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Subject: Article 88[1]-Distraction and Digital Culture
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 23, NO 3
Article 88[1] 10/05/00 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Distraction and Digital Culture [Part 1]
========================================
~William Bogard~
Two stories of distraction
--------------------------
She seemed removed again tonight, dimly preoccupied with something,
or someone, else. Entering the room, she pretended I wasn't there,
something I hate. Or she would smile indifferently, deafly assenting
to whatever remark I made, making her absence all that more glaring.
All my miserable attempts to seduce her failed. I noticed that her
state of distraction had deepened during the last weeks, and she fell
into innocuous habits that betrayed a hidden terror. She had always
despised routine, but now her routines never changed. Something had
stolen her eyes, as it would eventually take away her hands, her
entire body. By degree, her touch became cold and distant. I
suspected an affair. And soon, ~I~ became her distraction, her hated
routine, removing her from what had removed her. She could not bear
the sound of my voice, the cut of my collar, how I looked at her, how
I breathed, having to submit to these ridiculous signs of power. And
her irritation and detachment grew daily, until finally one morning
she disappeared.
A crowd gathers on the sidewalk. Ten stories above, a child, a young
girl, is perched precariously on a ledge, frozen, the wind dancing in
her hair. Below a pack of eyes raised to the sky, transfixed in the
anticipation of disaster. Trucks with satellite dishes arrive to
capture the event live, to be replayed a thousand times on every
channel from every angle to the last numbing detail, at least until
the ratings drop. Talking heads compare similar events in history. As
for the future, computer simulations show how it will look, to the
eyes of a child, to fall from a ten-story building or, to the "eyes"
of the sidewalk, how brains splatter on concrete from that height;
everything is rerun endlessly, blown up, and run again. A miniseries
is in the works, we hear... book deals, promotional materials, all
set to go. It's not everyday this happens (is it?). The police order
the crowd back, then rope off the viewing area. Stands are erected;
ambulances stand by; a helicopter hovers overhead, then swoops in low
for a tight shot. The stage is set, the suspense is perfect. Now, as
if on direction, the child moves closer to the edge, reaches out,
falters, then falls. Time expands. The crowd gasps and grows silent;
across the country the masses turn to their screens to see the moment
of impact. They think: we've seen this before...did we miss it the
first time? We ~live~ here, don't we? The fall is played over again
in slow motion, close, closer, the wind in the child's hair, then the
terror in her face, her eyes, the instant her head explodes. Every
image is so clean, so crisp, so beautiful; the technology has
advanced considerably since Zapruder. Since Baby Jessica and even
Baghdad. Freeze frame, each shot is meticulously superimposed on its
simulation for instant comparison; and they are the same - screen and
fall, child and spectator, concrete and blood. And the mass of
watchers blinks and stupidly stares until finally it too totters and
falls, into the screen of the catastrophe, and disappears.
Escape and Capture
------------------
Arthur Kroker used to refer to American media culture as a
"civilization in recline" (Kroker and Weinstein 1994:41; also Kroker
and Cook 1986:266ff.). The image was certainly apt. The perfect icon
for a bored, exhausted, and utterly "removed" American public on the
eve of the twenty-first century was someone in the classic Lazy-Boy
position, ~captured~ by the TV screen, oblivious to anything around
him (or her) beyond what flickered before his eyes between trips to
the refrigerator. This picture, however, seemed to contradict another
one of Kroker's - that of ~panic America~, neo-fascist and
hyper-paranoid, obsessed with death, haunted by the body and its
unruly fluids, and using whatever means to ~escape~ (Kroker 1989;
Kroker and Kroker 1987). Now we don't normally associate panic with
TV-induced catatonia. But in fact, as Kroker well knew, the two
scenes were intimately and even essentially connected. The
television, of course, is both the perfect means of capture and the
perfect escape device. Its logic has become even more pervasive with
the advent of the computer, which is now in the process of absorbing
it. McLuhan (1964) was the first to realize that physical capture (or
immobilization) does not prohibit, and indeed ~smoothes~, the active
neural integration of the subject into the medium (cf. also Bogard
2000). This is the whole pleasure - and terror - of television; it
induces flight to the same extent it leaves the body behind in "sleep
mode." TV is a ~panic release technology~ that operates by dividing
the body and removing all the parts superfluous for experience. It
"releases" experience in the same paradoxical way the woman in our
story is released, through a kind of habituation (we'll have more to
say about this in relation to Benjamin's theory of distraction
later). What has changed since TV has met its virtual nemesis in the
computer is certainly the intensity of that integration; perhaps it
even portends a qualitative shift. Baudrillard (1985; 1983a; 1983b)
imagines a time when the masses are integrated entirely into the
media, and the media into them, as in the scene of the falling child,
where the difference between capture and escape is meaningless - a
seamless integration/habituation of technology and the subject.
