[...]werful 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


(i am cautious at every turn to capture my own) *experience of distraction* is part of ajayeb studies. because it has to do with modes of attention and its persian history

perception is a dream

(an account of) [*]modernity: a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken up or degraded through technological, urban, and economic reorganization
==> a “decay” in the capacity for perception [<-- to be careful in working for ajayeb not to romanticize (elitist and regressive fantasy of communal relations in) premodern modalities of looking/listening as richer, deeper, or more valuable :
modern urban life as “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” =/= premodern's “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase"]

(sensory mental schema)


understanding of distraction within a larger deterioration of experience

-distraction (not as a product of decay or anthropy, rather) as a mean to overcome bankruptcy of bourgeois aesthetic (late 19th century):
•Benjamin: absorbed contemplation purified of the excess stimuli of modernity
•Adorno: distraction as regression: perception that is “arrested in the infantile stage” =/= “deep concentration”
•Rilke: authentic attention as precious and rare survival of the lost ideal of artistic absorption in work now exiled to the margins of mechanized and routinized world
•Rodin: gazing of the handworker
-
}--> “reception in a state of distraction”, (<== absorption is psychologically grounded perception) =/= Crary arguing that attention and distraction ceaselessly flowing into one another on the same continuum (of social field)



[tales of understanding]-*
•what are the cognites of ‘contemplation’ (in german or farsi)?
the theological resonances of this latinate word --> contemplation: viewing/considering with continued attention; going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into the deep roots of things, into their creative ground


(to oppose) contemporary modes of distraction
modern forms of interiority, absorption, psychic isolation

Riegl's dream of a world in which art would be inseparable from an imaginary democratic harmony of individual and community (=/= harem)

collective attention (central attentive mass audience, 1900) : cinema

rational attention: attention linked to thought, one's telescope on object

(for Nietzsche:) attention: possibility of an absorption ==> forgetting --> life-affirmative }--> “focusing on the present moment”

final virtue of modern man: *presence of mind* --Nietzsche--> necessary part of the (cosmopolitan) individual's functioning within a modern world of economic facts and qualities --> ready at response to the machine, affinity with the technical, athletic political (#integration tale)
--> the (serious) modern soul is directed towards the news, focusing on the present, to employ the moment (#presentism #past-studies)
•fable of “to be at the present moment”
•fable of “to adapt yourself”

perceptual acceleration of modernized social field (work + leisure) ==> new *cosmopolitan individual* (who receives signals from many fars and nears, equipped to ‘attend’ to messages and participate in their circulation ☆ #facebook? --> diffuse anxiety of the other-directed person : gyroscope --> radar)

Arendt:
modernity: fabricating rendered meaningless =/= contemplation: beholding the truth

‘life = being’ ==> ‘contemplation = truth’


Heidegger --> characterization of Greek's primordial self-disclosing look ==> makes presence possible + glaring predatory look --of--> modern subjects = objects of conquest


dystopian story: a promising outburst (always of human) activity [such as science or exploration or artificial intelligence, etc.] that leads in the most deadlines sterile passivity [such as alien predation, industrialisation of mind, global contamination, etc.]
(theatricalization of scientific mistake in the Handmaid TV series: scientific human progress failing ==> abolishing the distinction between private and public consciousness }<-- optics of narcissistic scepticism <== psychological shock of the temporality of process)


19th century: Schopenhauer's early grasp of the link between attention and perceptual disintegration
(for Schopenhauer: [cognitive chaos of] cultural modernity:) temporality ==> subjective anguish


[title]
the timing of intellect

(how come usually intellect does not have time? leaps out of time)


(chaotic successiveness of) perceptions are rendered intellectually coherent --(Schopenhauer)--> (unmotivated movement of the) will holds them together ~= body: will's most immediate objectified form
}==> (modernism's) looking: a purified perception suspended from time and the body's economy


telegram, Facebook
extremely heterogeneous mixture of fragments of representations of every kind constantly crossing one another
-ceaseless pulsing and animations of the body --> temporality of the bodies in Tehran
--✕--> possibility of subjective reflection (in a Cartesian sense) & association of discrete elements


distraction <--suggesting--> sublimation


(from Descartes to Kant) consciousness/cogito = ground of knowledge and certitude (= self-present subject) --✕--> (Schopenhauer recognizing) ending the unquestioned foundational priority of consciousness ==> attention (emerges as a problem)


broken attention
(idea for video documentation: a lagging mirror attached in front of the camera's lenses)



