Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Book Review by Amy lone (original) (raw)
Related papers
Attention and Representationalism
This paper is the translation of the article "Attention et représentationnalisme", published in Dialogue (cf above). I argue for a representational understanding of phenomenal saliency, in the lights of attention research.
The Origin of the Phenomenology of Attention
Research in Phenomenology, 2022
This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I unpack Husserl's analysis of interest from his 1893 manuscript, "Notes Towards a Theory of Attention and Interest" to demonstrate that it comprises his first rigorous genetic analysis of attention. Specifically, I explore Husserl's observations about how attentive interest is passively guided by affections, moods, habits, and cognitive tensions. In doing so, I reveal that the early Husserl described attention as always pulled forward to new discoveries via the rhythmic recurrence of tension and pleasure. Second, I demonstrate that "Notes" is the germ of Husserl's mature genetic phenomenology of attention. The 1893 analysis provides Husserl with all of the philosophical reasons and tools for the construction of his genetic account of attention in his late works. I then discuss how the disclosure of this novel subterranean link can prompt a rethinking of the development of phenomenology.
This paper considers 2 basic paradigms of attention: one in which attention constitutes a focusing or a narrowing of perception which reveals the nature of objects in greater profundity by shining a light upon them, and a second Bergsonian (and Kaprowian, after Allan Kaprow) paradigm where attention is conceived as a practice of immanent thought. The crisis of attention in the former paradigm is the distraction of that gaze when it hops from one discrete thing to another, or the diffusion of that light over too many different things at once – what the informational paradigm might call skimming and multi-tasking respectively. Here, to enhance attention or to save it from its current degraded form - means to shine more light on a thing, to make a conscious decision to think harder about it, to look at it more closely. By contrast, in the Kaprow/Bergson paradigm, attention is a thing in itself (rather than a mere effect of the sum of human discourses) but understood as a process rather than a static object. In turn, the solution here to the crisis of attentiveness is not a question of bringing more power of attention or perception (more consciousness, more representation) to the thing, but ironically less of these representationalist elements: less selection and more a kind of immersion in the object understood as a process, less conscious effort and more an immanent mode of thought forced upon us by the thing itself. Bergson defines the philosophical practice of ‘intuition’ as a reversal of the direction of thought: philosophy moving in the opposite direction from its usual trajectory. Concepts don’t come from us and project themselves on to the object here, but move in the other direction from the object to us – the attended is attending us, the object is thinking us. This is the nature of an expanded perception or an attention without the blinders that restrict it in consciousness. Attention is not about a decision to think harder, look harder about x; rather attention occurs when an unexpected y forces us to think anew.
Wilfrid Sellars, Perceptual Consciousness and Theories of Attention
Essays in Philosophy, 2004
The problem of the richness of visual experience is that of finding principled grounds for claims about how much of the world a person actually sees at any given moment. It is argued that there are suggestive parallels between the two-component analysis of experience defended by Wilfrid Sellars, and certain recently advanced information processing accounts of visual perception. Sellars' later account of experience is examined in detail, and it is argued that there are good reasons in support of the claim that the sensory nonconceptual content of experience can vary independently of conceptual awareness. It is argued that the Sellarsian analysis is not undermined by recent work on change blindness and related phenomena; a model of visual experience developed by Ronald Rensink is shown to be in essential harmony with the framework provided by Sellars, and provides a satisfactory answer to the problem of the richness of visual experience.
Consciousness and the Flow of Attention
2012
Visual phenomenology is highly illusive. One attempt to operationalize or to measure it is to use ‘cognitive accessibility’ to track its degrees. However, if Ned Block is right about the overflow phenomenon, then this way of operationalizing visual phenomenology is bound to fail. This thesis does not directly challenge Block’s view; rather it motivates a notion of cognitive accessibility different from Block’s one, and argues that given this notion, degrees of visual phenomenology can be tracked by degrees of cognitive accessibility. Block points out that in the psychology literature, ‘cognitive accessibility’ is often regarded as either all or nothing. However, the notion motivated in the thesis captures the important fact that accessibility comes in degrees (consider the visual field from fovea the periphery). Different legitimate notions of accessibility might be adopted for different purposes. The notion of accessibility motivated here is weaker than Block’s ‘identification’ (2007) but is stronger than Tye’s ‘demonstration’ (2007). The moral drawn from the discussion of Block can be applied to the debate between Dretske and Tye on the speckled-hen style examples. Dretske’s view is even stronger than Block’s, but his arguments from various figures he provides do not support his conclusion since he does not have right ideas about fixation and attention. Tye’s picture is more plausible but his notion of accessibility is so weak that he reaches the excessive conclusion that accessibility overflows phenomenology. Three ramifications might be considered in the final part of the thesis. The first is the relation between this debate and the one concerning higher-order/same-order theories of consciousness. The second is about John McDowell’s early proposal about demonstrative concepts in visual experiences. The third is the relation between the interpretation of the Sperling case proposed here and McDowell new view of experiential contents, i.e., his story about how we carve out conceptual contents out of intuitional contents without falling pray to the Myth of the Given.
2021
In this text, it is claimed that a phenomenological approach to attention could provide important distinctions concerning different levels of consciousness. After criticizing some classical ideas about attention, the phenomenological ideas are introduced pointing how relevant they are for conceiving key aspects of attention that are usually overlooked in other theories. By revisiting seminal ideas from Husserl, Gurvistch, Sartre and Merlau-Ponty, the relationship between the workings of attention and the modes of consciousness explored by phenomenology is underscored. From this point of view, two basic modes of attention are distinguished: a passive form which is involved in the forms of synthesis responsible for the structure of the immediate contents of experience, and an active mode, characterized by the sense of agency which allows the subject to make distinctions, individuate and highlight different aspects from the structure of experience. There is a dynamic relation between t...