by Joshua Cohen
We may compare Consciousness to a mass of stationary waves. If the surface of a lake be set in motion each wave diffuses itself over the whole surface, and finally reaches the shores, whence it is reflected back towards the center of the lake. This reflected wave is met by fresh incoming waves, there is a blending of the waves, and their product is a pattern on the surface. This pattern of stationary waves is a fluctuating pattern, because of the incessant arrival of fresh waves, incoming and reflected. Whenever a fresh stream enters the lakes (i.e., new sensation is excited from without), its waves will at first pass over the pattern, neither disturbing it nor being disturbed by it; but after reaching the shore the waves will be reflected back toward the center, and these will more or less modify the pattern.
That quote is from the second volume of Lewes’s unfinished Problems of Life and Mind. In the third volume, he first floated the idea of a “stream of consciousness”:
There is thus a Stream of Consciousness formed out of the rivulets of excitation, and this stream has its waves and groundswell: the curves are continuous and blend insensibly; there is no breach or pause.
Though light and sound had been described as being transmitted like “waves” since Antiquity (Vitruvius), and as transmitting in “waves” since at least the sixteenth century for sound (Galileo Galilei), and the seventeenth century for light (Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens), the eighteenth century abandoned the wave for Isaac Newton’s particles and his theory that both light and sound traveled piecemeal, in lines of discrete “corpuscules.” Newton’s theory held until the nineteenth century identified matter’s true particles—molecules and atoms (1803–8)—and James Maxwell proposed a series of equations (1861–62) that demonstrated that not only did magnetism and electricity travel in waves, but also that light was merely their disturbance. It was with electromagnetism that waves resurged as an analogy for awareness.*3
But while Lewes managed to contain this totalizing analogy of water, or fluidity, other writers were less elementally “focused” (visual), or “attuned” (aural). This “diffraction” or “refraction,” “diffusion” or “dissipation,” has been the case in every age, in every language, but was especially prevalent in nineteenth-century English, whose vast social literature ratified an equivalently social physiology (the science of physical function), and psychology (of mental function), and whose concern with class transferred its divisions to the cognitive. Attention, then, was not strictly physical—it could be “fixed” and “directed,” “located” and “spanned”—or strictly mental—it could be both “ideated” and “idealized,” simultaneously. It was also mechanical: attention could be “riveted”; and supernatural: attention could be “channeled”; it was pedagogical: to be “trained,” or “disciplined”; economic: to be “paid” and “repaid”; and noticeably sexual: its “desire” could be “attracted,” “aroused,” “seduced,” and even “stimulated”—it could also be “excited,” a term that, as Descartes’s excitare, was applied to the summoning of animal spirits, and, in its English translation, was used by a host of ocular and auricular theorists to describe how sensations excited the “aether.”
Just like light and sound were merely matters of this “disturbance,” or “deviance,” so too was attention. A disruption in the electromagnetic field became a perturbation of the cognitive field, and even a negligible differencing could comprise the totality of being. For Scottish physiologist Alexander Bain, “change of impression is essential to consciousness in every form”—his 1865 “Law of Relativity,” which preceded the at least slightly verifiable theories of physics by half a century.
Humans attend to a feeling or thought, only because “its intensity is in a precisely inverse relation to its extensity,” William Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1874. “There are in us many changes, which are slight, or even nil, so far as pleasure or pain is concerned, but which are important as transitions, that is to say, as differences,” Théodule Ribot, English Psychology, 1870.
Both of the above quotations point out the textual conundrum—too many words mean one thing (the intensity of a concept is denied by the extensity of its expression), and too many things are meant by one word (the differences between concepts register as slight, or even nil). “Attention” is all over Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, 1855, but for every use of it in a distinct physiological or psychological sense, there’s another placeholder, space-waster, usage: “let us confine our attention to the example,” “but confining our attention to the elements with which we have immediately to deal,” “in the last chapter we directed our attention mainly to a certain contingent class,” “due attention having been paid to this fact.”