Someday all you'll need is a brain, if that (!). In the same way, a
"recliner civilization" dreams of infinite worlds summoned at the
throw of a switch (the ingestion of a pill, the modification of a
gene). It imagines merging, body and soul, with the system of digital
codes, a time when, without going anywhere, it can live and ~be~ the
images on its screen. When it can disappear.
These ideas can serve as approximate entry points to a study of
distraction. This is because distraction is a logic of escape and
capture. To distract something is to elude its clutches; but also, as
a consequence, to now clutch ~it~, secretly and from behind. These
qualities of clutching, elusion, of escape and capture, are what make
distraction and its related strategies - simulation, disappearance,
removal - games of ~power~. When we speak about the power of the
digital media, we see lines of escape and capture everywhere - mass
distraction truly is the ~order~ of the day. This is not a moral
judgement. We assume this has both good and bad sides. Nor is it to
claim that our age is any more distracted than any other. There is no
reason to think that print is any less distracting than electronic
media, or that modern forms of spectacle distract the masses more
than ancient ones. Every society re-invents its own regimes of
distraction. Every culture develops its own methods of mobilizing
(and immobilizing) the masses.
This way of speaking, however, is already too narrowly sociological.
Distraction is hardly just a social, or even human, condition.
Animals can be distracted, and so can non-living things - geological
processes can be described in this way, as I'll suggest below. But
this also means that distraction is not a state of consciousness,
e.g., attention or inattention. Shifts of attention or consciousness
may certainly be ~produced~ by distractions, but they are not
identical with them.
It means, too, that distraction doesn't require a subject, although a
subject could be one its effects. Kroker's "recliner" is a subject of
distraction only in the sense that its body occupies a space where
multiple lines of escape and capture converge and diverge. The
~material~ scene of distraction is what's important - the proximate
relations of body parts (brain, hands, eyes) to the screen, the
design and engineering components of the console (inputs,
through-puts, outputs), the entire material infrastructure -
mathematical, molecular, technological, socio-cultural - of the flow
of information. ~You~ do not watch TV, Baudrillard says, TV watches
you (Baudrillard 1983a:53). Or rather, it ~removes~ you, takes you
away, "subtracts" you from your surroundings. It is on this material
scene or territory of removal that consciousness is produced and
consumed.
To note this extra-human dimension of distraction is in no way to
deny that it is one of the elemental features of human experience. In
countless forms, it is implicated in the production of life's
pleasures (the French meaning of the term is close to "entertainment"
or pleasurable "diversion") as well as its irritations and dangers
(the English word can convey the idea that distraction is something
hazardous, as in the case of being distracted while driving a car or
crossing the street). If we could limit its manifestation to living
forms - and we cannot - we could even make the case that distraction
is a ~condition of survival~, that the struggle for existence
absolutely depends on finding, managing and adapting to means of
escape and capture (for example, for many predatory animals, and even
many plants, distraction is an essential means of procuring food, or
avoiding becoming food).
Despite the fact that distraction is everywhere in experience, it is
not at all difficult to imagine a world without distraction. Such an
idea is in fact the norm if we consider it from the point of view of
social control. Institutions like the Church, the State, markets,
even the mass media, generally do not tolerate distraction, at least
when it fosters neglect of duty or responsibility. In Catholic
theology, for example, a world without distraction is one where
nothing disturbs one's prayers to God - distractions, such as
uncontrolled or impure thoughts, are a sign of man's imperfection and
inherent sinfulness. For bureaucracy, it is a world of dutiful,
law-abiding, on-time citizens; for the school, a classroom of focused
and docile students; for Capital, a shop of committed workers. The
television and advertising industries, even as they deal wholesale in
distraction themselves - e.g., by sexualizing images of commodities -
desire watchful, undistracted viewers.
