[...]texture of modern sensory life ==> attention: malleable entropic force susceptible to fatigue, distraction, and external management)
•to quest for the logic of meaning ==> primordial oneness of consciousness
----> (for Husserl) attention appears and appertains in the possibility of an *impersonal, preindividual, transcendental sphere free of anything empirical, of anything spatiotemporal* ==> attention: intentional act with an absolute structure, quasi-machine searchlight for an unwavering mode of looking at the act of looking
--Crary--> amid the dynamic dissolution of modernization (a world in which previously stable meanings, signs, social relations were being uprooted, made exchangeable, and put into circulation) Husserl proposes [in a hopeless quest] a monolithe technique of attention (to discern a halo of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subjective lifeworld [unable to go beyond ‘pre-cinematographic conditions’ (~ movement thought only from the anchorage of a static “pose”)]
 --Varela--> Husserl's (+ MerleauPonty) turn towards experience (the “things themselves”) was entirely theatrical : lacked any pragmatic dimension [---> go to Despret, Stewart]

what Cezanne did seek to “suspend” (to forget)?

(sensitivity to) perceptual experiences that had been ignored, marginalized, or incompatible (==> unarticulated)--within--> organization of knowledge about vision
}==> (Cezanne's) “attention to anomalous* --> ***engage a discordant exterior*** (that takes a hold on your recognizable world) [<-- our heritage in art]

Cezanne: “perception = process of its formation” : confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception =/= recording the evanescent appearances of the world

(Cezanne + Manet's discovery:) looking at one thing
=X=> fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence (~ rich immediacy)
==> perceptual disintegration and loss, breakdown as intelligible form ==> invention and discovery of previously unknown religions and organizations of forces

dissolution inherent in attentiveness ==support==> (Cezanne's) radical desymbolization of the world + perpetually modulating set of relations between the exterior and sensations

Cezanne attentive to:
•activity of the eye
•visual sensation
•myriad intricacies of subjective vision
•(physiological) limitations of sensory experience
•the body (its pulsation, temporalities, intersection of that body with a world of transitions, of events, of becomings)
•discontinuous composition of visual field (to its “concentric” format)

19th century scientific research ==>
•comprehensive account of human perception
•disjointed nature of the visual field
•central area of retina: photoreceptor cells
◦peripheral area of retina: sensitive to movement
•subjective visual field <== complex aggregate processes of the eye movement (“short fast jumps” =/= instantaneous intake of an image) --> a new psychological model of the human subject

acuity did not correspond strictly to localized anatomy but rather was the product of a dynamic relation of fovea and periphery as well as external luminous factors

hearing: aggregate perpetual process

Wundt's optical model (polarity between:)
•Blickfeld: field of consciousness
•Blickpunkt: focus of consciousness (where apperception occur) ~= attention

=/=
Locke, Descartes, Leibniz
consciousness = camera obscura

apperception: focalization of some content in consciousness ==> structure experience

--Crary--> what is at stake (with Wundt) is a cognitive modality part of a larger ***modern process of decentering***

(+ James -->) a question of the primacy of ‘transitive’ states in which the shifting fringes of perception were constitutive features of psychic “reality”


modernization of perception
center =/= periphery
dispersed functioning of sensory response

(how in 19th century capacities of human eye was made into:)
1. architectural model of *panorama* = permanent activation of optical periphery + no stable center of focused attentiveness
2. *stereoscope* = decisive exclusion of the periphery + 3D image hypertangiblity (<-- our model of visual consumption)
}==> loss of *consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer* [<-- this lost consistency is now in 2020 what everyone in art is busy with or to reactivate]


...having the fixed eye many disconnected areas of the visual field at once = continual beginning at a new center = Cezanne ~= *radical rethinking the nature of [*]synthesis: rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*

...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*

(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]

perceptual consistency is a phantom

(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation

-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?

-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?

perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough


the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world

•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]

fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness

the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation

fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability

the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically


perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them

Cezanne ==> understanding of the world (as processes of becoming) that doesn't possess a *premade integrity* (--> world of ajayeb is full of premade integrities)


reckon & calculate
--✕--> (Nietzsche's) formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensation
--✕--> (Cezanne's) continual emergence and disintegration of constellations (of relationships + self)



production (of other kinds) of fixed vision (amid the increasing awareness of the transitive and unstable nature of perception):
•modern psychology (late 19th century): how to incorporate the vagaries and unpredictability of subjectivity into a set of constants --> quantify subjective perceptual experience [<-- question of artistic feedback: how to perceptually isolate stimuli? how to temporally control one's exposure?]
•tachistoscope (mid 1880s--search for elemental unit of attentive behavior): the idea of instantaneous perception, mechanically producted “presence” --Crary--> fantasy of a descrete quantifiable perception detached from the lives dynamics of the body + the idea that pure nonsense reveals specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not conceive {based on naive realism (ignoring the existence of transient iconic memory) presupposing:
1- the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pattern
2- the subject's visual experience begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off
•Muybridge's machine ==> reconstruct appearances through the production of consecutive images
•

tachistoscope (nonconsecutive visual stimuli) --> how within the context of technological modernization, faster mechanical speeds are reciprocally related to new bodily forms of stasis (---> go to Virilio)
•chronometric device: measurement of relation time

}--> the break or interrupting of vision becomes the primary element within perceptual experience, rather than a visual continuum that maintains the cohesiveness of the world

