Notes on suspension of perception

Suspension of Perception
[Notes for Chapter ONE]

11 1810-1840 Shift from the models of objective vision to subjective vision.

…a classical regime of visuality…?

12. …the function of vision became dependent on the complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observe,, rendering vision faulty, unreliable ..and arbitrary.

…within both visual modernism and a modernizing mass visual culture, begins in the late 1870’s.

Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation.

13. …capitalist modernity (even today) has generated a constant re-creation of the condition of sensory experience, in what could be called a revolutionizing of the means of perception…

…perceptual modalities have be and continue to be in a state of perpetual transformation, or, some might claim, a state of crises…

…vision…has no enduring features…it is embedded in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social configuration, and economic imperatives.

…film, photography, and television are transient elements within an accelerating sequence of displacements and obsolescence, part of the delirious operations of modernization.

…late 1900’s, the problem of ATTENTION becomes a fundamental issue.

Inattention…began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem.

14. …changing configuration of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception.

Since Kant, part of the epistemological ilemma of modernity has been defining a human capacity for synthesis within the fragmentation and atomization of a cognitive field…Kan argued that all possible perception could occur only in terms of an original synthetic unification principle, a self-cause, that stood over and above any empirical sense experiences such as vision.

15. It became imperative for thinkers of all kinds to discover what faculties, operations, or organs produced or allowed the complex coherence or conscious thought.

Wilhelm Dilthey…the creative forms of synthesis and fusion that are specific to the activity of the human imagination…
…For Nietzsche synthesis was no longer the constitution of truth but rather a shifting alignment of forces that was endlessly creative and metamorphic.

1880-90, part of psychic normality was the ability to synthetically bind perceptions into a functional whole, thereby warding off the threat of dissociation, or of what Kant saw as perceptions “crowding in upon the soul.”

17. Attention…was a repressive and disciplinary defense against all potentially disruptive forms of free association….It is the bringing of the consciousness to a focus in some special direction…without it meaningless reverie will take the place of coherent thought. Attention thus became an imprecise way of designation the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interest of maintaining an orderly and productive world.

…attention and attentiveness (in the late 19th century) becomes a fundamentally new object within the modernization of subjectivity. In most cases…it had a local importance in matters of education, self-fashioning, etiquette, pedagogical and mnemonic practices, or scientific inquiry.

18 …attention was an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed contents of consciousness…a matter of the force of a sensation.

19. …two important condition for the emergence of attention as a major problem in accounts of subjectivity:

20. 1) …the collapse of classical models of vision and of the stable, punctual subject those models presupposed. 2) …the loss of any permanent or unconditional guarantees of mental unity and synthesis.

21. …by 1870’s…one finds attention consistently being attributed a central and formative role in accounts of how a practical or knowable world of objects comes into being for a perceiver….”Whatever its nature, [attention] is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind.

23. 1890’s…attention became a major issue for Freud. …in this period attentiveness…generated a sprawling diversity of often contradictory attempts to explain it.

24. …the study of attention in this period…asked these questions:
A. How did attention screen out some sensations and not others?
B. What determined how attention operated as a narrowing and focusing of conscious awareness?
C. What forces or conditions caused an individual to attend to some limited aspects of an external world and not others?
D. How many events or objects could one attend to simultaneously and for how long?
E. To what extent was attention an automatic or voluntary act; to what extend did it involve motor effort or psychic energy?
But however it was described—organization, selection, isolation—attention implied an inevitable fragmentation of a visual field in which the unified and homogeneous coherence of classical models of vision was impossible.

25. The cultural and philosophical implication of this reconceptualization in turn raised a larger set of problems and produced a range of position, which I will group into three loose categories.
A. …attention as an expression of the conscious will of an autonomous subject for whom the very activity of attention, as choice, was part of that subjects self-constituting freedom.
B. …attention was primarily a function of biologically determined instincts, unconscious drives, a remnant, as Freud and others believed, of our archaic evolutionary heritage, which inexorably shaped our lived relation to an environment.
C. …an attentive subject could be produced and managed through the knowledge and control of external procedures of stimulation as well as a wide-ranging technology of “attraction”.