(a fable)

looking out the window
perceive a landscape
light of consciousness
distribute over the landscape
then i try
to apprehend a single tree branch
the consciousness that the rest of the landscape was deployed then fades
diminishes into associational debris
into disappearance of representations

real nexus of psychic life
permeated colored enlivened feelings
distribution of feelings
the gradual unfolding
efforts of attention
are forms of volitional activity
impulsive energy to individual imagery
permit them to fade away
therefore, the tree branch, the window, is a process

Dilthey


in Peirce:
[*]attention = anti-optical act of selection [=/= (in traditional epistemological thought) singling out a contemplative object], “the power by which thought at one time is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time”
--✕--> *firstness: self-immediacy, absolute presence (before synthesis and differentiation) ~ nonreferenciality (=/= perception, attention consumed/constituted in time ~= continuous quantity = *secondness)


using a more act-oriented term “thought” instead of “consciousness”

dissociation
anaesthesia
hallucination
multiple selves
--James--> temporal model of mind: ‘stream’
(=/= scenic model of mind)
[this was part of a larger institutional field in which scientific psychology generally was abandoning ‘elemental’ conceptions of consciousness in favour of operational or functional models]
==> observer: an artist confronted with the primordial chaos of sensation --> (ethics of) overlapping common choices (made of autonomous subjects [--> you can see James seeking to lessen the shock of recent works in science and psychology for an American middle-class readership])
(William James:) irreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization



my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate


emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher



attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary

Simondon, mold & modulation
Deleuze, on fold

by the end of 19th century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence


(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness

hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses

focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object

sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness


Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that there were a complex and shifting relation of mutual exchange between the “luminous” physics with a huge range of other “darker” ideas about ‘action in a distance’ enacted in spiritism
@Zoumana


hypnosis & suggestion --> automatic processes (inferior, more instinctual, continuous with animality), “mental decapitation” =/= ration elicit patient with conscious participating will power [--> Star Wars will of the weaker and less independent, powerful natures exercise over weaker ones, jedi --> strance states (of the weaker ones): being instrument of undisguised power --Stengers--> deviant types of behavioural control]
(hypnosis still being researched on but) ideologically could not be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces

Ali's tacit appeal to state secret, military secret --> importance of low-level effects of suggestion and influence in contemporary global culture (Ali's interest)
the role ‘suggestion’ plays in a society of communication --> the effects of:
•fashion
•mimesis
•mass psychology
•media-related contagions
+ influences of all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends

(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*

attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift


(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization


Foucault's society of discipline
Guy Debord's society of spectacle

(Guy Debord's) *spectacle: a development of a technology of separation*, [multiple strategies of isolation] --> (capitalism's restructuring of) society without community
+
(Foucault's) [production of] docile bodies ~{ body = political force }
+
(<== Weber's) inner isolation of individual [<==> capitalist modernity]

management of attention is masscultural forms has to do (less with the visual contents and much more) with a larger **strategy of the individual** }-->
spectacle:
[--✕--> looking at images]
----> (construction of conditions that) individuate, immobilize, separate subjects
}==>
attention --> operation of noncoercive forms of power

(Crary:) optical/technological objects --> arrangement of bodies in space (--modernism--> techniques of separation)

television + personal computer --> anti-nomadic procedures (that fix and striate) ==> rendering bodies controllable and useful + simulation of choices and interactivity
--> (Williams: a technological and logic of) *mobile privatization*

(through the assessment of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and now popular narratives) the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action (~ human operator linked to a machine as an exterior object) [~/=? companion species]


irresistible imperative of communication ~~--> continuous effects of control

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

classical power:
•repression
•ideology
•
modern power:
•normalization
•modulation
•modelling
•*information that bear on:
◦language
◦perception
◦desire
◦movement
--> by way of microassemblages
(= *subjectification*)

