<underfire> Attention and affect - a coda

[Retort]

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 4159 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://underfire.eyebeam.org/pipermail/underfire/attachments/20061211/dbbfdf5d/attachment.bin