[...]ciousness 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 (on[...]