parnters will want to have anything to do with me. All of these are important considerations, and obviously I would never advocate forcing a relationship, or set of relationships, into the paradigm discussed above. But I think that it's important, if you want to do poly - if you really think that the whole model of dedicating your entire sexual life to a single person FOR EVER AND EVER AND EVER AMEN is a wee bit problematic - then it's important to think through the most aspects of different ways of doing things. This post is really about offering a way of thinking about poly that makes a virtue of what is often considered a vice.


*as an aside - what is it about it being 2013 and people still being embarassed about having met their partners on the internet? Seriously, you guys, I mean: it's fine.