…attention is the fundamental condition is the fundamental condition of knowledge.

…Most areas of research—reaction times, sensory and perceptual sensitivity, mental chronometry, reflex action, conditioned responses—al presupposed a subject whose attentiveness was the site of observation, classification, and measurement, and thus the point around which knowledge of many kinds was accumulated.

27. James and Bergson…explicitly challenged the notion of a pure or simple sensation, on which associationism depended. Both contended that any sensation, no matter how seemingly elemental, is always a compounding of memory, desire, will, anticipation, and immediate experience…But at the same time their work offered little support for the idea of a “pure” or autonomous aesthetic perception.

29. The problem of attention, then, was not a question of a neutral timeless activity like breathing or sleeping but of the emergence of a specific model of behavior with a historical structure—behavior that was articulated in terms of socially determined norms and was part of the formation of a modern technological milieu.

The problem was elaborated within an emergent economic system that demanded attentiveness of a subject in a wide range of new productive and spectacular tasks, but who internal movement was continually eroding the basis of any disciplinary attentiveness

30. …the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another. …it created a regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction…

(Helmholtz) “It is natural for the attention to be distracted from one thing to another. As soon as the interest in one object has been exhausted, and there is no longer anything new in it to be perceived, it is transferred to something else, even against our will. When we wish to rivet it on an object, we must constantly seek to find something novel about it, and this is especially true when other powerful impressions of the senses are tugging at it and trying to distract it.”

…avid defenders of tech advance acknowledge that subjective adaptation to new perceptual speeds and sensory overload would not be without difficulties.

…modernization was not a one-time set of changes but an ongoing and perpetually modulating process that would never pause for individual subjectivity to accommodate and ‘catch up’ with it.

31. …early 19th century techniques of display, exhibition, and consumption to paradigms that would become dominant in the 20th century. Edison’s importance lies…in his role in the emergence,…of a new system of quantification and distribution. …a system ‘primarily designed for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content.

Edison saw the marketplace in terms of how images, sounds, energy, or information could be reshaped into measurable and distributable commodities and how a social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units of consumption.

32. …today the computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption of electronic entertainment commodities.

…Edison understood the relation between hardware and software…

…Edison’s 1st products foreshadowed…in-distinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption.

33. …the management of attention depends on the capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatternings of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed.

…the problem of attention has remained…within the center of institutional empirical research and at the heart of the functioning of a capitalist consumer economy.

34. Antonio Damasio…maintained that “without basic attention and working memory there is no prospect of coherent mental activity.”

35. …attention has proven to be a remarkable persistent problem within the generalized disciplinary context of the social and behavioral sciences.

36. ADD is characterized by impulsiveness, short attention span, low frustration tolerance, distractibility, aggressiveness and in varying degrees hyperactivity…linked to feeling of underachievement

…today’s culture is founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” and on the celebration of aggressiveness,…

37. Clearly, many of the systemic measures in place now for the efficient management of attention are working imperfectly at best. Many of the modes of fixation, of sedentarization, of enforced attentiveness implicit in the diffusion of the personal computer may have achieved some of its disciplinary goals, in the production of what Foucault call docile bodies. The proliferation of electronic and communication products insures that docility will always be lined with intensified patters of consumption, but the forms of social disintegration that have accompanied the new regime have generated behaviors that have become systemically intolerable.

…chemicals or neurochemicals as a strategy of behavior management…

38. Wundt’s model of attention…was founded on the idea that various sensory, motor, and mental processes were necessarily inhibited in order to achieve the restricted clarity and focus that characterized attention.

The idea of inhibition and anesthesia as constitutive parts of perception is an indication of a dramatic reordering of visuality, implying the new importance of models based on an economy of forces rather than an optics of representation.