In fact, ~all~ these institutions develop and perfect their own
methods of distraction. They become, to use a phrase of Deleuze and
Guattari's, "apparatuses of capture," seeking in their different ways
to control movement, order desire and belief, and translate them into
habits (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:424ff.). How do religion, Capital,
and the State capture their objects? Simple. They generate what
appear as lines of escape or removal, as exits, outs, passages, and
so on: you too can escape from divine retribution (through the
passages of prayer, sacrifice, and confession); escape from work
(through money); escape from power (through prestige). The
authorities, like ~trappers~, know that the lure of escape is usually
the most powerful apparatus of capture. Money, prestige, indulgences,
sex, these are all traps at the same time as they are means of
flight. Although institutional power does not tolerate distraction
when it threatens to become unruly - and here distraction ~is~
conceived morally - distraction is its single most valuable tool.
Often, it prepares the way for the use of force, as when the police
employ it before making an arrest (the sting operation), but
sometimes it can also eliminate the need for force. In an important
sense, the distracted object (or subject) has already surrendered to
power - it does not ~see~ power or in any way sense its closeness,
thus power can operate behind its back, reserving force for the times
when distraction itself threatens to wrest the object from its grasp
(parents sometimes use TV to occupy their children's time and create
some free space for themselves, but it is a strategy that often
backfires, as the TV becomes the more powerful apparatus of capture).
We already sense that power, at least institutional power, does not
fully control the forces of distraction. In fact, distraction is a
principle that ~rivals~ power. The authorities not only fear losing
control ~over~ distraction, they fear losing control ~to~ it. A
distracted mass, potentially, owes nothing, not even its life, to
power, and the most dangerous groups are always those that could care
less about power, i.e., that are too distracted to care about their
own survival. As we shall see later, the means of distraction are
also those of power's ~annulment~. Distraction is what seduces power;
power can lose itself there, break into a million pieces, or scatter
in a hundred directions. But that does not mean distraction, as a
political strategy, can always save us from power, either, that it
can always be used to overturn power. Such dreams only mask a more
elaborate picture of an unstable mixture of forces and materials. We
take seriously Deleuze and Guattari's rule that no strategy once and
for all can serve as a guide for praxis. The truth is that as quickly
as distraction opens a line of flight, it also opens a line of death
- such is the nature of logics of escape and capture, which for all
their strategic character always involve indeterminacy, a measure of
luck.
So we don't ask if distraction is a good or bad thing - a question
more for the authorities anyway - but rather if it can serve to map
the dynamics of various and sundry social processes - wars and
militaristic maneuvers, rituals, the emergence of hierarchies,
population shifts, market and currency movements, and so on. Can we
view things like the evolution of material culture, in particular
digital mass media, through the theoretical lens of distraction? Is
it possible, more generally, to understand relations of power
themselves as effects of distraction? If so, it will be in terms of
logics (and paths) of escape and capture.
Distraction Machines
--------------------
Here we are interested mainly in how distraction functions on the
sociocultural and technical planes, but we will often use the term
more broadly to refer to a "machinic assemblage" composed of variable
matters and relations of force. Following the lead of Guattari
(1995:33), we do not intend "machines" in either mechanistic or
vitalist terms. He develops a machinism that does not reduce the idea
of a machine to a simple construction ~partes extra partes~ or
assimilate it to living beings (or living beings to it). Guattari's
model also differs in certain fundamental respects from the
cybernetic notion of the machine as a feedback mechanism, and with
philosophical notions of techne that link its function to an
ontological ground of "unmasking," as in Heidegger (1977). Throughout
all these positions, he proposes a concept of "machinic
heterogenesis" that would attempt to view the machine not in its
various limited aspects, but in its complex totality, in its
"technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars," as well as
in its operations in nature. His project, which we can only mention
in passing here, involves a basic rethinking of the general idea of a
machine in terms of ~differential flows of matter and energy~, for
example as processes of dispersion and concentration, stretching and
compaction, intensification and dissipation, friction and smoothing,
etc. (cf. also Guattari 1996; Bogard 2000). Machines are
"assemblages" of other machines, which are themselves composed of
further machines, in the manner of fractals, to use a mathematical
image. Machinic assemblages bring together machines that may differ
dramatically in nature (geophysical machines, biochemical machines,
technical machines, social machines, desiring machines, concept
machines), and combine them in an organized, consistent fashion. Such
heterogeneously composed but organized structures are spontaneously
generated and destroyed by what he and Deleuze (1987:141-48, 510-14)
call "abstract machines" or diagrams,[1] which impart form to
variable flows, or again, break their form apart and down. Machinic
assemblages do not depend on the actions or intentions of human
subjects (which are themselves a collection of differently composed
machines). Rather, they form and dissolve "autocatalytically," as
effects of their own dynamics (cf. De Landa 1997:62; 1989; cf. also
Maturana and Varela 1992).
