--Essay perception--

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Revision as of 12:52, 11 December 2013 by Mihail Bakalov (talk | contribs)

created on 11.2013

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.