ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Throughout his life Freud was traumatized by missing trains, and so showed up to stations early; missing a train was to miss an opportunity, for business or intercourse, an appointment with death; he dreaded the prospect of changing carriages, and even trains, while sleeping, though he’d never suffered from somnambulism; he had a phobia of accidents too and on vacations traveled separately from his family, whom he preferred not to witness his panic; he noted the mechanical excitation of trains, their sexual locomotival jolt; stops on the way to the spa were the Stations of the Cross; trains united and divided Jewry from gentiles, Jewry eastern and western; the class differences of a train, first and second class, based on nothing but purchasing power, both liberated and oppressed; the train carriage was a breeding stall of crisis, in which you the passenger sat stationary atop the border of public and private—exposed, neurotic about exposure, concealed, neurotic about concealment, compartmentalized, helpless.

  Freud’s problem was problematization: what/what not to problematize, how/why to problematize, attributing to everything its own pathology if not its own religion.

  It’s shocking that he never wrote anything about cars, for example, besides noting a case in which automobil, the word alone, called to mind another: autoerotik.

  CASE STUDY (MILITARY)

  A.) YOU’RE HALFWAY THROUGH a war. You’re the pilot of a bomber and your target is Hamburg. The Americans bomb by day. You, British, bomb by night. But all the lights in Hamburg are off. The gaßes and straßes are so black they’re the Elbe and the Elbe’s so black it’s the sea. The North Sea. Though around Hamburg there are lights so bright that you find yourself believing it’s Hamburg itself down there and so doubting your coordinates. After the war you’re informed: The Nazis just set out a series of generators in the middle of a field, a pasture of floodlights, arc lamps, burning. This was supposed to distract you. To create the impression of a city. Of your target. The people you were about to destroy were elsewhere, playing dead in blackness.

  B.) YOU’RE THE CAPTAIN of an American destroyer escort. Your ship is equipped with sonar. You transmit a ping, wait for the echo, ping and wait for the echo. Though whenever you ping a U-boat, by the time its echo is received, by the time its echo is processed, the U-boat’s in another place, but then you’re in another place as well, nearer, or farther, because the U-boat’s also pinging you, and you echo, you can’t help it. All sonar can detect is the past. The future floats between predictions. The U-boat might maneuver you astray, in a countermeasure obscuring the angles of your search, and so keeping concealed the second boat that would sink you. Though you might sink the first boat first.

  C.) YOU RETURN FROM the war. Intact and with enough medals to camouflage your trauma. The researchers have not yet returned to their universities, but remain in their clandestine barracks, having been ordered to experiment. On you.

  You’re a radar operator and they want to determine how many elements you can detect on a single or multiple screen(s). You operate a telephone switchboard and they want to determine how many calls you can handle at once. You’re asked to search for letters, digits, figures. Letters/digits are spaced equidistantly, with no semantic content. No denotata, no conotata, nothing. Except one element, only one, will be different/wrong, a letter upside down, a digit backward. You’re asked to identify which and timed. You’re asked to identify between two tones, which lower, which higher, and then to find, within a cluster of tones, their sum. Count, enumerate, subitize, guesstimate.

  On the switchboard, you’re given two telephones, each broadcasting its own conversation, and are asked to type up transcripts of both, or even to memorize both, “to the best of your ability” (you’re weary of that phrase). This is called divided, or dichotic, listening (if you’re listening). The conversations are conducted in two different languages. They are about two different things. They are about the same thing and are, in fact, so boring and lacking in style, but so accurately boring and so accurately lacking in style, that you can’t tell which is the original and which the translation.

