Retort: Attention and affect - a coda
A coda on the crucial - human - issue of affect and attention (raised by Nigel and developed by Brian and Anahid and Michael among others) just in from the philosopher Philip Turetzky:
'First of all it is not that there is little literature on attention; there is a scattered but actually quite extensive literature, but it tends to be poorly conceived and methodologically impoverished. The classic source for the psychological analysis of attention is William James’ Principles of Psychology. There was a journal Memory and Attention which discussed empirical work on this connection. However, it is correct to say that the standard (behaviorist, positivist) psychological studies focus mainly on duration of attention because it is easily measured. This allows them to discuss not only attention span, and also the relationship between attention and memory. However, the appeal to duration as evidence cripples them with regard to understanding both the focus of attention and the important relationship between affect and attention. The behavioral studies of attentional focus seem to me to be poorly conceived. They tend to study especially visual focus and do this by measuring behaviors like eye movements. This approach fails to understand that attention is organized by affect - in particular, that the body's capacity to be affected will filter and transform external stimuli so as to appear phenomenally with degrees of freedom that do not correlate with such behavioral measures. Gestalt psychologists obsessively argue for the necessity of the differentiation of foreground from background, but this distinction is too simple and does not allow for an understanding of the continuously changing configurations and distributions of import and emphasis. Such studies do not do well in considering the connection with affect.
'The unifocality of attention does not seem to me to be as important as the change in focus and the degrees of sharpness/fuzziness distributed over the attentional field, and the movement of items into and out of and across the field. This is why affect is so important vis-a-vis attention in that affects are becomings (in Deleuze’s sense) rather than structures; they distribute intensities, and produce open and attractive possibilities (in Husserl’s sense), and thus the passive syntheses operating in affect come to determine the attentional distributions in the active synthesis of consciousness. On this account, for example, when fear is produced, (and we should be clear that fear is an affect, while paranoia is a more complex phenomenon including dispositional and conceptual components), it distributes intensities and modulates their degrees so as to channel, direct, foreclose, distort, emphasize and suppress potentialities for action and thought. This can be related to the distributions of intensities already in sonic and visual means of affect production. However, this relation is complex and cannot be reduced to easy associations between socially contested music, anthems, etc. and conceptual, behavioral, and political effects. Instead, the sonic and visual productions need to be understood as affective first and to see conceptual, behavioral and political effects as organized by the affective distribution of intensities. This is why phenomena such as rhythms and entrainment are important. Rhythm distributes accents (emphases and intensities – accented and unaccented beats) over diverse materials (not merely sounds and silences, but movements and rests, percepts and lapses, kinematics, spatial orientations, haptics, and concepts). Entrainment operates to transmit these distributions, and transduce between the diverse materials. It is clear that the technological production of sound and image gives rise to such entrainments and hence complex social organizations, and more troubling, social orders of affects.'
If true, then one must conclude that any approach to the media that disregards form and mode, rhythm and entrainment (think of Adorno's remarks about 1940s AM radio in the US) is doomed to superficiality.
> Retort
'First of all it is not that there is little literature on attention; there is a scattered but actually quite extensive literature, but it tends to be poorly conceived and methodologically impoverished. The classic source for the psychological analysis of attention is William James’ Principles of Psychology. There was a journal Memory and Attention which discussed empirical work on this connection. However, it is correct to say that the standard (behaviorist, positivist) psychological studies focus mainly on duration of attention because it is easily measured. This allows them to discuss not only attention span, and also the relationship between attention and memory. However, the appeal to duration as evidence cripples them with regard to understanding both the focus of attention and the important relationship between affect and attention. The behavioral studies of attentional focus seem to me to be poorly conceived. They tend to study especially visual focus and do this by measuring behaviors like eye movements. This approach fails to understand that attention is organized by affect - in particular, that the body's capacity to be affected will filter and transform external stimuli so as to appear phenomenally with degrees of freedom that do not correlate with such behavioral measures. Gestalt psychologists obsessively argue for the necessity of the differentiation of foreground from background, but this distinction is too simple and does not allow for an understanding of the continuously changing configurations and distributions of import and emphasis. Such studies do not do well in considering the connection with affect.
'The unifocality of attention does not seem to me to be as important as the change in focus and the degrees of sharpness/fuzziness distributed over the attentional field, and the movement of items into and out of and across the field. This is why affect is so important vis-a-vis attention in that affects are becomings (in Deleuze’s sense) rather than structures; they distribute intensities, and produce open and attractive possibilities (in Husserl’s sense), and thus the passive syntheses operating in affect come to determine the attentional distributions in the active synthesis of consciousness. On this account, for example, when fear is produced, (and we should be clear that fear is an affect, while paranoia is a more complex phenomenon including dispositional and conceptual components), it distributes intensities and modulates their degrees so as to channel, direct, foreclose, distort, emphasize and suppress potentialities for action and thought. This can be related to the distributions of intensities already in sonic and visual means of affect production. However, this relation is complex and cannot be reduced to easy associations between socially contested music, anthems, etc. and conceptual, behavioral, and political effects. Instead, the sonic and visual productions need to be understood as affective first and to see conceptual, behavioral and political effects as organized by the affective distribution of intensities. This is why phenomena such as rhythms and entrainment are important. Rhythm distributes accents (emphases and intensities – accented and unaccented beats) over diverse materials (not merely sounds and silences, but movements and rests, percepts and lapses, kinematics, spatial orientations, haptics, and concepts). Entrainment operates to transmit these distributions, and transduce between the diverse materials. It is clear that the technological production of sound and image gives rise to such entrainments and hence complex social organizations, and more troubling, social orders of affects.'
If true, then one must conclude that any approach to the media that disregards form and mode, rhythm and entrainment (think of Adorno's remarks about 1940s AM radio in the US) is doomed to superficiality.
> Retort