window of consciousness, defined in this way, is barely ten or fifteen seconds
wide. Under some conditions, the width of our conscious window on the
world may be no more than two seconds wide.
(Donald 2001: 15)But the message gets worse: the average person can only grasp a few things
at a time. And worse: the average person is prevented from becoming aware of
most of their thought processes, they are simply not available for conscious
reflection. And worse again: consciousness is notoriously vulnerable to distraction;
the conscious mind finds it very difficult to maintain a sharp focus in the presence
of other attractions. In other words, conscious awareness is fragmented and
volatile; ‘our intellectual home, the cradle of our humanity, appears to be the most
limited part of our mind’ (Donald 2001: 25). This description is something of
an exaggeration^6 – it derives from laboratory experiments and glosses over the
richness of joint action in which subjects do much better – but it also points to
the way in which this minimal conscious perception is constantly backed up by
other systems, two of which are particularly important. One is all the non-cognitive
relays that hold it in place and do much of what we count as thinking:
a huge reservoir of unconscious or automatic cognitive processes that pro-
vide a background setting within which we can find meaning in experience.
By relying on these deep automaticities, we can achieve great things intel-
lectually. We can even carry out several parallel lines of cognition at the same
time, provided they are kept out of consciousness. Musicians know this. When
professional pianists play, they cannot afford to become overly conscious of
their fingering or the specific notes of the passage they are playing, particularly
the more rapid ones. That kind of self-consciousness is paralyzing. They have
to automatize these difficult passages, or they will make major mistakes. The
same rule applies to speaking.
(Donald 2001: 26)The other is that this minimal conscious perception is boosted and held in place
by all manner of systems and environments and sites that extend awareness, systems
and environments and sites that are increasingly artificial and increasingly made
up of commodities. For example, the system of reading and writing^7 trains people
to apply a highly detailed set of eye and other corporeal movements to a set
of systematic practices that allow the environment to act as a prosthetic for think-
ing (and allow resultant ideas to hold still long enough to be worked on and
developed). The facts of ethology cut in.
What is new about the current conjuncture is the way in which capitalism is
attempting to use the huge reservoir of non-cognitive processes, of forethought, for
its own industrial ends in a much more open-ended way.^8 In the past, capitalism
usually drew on non-cognitive processes by training managers and workers and
consumers to conform to set routines grooved into forethought by various kinds
of training such that the body could not master its own movements, or by trying
36 Part I