This, anyway, is the general frame in which we intend to view
distraction. Distraction is not an effect of the subject, but a
self-organizing machinic assemblage that channels and sorts flows of
differently composed matters into relatively consistent layers, much
like we see in natural processes of sedimentation and stratification.
Our first rule in this investigation is that we must consider
distraction in its ~geological~ (or meteorological) as much as its
sociological manifestations, in the language of changing pressures,
heats, and speeds (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 1987). What is meant by
this is not that the former can serve as metaphors for social
processes, as for example when we use terms like social "strata" or
social "currents," but rather that both share a common diagram or
abstract machine. De Landa (1997:58) notes, for instance, that it is
a different thing to say, as Marxists once did, that "class struggle
is the motor of history," than to say "a hurricane is a steam motor."
While the first example is clearly a metaphorical usage, the second
is not. In the second case what is claimed is that "hurricanes embody
the same diagram used by engineers to build steam motors - both
refer, for instance, to reservoirs of heat, thermal differences, and
circulations of energy and matter. Is it possible, De Landa asks, to
find a diagram (or abstract machine) that operates across geological,
meteorological and social formations? Over the last several decades,
chaos theory has proposed a language that perhaps makes such a
convergence possible (cf. Prigogine 1984; Gliek 1987). The ways in
which ordered structures or flows emerge from chaos may be the same
across fields with formally different contents. More, chaos theory
examines processes of self-structuration (or autocatalysis) and
suggests that they may not be exclusive to living materials, but may
extend to inorganic processes as well, such as the formation chemical
clocks, veins of minerals in the earth, cyclonic movements in the
atmosphere, etc., raising the possibility that more than analogies
may exist between natural and social phenomena. All this fits in well
with much of what we have already indicated regarding Guattari's
machinism.
"Distraction" of course is not a theoretical concept in geology. But
we can ask alternatively whether it makes sense to describe
geological processes in terms of escape and capture. De Landa
(1997:60) once again suggests that certain geologic structures like
strata beneath the ocean floor may be a function of ~sorting~
mechanisms that separate differently sized materials into relatively
homogeneous size-groups before depositing them in layers. Rivers, for
example, are recognized by geologists as one such sorting mechanism,
moving groups of smaller rocks faster, larger rocks slower, in
bundles of differentially paced lines of flow. It makes sense to
describe these dynamic mechanisms as systems of escape and capture
(certain rock sizes are "passed" quickly in the sorting process,
others are held back in the flow). Another example of such mechanisms
at the geological level might be the ways volcanic flows organize
surface features of the earth's crust as a function of different
speeds of deposition.
Chaos theory suggests that such dynamic systems are nonlinear,
nonequilibrial, and self-regulated. The question is whether the same
sorting diagrams can be located in the social and cultural spheres,
despite vast differences in form of content from geological
structures. De Landa (1997: 257ff.) believes this to be so, referring
to "slowing down" or "hardening" (crystallization) processes in the
formation of normative social structures, where the production of
those structures refers not simply to human decisions but, for
example, to how those decisions follow from spontaneous changes in
rates of flow of food, money, bodily fluids, etc. Social structures,
in this view, are seen in terms of relative speeds of mixtures of
different kinds of materials undergoing sorting and crystallization
processes. Formal social hierarchies run at relatively slow or fixed
speeds, generally by force of habit, compared with more fluid,
improvised groupings that De Landa (p. 32) calls "meshworks." In
terms of speed, the difference between a hierarchy and a meshwork is
like that between a solid and a liquid, or a liquid and a gas - both
move, but at different rates. Alternatively, we might characterize
one movement as molar (large-scale), the other as molecular (cf.
Guattari and Alliez 1984). We do not have to "humanize" these ideas
to apply them to the social sphere. In fact, they allow us to view
"human being" as a variable organization of differently paced flows
of matter and energy. To be "really" human, as excluded groups in any
social order know well, means to have the right flow of blood,
currency and equipment, to bear the right series of distinguishing
marks (eye color, skin color, hair color), maintain the proper
rhythms, habits, routines, and so on (cf. Guattari 1996:95-108;
1995:1-32; 1992; also Lingis 1994).
