Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science

As a direct effect of the omnipresence of the new media, attention has become a central focus of interest. Since the spectrum of visual stimuli and entertainment has become so broad, curiosity, pleasure and admiration are no longer regarded as virtues and passions to be stimulated and satisfied. The problem is rather how to acquire and manage more and more information in shorter and shorter periods of time. In this situation, attention is so precious and expensive, because it cannot be increased at one's discretion and it is a target for anyone who wants to "sell" goods, ideas, knowledge, or ideology. Authors such as Georg Franck speak of an "economy of attention" and regard it as a currency that makes it necessary to decide how to invest one's own attention and how to evoke the attention of others. Consequently Franck argues for a new "ethics of attention." ² The length of TV-spots has regulated our visual attention; the permanent threat of cell-phones has affected our capacity for concentration in various social situations; and the use of computers inevitably trains us to bring our own attention and speed of response into correspondence with the commands and functions of the machine. Attention today is inseparably linked to the conditions of information technology and media that surround us. However, attention is not an epiphenomenon of these media and technologies. In his comprehensive history of attention in modernity, Jonathan Crary argues that current patterns and mechanisms of attention are to be understood as a consequence of modern transformations of perception and of attention in the nineteenth century. ³ According to Crary, the goal was either to control the observer's subjective experience (e.g. with the tachistoscope and reaction time experiments), or to use attention as a dynamic system in order to enhance the capitalist world of goods, spectacle and consumption.

While Crary's analysis of this historical oscillation of attention between free-flow and control, (self)-disciplinary technologies and distraction is comprehensive and persuasive, he is silent about the history of attention in the first half of the nineteenth century. Assuming a radical rupture and discontinuity in the 1870s, Crary is remarkably inattentive to the importance of the practical construction of attention in the years around 1800 for the philosophical and cultural status of subjectivity in modern societies. As I want to argue in this essay, attention was displayed, defined and redefined in a historical situation, when self-experience, self-observation and self-experiment became important tools for the self-understanding of a remarkable number of academics, scholars, scientists, intellectuals, and artists. Scientific experiences with the own self, interest in pathological phenomena, observation and even evocation of physical and mental boundary states were part and parcel of this process. Attention was an object of these scientific experiences, but at the same time it was also used for calibrating and interpreting them. Attention filled the gap between the sometimes odd experiences and and their philosophical implications. I want to build my argument on two historical examples, namely on late eighteenth-century experiential psychology ("Erfahrungsseelenkunde"), and on mid nineteenth-century psychophysics. These two events are not only accepted as major contributions to the history of psychology; more recent literature has also pointed to the crucial role of at least experiential psychology and psychiatry in the constitution of the modern bourgeois self. ⁴ In trying to push these constraints further, I want to argue that changing experiences, definitions and classifications of attention were core elements of this process.

Making Attention a Virtue

Any approach to a history of attention has first of all to be aware of the various meanings of attention, circulating even at one and the same time. A glance at the "Historical Dictionary of Philosophy" suffices to bring the range of meanings applied to this term up to date. The author of the dictionary first differentiates between a motor-skills oriented, or physical, and an intellectual concept...