<underfire> Attention Spam

[Retort]

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




Anahid Kassabian wrote:

I apologize for the lateness of this response. I kept hoping to offer a 
thoroughgoing, thought-through response to this week's provocative 
offering, but I'm still thinking about it. Rather, I thought I might 
draw out or take up and expand on a few points.
 
The first is something that came up in Thrift's response - the question 
of spaces and how they dampen or boost affect. My own interests in this 
question focus on sound design, acoustics, and what I've called 
ubiquitous musics, which connects with my concerns with sound targeting 
and weapons. We're being aurally designed and targeted into intensities 
and affects before we even have adequate language to think about sound 
and music in the most basic ways, tools and strategies we can entirely 
take for granted in the visual realm.
 
This leads to the second point I want to take up, the engineering of 
affect in political psychology. The place of music in this terrain is 
both stunning and stunningly under-theorized--from older technologies 
such as national anthems to more recent ones (vide the 'Born in the 
USA' controversy in Reagan's re-election campaign and Bill Clinton's 
Arsenio Hall sax performance) to the utterly unclear (and 
misrepresented, or perhaps too uncomplicatedly represented, by Michael 
Moore) use of the Bloodhound Gang's 'Fire Water Burn' by US soldiers in 
Iraq. The use of music and sound in video games also becomes pertinent 
here.
 
Third, I think the question of attention and attention span requires a 
great deal more thought. I have been searching for a theory of 
attention, and the only works of interest I've found so far are 
Jonathan Crary's Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Beller's 
"Capital/Cinema," and some passages in Patricia Clough's Autoaffection.
 
Finally, with Thrift, I worry about paranoia - a lot. I keep wondering 
about the relationship between trauma and paranoia, which perhaps comes 
from having lived in NY in 2001 and in the UK, though not in London, 
since 2005. I can't help thinking that both the NY and London attacks, 
however horrific, were basically one-offs; my friends who have lived 
through decades of violence in Beirut are less paranoid than many of my 
friends in NY, but I don't know enough about political discourse in 
Lebanon to know how to think this through. Still, I keep coming back to 
the question of the relationship between power and political or 
national paranoia. Is the kind of paranoia circulating now in the US 
and UK a consequence of political privilege and power? Is there a 
parallel in the absence of power? Despair? The absence of affect? or 
the appearance thereof?

Anahid


-- 
Anahid Kassabian
James and Constance Alsop Chair
School of Music
University of Liverpool
80 Bedford Street South
Liverpool L69 7WW

+44 0151 794 3098
+44 0151 794 3141 (fax)
  http://www.liv.ac.uk/music/
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