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Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition's Histories

2019; University of California Press; Volume: 72; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2019.72.2.541

1547-3848

Francesca Brittan, Carmel Raz, Nicholas Mathew, Alexandra Kieffer, Benjamin Steege,

Historical Education Studies Worldwide

In a 2015 piece for the New Yorker ("Music, Fiction, and the Value of Attention"), literary critic Nicholas Dames thus muses on the dwindling cultural prestige of the novel: its difficulty in sustaining relevance, sales, and above all, attention. Music, Dames posits, has access to a cognitive power that prose cannot command, and perhaps this is why it has become the object of such elaborate description in contemporary fiction (Richard Powers's Orfeo, Colm Tóibín's Nora Webster, and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, among other novels). Here, sustained accounts of musical listening aspire to the "waves of [neural] connection" or the "rapt submergence" inspired by sound—forms of focus seemingly unavailable to text. But can accounts of attending to music restore a tragically lost literary attention? Do we even want it back? These are some of the issues Dames raises, in a piece that gestures toward a rich body of work on histories of literary attentiveness (including his own scholarly writing), while revealing a thinner understanding of auditory focus. Old myths about music's power to bewitch the mind (to induce a "dream of absorption") intermingle, in his essay, with newer theories about its potential to "[light] up long-dark regions in [the] head." We are left with questions about the aesthetic power of listening, its relationship to histories of philosophy, psychology, and cognition, and, in a more pointed sense, its role in defining states of attention or distraction.Dames's article forms part of an outpouring of popular writing intent on diagnosing and renovating our lack of focus. Alongside the New Yorker, venues including The Atlantic and, more recently, the New York Times have featured essays on rebuilding, strengthening, marshaling, and protecting our attention.2 Such general interest pieces are responses to a wave of work from the scientific and corporate domains: psychological and neuroscientific research on the cognitive workings of attentiveness, new diagnoses (especially ADHD) from the medical field, business models exploring the "psychic economy" of attention, and—moving beyond the human—efforts in Artificial Intelligence to extrapolate "attention mechanisms" for algorithmic learning. Across disciplines, there is an acute sense both that the power of focus is crucial, and that our access to it is dwindling—a problem often attributed to encroaching technological environments, information overload, and the cultural fetishization of speed and productivity.3 Our inability to agree on a coherent definition of attention coexists with the widely held sense that the path to salvation lies in laying bare its cognitive mysteries. We are, it would appear, suffering from a modern epidemic of distraction, one that we must make a concerted effort to understand and address.And yet inattention is clearly not a problem unique to the present day. The sense of yearning for a lost, utopian moment of focus—a condition of full awareness, self-knowledge, spiritual fulfillment, or connectedness—is perennial. Artistic productions are perhaps an obvious site from which to undertake an investigation of attention's histories; indeed, explicit engagements with the theme in relation to the visual arts can be traced at least to Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and to Jonathan Crary's subsequent recasting of the problem of attention as one of modernity in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999). Over the course of the last decade and a half, the rapid emergence of cognitive historicism has allowed us to expand our consideration of the mental processes of visual attention to include those associated with reading and writing. Foundational in this regard have been studies of Romantic neural sciences and psychology by Alan Richardson and by Dames himself, which pioneered the application of historical models of cognition to literary analysis.4 Explicit histories of attention dating from the early 2000s—cultural, religious, and scientific—have provided a theoretical infrastructure for more pointed studies of cognitive focus extending back to Aristotle and Augustine, and up to Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin.5 Most recently, scholarship on the history of attentive modalities has focused on literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, on the era in which philosophical and moral panic about distraction began to anticipate modern levels.The field of literary studies has shown that, over the course of the revolutionary and early Romantic periods—when industrialization, burgeoning commodity culture, globalization, and modern telecommunications began to transform the landscape—many of the anxieties about cognitive focus that we now regard as "contemporary" had already coalesced.6 Indeed, attention had long since held a central place within Enlightenment thought, situated by philosophers and aesthetic theorists as a keystone of the aware, fully participatory self. In France, eighteenth-century responses to René Descartes's Meditations (1641), and to Jean de La Bruyère's figure "distraction" (Les caractères, 1688), initiated a lively exchange about attentiveness, thoughtlessness, and reverie that occupied thinkers from Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Johann Caspar Lavater.7 In Germany, new ways of theorizing the mechanisms of focus in the work of Georg Friedrich Meier and Johann Georg Sulzer were taken up and extended by later thinkers who included Ernst Platner, Novalis, and Christian Friedrich Michaelis.8 And in Britain, John Locke's account of the role of volition in attention led to a grappling with the