-the shape of absentmindedness in my performances is skewed by the attentive imperative of modern subjectification? something unfocused, **something folds back against itself** =/= “processing” a stream of heterogeneous stimuli (in film, radio, television, cyberspace)
-my audience felt an uncomfortable sense of their own inattentiveness (in my performances of the experience of dissociation, of temporality incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow). what is they are asking me is to give a stream of heterogeneous stimuli --> ****how temporality is inhabited****


to diffuse (societies of spectacle) into (a single) integrated society of spectacle (==> separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals)


(film and television in competition with) *daydream* --> a domain of resistance internal to any system of coercion [?]-->
(?is capitalism's contemporary arrangement allowing/playing an) oscillation between spectacular attentiveness and the free play of subjective absorption
~ info/telematic systems simulating the possibility of drift ==> modes of sedentarization
--> (Crary asks) how creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish in the interstices of these circuits? @Sven ...amid technological forms of boredom ~ *modern boredom* [--> cognitive and perceptual synthesis. boredom is involved with the intensification of a sense of selfhood? ~~--> romantic (turned inside out?)]


*perception without awareness* (vilified in art and criticism)
--?--> automaticity: performance under conditions of divided attention

...................................

Manet: disengagement of perception from a model of interiority
Manet's painting discloses some of the important reconfigurations of the status of the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)

my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?

...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence

=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya's painting Majas on a Balcony]

(Manet's palette corresponding to) the luminous wavelengths of a new technological lifeworld...

Manet dramatizing (but not lamenting) the evaporation of a cohesive world...
(finely assembled) architecture of solitude and separation [...] in a space of a newly modern individual autonomy


modernization of urban space --> (crucial component of the) regime of perceptual adaptability


diagram = optical system --?--> ocular [~ *rationalizable spatial account of vision*] --> vision as reflexive : property of a subject figured as a geometric point (=/= ambiguity and disorganization of intersubjective relations)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)


*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*

uncertain content of the interior

(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] has become part of European subjectivity, it is good[?!], and i miss it in middle east postmodernism)


Manet tentative splitting of:
•figural representational facts
•facts of autonomous pictorial substance
(--> now a European tradition)
(a movement towards “formlessness” very different than eastern chaotic imagination)

Manet's confident inattention to the object and its coherence


fastening together and grounding narrative content


[Manet (and many other 1880 painters) -->] problem of [*]realism: a question of tenuous relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation
=/= question of mimesis

achieving a *reality-effect* ~= to hold something together, to “contain” things, ***to ward of experiences of disintegration***
(the reality-effect is processed and achieved differently in Iran. how? how iranian artists differ from the perceptual logic of modernity?)

([Elmira and Foad's] engagement with the) ambiguities of visual attentiveness

perceptual logic of modernity (: two powerful tendencies at work):
•*binding together of vision* {an obsessive holding together of perception to maintain the viability of a functional real world}--> sealed
•*dynamic of (psychic/economic) exchange* {dynamic of flux/dispersal}--> barely contained


(Manet's) faciality (a site of pictorial effect): casual amorphousness, a surface that no longer discloses interiority or self-reflection
(within 19th + 20th century modernity) face: (par excellence) the substance of expression of the signifier --(D+G)--> **capitalist faciality** (exists to serve a signifying formula): the means by which the signifier takes control, the ways it organizes a certain mode of individuated subjectification and collective madness of a *machine without any content* (Crary > Guattari)

-who returns to the more tightly bound order of faciality? when and why?
--> articulated hierarchy of socialized body
...relative integrity of the face --> a larger mode of conformity to a dominant reality
@Geert
(Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ head)’ [~ multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code] overcoded by what we call the Face
(////we have to escape the face and facialization!)

indication of bodies in my peers projects in apass:
-kinds of subduing and constrain necessary for the construction of an *organized and inhibited corporeality* (--> Laura's project)
-instruments of domestication

fixed pictorial (--> a holding action) --> social organization



study object of empirical sciences around 1880: perceptual field newly decomposed into various abstract units of sensation + related possibilities of synthesis
+ newly invented nervous disorders (hysteria, etc.)
--> (busy with) failures of the integrity of perception --> disassociated fragments --> (impairment asymbolias:)
*agnosia*: inability to make any conceptual or symbolic identification of an object ~ visual information experienced with a primal strangeness:
“perceptual field --✕--> pragmatic plasticity”
flat perception, no determination of depth object
}--> labelled as pathological [=/= my amazon project--was a form agnosia:
•resistance to consuming the world in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad

{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repression


“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)

subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}


(the state of) the seated woman


[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (= Manet's blanks), fashion would keep one's face from any identity (==> ‘the look’: public, outward, blase, impassive, not bored, not tired, not disdainful, not quite focused on anything)
impersonality -->(Benjamin's modernity:) public space in which, for the first time, individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other [~-> “chi dadash!?” or “was guckst du?!"]
-for three centuries, the meaning of human face was explained in terms of rhetoric of language. in 19th century suddenly face occupies a precarious position: it is belonging to a human being as a:
•physiological organism
•privatized, socialized individual subject
--Darwin--> split status of face:
•symptom of an organism's anatomical and physiological functioning
•the mark of the success or failure of a process of self-mastery and control (in the social construction of a normative individual)

*face: (sign of a disquieting) continuum between the somatic and the social*


boarded on a trance

(Bachelard:) reverie: irreality function --> keep the psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign nonself (!)
--✕--> reality function --> adapt to reality: to manufacture works which are realities

modern flirtation: refusal and the withdrawal of the self are fused with the phenomenon of drawing attention to the self (in one indivisible act)
-Simmel

Poetics of Reverie (by Bachelard) @Eszter


how Sina works
(in my more recent works i play with) [no] enactment of visual mastery
[no] ocular potency
-my storytelling operates in a state of distraction, in which the stability of the story begin to erode ==> breakdown of normative attentive narratives --> the audience finds themselves in a trancelike state ==> condition for mobile and transient synthesis
-i mobilize a set of associative chains that are part of a libidinal economy (that i am part of) --> *exceeding the binding logic of the work*


effectively
cross-eyed figure
sees
if anything at all
(it is a disunified field)
with two
disparate optical axes.
into the eclipse mental
the environment grows dim


attentive subject --Ricoeur--> part of the open state of the universe of signs --> juncture of the erotic & the semantic

symbols, in their overloaded semiotic banality, is where the ruse of desire is expressed

(a diagram:) parallel lines --> a principle of nonconvergence --> the binocularity of vision is not united or synthesized on a specific plane or point --> a spliting apart : *unreconciled binocular disparity* (--situates--> difference and nonidentity within the midst of perception)
[=/= convergence (without which a normative attention would be impossible ==> world of focused clarity)]


...as if a single object is seen by two nonreconciled eyes


seamless modulation of normative attention into a dispersed distraction ==?!==> (reassemblage and rebinding into the) *repetitive laws of the unconscious*

...the image of conjugality and adultery simultaneously
-fixed position of limits

Bindung --> figuration of an adulterous liaison

[*]adultery (in the context of modernization): “a cynicism of forms,” merely another effect of a dominant system of exchange (circulation and equivalence)
Tanner

[*]infidelity: capacity to decompose oneself into the plurality of distinctly different essential tendencies, to detach the periphery from the center, and to make interests and activities independent of their integral interconnection [=/=? my work]
Simmel

in Duchampian terminology: (Manet's painting In The Conservatory) blossoming bride and bachelor enmeshed in a verdant anticonjugal machine of perpetual nonfulfilment

cultural corrosion of conjugality <== (one of) larger disintegration of premodern positions (of male and female):
•violent insertion of women into the process of commodity production

*labor and society assume a mass character ==> “women = mass articles” & lose:
•their “natural” qualities (female essence defined by the production of life)
•their poetic aura

traditional positions disrupted by the logic of exchangeability***


greenhouses in 19th century, extended the dwelling and bore witness to the expansion of the private sphere. greenhouse provided a place to stroll in all weathers
--> frozen temporality ~=> memory and history excluded =(congealed present)==> dehistorisized subjectivity

(fundamental) withdrawal of the possibility of *gesture* --Agamben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]

incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacit[...]