  On the radar screen(s), you’re asked to react—to press a button—whenever a new blip appears. Blips appear at random intervals of space and time, both proximal and not. All the blips are a single color. All the blips are different colors. You’re asked to react to a certain color only, (in)correct. You’re asked to react to a certain color when and only when it’s accompanied by a certain sound, (mis)taken. You’re asked to follow one blip and your eye motions are monitored as other blips are added and still others subtracted—interference. You’re told to “be selective,” “the Central Intelligence Agency certainly is.” Selectivity, though, is a general matter, or a specific matter, and lack of agreement leads precisely to tests. Semblance or stimulus, choose one. It’s easier to focus on a certain blip if it’s solid and the other blips are blinking. It’s easier to focus on a certain blip if it’s blinking and the other blips are solid. 1.) True or False: It’s easier to focus when greenA is accompanied by sound. 2.) T or F: It’s easier to focus when redB is not accompanied by sound.

  D.) ONE WAR’S AIRPLANE cockpit maintained a separate gauge for each function. Another war’s airplane cockpit grouped the various functions—altimeter and speedometer, wind speed and direction—assigning each group its own gauge. You, a pilot, are asked to recall: Which best describes how you perceived your targets? As individual displays, or as multipurpose indicators whose dysfunction cried out en masse (weapons always get their own buttons)?

  The surface vessels you commanded towed decoys behind them, which emitted a homing frequency to lure torpedoes, or a signal that honed the torpedoes’ own, deflecting them toward an alternate target, even to the vessels of their launching. The submarines ejected zeppelins too, underwater blimps. Rapidly inflated bladders of air or just these intense bursts of bubble that approximated propeller cavitation. You, a captain, are asked to recall: How did you and/or your crew refer to these subaqueous bursts? (“Clouds.”)

  CASE STUDY (INDUSTRIAL)

  A.) YOU WORK IN AN OFFICE. An office automated to capacity. Or approaching capacity as you’re a human and still employed. But even once everything human has been automated, choices must yet be made. Your position—you—will be either terminated, or retained, based on whether your expertise includes the servicing and repair of these information machines when, not if, they malfunction. It is, no doubt, one of these information machines that will make the choice whether to terminate or retain you (your position).

  B.) THANKFULLY, YOUR EXPERTISE militates against termination. You don’t theorize, or program, you facilitate. You’re an engineer, a technician. Your work is to keep everything working, including the thing that is yourself. When a machine breaks, you find out why, you gather information. But while a scarcity of information compels attention, an excess of information compels distraction, and so yet another economy is described. Information loses value when its quantity exceeds the capacity of your attention, and so attention is converted to commodity. Conversely, attention loses value when its quality results in ignorance of a more efficient/more expeditious solution. Worth is directly proportional to use. Relevancy is to be fought for like officing and grants.

  C.) THE MACHINES IN your lab have become the models for your own machine, your brain—both “a processor” (“machine,” singular), and “a network” (“machines,” plural). It occurs to you that every model of cognition you’ve ever encountered has integrated the models of every machine you’ve ever encountered, at least of its power controls: the large, noisy vacuum tube you began with shattered into the quieter, smaller transistor, which switched electricity on and off and amplified the current, while the transistor, in turn, you yourself have managed to incorporate into the (nearly) silent, (nearly) invisible circuit, which limits initial electricity flow through “a resistor,” selectively limits flow according to preset conditions through “a diode,” and stores and disburses single str
ong blasts through “a capacitor.”

  If you can regard current as currency—the present around you—it follows that potential is defined by control. When currency exceeds your ability to control it, you overload and fail. As a circuit, you can either “resist,” and impede the initial flow of irrelevant data, diodically “decide,” and select among the data for relevance, or merely “capacitate,” which is to react—instinctively, reflexively.

  D.) SUCH ARE THE general schematics of attention, and it’s the middle selectivity, that diodic quality, that interests. (To be clear: That’s only because you’ve selected that interest.) To begin with, you don’t impede irrelevancies (you’re convinced of this). The very fact that you’ve considered that you might in fact impede serves as proof. Further, not only are you susceptible, you’re often willingly submissive. In repairwork, it’s often the perceived irrelevancies that prove crucial. This too can be explained neurologically. This too cannot be helped.