interrelationship of passive and active modes of attending by philosophers such as David Hartley, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart.9By the late eighteenth century, acute awareness of the political, economic, and aesthetic demands of cognitive focus—and a sense of its growing scarcity—shaped not only critical discourses but also forms of production: poetic modes, plot types, narrative style and pacing, and even page formatting. Literary scholars have offered up fascinating analyses of poetic inattention in William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and John Keats;10 of concentration and distraction in Jane Austen;11 of forms of rapt or wondrous cognition in Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Flaubert;12 and of aesthetic attentiveness in Karl Phillip Moritz, Georg Simmel, and Friedrich Nietzsche.13 Moving well beyond fiction and poetry, their work demonstrates attention's crucial role in bridging Romantic literary, medical, theological, and economic worlds. This historical cross-disciplinary orientation has persisted; indeed, the heavily diversified nature of attention research today is an extension of the scientific and philosophical collaboration that the topic stimulated across the breadth of the long nineteenth century.But what about music? And what of Dames's proposition that musical listening stimulates forms of focus unknown to other media? This idea is not entirely unfamiliar, and becomes less so when we consider the works singled out for description by Dames's authors—Bach's Goldberg Variations, Mozart's Requiem, Beethoven's symphonies, Franz Schubert's "An die Musik," and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (among others). The "lost" focus Dames fantasizes seems to be located in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires, which cast "a spell … more primal, maybe, than prose." His claim resonates easily with extant histories of listening, particularly those of James H. Johnson (1995), Thomas Tolley (2001), and Matthew Riley (2004), which identify the eighteenth century as the moment at which key discourses relating to auditory attention and distraction were first articulated.14 During this period (long before the sonic fictional descriptions highlighted by Dames), philosophers, musicians, and critics had already homed in on auditory awareness as an important index of focus or its deficit. Indeed, Locke's insight that an unnoticed sound literally goes unheard regardless of its impact on the sensing organ—his paradigmatic example of the way the mental state of absorption alters our perception—would be subsequently taken up by other philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.15 To be attentive was to focus on a specific object for some duration, as Reid observed; in other words, attentiveness entailed a mental state characterized by a distinctive (and often altered) sense of temporal flow.16Histories of listening are histories of attention. The reverse is not always true, although capacities of sonic awareness, recollection, and retention are often yoked, in broader discussions of creative invention, to acute powers of focus and, by extension, aesthetic insight. Over the course of the late eighteenth century, more explicitly musical forms of attending, including the rhapsodic absorption invoked by Dames's authors, become metonyms for the cultural ideal of attentiveness itself. We might locate the origins of this mode in the article "Unité de mélodie" in Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique (1768).17 Or in Adam Smith, who praised instrumental music for its potential to "fill up, completely the whole capacity of the mind, so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of any thing else" (before 1795).18 Certainly, it was in place by the time Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder described the "true way of listening" as "the most attentive observations of the notes and their progression … the distancing and withdrawal from every disruptive thought and from all extraneous sensuous impressions" (1792).19This kind of intensive focus was—or would be—inextricably bound up with idealist tenets, canonicity, nationalist ideologies, and theological injunction. Equally clearly, it was freighted with an Enlightenment valorization of concentration over wandering or diffuse forms of attending. Hardly surprising, then, that Dames, though fascinated by the phantasm of complete musical absorption, is also wary of it, pointing out that unwavering attention "does not necessarily equal perceptiveness." Why, then, he asks, "do we … feel so strongly that our artworks must nourish it?" The question is a useful one, and might be extended to encompass others. How are modes of attending, including Wackenroder's "true way," enforced, embraced, manipulated, or evaded? What role does auditory attention play in wider economies, or ecologies, of focus and distraction? What are its limits? And what relationship does musical attentiveness bear to affect, ethics, or identity formation? Work emanating from the fields of sound and media studies has already broached some of these questions,20 as has scholarship focused on histories of experimental psychology.21 In the contributions that follow, we broaden the scope, contemplating music's interaction with cultures of attention from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Theories of focus and distraction shift considerably across this period, but a sense that the content and meaning of music is inextricable from the forms of attention it demands remains stable. In many circles, problems relating to the temporality and ephemerality of sonic experience are recast as cognitive challenges that, as our work suggests, become inextricable from aesthetic and political programs of attentive conditioning.A number of unexpected threads run through the colloquy. Our contributors resist the hegemony of focused listening dictated by German idealist aesthetics, foregrounding the importance of music and auditory