We don't ask who organizes these flows, but rather what machines
inaugurate a change of state, what ~thresholds~ are crossed and how
(e.g., from a liquid to a gas, from non-human to human, from
uncoordinated individuals to a pack, as in animal groups, or from
non-social to social aggregates); where certain flows break off from
or reconnect with others (steam flows, or the places where the pack
splits off from the larger group (cf. Canetti 1960:93-124). Such
thresholds, in the case of liquids to gasses, refer to specific
heats. In animal groups, they may involve caloric levels, densities,
carrying capacities, etc., which above or below certain limits may
provoke organized action. Again, what matters in the immediate
context is that we can conceptualize all this in terms of escape and
capture, and from there as various forms of distraction.
Before leaving these ideas, we need to reiterate the importance of
~speed~ as a mechanism of escape and capture (Virilio 1986; cf. also
Der Derian 1990). In the old military formula, either you're "quick
or your dead" (Munro 1991). Speed is also a sorting function. It is
by virtue of their relative speeds that elements in a mixture,
whether geological or social, sort themselves into distinct flows. In
this way of viewing things, the "escape velocity" of objects has as
much meaning in the social as the natural sphere, i.e., if it makes
sense to describe as social the operations through which bodies are
captured and sorted into homogeneous groupings which are made to flow
at similar rates of speed. Foucault (1979), for example, does not
describe the prison in "institutional" or bureaucratic terms - viz.,
as systems of abstract rules and fixed relations of authority - but
as spaces of bodies organized around the homogenization and
routinization of specific flows (again, of food, waste, tasks,
information). Certain flows are slowed down (i.e., hardened) in
specific locations and during specified times, others are speeded up
- prison routine is the outcome of relatively paced lines of
movement. Foucault often writes of the importance of architectural
arrangements in determining the organization of bodies in prisons,
specifically as they affect conditions of perception. But alongside
this Foucault also gives us a kind of "geomorphology" of the
penitentiary that is at the same time a depiction of its social order
from the point of view of controlling rates of material flows, that
is, a model of relative speeds, thinnings and thickenings, gravity
sinks and acceleration points, capture and escape. ~Perception is
organized via the channeling of flows in engineered space~. But this
is precisely nothing more than a definition of distraction. (We will
return to these points below in our discussion of Walter Benjamin.)
We should further note, to anticipate our remarks below, that an
important effect of speed is ~stealth~. In social terms, we cannot
ignore the fact that distraction is a strategy of disappearance or
invisibility. Distraction allows a second event to take place behind
or "to the side of" the first one - it enables a close approach. The
classic pickpocket scheme is an example, provided we are willing to
characterize it, not in terms of the diversion of the mark's
attention or consciousness, but as series of flows, subtractions and
interruptions, slowings-down and speedings-up. Not attention, but
rather, "one hand moves faster than another to the pocket, a mark is
subtracted from his money." To capture or elude a thing by stealth is
to move at a different rate - to fall behind the thing, to outpace
it, to approach it transversally, as with predatory animals or their
prey (keeping in mind that both predator and prey draw upon the same
set of strategies). Virilio (1991; 1989; 1986; 1983) has intensively
studied the connections between speed and strategies of
disappearance, their relations in politics, war, and modern
telecommunications systems, and outlined their internal relation to
power. The power to capture one's enemies by stealth may involve
making them look where they shouldn't, but that often translates into
moving faster. In the same way, the power to elude one's predator by
stealth is, in some cases, to move slower (standing still as it
passes, falling back). The assemblages that best regulate relative
speeds, in the social sphere at least, are also the ones that are
usually the most stealthy - those that order the flows of traffic,
money, sex, food, information. Like Foucault (1980:92-102), we have
to look not just for specific "agencies" within society that enforce
laws relating to speed - e.g., the police - but to "impersonal
strategies" and criss-crossing lines of force, to open and closed
pathways, acceleration points, bottlenecks, regions of stretching and
contraction, and so on. The central role of the image of the
Panopticon in Foucault's (1979:195ff.) history of the prison is not
simply a matter of how it describes a complex structure of visibility
and invisibility, but how that structure emerges through minute
adjustments of speed that supply the prison's specific "texture" of
activity (the prison is a "hard" social space indeed, but one where
certain flows may periodically escape - riots, streams of contraband,
drugs, etc.).
Perhaps we can begin to glimpse from these reflections new ways to
develop the idea of distraction as a social-machinic assemblage, and
perhaps from there suggest a different way of viewing its importance
in the production of contemporary culture ("recliner culture").
