History, Philosophy, Science
Princeton University
History of Science Workshop
March 19-20, 2021
D. Graham Burnett (History of Science, Princeton)
& Justin E. H. Smith (Philosophy of Science, Paris VII)
We do not simply “see” what falls before our eyes. Rather, we isolate certain of the elements of our visual field by a special power of the mind, and by this same power we screen out or dismiss other elements. This power — which operates paradigmatically in the domain of vision, but which would seem to function across the whole of the sensory/cognitive domain — is called “attention,” and it has been (and remains) of great interest to philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and creative artists alike. Because we are widely thought to be experiencing, today, a “crisis of attention” (a crisis unfolding in the context of new theorizations of the “attention economy”), close work on the historical evolution of our understanding of attention feels urgent — as does meaningful engagement with current critical and technical discourse in this area. What attention is, and how to cultivate and activate it, are, we believe, among the most pressing questions of our era.
The scientific study of attention represents a significant chapter in the history of psychology, psychophysics, and the physiology of perception. From experimental work in the nineteenth century on the attention “span,” to landmark research on vigilance in the twentieth, the techno-scientific investigation of human attentional capacities has been implicated in pedagogy, warfare, advertising, and the changing discourses of human subjectivity. Concern with the attentive subject strongly marks the history of pedagogy and politics in the modern period; indeed, powerful arguments have been made that new forms of measurement and discipline of attention consistently index upheavals in the understanding of both the individual and society.
As a philosophical problem, attention is many-pronged, and straddles different domains. It is surprisingly undertheorized within aesthetics, which might seem its natural home. But aesthetics, since Alexander Baumgarten coined the term in the 1740s, has been principally concerned with perception, a mental faculty often held to be the more basic of the two, to the extent that it encompasses everything that comes before the mind, via sense, prior to the filtering work of attention. But if perception is in this respect more “fundamental,” it is correspondingly less germane to a number of key issues involving agency and personhood: What, for example, is the role of will in the activity of attending? And to the extent that will is involved, how might we thus see attention as a faculty that overreaches the bounds of the aesthetic and extends into the domain of the moral? Here our philosophical suspicion, of a moral dimension to the exercise of attention, is confirmed by everyday speech: to request of someone, “Pay attention to me!” is not just to ask them to take note of our perceptible features, but also to care about our well-being as persons, to acknowledge our moral worth. Attention is in this respect a key boundary-straddling concept in philosophy, and has been at least since Aristotle analyzed it under the name of φροντίς.
Heightened understanding of the storied history of the concept of attention — scientific, aesthetic, ethical, and political at once — should enable us to return, better armed, to the problem of what is now called “the attention economy” in all its complexity. If we acknowledge the moral imperative that comes in the voice of another person who beseeches us to pay attention, how are we in turn to understand the call of the ubiquitous advertisements, algorithms, apps, and appointment dynamics that are currently fracking the human subject for that vaporous and monetizable asset called “attention”? What forms of resistance, accommodation, or transformation hold promise as we look to the future?