cultures to less familiar modes of attentiveness ranging from British conceptions of interest qua reward (Mathew) to the performance of pathological focus in European medical contexts (Raz) and the importance of vacant or idle attention in Schubert (Brittan). The stakes of the psychic economy and the role of gender in constructions of attention appear as themes in a number of essays, as does the idea of attentiveness as a tool in forging individual and national consciousness (Kieffer). The long historical sweep of the set reveals that the heritage of Wackenroder's "true way of listening" continued to haunt fin-de-siècle and Weimar Republic listeners attempting to grapple with their own acculturation as auditors, the political implications of listening, and the weight of attention's musical histories (Steege). Issues of agency surface repeatedly, including the role of volition and acquiescence in musical attending, and the centrality of distraction to self-aware forms of auditory focus.Attending to attention is, of course, a tricky business, but it is also illuminating. Centering our inquiries on historical cognitive processes themselves allows us to home in on the patterns of spotlighting, filtering, and dispersal that shape theories of creative production as well as modes of musical consumption, analysis, and investment. Our intention is to provoke questions as well as provide preliminary answers—to consider how and at what cost we pay attention.Days before Joseph Haydn arrived in London from Vienna in January 1791, the Morning Chronicle published an excited preview of the major musical events that were planned for that year. In addition to the Hanover Square concerts, at which Haydn was to be the star attraction, the list included the "professional concert under the able conduct of Cramer," "two rival Opera houses," the "Antient concert," the "Ladies subscription concert" on Sunday evenings, "Oratorios twice a week" during Lent, and the "Academy of Antient Music."22 And there was more: there would have been concerts in the main pleasure gardens, large musical gatherings sponsored by organizations such as the Anacreontic Society, and countless semi-private musical performances in the houses of the gentry. Never before would Haydn have witnessed such a glut of music making.By the end of his second full season, Haydn was regularly attracting immense crowds to the Festino Room at Hanover Square, which comfortably held around 800 people: "1500 people entered the door," noted the socialite Charlotte Papendiek on her ticket following the concert of May 3, 1792. This program, advertised in several newspapers, was as densely packed as the room: a couple of symphonies, some songs, a "Concertante," a cantata, concertos for violin and for harp, and—a finale surely guaranteed to bring the house down—the Earthquake from Haydn's Seven Last Words.23 Any ticket holders who were unable to get a good look at Haydn amid the crush were in luck: the Morning Chronicle announced that Thomas Hardy's dashing oil portrait of him—an image that was already circulating as an engraving published by John Bland—was on show that very day in the gallery of the Royal Academy. Publicity, ticketing, the jostling of celebrity singers and instrumentalists, reports and reviews published before and after the concert in newspapers and journals, not to mention the subsequent sale of parts and piano reductions of Haydn's newest music (some of which were hawked even in the concert venue): this was information overload, of a kind that Haydn had never previously experienced, a bracing encounter with the hubbub of the early "attention economy."The concept of the "attention economy" was unpacked most comprehensively in a book of the same name by Thomas Davenport and John Beck, published between the founding of Google and the launch of Facebook.24 Though their idea was crucially shaped by the new forms of monetary and social commerce made possible by the Internet, it was premised on an analysis of information richness by the economist Herbert Simon, who, decades earlier, had been responding, together with media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, to a predigital iteration of public anxiety about the overabundance of data and the concomitant possibility of cognitive exhaustion. "The wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes," Simon explained. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."25It is tempting to say that Simon merely expressed, in the technocratic terms of his postwar moment, media-induced anxieties of much longer standing. Indeed, in that spirit, the philosopher Galen Strawson cites René Descartes's reassuring complaint that "it is impossible for individuals to examine the huge number of new books that are published every day"—a sentiment that was possible as early as 1642.26 But this would be to ignore the historically distinctive conception of the human mind that underpins any kind of attention economy: there are no forms of attention without the web of social practices and material infrastructures, techniques and technologies, that make them thinkable.Foremost among the technologies that shaped Davenport and Beck's analysis was, of course, the web page (a standard unit of our phenomenal landscape nowadays), and we might pause to consider how the average web page reinforces the conceptual premises of the attention economy. Having atomized our attention into clicks, the web typically displays a center encroached upon by advertising, peripheries that are laid as so much bait. The parsing of our attention into clicks to be harvested by these pestering margins—discrete parcels of response to seduction or surprise—has everything to do with money. As in the prosopopoeia of the commodity early on in Marx's Capital, when Marx reports on what the commodity would say if it were to speak, clickbait appeals to us in a voice made of barely more than social relations, a voice whose distinctiveness and seductiveness, in the Marxian analysis, nonetheless occludes these relations