<underfire> Attention Spam

Thu Dec 7 16:12:26 EST 2006

Re Thrift, Kassabian, and Retort,

Perhaps you have already dismissed my theories, but if not, may I  
point you to my ongoing unveiling of my chapter on  "What is  
Attention?" from my book, long in process, on the Attention Economy,  
now to be titled All the World a Stage. See http://goldhaber.org/blog/ 
2006/09/
Also, in this connection, my 2003 and 2002 articles in Telepolis are  
relevant http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/14/14874/1.html and http:// 
heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/13/13298/1.html, etc.

Best,
Michael

On Dec 7, 2006, at 12:39 PM, Retort wrote:

> 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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