Aesthetics of Dispersed Attention
Interview with German Media Theorist Petra Loeffler
By Geert Lovink
When I met Petra Loeffler in the summer of 2012 in Weimar I was amazed to find
out about her habilitation topic. She had just finished a study on the history
of distraction from a German media theory perspective. After I read the
manuscript (in German) we decided to do an email interview in English so that
more people could find out about her research. The study will appear late 2013
(in German) with Diaphanes Verlag under the title Verteilte Aufmerksamkeit.
Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung (Distributed Attention, a Media History
of Distraction). Since October 2011 Petra Loeffler has replaced Lorenz Engell
as media philosophy professor at Bauhaus University in Weimar. Before this
appointment she worked in Regensburg, Vienna and Siegen. Her main research
areas are affect theory, media archaeology, early cinema, visual culture and
digital archives.
With the hyper growth of internet, video, mobile phones, games, txt messaging,
the new media debate gets narrowed down to this one question: what do you
think of attention? The supposed decline in concentration and today's inability
to read longer, complicated texts is starting to affect the future of research
as such. Social media only make things worse. Human kind is, once again, on the
way down hill, this time busy multitasking on their smart phones. Like any
issue this one must have a genealogy too, but if we look at the current
literature, from Bernard Stiegler to Nicolas Carr and Frank Schirrmacher, from
Sherry Turkle to Franco Berardi, and Andrew Keen to Jaron Lanier, including my
own contribution, the long view is entirely missing. Bernard Stiegler digs into
Greek philosophy, yes, but also leaves out the historical media theory angle.
This also counts for those who stress solutions such as training and abstinence
(a field ranging from Peter Sloterdijk to Howard Rheingold). But can a
contemporary critique of attention really do without proper historical
foundations?
While the education sector and the IT industry promote the use of tablets in
classrooms (with MOOCs as the most current hype), there is only a hand full of
experts that warn against the long-term consequences. The absence of a serious
discussion and policy then gives way to a range of popular myths. Quickly the
debate gets polarized and any unease is reduced to generational issues and
technophobia. Deceases amongst millions of computer workers vary from damaged
eyesight, ADHD and related medication problems (Retalin), Carpal Tunnel
Syndrome, RSI and bad postures due to badly designed peripherals, leading to
widespread spinal disk problems. There is talk of mutations in the brain (see
for instance the work of the German psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer). Within this
worrying spread of postmodern deceases, who would talk about the 'healing
effects of daydreaming'? Petra Loeffler does, and she refers to Michel de
Montaigne, who, already many centuries ago, recommended diversion as a comfort
against suffering of the souls. Why can't we acknowledge the distribution of
attention as an art form, a gift, in fact a high skill?
Geert Lovink: How did you come up with the idea to write the history of
distraction? When you told me about your work and I read your habilitation (a
major study in German speaking countries after your PhD if you want to become
professor) it occurred to me how obvious this intellectual undertaken was from
a media theory perspective97and yet I wondered why it wasn't done before. Would
you call its history a classic black spot? You didn't go along the
institutional knowledge road a la Foucault, nor do you use the hermeneutical
method, the Latourian history of science approach or mentality history, for
that matter. How did you come up with your angle?
Petra Loeffler: That's a long story. Around 2000, with my colleague Albert
Kuemmel, I was working at an anthology about ephemeral discourses dealing with
media dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. We found a lot
of interesting stuff in scientific journals from very different disciplines.
Out of this rich material we developed a classification system consisting of
discourse-relevant terms we found in the articles, and published a book
representing our research results (Albert Kuemmel and Petra Loeffler,
Medientheorie 1888-1933, Texte und Kommentare, 2002). 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). Like you now, I then was wondering why, in media
theory, a conceptualization of distraction was missing up to date, although
important early theoreticians such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin,
in the 1930s have formulated powerful concepts of mass entertainment, cinema
and the political role of distraction that were quoted regularly. That's why I
wanted to know more about the 'roots', the background of their thinking of
distraction in other discourses.
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. So, I wanted to analyse the schools of knowledge that support that
bad reputation and through this way reveal the 'other' side of distraction, its
positive meaning and its necessity. For this project 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: It depends on my temper. I really hate to get up in the middle of the night
by a terrible noise. I guess nobody wants that. But 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. Always being part of the mass of passers-by
the gawker looks at the same time for diversions, for accidents and incidents
in the streets. This is to say his attention is always distracted between an
awareness of what happens on the streets and navigating between people and
vehicles. 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. Gawkers often went into the view of
the camera gesticulating or grimacing in front of it. That's why the gawker has
become a very popular figure mirroring the modern mass audience on the screen.
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: Today no more the few see the many (panopticon) or the many
see the few (popular stars) today, because of the multiplication and
connectivity of screens in public and private spaces, the many see the many.