Distraction is a machinery that generates differential rates of flow
of matter and energy. It is an "abstract" machine in the sense that
it coordinates elements circulating on very different planes of
intelligibility (geological, meteorological, biochemical,
sociological, political). It opens lines of escape and capture, of
approach and invisibility. This machinery leaves behind ~deposits~ of
various sorts, hardenings or thickenings (sediments, strata, scars),
but it can also generate, within these structures, liquid or gaseous
conditions, zones of turbulence.[2] Distraction, in one sense, may
even describe a crucial event in all self-organizing processes, i.e.,
the production of ~singularities~. It is singularities that initiate
changes of flow and the emergence of qualitatively new states -
things like bifurcation points, thresholds, pinch points, edges,
holes and cracks, strange attractors. A distraction, in its deepest
sense, ~is~ a singularity, and not simply in terms of an event that
draws one's attention because of its rarity or uniqueness, but an
event that ~because~ of its rarity and uniqueness causes a flow to
break away, to subtract itself, from a mass of materials to which it
had formerly adhered. Distraction generates, to refer this again back
to Deleuze and Guattari, a ~multiplicity~. One is only a member of a
multiplicity, they say, via subtraction, as N-1 (1987:6). Distraction
is what subtracts one from a collection to create a multiplicity - it
is what causes the lone individual to break away from the randomness
of a milling crowd and generate a "pack," the unique event that pulls
a particle off-track and causes other particles to follow. It is in
this sense above all a ~gravitational~ force before it is a conscious
one.
"To distract" literally means "to draw in different directions" or
"to pull apart," and we will feel free to exploit all the rich
connotations of these terms. While "to draw" has the gravitational
sense we just assigned to it, we will also pay close attention to its
~graphical~ meaning. To distract something is to ~mark~ it, and
thereby make it vulnerable. A distraction creates a target; it makes
a thing ~traceable~. Sun Tzu (1963:90-101, 142-49), in _The Art of
War_, lists the military benefits of distracting an enemy - it
dislodges him, isolates him from his main forces; he is marked by his
very separation and thus rendered visible and open to attack. For Sun
Tzu, it is a matter of one's superior use of the landscape, the
exploitation of pinch points and higher ground along the route of
march, the strategic employment of diversions of all sorts (false
information, double agents, etc.).
Foucault's analysis of Panoptic power, again, is full of allusions to
spatial and temporal devices that distract the subject and thus allow
for his more efficient control "from another direction." In Foucault,
power often operates through the creation of a host of "blind spots"
and lighted spaces, structural devices for keeping the prisoner under
surveillance and occupied with everything but the real lines of his
capture, which always intersect him from the side or behind his back.
In that sense, to distract is not only to reveal the prisoner-enemy,
~but to make the object that distracts disappear~. That is, we must
also consider the reverse graphical function of distraction, viz., to
unmark or erase. The first rule of disappearance is always to create
a diversion, hence its importance as a strategic tool not only in war
but in magic (and, we'll see, in electronic media, which has elements
of both). This happens through a process of bifurcation or breaking
apart: the magician makes an object disappear by a double movement
that separates it from a set of objects of which it had formerly been
a member. One movement creates a zone of intensity to divert the
spectator's eye, the other whisks the object away, the two lines, one
of capture (the eye), one of escape (the "erased" object), separated
by a singularity, the distraction, that pulls in different directions
at the same time. In Foucault, if power operates imperceptibly, it is
because it initiates this double flow of escape and capture - we
should not forget that Foucault's concept of power relations includes
their resistance - and this is possible only through the organization
of elaborate machineries of distraction, means of dividing perceptual
space (and time), technologies of dispersion, of pulling apart,
splitting, breaking off, etc. If we conceive of mass media in terms
of distraction, we are essentially asking how it functions in all
these diverse ways - as a force of gravitation, as a means of making
visible or traceable (surveillance), and as a machinery of erasure or
unmarking.
Distraction in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction
------------------------------------------------
Let us now examine the matter more closely, as it relates to the
question of social control and cultural patterning, with an eye to
contemporary electronic media as distraction assemblages. Before
proceeding, however, we must give two qualifications:
First, despite its ubiquitousness and its character as an abstract
machine, there is no universal or unitary mode of distraction.
Politically and culturally, it is useless to talk about distraction
in a global sense. It is characterized rather, as we have seen, by
its singularities and bifurcations, by the concrete mixtures of
heterogeneous elements it coordinates. Although its lines intersect
with those of human decision, belief and desire, distraction, we have
said, is not "human." If anything, "human being," the "subject," the
"person," the "individual," "consciousness," "attention" - all these
things are so many effects of distraction, which is not to deny their
strategic role in how distraction games play out in a given society.