39. (Charles Fe’re’ and Alfred Binet)…described the simple fact of attention as a “concentration of the whole mind on a single point, resulting in the intensification of the perception of this point and producing all around it a zone of anesthesia; attention increases the force of certain sensations while it weakens others.”…the “negative effects of attention”

…attention “suppressed” the contents of consciousness and produced a shrinkage of the visual field.

40. …the normative 19th century observer…began to conceptualize not only in terms of the isolated objects of attention, but equally in terms of what is not perceived, or only dimly perceived, of the distractions, the fringes, and peripheries that are excluded or shut out of the perceptual field.

…the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness

Darwin established a pervasive believe in the important of attention in human evolution, identifying it as a survival mechanism.

41. …reactive attention…an essential part of human biology…(predators or prey)…[men see women]…

…state of heightened alertness and of intense focus…

42. …3 models through which attention as movement was understood..
A. Attention as a reflex process...its origins in involuntary and instinctive perceptual responses.
B. Attention as determined by the operations of various automatic or unconscious processes or forces,…
C. …attention as a decisive, voluntary activity of the subject, and expression of its autonomous power to actively organize and impose itself on a perceived world.

45. …the great dream of the 19th century…that man could be liberated, could become for the first time master of himself, self possessed. In other words, one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence.

…the more one investigat4ed, the more attention was shown to contain within itself the condition for its own undoing—attentiveness was in fact continuous with states of distraction, reverie, dissociation, and trance. Attention finally could not coincide with a modern dream of autonomy.

46. Much modernist art and music theory has been based on dualistic systems of perception in which a rapt, timeless presence of perception is contrasted with lower, mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening. Within the visual arts,…modernism imagines two orders>
A. …the…”empirical vision, the object as it is ‘seen’, the object bounded by its contours, the object modernism spurns.
B. …the formal conditions of the possibility of vision itself, the level at which ‘pure’ form operated as a principle of coordination, unity, structure, visible but unseen.

Modernist vision with its “all-at-oneness,”…is founded on the cancellation of the empirical conditions of perception, including the experience of successiveness.

47. …the concept of attention was volatile…and incompatible with any model of a sustained aesthetic gaze. Attention always contained within itself the condition for its own disintegration. It was hauned by the possibility of its own excess—which we all know so well whenever we try to look at or listen to any one thing for too long. In any number of ways, attention inevitably reaches a threshold at which it breaks down.

Attention and distraction were not two essentially different states but existed on a single continuum, and thus attention was,…a dynamic process, intensifying and diminishing, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing according to an indeterminate set of variables.

“concentration of the will and of attention on anything will lead to exhaustion of attention and to a paralysis of the will”, Alfred Fouillee.

Emile Durkheim, 1890’s…”We are always to a certain extent in a state of

48 distraction, since the attention, in concentrating the mind on a small number of objects, blinds it to a greater number of others; all distraction has the effect of withdrawing certain psychic states from consciousness which do not cease to be real for all that , since they continue to function.”

…a distracted perception was central to any account of subjectivity within modernity.

49. …modern distraction was…an effect , and in many cases a constituent element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects.

50. …distraction is the disruption inherent in shock and distraction held forth the possibility of new modes of perception…a fundamental duality..

51. …attention and distraction…a continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, as part of a social field in which the same imperatives and forces incite one and the other.

…integrity depended on a reciprocal relation between an unwavering subjective attentiveness and a coherent objective world.

52. …the conduct of commerce and trade (are) based on deliberation (and) depends on the social cultivation of attentive habits.

55. Schopenhauer is one of the earliest to grasp the link between attention and perceptual disintegration, and he compare the “defective” and “Fragmentary” nature of subjective attentiveness to a “magic latern, in the focus of which only one picture can appear at a time; and every picture, even when it depicts the most noble thing, must nevertheless soon vanish to make way for the most different and even most vulgar thing…he identifies temporality itself as a source of subjective anguish.