themselves.27 For the commodity that is bought and sold in the course of our clicks (as we might recognize when the advertising that pops up on our browsers uncannily predicts our desires) is actually our attention itself. Every click reifies it and passes it on to somebody else, who can use it to gather still more. This transaction—as Tim Wu, among others, has noted—produces "attention" as a kind of psychic currency.28The idea of attention as currency is a good deal older than the Internet, however. It is to some degree implied in words that nowadays seem oddly to blend monetary and psychic meanings, such as "investment" and "interest." It was in the eighteenth century that this blend was established—when, as historians of commercial society have long observed, subjects also became consumers, and were increasingly assailed by inducements to invest in things. This was especially true in the metropolitan landscapes of eighteenth-century England. Thus the eponymous protagonist of Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) is introduced to the world in large part through the bundle of activities captured in the novel's most fashionable neologism: "shopping." "There seem to be six or seven men belonging to each shop, and every one took care, by bowing and smirking, to be noticed," marvels the innocent Evelina. "I thought I should never have chosen a silk, for they produced so many, I knew not which to fix upon," she continues, describing the kind of distraction and information overload that have become motifs of the present-day attention economy.29 Amid this whirl of competing investments, many eighteenth-century commentators remarked on the risk of overstimulation, and the related epidemic of boredom appeared, an idea now loosened from the centuries-old theological condemnation of ennui. The London beau monde, explained Samuel Johnson, was "always endeavouring to raise some new desire that they may have something to persue [sic]"—seeking somewhere to invest its mental capital, lest its psychic currency should accrue no interest.30Johnson and his contemporaries eagerly cultivated the new genres and formats of the eighteenth-century attention economy, the literary style and presentational forms that Shaftesbury had dubbed "the miscellaneous manner of writing"—the gatherings and re-gatherings of notes, quotes, and anecdotes that constituted the bulk of the period's publications.31 It is something of an irony that the continuing moral panic about the fracturing of our attention spans in the smartphone age tends to contrast an emerging form of (in)attention modeled on the Internet—an assemblage of jerky, metonymic clicks and links—with the austere and bounded self-presence of the book. Yet in the eighteenth century, the book was by no means self-evident as a symbol of cohesion and continuity: "Among the Variety of matter treated of, every Reader may find something worth laying up," promised William Dover in the preface to his Useful Miscellanies (1753).32 The oft-repeated metaphor of knowledge as a disparate collection of useful items to be laid up as capital, whether in the memory or on the page, extended at least as far back as John Locke's distinctively mercantile image of the educated mind, common in late seventeenth-century thought, as, in part, a "magazine of materials," well stocked with experience.33 Given the long-standing metaphorical interplay of physical storehouses, psychic spaces, and new media forms, one can well understand why the eighteenth-century literary entrepreneur Edward Cave should have adopted the word "magazine" to denote a publication: the shop or warehouse of miscellaneous things.Next to these literary technologies of the attention economy, the music historian could place a cluster of media platforms that came to prominence toward the end of the eighteenth century: the ticketed public concert (of the kind that Salomon and Haydn staged in London), the purpose-designed concert rooms where such diversions took place (such as those at Hanover Square), and the copious printed materials (announcements, reviews, and related musical publications) that mediated these events. And the music that Haydn and others composed in this commercial environment inevitably contained formal traces of the new attention economy. Music historians are well used to the claim—argued in connection with Paris by James Johnson, London by Thomas Tolley, and German-speaking centers by Matthew Riley—that new ideals of attention (or, sometimes, a species of attention called "attentiveness") may have developed in the late eighteenth century, and that they may have accompanied social practices such as listening in relative silence.34 Less common, however, is the idea not only that musical publications and performances might have been subject to changing techniques of attention, or might have been in dialogue with changing listening publics, but that musical forms, styles, and genres could be considered among the technologies that produced the modern currency of attention itself.I have argued elsewhere that several of Haydn's London compositions both responded to and taught the relatively new concepts of interest and the interesting in music, via musical technologies that were designed not merely to capture audience attention in the concert room, but to sustain this attention in an iterable way, in part by acknowledging and spurring the further production of music-related discourse.35 One of the period's most energetic producers of such discourse, Charles Burney was only the most prominent of contemporaries to laud the "contrivance, and the interesting combination of the whole" in Haydn's symphonies.36 These interesting musical combinations kept him, and everybody else, writing and talking. Following their earliest performances, several of the London symphonies acquired nicknames that pointed out, in the baldest terms, their most interesting features. The "Surprise"—the unequivocal hit of the 1792 season—was perhaps the most lastingly popular of them, reportedly