The Attention Complex

Media, Archeology, Method

K. Rogers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349434534, 9781137004123
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318640
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Over the past two decades in the United States, a profound reorientation of human attention has taken shape. This book addresses the recent cultural anxiety about attention as a way of negotiating a crisis of the self that is increasingly managed, mediated, and controlled by technologies.

PART I

ATTENTION SHIFTS

CHAPTER ONE

BEHAVIOR

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the fixation on attention that had preoccupied the nineteenth-century human sciences had all but disappeared. There was a precipitous decline in research and publication that took up the problem as a stand-alone object of philosophical, psychological, and scientific inquiry, and a concomitant reorientation of the remaining interest in attention toward the more empiricist realm of the applied sciences. The reasons for this alteration were numerous and elusive, but by 1910 the fields of philosophy, neurophysiology, psychophysics, physiological psychology, and sociology, all of which had yielded voluminous studies on the topic, fell comparatively silent as they shifted in their orientation and turned to meet the demands of early twentieth-century modernity. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century theories of attention had been born from an uneasy confrontation between the autonomous, transcendental consciousness of the Enlightenment and modern psychophysiology. The principal investigators into the subject all grappled with this opposition in similar ways. For figures like John Dewey, Gustav Fechner, Herman von Helmholtz, William James, G. E. Müller, Walter Pilsbury, Théodule Ribot, Edward Titchener, and many others, attention took shape somewhere in the meeting place between the inalienable quality of the conscious mind and the automated systems of the sensory motor cortex.

No one navigated that fraught dualism more elegantly or more concisely than William James when in The Principles of Psychology he famously proclaimed that “my experience is what I agree to attend to” (James 1890: 402). Here, James posits a being with pragmatic agency, one that actively and consciously destines experience by force of will in a manner reminiscent of Kant and Schopenhauer. James creates a detailed classification of attention based on consciousness not as a state but as a faculty of orientation toward a stream of internal and external stimuli. This “stream-of-consciousness” is the internal focus that narrows the field from a successive flow of impressions. The variety of ways in which we adjust our attention to these impressions, he explains, is framed by three sets of binary oppositions: attention can be either sensorial or intellectual (focused either on sensed objects or mental objects), immediate or derived (arising from the immediate environment or relating to memories and ideas anterior to the attentive state), and active (voluntary) or passive (involuntary/reflexive) (James 1890: 416). Evident in these sets is attention’s deployment as a way of adapting classical metaphysical states of consciousness to an emergent discovery of the reflex circuit found in the localized neurological body; thus James places attention at the center of his take on one of the great problems of the second half of the nineteenth century: the contest between mind and brain. Because attention, for James, was essentially a process of subtractive selection—the narrowing of an expanse of possibility into a limited span of focus—it was able to appear as both the active and volitional intent of a sentient mind and the reflexive response of the neurophysiological systems in the brain. Thus James’s psychology formed a unified pragmatic integration of contrasting models of the interior functions of the human being.

By the early twentieth century, the pressing need for such reconciliation had passed. Neurophysiological explications of internal conscious experience had given way to vitalism, phenomenology, lebensphilosophie, and psychoanalysis, and would not return to the fore with the same tenability until the 1990s. Bergson’s élan vital and Freud’s notion of an unconscious shaped by irrational desire and sublimation both acknowledged that there was a close a connection between brain physiology and inner experience, but rejected the argument that the former could ever be the absolute hypostasis of the latter. Just as psychoanalysis and vitalism refuted psychophysiological parallelism to decrypt the language of inner experience, James’s stream of consciousness lost its appeal as a psychophysiological theory and found its most fervent following in literary culture, most notably in the works of his brother Henry James, but also in the experimental novels of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

On the opposite side of the schism, what remained of psychophysiology by 1910 became retrenched in pure biologism, stripped of everything that could not be determined or explained on biological grounds. The practices of experimental psychology and neurophysiology that had once aspired to account for the innermost recesses of conscious experience alongside the localized structures and functions of the neurological body became increasingly reductionist in their outlook. A new, mechanistic form of experimental psychology based on metrics and testing arose, one that dismissed any kind of introspective explication of conscious experience—were it solipsistic, vitalist, phenomenological, gestaltist, or psychoanalytic. Within this emergent framework, inner experience was almost entirely dismissed as mere speculation. Perception, experience, thinking, affect, emotion, and desire were coded as insubstantial phenomena that had little relevance to a method concerned with the external surface of a subject’s behavior: its development within and response to the stimuli of its environment. This period in the teens and the early twenties marks the beginnings of behaviorism in experimental and applied psychology, whose paradigmatic dominance would prevail until the cognitive revolution of the 1950s.

