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*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment

Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)

for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight

•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•

historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception

*attention: simulation of presence, a pragmatic substitute in the face of its impossibility

atemporal nature of perception

? direct perceptual access to self-presdenceex

(newly) designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming

(subjective conception of vision ==>) *attention: the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception ‘its own’ [&] the means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies***

interrelated problem of perception and modernization

Crary's development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption

general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention

optical verisimilitude

attention --> tension --> possibly of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded

how can something originate in its opposite?
Nietzsche

sudden emergence of model of subjective vision (in the 19th century)

complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer ==> vision is rendered faulty, even arbitrary

reality maintenance

aftershocks of apperception

failure of a capacity for synthesis of conscious thought (named dissociation) became linked in the 19th century with pathological psychosis
this label (of pathological disintegration) was evidence of a shift in the relation of the subject to a visual field
*synthesis
•for Bergson: bind with creative forces of memory
•for Dilthey: creative forms of fusion specific to human imagination
•for Nietzsche: endlessly creative and metamorphic and not constitutive of truth


the rise of psychological explanation within epistemology


Kant saw perception crowding in upon the soul

for Külpe attention was the very condition of thinking, consciousness not in the mercy of external impressions

the importance of attention to the conception of subjective time in Augustine and Husserl

(curiosity triggered by) wonder for Descartes

in 18th century:
-‘unified’ operation of mental life
-force of a sensation
-an effect of an event external to the subject
--✕-->
in 19th century, attention: an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed content of consciousness


running in the park, a motif of selfhood, of individual freedom, finality of the possibility of soul from the enduring experience of active, willed effort in relation to the body
==> moi: a repository of self-initiated (mental physical) activity and free will
-running in park/city: a priori believe in the self
-your experience is yours

•attention
•judgement
•memory
•perception
•mediation

apperception --> nature of intuition --> (a mobile and dynamic) conception of will --> motor activity

19th century:
attention = will
character = unity
attention ==> mind --{attention is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind}, systematic acquirement of knowledge, for the control of passions and emotions
--> powerful accounts of the nature of human subjectivity


practical or knowledge world of objects (the berlin naturkunde museum)

attention became part of the dense network of institutional discourses/practices around which “the truth of perception was organised and structured”
not part of a “regime of power” rather part of a space in which new conditions of subjectivity were articulated

19th century reconceptualization of attention: inevitable fragmentation of a visual field, an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unperceived ==>
1. attention as expression of the conscious will of an autonomous subject, as free choice, part of that subject's self-constituting freedom
2. attention as a function of biologically determined instinct, shaped our lived relation to environment
3. attentive subject could be produced and managed through the knowledge and control of external procedures of stimulation: technologies of attraction [--> formative component of a modernized mass visual culture (in the West): strategies of engaging an attentive spectator: comedians smirking at the camera, gesturing conjurers in magic film --> a cinema that displays its visibility, rupturing a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator; Gunning 1990]

Hegel's understanding of attention as “the beginning of education”

(rationalizing possibilities of) psychometrics
a site of quantification
==> subjective operations of repression and anesthetization ~~--> Freud

the model of an attentive human observer
compatible with technical conditions, insignificant “interior” faculty, a set of effects that could be measured externally
(technological transformation of physiology and psychology in the 19th century, development of electrophysiology --> cultural history of electricity)


behaviour with a historical structure: a behaviour articulated in terms of socially determined norms and is part of the formation of a modern technological milieu

1879, Wundt's psychology laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)


part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction


conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.

(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)

(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda


ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness of the will
-in adults: any economic shortcoming or social insecurity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)


(Miller @Zoumana) ...the unconscious as part of a system in which ‘automatic’ behaviour was reciprocally intertwined with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.

Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes


(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)

institutional discourse
techniques of the subject

attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis


observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception


unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition

community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception


eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master

(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’

co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissociation, trance,

@apass, work on attention is so interesting because it is part of the history of modality of contemplation about processes and activities of the body


the neo-Kantian legacy of a disinterested aesthetic perception --desire--> to escape bodily time (and its vagaries)
•(Hume's) artist: someone in whom “nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action” (<-- sounds familiar? “free” artistic perception)
•(for Roger Fry:) “imaginative life” is about contemplation disconnected from the possibility of action (=/= instinctive reactions to sensible objects and their accompanying emotions ~= animal)}--> a bad fable
modernist art: *timeless perception* [formal conditions of the possibility of vision, pure form operates as a principle of structure, Krauss outlines how temporality is excluded] =/= mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening [the object bounded by its contours, spurred/hated by modernism]


whenever we try to look at or listen to one thing for too long the attention (containing within itself the conditions for its own disintegration) inevitably reaches a threshold at which it breaks down[<-- a game i used to play as a child, playing with attention and distraction, mutating myself into a state of trance or autohypnosis, absorbed, diverted, nebulous =/= socially adaptive subject] --> *perceptual identity* (of its object) begins to deteriorate (& paralysis of will?) [_that is why in spectacle visual regimes the duration of perception must be regulated in short intervals]

attention is thermodynamic : a given force could assume more than ine form
partial sleep <--> abnormal fixation[...]