  You are working to fix a component when a co-worker visits your cube. This co-worker is but another component, though he does not require fixing. He is, you’re conscious of this, a superior. A scientist. A mind. But he’s also irrelevant to your fixing. Still you hear him, you see him; he cannot be blocked. Even if he weren’t a superior, but an inferior, he’d be unblockable, given his proximity and frequency, that flushed circle face and circuitous chatter. Rather, you ignore him; rather, you can only choose to ignore him. Though in that choice itself there’s still enough proximity and frequency for you to become aware that he’s chatting with someone else in some other cube who has (you’ve been told), or might have (you suspect), new information about the layoffs.

  E.) YOUR SUPERIOR’S UNINTENTIONAL interruption has not been preattentively “filtered,” but postattentively “attenuated.” These are words for breaks; these words are breaks themselves. “Filter” makes you think of a tea bag, or a paper coffee cone, leaching the leaves or grounds for flavor, not for texture. “Attenuation” makes you think of weakness, loss, fade, extinction. The wanelife of the unemployed. Volume turned down, color dulled.

  According to attenuation theory—a theory of attention (selective, or perpendicular/intersecting with intent) within attention (total, or in parallel with stimuli)—irrelevancies are inhibited, until they exhibit as relevant. You don’t need a job, until you don’t have a job, unless you want one (or another). This most recent conception of attention suggests to you the most recent machine you’ve been working to fix—a machine that, in fact, has never worked, so, in fact, has never been broken. It’s a machine used in business now intended for use in the home. (You yourself, throughout your career, had always been employed by universities, funded by governments—this current position has been your only experience in business.)

  F.) “COMPUTERS” ARE NOT dedicated machines, not unitasked units; rather they’re templates, platforms, capable of executing polyvalent tasks, synarchic “programs.” Human programs that load immediately, simultaneously, are either innate or acquired (self-programmed). These include breathing (innate), stress/tension (acquired). Computer programming is currently strictly “innate,” though there’s a hope in the lab that computers might one day be programmed to “acquire”—to learn from users, teach themselves. There’s even the dream that one day computers might become capable of processing the greatest of human programs, those involving apperception, or appreciation of the self, programs so demanding—involving ethics, morality, appetites, drives—that humans must still load them serially, with deliberate dedication.

  G.) EXECUTE THE FOLLOWING programs: Explain how you didn’t notice that your superior was addressing you; explain how you didn’t register that he was letting you go; explain how it’s not your fault that you’ve been inattentive lately; explain how the 5150’s recent memory malfunctions haven’t been because of you; explain why you weren’t able to find your car in the parkinglot; explain why you suddenly found it; explain your feeling that you don’t deserve your car; explain how you got lost on your way home; explain your lateness without mentioning getting lost and explain your earliness without mentioning job loss; explain how you’re going to explain all this loss to your wife.

  H.) REDUNDANATED. FIRED. MISFIRED. Laid off. You sprawl on the loveseat with your wife. IF how much, THEN moreover what, information is required? And why?

  CASE STUDY (SOVIET)

  You’re a Russian poet, on a train journey from Moscow, fleeing one doomed love affair for another. Spying on your own life, your code name is “Boris Pasternak.” Your face—your “prominent” nose—is pressed against the window, which edits the landscape and then sequences it into frames. Subtitles, supertitles, enter (leap into) your head (your soul), in voiceover. Poetry, the overdub of life:

  stations flying from the train like

  stone butterflies/moths of rock

  the suffocating sun was borne along

  on innumerable striped divans

  Summer waved farewell to the wayside station. Thunder

  removed its cap to snap a hundred blinding photos.

  A bloom of lilac dimmed and thunder gathered sheaves

  of lightning exposing, from far fields, the stationmaster’s hut.

  Wells hum like kobzas

  in the dust and wind,

  haystacks and poplars creak

  hurl themselves to earth.