Insofar, one can conclude, the gawker or gazer is an overall-phenomenon, a
non-specific subjectivity of a distributed publicity.
GL: In your study you show that, like in so many other instances, the 'birth'
of attention as a modern problem, comes up during the late 18th century. I am
joking, but Kant seems the first and the last philosopher who is praising
distraction. 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: From the perspective of a media archaeologist I would say, of course, the
period around 1800 just because things look different from a distance. I was
really surprised by regimes of distraction arising around 1800 in psychiatry,
where people suffering from a mental breakdown were cured with the help of
sensual shocks and spectacular performances. At the same time the need to
distribute one's attention, to react on different stimuli almost
simultaneously, was more and more regarded as necessary. 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: I can imagine that debates during the rise of mass education, the invention
of film are different from ours. But is that the case? It is all pedagogy, so
it seems. We never seem to leave the classroom.
PL: The question is, leaving where? Entering the other side (likewise amusement
sites or absorbing fantasies)? Why not? Changing perspectives? Yes, that's what
we have to do. But for that purpose we don't have to leave the classroom
necessarily. Rather, we should rebuilt it as a room of testing modes of
thinking in very concrete ways. I'm thinking of Jacques Ranciere's suggestions,
in his essay Le partage du sensible, about the power relation between teachers
and pupils. Maybe today teachers can learn more (for instance soft skills) from
their pupils than the other way around. We need other regimes of distribution
of power, also in the classroom, a differentiation of tasks, of velocities and
singularities97in short: we need micropolitics.
More seriously, your question indicates a strong relationship between pedagogy
and media. There's a reason why media theorists like Friedrich Kittler had
pointed to media's affinity to propaganda and institutions of power. I think of
his important book Discourse Networks, where he has revealed the relevance of
mediated writing techniques for the formation of educational institutions and
for subjectivation. That's why the question is, what are the tasks we have to
learn in order to exist in the world of electronic mass media? What means
'Bildung' for us nowadays?
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? This is just a heightened sensibility, a
fashion, or is there really something at stake? Would you classify it as
petit-bourgeois anxieties? Loss of attention as a metaphor for threatening
poverty and status loss of the traditional middle class in the West? How do you
read the use of brain research by Nicholas Carr, Frank Schirrmacher and more
recently also the German psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer who came up with a few
bold statement concerning the devastating consequences of computer use for the
(young) human brain. Having read your study one could say: don't worry, nothing
new under the sun. But is this the right answer?
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. That's why the Pisa studies have revealed a lot of
deficits and have provoked debates on what kind of education is necessary for
our children. On the one hand it's a debate on cultural values, but on the
other it's a struggle on power relations. We are living in a society of
control, and how to become a subject and how this subject is related to other
subjects in mediated environments are important questions.
A great uncertainty is emerged. That's why formulas that promise easy solutions
are highly welcomed. Neurological concepts are often based on one-sided models
concerning the relationship between body and mind, and they often leave out the
role of social and environmental factors. From historians of science such as
Canguilhem and Foucault one can learn that psychiatrist models of brain defects
and mental anomalies not only mirror social anxieties, but also produce
knowledge about what is defined as normal. And it is up to us as observers of
such discourses to name those anxieties today. 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 clichees 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. I'm always
wondering how easy philosophers like Stiegler or Christoph Tuercke in Germany
jump from ancient cultures (the Greeks, the Romans or to name another popular
example Stone Age populations) to modern cultures of the 21st century. I take
this as suspicious. Reading as well as writing were, of course, important
cultural techniques over a long period of time but both are techniques that
have undertaken several heavy changes in their long taking history, long before
media such as cinema or television have entered the scene. 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 91dark 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 absent-mindedness 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 destabilise the public order has to be
refused.
My sneaking suspicion is that Stiegler or Tuercke are focussing only to small
cuttings of media history, because their interest is to construct almost
apocalyptic scenarios of a great divide. Not surprisingly Tuercke,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 habits97and 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?
It all boils down to dosage. Do you believe there is a 'will to entropy'?
Altered states that invite us to enter unknown spaces? Would it make sense to
study another side of the so-called loss of attention in the drug experiences
as described from Baudelaire and Benjamin to Huxley and Juenger?
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. One reason why I've studied not only
discourses, but also practices of distraction was the fact that most of the
diversions of urban culture were built on (and for) a mass audience. To be with
unfamiliar others at the same place and at the same time was an experience, a
thrill people were addicted to. Today other mass entertainments have emerged
such as multiplex-cinemas, public viewings or big sports events, which are, of
course, unthinkable without the rise of mass communication and mass media like
television. That's why I'm not sure if the description made for instance by
Nicholas Carr and Frank Schirrmacher we are living nowadays under a brutal
regime of a cannibalistic monster-machine nourished by our attention witch is
known as personal computer is telling the whole story.
