On August 2, 1914, Franz Kafka noted in his diary: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon”. Here is a paradigmatic example of a jump in attention. The personal stake is great – Kafka abandons nothing less than his response to a world-historical cataclysm – but the insistent entanglement of attention with distraction is greater. It raises the question of just how much responsibility we have for the vicissitudes of our attention.
The many writers discussed by Carolin Duttlinger in her extraordinarily rich study throw light on this question. Walter Benjamin thought psychology was feckless if it did not consider the moral dimensions of the personality; Hermann von Helmholtz, William James and countless others saw attention and distraction as inseparable vectors. The fundamental question underlying the various theories remains unanswered: is attention willed, as believed by Wilhelm Wundt and to some extent Edmund Husserl; or is it chiefly an affair of the captivating event, as proposed by Ernst Mach?
Duttlinger studies her great topic within the growing discipline of German psychology: from the Enlightenment, through the Sattelzeit of the Revolutionary period, into the late nineteenth century and on to modernity. The development has a thrust. In the eighteenth century attention lay at the heart of an optimistic anthropology: disciplining attention was part of an Enlightenment project, with its confident view of self-mastery en route to self-perfection. But with the growing sophistication of scientistic methods examining these faculties, they become more rather than less elusive, an uncertainty that persisted into the twentieth century as an object of fascination. In the absence of a conclusive answer Duttlinger produces sovereign readings of Kafka, Benjamin, Robert Musil, Theodor Adorno, Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald and Felicitas Hoppe, with chapters on related topics: psychotechnics, Weimar photography, Weimar and self-help literature, and, finally, musical listening. Historical context informs and interpret the literary texts.
The strongest sections of the book are Duttlinger’s readings of Kafka and Musil. She develops the work done on how Kafka’s experience as an insurance lawyer penetrated into the heart of his literature, charging it with concepts of risk, proportionality and accidental damage. In his professional work, momentary distraction in the modern factory figures as an inevitable harm, but “as a statistical constant rather than a matter of personal responsibility”. By contrast, “a completely different picture emerges in Kafka’s fiction, where such drops of attention are blamed on the individual and often set into motion a chain of disastrous events”.
Whereas Kafka’s narratives “revolve around momentary slippages of attention and their disastrous consequences”, Duttlinger finds that Musil “depicts instances of epiphanically heightened awareness and the equally sudden dissipation of such states”. These states, as she shows, are informed by the knowledge that both writers took from experimental psychology: Gustav Adolf Lindner’s Manual of Empirical Psychology (1858) was required reading for all Austrian students. Moreover, Musil was a university-trained experimental psychologist, writing a doctoral dissertation on Mach; psychotechnics is at home in The Man Without Qualities (1930).
In support of her psychological interpretations Duttlinger reads and relates numerous key thinkers, taking in Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Husserl on “emphatic” intentionality, Sigmund Freud on the “free-floating” attention required of both patient and analyst, and Benjamin and the perceptual intricacies in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductibility”. She also touches on less familiar figures of interest: Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), whose view of the mind was of a hitherto unacknowledged complexity of competing forces; Wilhelm Heinrich Erb (1840–1921), who identified historical precedents for contemporary nervousness; the Swiss psychologist Charles Baudouin (1893–1963), whose self-help treatises were admired by Musil; and their predecessor Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813), who in 1802 “pinpoints distraction and immersion as the two pathological aberrations of attention”. Reil, Duttlinger informs us, addressed madness through a programme of targeted stimulation, with prescribed treatments including both pain and pleasure. “In the hospital grounds, Reil envisaged building an assault course, where patients were sprayed with water and trapped in a pit; mental hospitals should also … stage spectacles inducing ‘terror, shock, astonishment, fear’ to crowd out the ‘obsessions of madness.’”
Perhaps too much room is given over to the more futile nineteenth-century laboratory experimenters, although Duttlinger astutely observes the deep fault in their protocols: “Time and again, experiments underlined the fragility and instability of attention, and yet these experiments were centered on the figure of the impartial observer able to follow them with sustained concentration”.
Somewhat surprisingly, the literary heroes of the Sattelzeit – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich von Kleist – are largely unaddressed. Duttlinger’s discussions of the strains of Weimar culture, for example, cry out for Goethe’s famous letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter, from 1825:
Everything … is now ‘ultra,’ everything ‘outdoes’ irresistibly, in thought as in action. No one knows himself any longer, no one grasps the element that sustains him and in which he functions …. Young people are stimulated far too soon and then torn along in the whirlpool of the time; wealth and speed are what the world admires and what it strives for; trains, express mail, steamships, and all sorts of communicative facilities are what the civilized world aims at in outdoing itself.
This motive of reciprocal outdoing recurs in Weimar self-help manuals and photographic essays. The photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s repetition of the tropes of the neurasthenia discourse, for instance (from which Duttlinger quotes), is little more than a citation of Goethe’s letter:
By means of newspaper, telephone, radio, aeroplane, the modern individual attends to everything except herself. The madness of more and more stimulation demands perpetual exaggeration, constantly upping the stakes; one impression chases the next, but they never become proper experiences for the necessary repose is lacking.
Duttlinger is certainly right that the passage echoes critiques of modernity as a time of sensory overload by turn-of-the-century critics such as Georg Simmel and Karl Lamprecht. But Goethe is a century ahead of them.
Alongside the alternately ultra-focused or rapturously distracted heroes of Kafka’s novels, it would have been good to see Hölderlin’s complaint of his pathological fixation on small harms: his attention suffers from an exorbitant sense of shortcoming and goes directly to the mood of Verlegenheit (“being at a loss”) that besets so many of Kafka’s heroes, which in Duttlinger’s account is owed precisely to their inability to control their attention. Nietzsche, to cite one further example, is another lack crying out to be made good, with his critique of fast reading and his demand for rumination.
For all that, however, Carolin Duttlinger must be admired for the originality and creativity of her approach, and for its learned execution. Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Culture, and Thought could very well mark the beginning of an epoch in which one reads books and cultures through the lens of attention and distraction, and such linked phenomena as contemplation and diversion, literalness and allegory, teleology and digression, and melancholy and agitation.
Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton, 2022
Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS at the TLS Shop
The post In the whirlpool appeared first on TLS.
