--Essay perception--

This essay would look through perception and focus on the subjects of attention in todays society refering to Jonathan 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.

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 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

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.