--Essay perception--: Difference between revisions

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This essay would look throuhg perception and focus on the subjects of attention in todays society refering to Johnathan Crary and Marry Ann Doan. Exploring attention as an inescapable component of an institutional construction of subjectivity. The effect of todays live on human beings as we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment. An example of such an effect is the "attention deficit disorder”(ADD). One of the effects related way today, attention remains an indispensable category for institutional discourses and techniques of the subject, not only in its obvious social manifestations like the debate around ADD but also within the sprawling precincts of the cognitive sciences, even as the relevance or existence of “mind” and “consciousness” is contested in those same domains. Many of the modes of fixation, of sedentarization, of enforced attentiveness implicit in the diffusion of the personal computer may have achieved some of its disciplinary goals, in the production of what Foucault calls docile bodies. Attention within modernity is constituted by these forms of exteriority, not the intentionality of an autonomous subject. Rather than a faculty of some already formed subject, it is a sign, not so much of the subject’s disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality. Attentiveness is a critical feature of a productive and socially adaptive subject, but the border that separated a socially useful attentiveness and a dangerously absorbed or diverted. The great dualisum of attention and distraction althoug they are existing on a single continuum. In this sence Jonathan Crary states that modern distraction was not a disruption of stable or “natural” kinds of sustained, value-laden perception that had existed for centuries but was an effect, and in many cases a constituent element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects. If distraction emerges as a problem in the late nineteenth century, it is inseparable from the parallel construction of an attentive observer in various domains.

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 Many of the modes of fixation, of sedentarization, of enforced attentiveness implicit in the diffusion of  the personal computer may have achieved some of its disciplinary goals, in the production of what Foucault calls docile bodies.
 Attention within modernity is constituted by these forms of exteriority, not the intentionality of an autonomous subject. Rather than a faculty of some already formed subject, it is a sign, not so much of the subject’s disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality.  Attentiveness is a critical feature of a productive and socially adaptive subject, but the border that separated a socially useful attentiveness and a dangerously absorbed or diverted. The great dualisum of attention and distraction althoug they are existing on a single continuum. In this sence Jonathan Crary states  that   modern distraction was not a disruption of stable or “natural” kinds of sustained, value-laden perception that had existed for centuries but was an effect, and in many cases a constituent element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects.  If distraction emerges as a problem in the late nineteenth century, it is inseparable from the parallel construction of an attentive observer in various domains.
-WORK IN PROGRESS
-Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation.
-This was the decisive achievement of the science of psychophysics in the mid-nineteenth century, which, by apparently rendering sensation measurable, embedded human perception in the domain of the quantiﬁable and the abstract. Vision, conceived in this way, became compatible with many other processes of modernization, even as it also opened up the possibility of visual experience that was intrinsically nonrationalizable, that exceeded any procedures of normalization.
-attention increases the force of certain sensations while it weakens others.
-attention increases the force of certain sensations while it weakens others.
-WUNDT - essential (but not a priori)
-role in producing an effective unity of consciousness and perception
-Modernity and the Problem of Attention 13crisis of attentiveness, in which the changing conﬁgurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endlesssequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception.
-When we seek to revivid on an object we only try see something novel about it
-and fail to keep attention when we dont find something new.
-Inhibition and anesthesia  dramatic reordering of visuality, implying the new importance of
-models based on an economy of forces rather than an optics of representation
-From the mid-1800s on, perception is fundamentally characterized by experiences of fragmentation, shock, and dispersal. I argue that modern distraction can only be understood through its reciprocal relation to the rise of attentive norms and practices.
-In the late nineteenth century attention became a problem alongside the specific systemic organization of labor and production by industrial capitalism.
-To paraphrase Foucault, this has been one of the practical and discursive spaces
-within modernity in which human beings “problematize what they are