Again, distractions manifest themselves as zones of turbulence where
flows of matter and energy are intensified or dissipated, where
disjunctions occur and new structures emerge. In society they may
often appear as the expression of intentional choices, but this would
be to seriously misunderstand their chaotic nature - the production
of singular events, the unpredictable bifurcation of lines. We are
not looking for essences here; it is the actual mixtures that are
interesting and constitute the dynamics of distraction.
Second, we will not define distraction as a social or cultural
totality. There is no "society or culture of distraction," as if
society was only this and nothing else. It is one among many traits
of contemporary media culture. As we have indicated, it has
oppressive and liberating qualities, often both simultaneously. You
can be distracted by the police, but the police can be distracted,
too. It is possible that everyone in a given society is distracted in
a certain way, though unlikely (Kroker's recliner is undoubtedly only
a convenient fiction to draw attention to a more complex state of
affairs).
Finally, although distraction seems to explain certain relations of
activity (or inactivity) in a population in an external way, in fact
it is immanent to them. For an investigation into the social
organization of distraction, we should look, following Foucault again
on this point, to the concrete relations themselves to discover the
distraction in them rather than invent a principle that occupies a
space below or outside them. Distraction manifests itself in
innumerable scenes of escape and capture, traps, ruses, surprises,
catastrophes, encirclements, blockages. We must not turn all this
into a "theory" of distraction, but examine it, as Foucault says,
from the point of view of its political anatomy, the ways it
distributes bodies and coordinates their movements.
Walter Benjamin (1968:217-251), in The _Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Production_, is really the first to raise the question
about the role of distraction in societies dominated by the mass
media. Typically, he does not frame this question as a matter of
attention, but in terms of how a population, or rather a mass,
distributes itself in relation to material culture, in this case to
technologies of aesthetic reproduction. As we shall see, Benjamin
locates the problem of distraction in its connection to the formation
of ~habits~, not to a state of consciousness. Specifically, he asks
how art integrates or is integrated into the performance of routine
but socially necessary tasks. Whereas the traditional work of art
perhaps demanded thoughtful contemplation on the part of an
individual spectator, modern mass-produced art, most paradigmatically
film for Benjamin, is appropriated not by engaged individuals but by
the masses in a mode of distraction. Benjamin noted that it was
commonplace in his time to hear social critics lament the masses'
distraction and blame the cinema or other elements of mass culture
for promoting it. We still hear this charge leveled in various
quarters today, typically from the moral Right, not just against
Hollywood but against media in general. Whatever its morality,
however, the relation between distraction and aesthetic media is not
a new situation according to Benjamin, and demands a closer
investigation.
Since earliest times, the most important case of the connection
between distraction and art involves the social appropriation of
architecture, which generally functions not as an object of
contemplation (except perhaps for tourists), but as a
taken-for-granted background of human activity (p. 240). It is not
simply the fact that architecture is seen but rarely thematized as
people go about their daily business that constitutes the meaning of
distraction for Benjamin. The masses appropriate architecture not
just visually, but ~tactilely~. In an important sense, tactile
appropriation is not just another mode of reception on par with
visual or optical appropriation. Rather, Benjamin argues, it
constitutes the conditions of possibility for the latter, in the
sense that habitualized behaviors which develop around the use of
dwelling spaces, as routinized practices, ~organize perception~.
Architectural arrangements, in the social as much as the physical
sense, determine what can and cannot be seen. We should remind
ourselves again of Foucault's analysis of the prison here. Insofar as
these arrangements control the conditions of perception, they foster
routinized forms of behavior. The prisoner in Foucault's Panopticon
unconsciously regulates his own behavior and is thus perfectly
predictable. He becomes a creature of habit to the extent that he
does not see the real lines of power that control him, i.e., by
virtue of the fact that he is distracted in and by the relation to
the ordered spaces in which he finds himself, and in which he must
function. Let us return to how Benjamin describes it (240):
"Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by
perception - or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation
cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of
a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is
no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile
appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by
habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large
extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less
through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental
fashion."
That is, as a function of distraction. Despite Benjamin's fall back
into the language of consciousness ("noticing the object in
incidental fashion"), it is clear that distraction has a far wider
political sense for him.[3] It is, in a word, a means of ~training~.