The tension between Attention the extensive proper name (addressing “the subject” of attention), and attention the intensive common name (addressing “the reader as subject” who is reading about attention): The Pragmatists, though practical in their expression, were less guilty of bisemous usage than their physiologist and psychologist peers (less guilty, perhaps, because their only laboratory was style). Charles Sanders Peirce, 1878: “In this pedantic age, when the general mob of writers attend so much more to words than to things.” F.C.S. Schiller, 1912: “Formal logic is constrained by its chosen standpoint to confound together verbal and real ambiguity, and so it diverts attention from real and serious failures to convey meaning to mere diversities of usage which an intelligent mind has no difficulty in understanding.”
The valorization of word over thing, the confusion of “verbal” and “real” ambiguity—not just verbal or real doubts about academic pedantry or analytic thought, but philosophy’s attempts to forestall the dominance of science both by claiming it (the materiality of things) and criticizing it (ambiguity in the application to language of mathematical rigor). Meanwhile, France and Germany preferred to write their attention in numbers.
* * *
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DATA WERE BETTER MIRRORS than prose, but better still was a mirror. Physiologist and ophthalmologist Louis-Émile Javal, professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, was reading silently—unfortunately, which book isn’t recorded—with a mirror laid over the facing page. He noticed that his reading was not continuous but discrete, each line broken by pauses (“fixations”) and sudden leaps (“saccades,” after the abrupt jerking of a horse, or of a sail in the wind). Reading, it transpired, was nervous, neurotic, but naturally so—even in 1878. According to Javal, the average reader breaks the average line into sections of approx. fifteen to eighteen letters, each that, once fixed into view, are rapidly jumped from—comprehension as a wave, but particulate in its “fluctuations” and “rivulets,” reading as the sine to the cosine of text.
Javal’s eye was for the eye; Heinrich Obersteiner kept his ear to the ear. In 1874, he and his colleague at the University of Vienna, Sigmund Exner, built a “psychodometer”:
The handle (H) tugs a glass strip covered in soot (T), until the catch (G) releases the spring (F), creating a tone. With the spring’s vibration, the needle or pin attached to its end scribbles sinuses in the soot of the strip—a timeline skipping through the ashes. The subject is instructed to depress the button (K) immediately upon hearing the tone, thereby lifting the needle or pin from the strip, and so recoiling the spring, and so ending the tone. The inscription remaining would be white on black, as if an inversion of text. Though it was Dutch ophthalmologist Franciscus Donders who first experimented with temporally measurable response, or “mental chronometry,” in 1868, it was Exner who provided the gauge of Reaktionsdauer, “reaction time”—the number authenticated by an otherwise indecipherable signature.
Psychometrics—the timing of cognitive processes—was pioneered in 1879 in Leipzig, at the first psychological laboratory, administered by Wilhelm Wundt, who’d developed a theory that the basic unit of language was the “clause,” or “sentence” (German’s Satz means both), and that such mensurations of cogni
tion represented “the willful structuring of a total conception into units that stand in logical relationship to one another.” The timing of such units would not measure “perception”—for which it was sufficient to test by light/sound—but “apperception”—the ability to comprehend.
At Leipzig, Wundt’s assistant, the American James McKeen Cattell, constructed the “gravity chronometer”:
An electromagnetized white “screen,” suspended between two brass stanchions, is suddenly released to fall—by a mechanism resembling a telegraph key—at a predetermined speed (adjustable up to 10, or 1/1,000th of a second), to reveal, in its place, a black pasteboard bearing a single word supported by clips (g and g). As the screen’s fall is arrested—by the spring (f) and rubber supports (c and c)—the di-pronged copper wire (w) attached to its bottom makes contact with two bored basins filled with mercury connected to the binding screws (h and h), which start the ticking of the timing apparatus (a version of Matthäus Hipp’s 1847 chronoscope, an infinitesimally accurate stopwatch, not pictured). This timing apparatus is stopped only when the subject pronounces the word into a mouthpiece (not pictured). The time elapsed would measure cognition, or literacy, or both, or neither—regardless, all would also be made an issue of the mouth.
