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Aesthetics of dispersed attention interview with Petra Loffler
Geert Lovink: How did you come up with the idea to write the history of distraction? How did you come up with your angle?
Petra Löffler: That’s a long story. Around 2000, with my colleague Albert Kümmel, I was working at an anthology about ephemeral discourses dealing with media dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the topics was ‘Aufmerksamkeit’ (attention). Later I reviewed the material, much of it was unpublished, and came across a collection of related texts, which focussed on ‘Zerstreuung’ (distraction). Another motivation was that in the tradition of the Frankfurter Schule, which is very influential until now (not only in Germany), distraction has a bad reputation. I had to go back to the early reflections on modernity in the 18th century and to cross very different discourses from philosophy and pedagogy to psychiatry and physiology to optics and aesthetics. There was not a single constant discourse, but various discontinuous propositions that could not easy be summarized into a respectable object of knowledge. I owe Foucault’s discourse analysis and archaeology of knowledge a lot, but for my research object stable systems of propositions didn’t exist, and the gaps between discourses were evident. May be that’s why, for a long time, distraction seems to be only an ephemeral side product of discourses on attention––or better a bastard, that has to be hide.
GL: You don’t seem to be bothered by distraction, is that true?
PL: I have been living in big cities for decades and I accept a certain level of noise as normal—just because I also estimate the various leisure time distractions every metropolis has to offer. Following philosophers like Kant or psychologists like Ribot I belief that a certain level of distraction is not only necessary for a life balance, but also a common state of body and mind.
GL: You got a fascinating chapter in your habilitation about early cinema and the scattering of attention it would be responsible for. The figure of the nosy parker that gawks interests you and you contrast it to the street roaming flaneur.
PL: Yes, the gawker is a fascinating figure, because according to my research results it is the corporation of the modern spectator who is also a member of a mass audience––the flaneur never was part of it. The gawker or gazer, like the flaneur, appeared at first in the modern metropolis with its multi-sensorial sensations and attractions. According to Walter Benjamin the flaneur disappeared at the moment, when the famous passages were broken down. They had to make room for greater boulevards that were able to steer the advanced traffic in the French metropolis.
No wonder movie theatres were often opened at locations with a high level of traffic inviting passers-by to go inside and, for a certain period of time, becoming part of an audience. Furthermore many films of the period of Early Cinema were actualities showing the modern city-life. In these films the movie-camera was positioned at busy streets or corners in order to record movements of human and non-human agents.
Today to view one’s own face on a screen is an everyday experience. Not only CCTV-cameras at public spaces record passers-by, often without their notice. Also popular TV-shows that require life-participation such as casting shows once more offer members of the audience the opportunity to see themselves on a screen. At the same time many people post their portraits on websites of social networks. They want to be seen by others because they want to be part of a greater audience––the network community. This is what Jean Baudrillard has called connectivity. The alliance between the drive to see and to being seen establishes a new order of seeing which differs significantly from Foucault’s panoptical vision:
GL: What is it with this period around 1800? You studied at least two centuries of material. Which period did you think is the most interesting?
PL: This formulation of a distributed or distracted attention can be considered as an effect of the dynamics of modernity, its drive to economize every part of living, even the human body. What we used to declare as phenomena of our time such as multi-tasking can be already found in discussions about distraction two hundred years ago. So it seems that changes in our media environments regularly provoke discussions about regimes of attention and questions the role of distraction.
Today, with the ubiquitous use of information technologies, discussions about distraction or distributed attention, the balance between stress and relaxation arises again, and philosophers like Richard Shusterman again consider the body’s role for that purpose. For me, Kant’s quest for distraction as an art of living is resonated much by such accounts.
GL: There is an ‘attention war’ going on, with debates across traditional print and broadcast media about the rise in distraction, in schools, at home. On the street we see people hooked on their smart phones, multitasking, everywhere they go. What do you make of this?
PL: Your description addresses severe debates. Nothing less than the future of our Western culture seems to be at stake. Institutions like the educational systems are under permanent critique, concerning all levels from primary schools to universities.
Nonetheless, I would not signify distraction as a metaphor. It is in fact a concrete phase of the body, a state of the mind. It’s real. You cannot deal with it when you call it a disability or a disease and just pop pills or switch off your electronic devices.
GL: Building on Simondon, Bernard Stiegler develops a theory of attention that might be different from the US-American mainstream polarity between dotcom utopians and social media pessimists. His ‘pharmacological’ approach is different, less polemic, in search of new concepts in order to leave behind the known clichés and dichotomies. His book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations from 2008 contains pretty strong warnings about our loss of concentration to read longer, complicated texts. What do you make of this?
PL: Bernard Stiegler’s approach combines different arguments––the clash of generations, the rise of marketing and entertainment industries.
Think only of the invention of printing, the development of the mass press in the 18th century or the invention of the typewriter one century later. It’s hard to imagine that these epochal events should not have had any influence on how to learn reading and writing. You read the columns of a newspaper or a picture book in a different way than the pages of a printed book filled with characters only. This was common knowledge even then.
Techniques such as a quickly scan and scroll through a text (‘Querlesen’) had become widespread, and newspaper layouts support this kind of reading. The actual hype of a deep-attention-reading is, seen from a media-archaeological perspective, not simply nostalgic. It forgets its ‘dark side’ as it was seen in the civil cultures of the 18th and 19th century, when especially bored middle-class women were accused of being addicted reading novels and were condemned because of escaping in exciting dream worlds. Deep concentration was then regarded as dangerous, because it leads to absentmindedness and even mental confusion making individuals unusable especially for a capitalist economy. Civil cultures have an interest to control their populations, their bodies and desires, for the sake of normalization. In this perspective, a ‘too much’, of what quality ever that can destabilize the public order has to be refused.
My sneaking suspicion is that Stiegler or Türcke are focussing only to small cuttings of media history, because their interest is to construct almost apocalyptic scenarios of a great divide. Not surprisingly Türcke, in his actual book on hyperactivity, criticizes newspapers for having reduced the length of articles and at the same time having advanced number and size of pictures. But other changes are more important––unnoticed by these philosophers. With the rise of personal computers and multi-media devices using touch-screens tactility has become again a major human faculty. Media based on haptic operations change the interplay of the senses and create new habits—and insofar writing and reading have to amplify their dimensions.
GL: There is (the New Age cult of) mindfulness. And there is Peter Sloterdijk. What do you make of such calls to exercise, to save attention through training?
PL: I guess, the training of our senses and the experiments of losing self-control belong to the same regime of taking care of oneself. It occurs to me that one major difference between the self-experiments you name and what I’ve analyzed is the isolation of the persons experimenting with drugs to enter altered states of body and mind.
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