Even, and perhaps especially, when art is appropriated in a mode of
distraction, it exercises a "covert control over the extent to which
new tasks have become soluble by apperception," i.e., through the
adjustment of the conditions of perception, through architectures of
visibility and invisibility. "Since, moreover" Benjamin continues,
"individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks [for example, those
necessary for the reproduction of Capital], art will tackle the most
difficult and important ones where it is able to mobilize the
masses," where it can convert those tasks into habits. In our terms,
this is a view of art as, potentially, a means of capture. Benjamin
sees this potential existing not only in modern film, but
increasingly as an imperative behind all mass produced art whose
reception, like architecture, becomes a matter of distraction.
Habits are not just subjective states or psychological structures.
They involve the initiation of repetitive flows, the construction and
placement of material blocks, obstacles, corrective devices; the
partitioning of space; the functionalization of time, and the
normalization of specific behavioral trajectories. They are
"hardenings" or "contractions" of activity, sedimentations and
stratifications of planes of conduct, condensations of matter and
energy.[4] But they can also be "softenings"- one only forms new
habits, after all, by breaking old ones. The distracted person could
just as easily fall into bad as good habits, from the authorities'
point of view. In prisons, as in workshops, schools, homes, etc.,
distractions always threaten to divert flows away from their desired
(moral) ends and must therefore be rigorously controlled. Hence, a
whole system of rules and practices evolves around their strategic
placement - a wall is erected to keep the eyes from straying (the
worker's cubicle), an opening closed to prevent any leakage to or
from the outside (the locked door). Temperatures are adjusted to
insure maximum peak performance (climate control), pressures are
adjusted relative to threshold values to guarantee that distraction
will smoothly and predictably serve the interests of power
(deadlines, quotas, production schedules, grading and ranking schema,
etc., so many forms of pressure). All of these in themselves
constitute "capture-distractions," but only in the sense that they
attempt to short-circuit "escape-distractions." One must assemble a
distraction machine that develops the right repetitions, the "good"
habits, and disassemble those machines that generate the bad
repetitions, the habits that upset the power structure, which is to
say, the dominant system of distractions (Regarding this, the droning
and "distracting" mantras of one's parents - don't eat between meals,
be in bed by ten, do your homework before watching TV, pick up your
room... And do this without being told, make it your routine. Don't
fall into bad habits. On and on. How many of these repetitive flows
are channeled around one's living space, one's negotiation of
passageways, open and closed doors, in short, one's ~habitat?~).[5]
Notes
-----
[1] The term "diagram" is used by Foucault in _Discipline and Punish_
(1979) to describe the organization of the modern prison not in terms
of a rational schema, but as a consistent space of differently
composed matters, some architectural, some imported from military,
educational or religious institutions, some linguistic, etc. The
diagram, which he formulates under the broad heading of "discipline,"
is not unique to one field or plane, but organizes qualitatively
different fields in similar ways (the school, the barracks, the
asylum, etc. - all effect disciplinary regimes in their specific
characteristic arrangements) (Cf. also Deleuze [1988:34] on
Foucault's use of "diagram."
[2] Again, we are trying not to speak metaphorically. The phenomenon
of crowd formation, for example, could be considered from the
standpoint of chaos theory as the spontaneous organization of
turbulence, i.e., the self organization of flows of heterogeneous
elements breaking out from within relatively hardened structures.
Canetti's (1960) work, to which we have already alluded, is important
in this regard as it relates to the movement of packs. Bill Buford's
book _Among the Thugs_ (1992) offers an interesting and important
interpretation of crowd behavior in terms of "threshold" events
(sudden noises, concentration and density limits, spontaneous
breakaways of atomic elements that initiate collective movements,
etc.). We could easily call such initiatory events "distractions."
[3] Percepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1994:163-199), are
not mental states of a subject, but power arrangements,
desiring-machines, etc. Again, insofar as distraction involves
perception, it is in the sense of organizing its conditions, i.e.,
its material environment.
[4] Cf. Deleuze (1994:70-82) on the notion of habit as contraction.
[5] Of course, the work of Bourdieu (1977) is central here, though
his work remains "sociological" in the narrow sense, rather than
"machinic."
_____________________________________________________________________
Editor's note: Part 2 of "Distraction and Digital Culture" will be
published next week.
_____________________________________________________________________
William Bogard is a Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in
Washington, and is currently writing a book about smoothing machines.
_____________________________________________________________________
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