By 1909, when Wundt’s student the British psychologist Edward Titchener published his Textbook of Psychology, the new monitoring machines had already become historical: the kymograph (lit. “wave-writer”), which put blood pressure and muscle contraction onto paper; the sphygmograph (“pulse-writer”), which graphed pulse; the ergograph (“effort-writer”), which texted muscle strength through the hand or finger compressing a spring to activate a stilus; the pneumograph (“breath-writer,” in which the stilus was controlled by the abdomen’s expansion/contraction); the plethysmograph (“excess-writer,” in which swelling was measured by submerging the affected body part in a jar, the water of which, when displaced, compressed the air to activate a stilus).*4
(sphygmograph, pulses)
(dynamograph of a carriage drawn by a horse)
The new attention writing and so the new attention had developed its own “semiosis” (the word is Charles Sanders Peirce’s):
The screens of the future wouldn’t fall to expose a stimulus and trip the clock, they’d only—in the word’s original Anglo-Saxon meaning—screen (the word in the sense of “a surface for projection” dates to the mid-nineteenth century, in the sense of “systematic examination,” to mid-twentieth).
Screens would only further conceal with data, bar with information, the attenuated Word.
*1 John Pemberton, a druggist from Georgia, invented a nonalcoholic brand of coca wine in 1886. The accountant for the Pemberton Chemical Company, Frank Robinson, trained in Spencer, labeled the ledgers for this product , which at the time and until ledgers for this product , which at the time and until ich at the time and until it acquired its ®, read as exceedingly direct, even plain.
*2 Even the Cyrillic cultures based keyboards on the American design, establishing phonological or morphological correspondences between their languages’ characters and Latin’s. Arabic and Hebrew mapped their characters in QWERTY’s reverse, mirror images especially pronounced in dual-use—L-to-R language/R-to-L language—keyboards. The history of the keyboard—of the typewriter too—in the logographic systems of Asia (hanzi, kanji, hangul) is a heroic exception to this rule, far exceeding the scope of a footnote, not least because it would have to be written in columns.
*3 Study of the 1887 photoelectric effect, which showed electrons being emitted from matter as a consequence of light absorption, inaugurated a partial reconsideration of particulateism, from 1896. Experimentation suggested a particle-like nature in the wave principle (electrons being transmitted in proportion to frequency and so in measurable quanta), and a wavelike nature in the particle principle (the motion of electrons). This would result in the proposal of a paradoxical wave-particle duality to describe both the properties of light (the proportional transference of electrons explained by their absorption of Albert Einstein’s “photons,” ca. 1905) and of all matter (initially the motion of electrons and later their energy spectra demonstrated as conforming to Maxwell’s equations, ca. 1924).
*4 “Involuntary movement,” Titchener writes, “is registered by the automatograph, a form of planchette or ouija board which still figures largely in spiritistic séances. A board is slung from the ceiling, so that it lies horizontally just over the surface of a table; a pointed glass rod stands vertically in a hole pierced at its forward end. On the table, under the point of the rod, is spread a sheet of smoked paper. If the arm is laid carefully on the board, and left to itself, the glass point traces on the paper the record of its involuntary movements.”
K. CASE STUDIES 1
CASE STUDY (CA. 1914)
MODERNISM
YOU’RE UNHAPPY, AND IT’S DEBILITATING to realize how unhappy you are, given that you’re neither a woman nor a person of color, nor a public nor private homosexual. Your mother was “hypochondriacal,” and “neurasthenic”; your father’s “depression” expressed itself “psychosomatically.” You yourself appear to be concealing something, to others, you suspect, but also to yourself, though you’re not sure what that something might be: “delusional” (ca. 1870).