  Stepping off the train, I tossed

  fresh paint on canvas

  for a willow grove

  where, again, I found you

  Drafts—cold drafts whether winter or summer, or the hundred seasons Russia poses for between.

  It chills you, how words used to promise more, at least to be more themselves, in the original: not in Russian, but before the words ever became Russian. (You’d believed that poetry, and even the prose of poets, existed prior to language: in spirit.)

  But this regard for writing, once natural to you in the way that breathing continues to be natural (fogging the pane), turned absurd—attention shift, swerve, to another track—the very moment you associated it with “narration.”

  A bit of fence, a toppled chimney: There used to be a way of writing that was, at heart, still a way of being, a way of seeing and hearing things better, not worse, by writing them down. But then it changed, and this change was not akin to those rasputitsal mutations by which strangers become lovers, and lovers, strangers; neither was it related to any of those newer political or economic processes by which one thing is modified into another or gains and loses essence—like grain into bread, and bread into kvass, all of which are traded in the provinces, but bought and sold in the cities; or like tourism, which is a caricature of exile; or like space-time, whose mysteries have been obliterated by telecommunications and improvements of the post; or like calm, a virtue that’s been condemned as laziness, idleness, decadence, parasitism.

  This change was different because it changed not just your mind, but also your senses: smell and touch. Things lost their odors and textures, which loss the poetry of your age felt the need to compensate for, vocabularily. The way words looked on the page, the way they sounded, declaimed.

  CUT—The train is stalled just outside Kiev and is left like an unfurled banner whose propaganda can be read by the passengers only by marching alongside it. A stomping of barefoot pistons is the score.

  CUT—[to himself] I should’ve switched at Kharkov.

  You remember when you were separated from someone you wanted to write about—you couldn’t get a picture of her in your mind, so you wrote to her requesting a photograph. Subsequently, that request was implicit in every line you wrote, not just of prose. You propped the photo against the telephone when you called her. You could not remember her voice. It was as if you were together only when there was something between you: glass, pickets, a guardrail. Or like when you open a package from Odessa that’s been through customs
, that’s been through the censors, and though all its contents are received as they were sent, you’re still able to sense that other presence.

  That was the change—that intermediary presence felt in everything.

  M. BEHAVIORISM AND GESTALT, NEUROACADEMIA, CONSUMPTION V. PROSUMPTION, BUDDHISMS

  “The preceding two chapters will be followed by the two chapters that follow” (I read that in a textbook). The preceding two chapters dramatized, in sequence: Modernism in the arts; sexism and work; migration and the physiological experiments of von Helmholtz; racism and the psychophysics of Fechner and Weber; Freudian analysis and travel; the military-vigilance experiments of Norman Mackworth, along with the signal-detection research of David Green and John Swets (1954); industry and the filtration and attenuation theories of Donald Broadbent (1958), Jaroslav and Diana Deutsch (1963), and Anne Treisman (1964); and, finally, the mediation of experience through Soviet ideology.

  I—first person—knew of no other way to do something I thought crucial: provide some perspective on how people of previous eras experienced and felt about attention. I’ve been in analysis and held bad jobs (though I’ve never been a white female secretary or a black female copper scavenger), and I’ve written this essay, for which I’ve read countless books, and what I find I’m still lacking is this: a true or just tractive account of how nonwriters, especially, attended. This, dear reader, is inevitable.

  To wonder why so few memoirists and diarists wrote about attention at the turn of the twentieth century is to wonder why so few of them wrote about climate change, or genomics—either the topic hadn’t yet occurred to them, or hadn’t yet occurred. Perhaps they didn’t regard their attention as being threatened; or perhaps they didn’t even regard their attention as being theirs—as a property that others wanted (it could be taken), or as a function that others wanted to make use of (it could be manipulated). But whenever attention itself is stimulated (addressed directly as attention), it responds as something else—in economic terms, the attention-property is converted into a commodity, and the attention-function is converted into a process of exchange.