For more information, and to RSVP, visit TPSNY.
FIRST SESSION: Sunday, March 18th at 7pm, 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint
For our first meeting, Jacob King will lead a discussion around the first chapter of Jonathan Crary’s book “Suspensions of Perception”, which examines how ‘attention’ emerged as a field of inquiry in the 19th century. It sets the stage for seeing attention not as something pre-existing or natural, but rather, as an object which has been constructed, reconstructed, visualized, and measured. You can download the preparatory reading here.
***Course Description***
As information circulates more rapidly and more cheaply, it seems like we are told with increasing frequency and in an increasing number of places that our flourishing or floundering as subjects is dependent upon our attention—on the ways and manner in which we exert, regulate, and allocate it. Franco Berardi, for example, writing in a recent issue of e-flux Journal, argues that “in a semiocapitalist world the main commodity becomes attention,” describing an economy in which what we produce and consume are not so much durable goods but rather quantities (or qualities) of attention. An article in New York magazine asks if we are living through a “crisis of attention,” and then cites a study showing that people who frequently check their email have tested as less intelligent than people who are high on marijuana. Meanwhile a recent management consulting textbook declares that as “flows of unnecessary information clog worker brains and corporate communication links, attention is the rare resource that truly powers a company.”
Attention is at once all-enveloping—figured as the ground for cognition (“the turnings of our attention form the nucleus of our inner self” writes William James) and the very core of post-Fordist production—while at the same time, it is nearly impossible to locate (is there anything like a muscle of attention which we flex as we focus?), disappearing into networks even as we devise more sophisticated ways to seize hold of it.
The impetus for this workshop is not so much to ask, What is attention?, but rather something more like: Where is attention? Not whether or not attention really exists in some relationship between an organism and an object, but rather, to ask how and where attention has been realized as something substantive and something vital, as something that we can feel, as an agent with an ability to act and be acted upon. Looking closely and widely, from the level of the neuron to that of the artwork, can we pinpoint some of the diverse sites and objects where attention has been visualized, where it is made to appear? We might ask, for example, how attention is measured: in what units, currencies, laboratories, software programs, computer screens, museums, algorithms, keywords, or financial transactions?
Deliberately avoiding a “reading-based” model, the aim of this workshop is to place a particular emphasis on re-enacting specific methodologies and experiments—ranging from stimulus-response tests to auditory channel experiments to the management consultant’s “Attentionscape” graph—taking turns as subjects and administrators, and bringing in guests. Attention, perhaps, is interesting not so much in itself, but rather because it appears across so many sites and disciplines—neuroscience, psychology, economics, art history, computer science, politics, religion, business management, education—making it an exemplary object for thinking about cognition and exchange in our digital age.