Attention-Attention-Attention

Attention-Attention-Attention




What is an attentional zone? What is a bite-sized quota of gaze after which there must be a blink for refreshment, the watering windscreen wiper over the surface of the eye and a near seamless sewing together of a similar gaze? What about a gulp of air- or the dilated nostrils flaring up with the intake of a scent- perhaps the body odour of a plumber caught in a small back closet from a job nearly ten years before who worked his fine motor skills with the bulk of his body caught and overheating. How do we pass these disparate scent readings over the thin blood vessels inside the nose cavity that is the only part of our brains open – albeit in a vacuumed tunnel, to the elements of what we call our “outside world”? More than any other question is the one that probes this durational timing technique- the micro timing of the in-breath and the out-breath, of a gaze and a blink, of a stance and a shift of weight, of the slight whiff of a scent and the shifting of the neck muscles- to somehow modulate the impulse where between full on-collision and aversion there is some kind of wavering that perhaps keeps the impulse coming precisely by switching it on and off in duration and intensity; a variable where contrast can be registered. And sound too; perhaps we do not so much as hear a certain pitch or timbre as modulate between differences and organize the intervals between these differences in the way we rearrange our bodies so as to create a precise peak- a very fine line between this and that – a resonance that gurgles on its own unsettlement- this very aggravation the cause of our attention- our alertness- perhaps even our consciousness and registration of any such fact of experience. The body is in constant motion not only as a locomotive vehicle that goes from here to there but also in this way to modify- to modulate impulses – to filter and hold in the balance variables so that they do not rule out one another but co-exist- percolate- interrelate and diffuse through one another. This than is the first frontier of affect – before there is anything like a you and I to pick up and put down a shopping list of sensory and cognitive exhibits. More we are cobbling out of these peaks and slopes- attention on the very verge of intolerances, intolerances on the very verge of an overwhelming attraction. This threshed is extremely refined- more like a brink that we situate ourselves on- that we know our experiences by. What is a spasm to one is an activation and awakening to another. What is docility and near muteness to another is a tempering of impulses- the holding in the balance the moment of action in a process that is never done with; the quality of a reflective state.


So that all this of course opens up many questions about functionality, coping and at the other extreme ineptness, lack of function, failure to respond in the appropriate manner; disability.


Could there by multiple possibilities of pulsing the beat between an in breath and an out breath? Are attentional zones of duration in themselves mutable- open to plasticity- to stretching, bending and sudden curtailment? Are these ways to micro manage an articulation of experience and worlding in which our bodies are inextricably woven into this languaging- in which body shape is in-dissociable from speed, spin, pause, suspension, reinvigoration? Is this performance?


How then could mediated experiences such as touch, co-movement, shared attention, and humour or play that intentionally disrupts attention at the same time as it rough plays the body become a way of crafting articulations through body plasticity as a pre-emption to metabolic, cognitive, and feeling plasticity. Is it a pedagogy for learning that is not prescriptive but is inflective- a responsive co-adaptation in the moment of how we blink, how we breath, how we move and stop? The pulsing on and off of an attentional zone; the invigoration, seizure, disturbance and re-implication of an emphasis that can not remain known in stasis- that needs to probe at the edge of what it is not to come into a bearing at this very pint of impossible feedback- otherwise it is a washout of white light- or a long dark sleep.


Perhaps a longer sustained gaze can create the conditions for a deeper amassment of co-influential tendencies- a multiplicity that begins to seize the moment as if they were single celled animals given a democracy of influence in the shaping of a grosser mass. Could one draw conclusions from the pulse of gestures, the immanence of breath and languaging potential that differs when the gaze is held open with no intentional sequential story to verify the next caption in the blink of an eye?


What would simply emerge under these eclectic ecological conditions where any passer-by rather than being ruled out as a distraction to the main point of occupation becomes a bit player in an open scene that is only as much and as little as what traverses and impacts that zone of attention, until the windscreen wiper again comes down. So that this would be a radically different kind of articulation or story-making process- not one of narrative sequential story lines but something more multi-dimensional like a holographic blossoming of connotations upon every tiny impulse that is not blinked into separate categories but forms a continuance that grows more like a plant subject to the conditions of moisture, light and heat and cold than to a pre-given structure of a popular story with a beginning, middle and end.


How then would personality emerge and be arrived at under these circumstances where associative assemblages become more important than historical lineage? Where circumstance and affect in the moment becomes the guiding principle to a gradually ballooning and elastic shape that depends on the motivation, volition and speed of chance multi-scalar encounters rather than to individual integrities. Rather that integrity depends first on these more pliable and reversible sets of tension.


Could this create a very different political landscape- where context creates form personality beckoning in due course as secondary individuations after the process is well underway?


Could this be a different kind of languaging that stretches across bodies and minds as effortlessly as tracks across an uneven landscape – where articulation is the constantly extending and atrophying circumstances in which we find ourselves at every moment? Is this now what it means to have a body- to have a language that is still vital?