Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger Anne Fuchs Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture. By Carolin Duttlinger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. xvii+ 437 pp. £90. ISBN 978–0–19–285630–2. The overabundance of self-help books about mindfulness and mental resilience underlines the topicality of in/attention in the twenty-first century. ADHD is now classified as a neurological condition and diagnosed in an increasing number of children and adults. Carolin Duttlinger's authoritative and scholarly study places the perceived crisis of attention in the longue dureé of this trope. Rather than singling out the contemporary economy of attention (Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf (Munich: Hanser, 1998)) or new modes of perception and modern subjectivity around 1900 (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perceptions: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001)), her study covers the far-reaching discourse on attention from the late eighteenth century to the present day, straddling pedagogy, anthropology, experimental psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychotechnics, philosophy, and aesthetics. At the core of this vast transdisciplinary enquiry is her discerning engagement with modernism in the writings of Kafka, Musil, Benjamin, and Adorno, and in Weimar culture more broadly. Chapter 1 lays a historical foundation by touching on Enlightenment debates of self-care in writings by Georg Friedrich Meier, Kant, and Karl Philip Moritz, who advocated practice, alertness, targeted distraction, or self-observation. Against this backdrop she then explores the paradigm change in nineteenth-century experimental psychology; attention was now subjected to quantification in the laboratory. However, while William James, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt aimed to turn attention into a scientific phenomenon, their experiments with measuring devices ultimately highlighted the fickleness of attention; inflected by various environmental factors, it was unstable and flipped over into distraction. Moving on to modern debates about psychic life in the writings of Ribot, Nordau, Simmel, and Freud, Chapter 2 illuminates how the debate on attention contributed to the modern reconceptualization of subjecthood: by contrast to the anthropocentric subject of the Enlightenment, modern subjectivity was in need of continual 'Reizschutz' against the threat of sensory overload. Chapter 3 shows that Kafka's engagement [End Page 638] with attention as a challenge facing Kafka the writer as well as his protagonists was influenced by Johann Friedrich Herbart's and Gustav Lindner's dynamic theory of the mind. An internationally established Kafka expert, Duttlinger skilfully explores Kafka's profound ambivalence towards attention across a wide range of fictional and non-fictional texts, including his report for the Workers' Insurance Institute. Chapter 4 analyses the ubiquity of psychotechnics in Weimar Germany. While Hugo Münsterberg and William Stern had promoted psychotechnics already before the First World War, aptitude testing came to prominence during the war when it was used by the military in the recruitment of pilots or wireless operators. But it was in Weimar Germany that it became the leading discipline in psychology, and the first chair in psychotechnics was established at the Technische Universität Berlin in 1921. Psychotechnics gained huge social resonance as it was seen to enable a more productive and fairer society. However, contrary to this social dream, aptitude testing reinforced the disciplinary regime at the modern workplace, while also influencing the burgeoning advertising industry and consumer psychology; the fierce competition over attention thus underlined its status as a prized economic resource. The chapter concludes with an excellent discussion of Siegfried Kracauer's opposition to psychotechnics and his astute analysis of distraction as a dominant feature of mass culture. Chapter 5 tracks Musil's wholehearted endorsement of psychotechnics as a method of cognitive self-training as well as his failure to Taylorize the writing process of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. While Musil remained committed to cognitive optimization, his fiction exploits psychotechnics to different effect, ranging from the exploration of mental threshold states to defamiliarizing the reader away from ingrained habits of apperception. Chapter 6 explores the social impact of psychotechnics in popular self-help books. Ignoring the role of class, gender, ethnicity, and age as major factors enabling or hindering personal success, Duttlinger shows that this type of literature was caught...