[Hi Petia, I am afraid there is a second part to this article which has not
appeared yet! Also, you can send your comments to _CTHEORY at the
[log in to unmask] address. They will be passed on to the author. Best
wishes, John.]
=================================
-----Original Message-----
From: petia koleva
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 07/10/00 12:04
Subject: Re: [CSL]: CTHEORY Article 88[1]-Distraction and Digital Culture
Apologies in case this responce is inappropriately addressed but I
could
not see another link to direct my opinion on the article below. Please
channel further if that is the case.
I am totally dismayed that professional academics and intellectuals like
William Bogard today keep themselves busy with inventing "new" terms to
describe yet another new phenomenon of social reality; packing this in
pseudoscientific jargon and selling it out (to journals like this for
examples). Not only is this a waste of their and their reader's time but
also of human intellect in general and much too of the "conference
paper"
industry . The "distraction" concept for example, even with a literary
intro warm-up and science references to make it stand in a steadfast
position somewhere between sociology, biology, physics etc. is a totally
funny Frankenstein monster patched up with dead hide torn from various
disciplines, called a machine and expected to "save or serve" humans.
Indeed _Intellectual Impostures_ by Sokal is an unfinished book of
analysis of falsely and purposelessly employed scientific jargon (like
the treatment of chaos theory, linearity and set theory, or the
("non"metaphoric) use of machine analogies below). The only problem I
have is that so many people possibly believe that they have actually put
their effort in the right place when obviously the result is a
mystification of understanding and a ridiculing (in effect) of the
work
of theorists who have tried to introduce a new element of perception
(like Foucault or Guatary quoted below). Pardon me of Virilio, De Landa
or the author below seem to be less on the track fo their own research
in
my view, but the results simply do not justify the implementation of new
terminology and cross discipline invocations and they have probably
heard
of similar mistakes having been pointed out, so why do they carry on,
why
do such papers continue being taken seriously?
Best,
petya
John Armitage wrote:
> From: CTHEORY EDITORS
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: 05/10/00 20:14
> Subject: Article 88[1]-Distraction and Digital Culture
>
> _____________________________________________________________________
> CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 23, NO 3
>
> Article 88[1] 10/05/00 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
> 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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