inducing raptures with its sudden timpani stroke and orchestral tutti in the midst of its otherwise placid Andante. These symphonic nicknames are evidence, I have argued, not merely of Haydn's newly blatant attention-seeking in London's densely populated attention economy, but of a new range of social relations mediated by the London music market: publicity and advertising, critical extraction and elaboration in newspapers and journals, and the expectation of future iterations in formats such as piano transcriptions—all technologies that made possible new modes of musical curiosity, discrimination, and attentiveness. It seems to me that, in this case, the term "interest" proves more useful and revealing to the historian of this period than its more immediate-sounding cousin "attention," not only because it cropped up repeatedly in contemporary commentaries on Haydn's music, and not only because it more clearly connoted economic models of personal involvement, which were especially relevant as concert impresarios and music sellers competed to sell tickets and publications. More than this, the iterative, discourse-oriented nature of the interesting—more obviously than the apparent suddenness of attention-grabbing—points toward the many technologies and media forms that worked to turn ephemeral strategies of musical attention-seeking into more lasting capital. Haydn's music generated interest, and thus value, over and over.By contrast, "attention" risks implying a capacity of mind that is somehow thinkable apart from the technologies and social relations with which it is always enmeshed. Now and again, William Weber's important exploration of the question "Did people listen in the eighteenth century?" frames the history of musical attention as though it were predominantly a quantitative matter, a question of the ways in which "other musical cultures" valued and inculcated greater or lesser amounts of attentiveness.37 I would be more inclined to say that, in the absence of the media infrastructures and social relations characteristic of the incipient capitalism that Haydn first encountered in England, one cannot speak meaningfully of attentiveness as though it were a measurable degree of psychic investment—in other words, that particular conceptions of attention require particular economies. As in the case of the insistent appeals of clickbait or the seductive voice of the Marxian commodity, even the most distinctive and instantaneous moments of the London symphonies were produced and sustained by a series of social relations: compressed into the single click of attention are the complex patterns of musical mediation that model attention itself.Since the nineteenth century, most discussions of musical attention have been structured around a series of ethically freighted oppositions: attentiveness versus distraction, continuous versus intermittent, depth versus surface, interest versus disinterest, structural versus culinary, and so on. Yet the music of the late eighteenth-century commercial metropolis might reveal what the attention economy and its ostensibly more virtuous opposites have in common: a conception of all attention as a kind of expenditure, and thus the belief that even the most superior forms of attention involve investing one's psychic currency wisely, and in the choicest things.Nineteenth-century European medical texts abound in reports of patients allegedly seeing, tasting, smelling, or hearing by means of their internal organs or their extremities. These dislocations traversed corporeal and national boundaries. In Aix, Estelle L'Hardy heard with her wrist, elbow, and stomach, while in Bologna, a woman heard with the palms of her hands, the soles of her feet, and the pit of her stomach.38 Ann Finn of Dublin could hear only when spoken to on her abdomen, while Johanna Anschütz of Vienna heard with the hollow of her hand.39 The patients—typically young women—acted as if some or all of their senses had been transferred to another limb or organ, one that alone was capable of perception. Contemporary physicians ascribed these sensory transformations to a trance-like state of catatonic passivity. Alternately termed "hysteria," "catalepsy," "ecstasy," or "somnambulism," this condition was typically diagnosed as arising either spontaneously from organic causes or as a result of a mesmeric magnetization.40The phenomenon of "transposition des sens" or sensory transposition, as these altered capacities became known, was first described by Jacques-Henri-Désiré Petetin in 1805. Petetin (1744–1808), a Lyon-based physician with an interest in medical electricity, had been summoned to treat a young female somnambulist. At one point, she began to sing compulsively.41 Unable to attract the woman's attention in this disordered state, Petetin grasped her, and in doing so slipped and fell across her body, crying out, "It is truly unfortunate that I cannot make this woman stop singing."42 Astonishingly, his outburst brought about an immediate reaction from the invalid, who halted her song. From this, Petetin concluded that she had heard him only because, as he stumbled, his mouth had made accidental contact with her abdominal region. In his subsequent investigations, he discovered that the site of hearing could also be transferred to her feet and fingertips. The woman further revealed that she sang only to distract herself from an additional altered sensory capacity: her sight had been transposed inward, affording a literal clairvoyance in the form of the horrifying view of her internal organs. These symptoms led Petetin to speculate that, under certain conditions, the loci of sensation could roam and concentrate throughout the body.43After Petetin published this case history in 1805, reports of transposed senses began to appear throughout Europe. The diagnostic category of sensory transposition persisted for over a century in the face of repeated debunking by expert commissions.44 Moreover, the conspicuous role of musical performance in Petetin's symptomology remained remark