e-book The Problem of Distraction

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Noli mihi obstrepere; quod est, noli tibi obstrepere turbis affectionum tuarum. In you, O my mind, I measure my times. Do not interrupt me; that is, do not interrupt yourself with a disturbance of your affections. I am deeply grateful to them for their guidance.

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I am also beholden to people who shared thoughts on distraction in innumerable conversations: Critical comments on individual chapters by Corinne Bayerl and Barbara Cassin were invaluable in revising. Yes, this is the age of distraction; many have called it that. For a hundred years or more in actuality fifteen hundred, since Augustine , the disintegration of attention has been lamented, and every new decade and discipline seems to offer a new explanation and remedy for the loss. Education calls out the attention brigades to fight the shifty figure that steals away our focus.

Have we won the war on distraction? A more primary question would be: Commerce wrestles over the splinters of awareness that technology has shattered. Why cure them of what is surely a timely habit? Drugged up, warned off, lured in, and made to swallow theories about a society in distraction, few have the presence of mind left to ask: What is the meaning of the word, the truth of the phenomenon, and moreover, who will tell the story of its arrival in this history and its fetishization in reasonable discourse? Who can say they understand distraction?

The English word calls up several images: Which one or more of these do we mean when we say distraction? Burdened with the label, occupants of an age named for our chief failing, we mean, almost inevitably, when we say distraction, the lack of attention. And we know it is a fundamental thing we are lacking.

Today we lack that which makes us most fundamentally ourselves, and so we credit the force that could steal the fundament from us with great powers, such that powerful acts are needed to contain it. This furtive and destructive force, a distraction not only equal to but possibly also stronger than attention, is not the subject of this book. It must be—it is—the starting point for a prologue to the problem of distraction, but only insofar as we can quickly move through the com- mon understanding before arriving at a different distraction, beyond the anxieties about attention that appear to determine it fully.

Disciplines cling to attention; they desire it as one desires a solution to a problem even when the outlines of the problem are still fuzzy. They write about it, lament its perversion or breakdown, and act with uncom- mon urgency to bring it back when it is not at hand. This is the most common circumstance in which attention appears. When it makes itself unavailable, attention becomes the object of an anxious search. Attention intensifies most, you might say, in its loss; it becomes itself when one goes in search of it.

Producing itself out of fear of its unavailability, through this fiction, it must be pulled back continually from an unknown place to which it has slipped away. In this way, attention depends on an internal reference to distraction. But this reference, in turn, never seems to produce its referent. Attention constitutes itself by saving itself from a distraction whose meaning or image is even less articulable than the attention we say distraction is not.

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Distraction: A Serious Problem of Modern Life.

A tautology seems to block our inquiry here. The non-attention whose negation forms the most common origin for attention can only be specified from the perspective of attention.

Paul North, The Problem of Distraction - PhilPapers

Although it is often described on analogy with vision, attention has other attributes worth noting. Attention is patient; it has fortitude, is obsessive even, about its activity and its objects, and, continuing in this direction, the content of its patience and the object of its obsession is greed. This is its self-referential core: The hand of attention stretches out, ad- tenere, toward the things it wishes to take and possess, and it compels itself to do so again and again. Attention is a name for a will to possession that is comparable to vision only insofar as vision is also thought of as willful and possessive.

One idea of sight co-originates with attention in this will. The more restrictive of the two is clearly attention—there can be attentive and non-attentive vision.

Distraction: A Serious Problem of Modern Life

Above all, at least in the common understand- ing, attention always possesses a unit, even if the unit is a conjunction of a few objects. And it possesses the unit alone, abandoning other units to other faculties or disciplines to handle in the same way, greedily, admin- istering their ownership defensively against other disciplines. Only to its own thing does attention give the gift of undividedness, and the gift often brings with it a share of defensive violence. The opposite of this posses- siveness, we are led to assume, is distraction.

Distraction either does not appropriate or impedes appropriation. Perhaps it is not even greedy about its own tendencies; it shifts, undervalues itself, gives itself away. Thus, when a discipline—a Wissenschaft, a methodical, repeatable relation to sanctioned objects, an institutionalized attention—restricts itself to its ob- jects, it excludes not only other objects and disciplines but also, and more importantly, other acts or non-acts that would include them, even though they are unrelated and even if they are not properly sanctioned as objects.

Reception of the human genome and a fruit fly and three hundred years of American military history and the concept of the proper name is simply not attention.

