Retort: Attention Spam
Thanks to Anahid Kassabian for, well, drawing attention to the poverty of theory around attention, and its relation to affect. Unifocality seem to be a fact about the evolved human animal; in its field of attention there can be only one sharp focus at any time. All that seems to get discussed however is duration, viz. patronizing laments about the shrinking of the "span" of children's attention, especially boys - as if almost everything on offer is not consciously designed for cursory attention, or doesn't fully merit disattention. Certainly the same youngsters are capable of profound absorption, notably in certain forms of the virtual. The new screen technologies constitute the myth spaces of modernity; no surprise that they have brought us ancient patriarchal motifs - warriors and maidens and.....dinosaurs, those sexual lizards, huge yet safely extinct, which body forth, from out of deep time, both the fears and wants of their audience. What needs to be explored is whether there are emergent properties of the new constellation of digital machinery and imaging techniques that suggest a causal relation between their kinds of virtuality and the production of paranoia. The cyborgs in the screen are an allegory of the fear of social death and incorporation into the machine. (Of course, the best paranoids don't need machinery; they do it all in their heads.)
Philip Turetzky, the philosopher who has written the standard Oxford text on theories of time, has been developing over many years a critical theory of attention, which he relates to rhythm and sense-making, their ethics and aesthetics. On his view the politics of attention - what comes to "matter" from moment to moment to people, how sustained or not, with what affect - cannot be extricated from an account of the gesturing and sounding body in context (and the dynamics of context, which is a manifold, can in no way be reduced to "background" or "setting" or engineer's "noise"). Historicizing the soundscape would be a necessary part of the project - from the bells in Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages to E. P. Thompson's "Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism" to Murray Schafer's The Tuning of the World, to the whump-whump of gunships over Gaza.
> Retort
Philip Turetzky, the philosopher who has written the standard Oxford text on theories of time, has been developing over many years a critical theory of attention, which he relates to rhythm and sense-making, their ethics and aesthetics. On his view the politics of attention - what comes to "matter" from moment to moment to people, how sustained or not, with what affect - cannot be extricated from an account of the gesturing and sounding body in context (and the dynamics of context, which is a manifold, can in no way be reduced to "background" or "setting" or engineer's "noise"). Historicizing the soundscape would be a necessary part of the project - from the bells in Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages to E. P. Thompson's "Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism" to Murray Schafer's The Tuning of the World, to the whump-whump of gunships over Gaza.
> Retort