}==> *possibility of pure sensation without perception*


“mental test”
detailed psychometrics of individual performance and behavior --preoccupied--> features of a generalized consciousness

20th century behaviorism --> abandonment of interest in any internal or introspective experience (in favor of data resulted from objective external controlled observation)
 ==Cattel==> application of systematized knowledge to the control of human nature
--Crary--> **accommodation of subjective life to machine operations** (+ speeds, temporalities)



new objective world: decomposed into autonomous and abstract stimuli (+ machine rythmes that differed dramatically from those of the body) ==> repositioning of the perceiver (+ motor readiness) }-->
•new patterns of production
•spectacular consumption

*machinic interface is the body* ==> related temporal shaping of everyday life

computer ==> psychic field of expectant attentiveness <--within-- one inevitably trains one self to maximize the speed of response to specific commands and functions (and derive at least one satisfaction from these habitual operations of mechanical facility)

}<--Crary-- epistemic shift in 20th century to theorise of subjective vision


instantaneity: unproblematic presentness of vision

Helmholtz (discovery of slow speed of nerve transmission) ==> “present state” of perception is deployed within a temporally extended physiological set of events


19th century --Foucault--> the essence of human life ceased to be something representable in the tabular space of classical representation =/= human life understood in terms of it's existence in time, of functions and energies that unfolded and developed outside the **immediacy of classical visibility**


*the conditioned reflex*
a chimerical notion of the western imagination in the 20th century

reflex (central cerebral process, onset of stimulus ==> preparation of motor response)
•one of the ways in which attention was positioned within knowledge of human behavior
==producing==> new forms of sensory experience outside of (various myth of) organic wholeness of subjectivity (--> distinction between “natural” & “artificial” sensation [---> go to my work in WIELS bestiary characters: what was individual experience in middle ages?])
•practical reconfiguration of behavior + possibility of external intervention and control
=/= Dewey's (galvanic image of) subject in a perpetual sensory interface with the world = uninterrupted mass motion --> unity of activity -->{*continuity* ==sustain==> an ideal of unity and wholeness =/= disintegration of individual experience, *disconnected nature of reality*}

(domain of experience in urban capitalist lifeworld:)
•industrial production
•spectacular condonation
•technological modernization
•rational, social, managerial control

(apperceptive experience of) anticipation, memory, and preparation for future actions

(halfway modernist Dewey didn't consider) breaks in perception might also have the capacity for *revivifying or expanding the limits of thought or cognitive awareness* [<-- and today 2020 many don't consider our contemporary media culture has this capacity]
--> what if our fragmented nature is one of the forms the discontinuous nature of reality can be apprehended?

celestial camera obscura

Dewey was deeply interested in practical ways of mind-body unity
rhythm, eurhythmy
alexander technique


unwavering model of pure contemplation
“pure knowing subject = forget your own personality, lose oneself in perception" = clear eye of the world (Schopenhauerian model of knowing in Doctor Strange movie, seeing the world directly and leave entirely one's own interests, the premodern idea of *perception = presence*)



Bergson (+ Cezanne) --> deepest forms of perception are mixed and composite

(in Matter and Memory) Bergson: establish a model of perception =/= routinized and reified forms of perceptual experience within western urban and scientific culture of the late 19th century

[*]externality = dream of inhuman immediacy: a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous
---> go to Lucy movie primordial and fundamental act of perception

Bergson (+ Dewey's ideal of coordination)
(the role of the) *body: reproduce in action the life of the mind*
(the role of the) *mind: hindering the thought from being lost in dream, an organ of ‘attention to life’
--> how memory and perception interpret each other
*memory coincides (diverge, intersect) with the “present” perception*
{ [*]determine: the more habitual and repetitive one's perceptual response to one's environment ==> the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual experience }--> creativity = (zone of) indetermination

--again--> Bergson (disturbed by new arrangement of spectacular consumption posed as novelty within a mass society ==> redundancy and habit + decay of traditional forms of collective memory) his work is a response to:
•general standardization of experience
•automation of perceptual response
(<--Sina-- typical problem of life-philosophers lebensphilosophie at the turn of the century reaction to the “intrusion of the mechanical”)

*preconditions of a free and autonomous subject* + *endangered (coherent) system of meaning*

(weak evolutionary assumptions of Bergson's elaboration of) human subject (= the most developed organism) = potential (for indetermination) = escape from a relationship of constraint and necessity in one's lived milieu [=/= animal]


Helmholtz (research on physiological optics) ==> غیر واقعی nonveridical status of vision (and perception) ~= there is no direct correspondence between sense experience and objects in the world ==>
•uprooting: rationalization and instrumentalization of senses (--> technical prostheses)
•displacing: reterritorializing of perception

Helmholtz (~/= Bergson) committed to expanding and optimizing the productive functioning of socioeconomic world (of imperial Germany) --> vision of capitalist industrialization (exchangeability, convertibility, etc.)

Helmholtz's ontology --> physics
Helmholtz's epistemology --> semiotics: representational and quasilogical order of signs


(Helmholtz +) Bergson's attention:
1. condition of relative motor arrest (Ribot)
2. gives up the useful effect of present perception
3. backward movement of the mind

Bergson's attention: a binding together of reality to ward off both perceptual and psychic disintegration


endosmosis: process of remaking an object of perception

Deleuze's attention: gives back to duration its true characteristic... a very special coexistence (=/= succession), a simultaneity of fluxes, in which the body was always implicated --> “freedom = awareness of that coexistence”,


“reality function”
(psychic+) sensorimotor grounding in the reality

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