You own a factory. You have money but no time. Two newspapers come daily; you keep up with the industry through weekly trade magazines, and twice monthly you go to concerts and operas and museums and galleries. But the music you’ve been hearing lately sounds inappropriate or like two types being played both at once; or rather it’s that lately you’ve detected an irony within music, in its juxtaposition of consonance/dissonance; or in its reference to a popular song with a bawdy lyric; or, perhaps, in its orchestration, which features uncommon combinations of instruments, like bassoons, tubas, a soprano saxophone, and a muted piccolo trumpet, accompanied by gongs and “vibraphone”; and the tune you thought you’d recognized not only isn’t popular anymore, but isn’t the tune you thought you’d recognized, which means the obscenity of the lyrics is all in your head, and your daughter has been clamoring for a radio; whereas the paintings you’ve recently seen either remind you of how much you like photographs, or look to you like incompetent photographs, like there had been a scratch on the lens or the tripod was missing a limb and the exposure was too much or not enough; or else you’re not sure if that’s supposed to be an apple or a bleeding abscess; or how far or close to stand from or to the canvas, whether far enough so that the grass can be viewed as grass or close enough so that it can be viewed as a swirl of green dots but then there are also scatterings of brown and yellow.
You feel as if you’ve seen and heard too much, but also nothing. Even going to the theater ruins your mood.
You’re late, driving your automobile against the hoof traffic from Washington Square. But you can’t be late because the theater issues only one ticket: one audience member per performance. The play begins at a strange time, five minutes after the hour, and ends at a strange time, five minutes before the hour, so that the audience members of consecutive performances never meet one another, and you wonder what the cast does during the ten-minute intermissions and why they can’t shift their performance/appointment schedules, so that the audience members can come and go on the hour exactly, and when you get to the theater (42nd and Broadway), you ask the box-office woman about it and she answers, “Research has shown that the hour is intimidating,” and you ask the usher girl and she drags you inside and answers, “Science has become skeptical of the natural numbers,” but you don’t pursue it further because now you’ve gone all the way down the empty aisle and up the stairs to the stage, set like a snug office with a smug Oriental rug and an armchair, in which the entire cast sits—one man, a doctor.
He clears his throat, as if expecting you to speak. But you don’t know your lines. You didn’t even know you had lines. Yo
u have to lie down. The doctor directs you to an angled settee such as you’d nuzzle your wife on. You sit. Out in the audience is—your wife? being nuzzled? (The sitting itself is the cure.)
Even the doctor’s face has an accent—Austro-Hungary: “Ridiculous, this war.”
CASE STUDY (CA. 1904)
SEXISM
A.) YOU ARE A WOMAN working as the sole typist at a factory. You work on the office floor above the production floor. Last week you’d typed an interoffice memo from the owner to the manager telling him to “prepare a report on the suitability of employing women in our workplace,” but then this week you typed an interoffice memo from the manager to the production chiefs telling them to “prepare reports on the effect on our workplace of employing women,” which implied, to you at least, that a decision had been made, that female workers would be hired. You are conflicted. You are confused.
B.) THE REPORTS ARE submitted, handwritten, and you type them up. No consensus is achieved. One notes that approx. 20 percent of the U.S. workforce is women; another notes that approx. 20 percent of U.S. women work. Labor statistics, phys/psych studies, are cited: “melancholy,” “morbidity,” “hysteria,” “neuroses.” Eighty percent of all typists share your gender. Other data are anecdotal, or polemical—political pamphlets for and against. One report insists that an increase in working women led to an increase in profits; another insists to a decrease; another insists to a decrease, but in agriculture. The only datum you can establish definitively is that between the censuses of 1890 and 1900 the State of Iowa lost two people, one to a head wound from a horse newly shod (your father), the other to tuberculosis (your mother). Council Bluffs, from where you escaped. Even the Sioux had gotten out of there.