56. …intellect did not have time as its form…
…The problem of consciousness becomes inseparable from the question of physiological temporality and process…
…Schopenhauser’s work is founded on a model of an “immediate instinctive intuition” rather than conceptual reflection.

57. The chaotic successiveness of perception is determined only by the unmotivated and blind movement of will. For most individual subjects, the will was directly experienced as one’s own body; that is, the will’s most immediate objectified form was the instinctual desiring economy of one’s physical existence.

Distraction and forgetfulness…became for Schopenhauer powerful components within the fluid economy of psychic experience. All of the mental states (sleep, trance, fainting, daydream, dissociation) that classical thought had marginalized or excluded from its theories of knowledge now took center stage as parts of psychological accounts of normative subjectivity…

…(from such theories we see) the disintegration of the epistemological tradition running from Descartes to Kant for which consciousness or the cogito is the ground of all knowledge and certitude.

58. …end of 19th century…Wilhelm Dilthey put forth his notion of subjective experience as “a continuous stream”…”the course of psychic life as given in the flow of time can only manifest on relative representation as if disappears and another relative representation as it begins to appear…he imagined consciousness as an immense terrain that was illuminated only in very small areas by the beam of attention.

59. EX: “If I am looking out the window and perceive a landscape, the light of consciousness many well distribute itself evenly over the entire landscape. But as soon as I try to apprehend a single tree or ever a branch in greater detail, the consciousness which I direct toward the rest of the landscape diminishes…Dilthey…(was) reacting against associationist explanations of mental and perceptual processes which posited the objects of consciousness of perception as fixed quantities or representations.

…1868…Charles S. Peirce…”Sensation and the power of abstraction or attention may be regarded as…the sole constituents of all thought.”…attention is an act of selection…”By the force of attention, an emphasis is put on one of the objective elements of consciousness.”

61. William James is of particular interest for his emphasis on the primacy of the “stream” and at the same time for situating attention, that which figuratively freezes the stream, and an indispensable activity “without which experience is an utter chaos.”

63. 1870…William B. Carpenter…”It is the aim of the Teacher to fix the attention of the Pupil upon objects which may have in themselves little or not attraction for I . . . The habit of attention, at first purely automatic, gradually becomes, by judicious training, in great degree amenable to the Will of the Teacher, who encourages it by the suggestion of appropriate motives, whilst taking care not to overstrain the child’s mind by too long dwelling upon on object.”

64. Attention, then was what prevented our perception from being an incoherent flood of sensations.

From the classical model of a mental stabilization of perception into a fixed mold, attention in the nineteenth century effectively became a continuum of variation, a temporal modulation, and it was repeatedly describe as having a rhythmic or wavelike character.

65. Perhaps nowhere else in the late nineteenth century is the ambivalent status of attention as visible as in the social phenomenon of hypnosis.

…hypnosis posed an unprecedented challenge to the separabiity of psychological, physiological and social factors. …the border between a focused normative attentiveness and a hypnotic trance was indistinct.

66. Attention was thus shown to be the gateway to some vaguely understood but qualitatively different state from what had been understood as consciousness.

67. Hypnosis also made clear the attentive states could be delineated in terms of absorption, dissociation, and suggestibility.

68. …hypnosis involved a narrowing of attention, it paradoxically also enabled subject to expand their awareness, in effect to see and remember more…

Just as photographic and cinematic innovation in the 1880s and 1890s defined the terms of an automation of perception, hypnosis too…was a technology that offered at least the fantasy of rendering behavior both automatic and predictable.

69. …hypnosis abruptly disappeared for the mainstream of institution practice and research 9in 1900).

71. Television…emerged as the most pervasive and efficient system for the management of attention, and it has become so fully integrated into social and subjective life that certain kinds of statements about television (for example, about addiction, habit, persuasion, and control) are in a sense unspeakable, effectively excluded from public discourse.