GL: How would you situate your own work inside what is known as German media
theory? History of ideas meets archaeology of knowledge? You have a strong
interest in the medical discourse (which is, again, very strong these days).
Would you say that media steer our perception?
PL: Maybe I'm not the right person answering that question, but I would like to
describe my work as a combination of archaeology of knowledge and media
archaeology. In German media studies the epistemology and history of media has
played a crucial role. Friedrich Kittler, in the 1980s, has inaugurated a
discourse analysis of media that highlights the importance of the materiality
of media, the a priori of technique and the power of institutions. The main
question thereby is how media constitute what can be known and how media
influence the ways we consider the world. Scholars like Siegfried Zielinski or
Wolfgang Ernst have developed the field of media archaeology further. Recently
interdependencies between media techniques and infrastructures at the one hand
and cultural or body techniques at the other are an important topic of
research, namely by scholars such as Bernhard Siegert (Weimar) or Erhard
Schuettpelz (Siegen). At the same time media philosophers not only in Germany
rethink mediation in terms of triangular relations. In recent debates questions
of media ecology and ontology respectively mediated modes of existence have
gained much attention.20
My strong interest in the medical discourse derives from the role it plays for
formulations of normality. This is, of course, a Foucaultian perspective. The
distinction between what is regarded as normal or abnormal behaviour or sane or
insane is always a result of cultural negotiations. I'm interested in the role
mass media play in these negotiations. Perception, in my point of view, is a
relay, and media can intensify the permeability of it. No more, no less.
GL: Seen from other countries and continents Germany is still the country of
Schiller and Goethe, high literature and philosophy. Students still read tons
of thick and complex books, so it seems. You teach in Weimar and that must
certainly be a strange one-off museum experience. Is there something we can
learn from the German education system or are you as pessimistic as everyone
else when it comes to the lack of books that young people read these days, the
decline of the shared canon and the long-term implications this has for the
intellectual life and the level of thinking and critical reflection? Do you see
already see long-term impacts of the computer and Internet on German theory
production?
PL: Weimar is not only the city of Goethe and Schiller. Nietzsche lived here,
and the Bauhaus had its first residence here. And there is Buchenwald, a
concentration camp of the Nazi regime, too. Before I came to Weimar I was
teaching in Vienna. From your point of view it seems I'm collecting strange
one-off museum experiences. But, one mayor difference between these university
cities (and, by the way, to many other universities in Germany) is the fact
that the Bauhaus-University of Weimar is a very young university, founded
shortly after Germany's reunification. It's not a classical alma mater: there
is no faculty of humanities, but faculties of engineering, architecture,
design, and media. The idea is, that theoretical and practical education goes
hand in hand. The curriculum offers students courses where they can train their
skills in photography, film, design or programming. The ability to develop own
solutions is regarded as very important. At the same time Weimar is a place
where a lot of research is going on, where scientists meet and theoretical
debates are initiated. That's the intellectual climate around here.
German theory production has an affinity to media archaeology and the history
and philosophy of cultural practices. Friedrich Kittler was among the first
media theorists who thought about the role of the computer as a super-medium,
which is able to incorporate all other media. Claus Pias and Martin Warnke have
just lanced a research group locating in Lueneburg investigating the media
cultures of computer simulations and their input for knowledge production. I
think the faculties of reading and writing will be important skills also in the
future, but they have to be advanced by others such as working with data and
their different representations for instance as pictures or circulating
information of any format in order to manage the interplay of senses in
computer-based environments.
GL: I want to come back to the Frankfurt School. Did you say that Adorno is
moralistic in his rejection of the media as a light form of dispersed
entertainment? If he would still be alive, do you think he would say the same
of the Internet? I always wondered if there would be more sarcastic forms of
critique, in the tradition of Adorno and others that is less elitist, less
traditional?
PL: For Adorno's thinking of negativity and the Frankfurt School art is an
autonomous and alternative sphere of society. And it's art's alterity and
autonomy that is the condition for its power to undermine the capitalistic
order. That's why, for these thinkers, it's not a question of morality to
reject popular mass media of entertainment, it's, I would say an 82ontological'
question, because these media give not room for reflecting the mode of
existence in capitalist society. But Adorno's position is not so much definite
as it seems at first sight. I was surprised reading in Dialectics of
Enlightment that, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, a total excess of
distraction comes, in its extremity, close to art. This thought, it occurs to
me, resonates Siegfried Kracauer's utopia of distraction of the 1'0s dealing
with modern mass media, especially cinema. In tis passage of their book, Adorno
and Horkheimer are saying, and that is revolutionary for me, nothing less than
that an accumulation and intensification of distraction is able to fulfil the
task of negation that was originally dedicated to art, because it alters the
state of the subject in the world completely. With this thought in mind it
would be really funny and, at the end much less elitist, to speculate about
what Adorno would say of the Internet.
--
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