The decline in attention to attention as an object of philosophy and psychology corresponds directly with the rise of behaviorism. Around 1910, once biologist models of human behavior begin gaining traction within the fields of experimental and applied psychology, attention becomes externalized, retrofit to the standards of the new methods that have claimed it. No longer theorized as an essential faculty of the conscious mind primarily attainable through introspection, attention becomes just another descriptive category of behavior understood only through its surface manifestations. Oddly, once taken up by behaviorist psychologists, the actual categorical terms for attention developed by James and his contemporaries change very little. For example, Edward Thorndike’s The Elements of Psychology (1905), a foundational methodological treatise on behaviorism, takes James’s terms letter for letter—voluntary/involuntary, immediate/derived, etc. The difference for behaviorists has little to do with the formation of the concept of attention itself, which remains largely intact, but relates, rather, to its intelligibility and function within a general framework of knowledge that has changed dramatically. Attention is no longer an inborn, primary, vital force of the mind that shapes worldly experience, it is, instead, secondary—the residual evidence that the world has already shaped our attention to it. What is at stake here is not a matter of philosophical bickering, but one of social utility. Now severed from its ontological anchor to internal consciousness, behaviorist attention (precisely because of its intractable empiricism) becomes freely applicable to a much wider range of social phenomena as a technique of the applied sciences. Attention has moved from supporting a model of the mind toward actively shaping and managing the conduct of the body through theories of predictable response. In short, early twentieth-century attention is now an externalized descriptor of a category of behavior; it has moved from the unifying experience of consciousness, validated by James through the introspective method, to become a minor technique of habituation in programs of training, management, and education.

Habit

It is unsurprising that the behaviorist paradigm should recast attention as an effect of habit. The dynamics of animal habituation were central to the understanding of the early behaviorists John Watson and Edward Thorndike, as well as to others who developed the field such as Ivan Pavlov, Clark Hull, Kenneth Spence, Edward Tolman, and, later, the radical behaviorist, B. F. Skinner. Their approach was largely an extension of Darwinist evolutionary biology and of the evolutionary associationism elaborated in Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics that placed human behavior in the same spectral band as animal behavior. Although Freud, too, was indebted to Darwin on the question of the drives, the behaviorists approached psychology as a natural science, and thus derived part of its methodology from early evolutionary biology. Darwin’s Expressions on the Emotions in Man and Animals (2009) reads, at times, like an uncanny proto-behaviorist manifesto. Habit is central to his argument about the proximity of human emotions to those of animals, and in discussing the general principles of expression, Darwin discusses the habituation of actions as evidenced by their association with previous experience, even if that experience is not relevant to the situation at hand.

Certain complex actions are of direct or indirect service under certain states of mind [ . . . ] and whenever the same state of mind is induced, however feebly, there is a tendency through the force of habit and association for the same movements to be performed, though they may not then be of the least use. (Darwin 2009: 34)

In a later chapter, he offers detailed examples of this habituation in animal behavior that might share commonalities with our own. Attention in dogs is one of the habituated states considered:

Attention is shown by the head being raised, with the ears erected, and eyes intently directed toward the object or quarter under observation. If it be a sound and the source is not known, the head is often turned obliquely from side to side in a most significant manner, apparently in order to judge with more exactness from what point the sound proceeds. But I have seen a dog greatly surprised at a new noise, turning his head to one side through habit, though he clearly perceived the source of the noise. (Darwin 2009: 122)

Although the behaviorist would surely reject the concept of evolutionary adaptation as vitalist or animist speculation, the natural science methodology, which refutes introspection as a unique property of “man” and links the external observation of the habits of animals to that of human beings, certainly dates back to the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm. The above passage might echo Pavlov’s 1928 writings on the “conditioned reflex” some 55 years later. The critical difference being, of course, that with either Pavlov’s dogs or Thorndike’s cats, animal observation takes on the metric precision of an industrial operation, with apparatuses and forms of measurement that account for all possible variables. The behaviorist operation is distinct in its search for a strictly positivist, empirical approach, as opposed to the conjectures of Darwinian intuition.

The ultrapositivism of the behaviorist method means that attention can only become verifiable as a habituated condition, and this shift also leaves the very validity of the category in question, and the term “attention,” wholly discredited of its recourse to inner experience, edges to the verge of disuse. John Watson’s methodological treatise on behaviorism aggressively confronts James on the falsity and inadequacy of “attention” and its minor relevance to the behaviorist project:

Many of the introspectionists’ terms should be similarly turned back upon them. For example, attention. The behaviorist, if he felt inclined, could “explain” attention and define it and use it, but he doesn’t need the word. The introspectionist, even James, has to define it in terms of vitalism as an active process that selects this or that from other happenings. Such terms, of course, only slowly die out. (Watson 1924: 201)

And in an effort to further his attack on the obsolescence of the so-called introspectionists, Watson later writes:

May I diverge here just a moment to say that this way of looking at the dominance of habit systems removes from the psychology of the behaviorist any need of the term attention! Attention is merely then, with us, synonymous with the complete dominance of any one habit system, be that a verbal habit system, a manual habit system or a visceral one. “Distraction of attention,” on the other hand, is merely an expression of the fact that the situation does not immediately lead to dominance of any one habit system, but first to one and then to the other.[ . . . ] For these reasons the behaviorist feels that the term “attention” has no application in psychology and is just another confession of our inability to think clearly, and to keep mystery out of psychological terms. (Watson 1924: 222–23)¹

Watson goes on to provide a number of concrete examples of individuals negotiating or managing their “attention” as nothing more than multiple and often conflicting habit systems of different orders, all struggling for dominance over the human organism. The failure of the proper formation of habit dominance, he suggests, leads to failures of all kinds: fumbling in speech and action, unaccomplished tasks, unlearned skills, and so forth. Paradoxically, the intent of Watson’s attacks to disarm attention as an internal phenomenon and to replace it with the notion of a dominant habit system opens attention’s utility and applicability to other fields and realms of society, where it flourishes. It is through behaviorism’s effective demotion of attention that the term first becomes plausibly redeployed within social practice. It is around the same time that the behaviorist shaping of the conditioned reflex begins that a concern for attention arises with greater frequency in the applied social sciences, most importantly in the concrete technologies of scientific management, pedagogy, and military training.

Neither was the behaviorist turn the discovery of a new universal nor did it take place in a vacuum: it arose out of a complex of changing institutional paradigms; forms of applied knowledge; technological infrastructures; social attitudes, movements, and struggles; pedagogical models; and political and economic realities that together shaped a new regime of management and regulation of biological life. This turn did not efface earlier models, but became the dominant tendency in experimental psychology—a new regularity of scientific discourse brought about by the reorganization and redeployment of existing knowledge and practices. The narrative that is so often ascribed to such emergences, however, tends to be absolutist in nature; it views a new order of knowledge as the result of a clearly demarcated transition from one paradigm to another, and understands it as existing within a homogeneous epistemic field, sharing continuities and commonalities across other domains of knowledge. From this perspective, the behaviorist turn might appear determined by a broadly conceived shift into the second industrial revolution (which is said to have moved early industrial societies out of the period of mechanization and into that of automation and electrification). Indeed, there was a strong coincidence between these events as well as between the other related transitions noted above (social attitudes, political and economic concerns, etc.). However, the tidy compartmentalization of parallel transitions in the arts and the sciences, or the structuration of society into paradigm shifts conjoined in epistemic contiguity, is misleading, as it often imagines these shifts as originating from a zero-point of theoretical abstraction imposed from above, rather than percolating from below, seeping to the surface through a thousand porous crevices that extrude into the topsoil of a new dispositif—a patchy, uneven layer of elements, emerging from everywhere, combined in their heterogeneity and directed toward the exertion of power.

Still, it is vital to trace this behaviorist tendency in the concrete application of attention as it moves toward the applied social sciences. I have in mind three dominant examples: (1) pedagogical science, (2) military training, and (3) the sciences of management and industrial production. Deployed within all three during this period, the operative technology of attention became one of behaviorist habituation. The destination of the term “attention” migrated away from a strictly theoretical and descriptive form of science to a primarily applied and prescriptive one, one that had profound material effects in techniques of social control achieved by actively shaping the behavior of human beings. More importantly, what is common to the above examples is that for the first time attention entered the vocabulary of quantification, enumeration, and exchange. These techniques found ways to test and measure attention so as to better condition it to dynamically changing environments and to contain, in a rudimentary way, its economic value. What emerged out of the attention of the early twentieth century was the first ascription of value to attention within the sphere of industrial management. In other words, attention’s conception as a measurable factor of industrial production was instrumental in refining human labor within a changing economic system.

I argue that this change in the positioning of attention within a dispositif is essential to understanding a new regime that exerted power over populations through disciplinary and institutional domination over individuals as well as through capillary techniques of self-regulation (Foucault 1979). The constitution of a new applied science of attention concretizes what had been an internal aspect of conscious experience and philosophical introspection into a technique of habituation and social conditioning. In the process, attention became, for the first time, an important technology of subjectification that produced the pedant, the drill sergeant, and the industrial manager. This proto-attention complex arose within advancing forms of economic liberalism (particularly those of the Austrian School of Economics), industrial production (Taylorism/Fordism), and consumer society (bolstered by theories of conspicuous consumption and marginal utility), in a modern geopolitical organization of national territory and trade rising from the ashes of the First World War.

What makes this moment of attention’s disappearance crucial in identifying the precursor of the complex that is yet to emerge is that it is precisely by way of that disappearance that attention sheds its claim as a universal intellectual construct and becomes a dispersed, concrete, and material form of power that Foucault calls “capillary power” or the “micro-physics” of power (Fouc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Overview and Method
• Part I Attention Shifts
• Part II Attention Deficits
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index