<underfire> Attention Spam

[Anahid Kassabian]

My apologies, Michael--not a dismissal at all. I hadn't found your work, but
after my post, John Hopkins forwarded me the link to your article in First
Monday. I'll look forward to reading all the articles you mention.

Retort, thanks for the reference to Turetzky, which I'll also find
immediately. There's some wonderful historical soundscape work, including
Alain Corbin's Village Bells, Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity,
John Picker's Victorian Soundscapes, Richard Cullen Rath's How Early America
Sounded, and the essays in Veit Erlmann's Hearing Culture. Jonathan Sterne's
The Audible Past, while not about soundscapes, offers an important
historical account of changes in listening...

Anahid

On 07/12/06, Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh at well.com > wrote:
>
>  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 *A**ll
> 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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> 16 October - 10 December 2006
> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
> all writings copyright individual authors
> no commercial use without permission
> to post a message, send an email to:
> underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
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>
> _______________________________________________
> Under Fire  http://underfire.eyebeam.org
> 16 October - 10 December 2006
> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
> all writings copyright individual authors
> no commercial use without permission
> to post a message, send an email to:
> underfire at underfire.eyebeam.org
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-- 
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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