Yet, by this argument alone attention cannot definitively be said to be attentive. Its will to possession cannot be derived from observation of its activity. This is because attention can possess anything but itself. An argument ex negativo can perhaps demonstrate this problem. When the intellect is duly disciplined, the blinders on, so to speak—when it pays attention—what faculty remains to attend to it—to attend to the attention to objects?

If attention is the only intellectual disposition that produces truth, this poses an enormous problem, akin to classical for- mulation of the problem of reflection. To attention attention cannot be paid. Franz Brentano made this impossibility a cornerstone of empirical psychology, and this insight had broad effects in twentieth-century phi- losophy and psychology.

For Brentano, as well as for his students such as Husserl and Freud, the intellectual mode in which attentive thought can possibly come to be studied is not itself attention. Where attentive thought is con- sidered the prime condition for truth, where the attendable is the only candidate for the true be the objects empirical, intellectual, or divine , this is tantamount to an admission that the nature of attention is neither verifiable nor unverifiable.

Attention may be asserted by disciplines; they may even practice it or claim they are practicing it; nevertheless, it cannot be understood in a disciplined way, at least insofar as discipline is associ- ated primarily with attentive thought. Attention is not an attendable, and this is where its supposed oppo- site, distraction, begins to take on supreme importance. This is also where the problems we are dealing with cease to be only our problems; they are not recent, but lie at the heart of an old understanding of thought. For as long as a grasping, excluding, unequivocal attention has been desired as the fundamental human disposition, we have been living in an age of potential distraction.

Most attempts to place cognition at the font of human life, from Aristotle to Descartes to Husserl, depend on it, however clandestinely. For this reason, when we ask what we mean when we say distraction, we could answer: Distrac- tion, according to this reasoning, means the disintegration or misdirection of a unified, stable, directional mental force for possession of sanctioned objects. In the most common understanding today, distraction means a divided or a diverted attention.

The dia- lectic begins to break down, insofar as, in this picture, the two concepts, attention and distraction, are not opposites at all, but rather contraries, the one, distraction, consists in the other, attention, to the lowest degree. The age of distraction, it turns out, was always but the age of attention, and what it lacked more than anything was its eponymous phenomenon.

There is no distraction, only an attention to the zero degree. What we call distraction is attentive thought degraded until it can do nothing but clamor for a return to its ideal.

Naming itself thus, the age assures itself that attention awaits, before or after it. Its task is to find a way to it, whether the way runs back or forward. Recent intellectual history has been written in accordance with this conceptual shell game. Theories of attention depend on distraction, since alone attention cannot be understood.

Distraction is then defined as a di- vided or hugely degraded attention. In this way the tautological structure of the concept is preserved. One book that claims to critique the emphasis on attention nevertheless makes its unspoken commitment to an attention theory of distraction plain. The author describes his program in the intro- duction: It is true, as long as we think of it as the fundamental capacity of an eternal psyche, attention does not seem susceptible to historicization.

Crary attacks this assumption, challenging the intellectual complacency that led to the concealment of the history of attention. With this theory, however, Crary con- fines his inquiry to the very edifice he wishes to dismantle. Few ask, and those who do often cannot abide the peculiar conclusions to which the inquiry leads. Another distraction that is not diversion, not a species or degree of atten- tion, appears rarely in the history of the thought of thought.

This is not all that can be said about it, however. Its rarity seems to follow a pattern, a pattern closely intertwined with the path of Western philosophy begin- ning in Greece, namely: The specter of a non-attentional distraction haunted Aristotle in his attempt to theorize the soul. Chapter 1 argues that what frightened Aristotle was the image of an intermittent interruption of cognition. A century and a half earlier Parmenides had already envisioned something like this as the defining characteristic of mortals. It was also, Parmenides demonstrated, the chief threat to the new discipline he was inventing: This banishment had a long life: Yet banish- ments prepare the way for returns.

The path of not-always-thinking is full of leaps.

Google Books no proxy dx. Michael Marder - - Research in Phenomenology 41 3: Modulation of Distraction in Ageing. Axel Cleeremans - unknown.

A Reassessment of Unconscious Thought Theory. Robert Smith - - Angelaki 3 2: Joyce Burgmann - - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 17 3: Is Ethics Consultation an Elegant Distraction? Moreno - - HEC Forum 8 1: Distraction and Santayana's Idea of Progress. Christopher Perricone - - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 19 2: Laughter Between Distraction and Awakening: Michael Bray - - In Jeremy Wisnewski ed. Scenes From the Unexamined Life. Attraction, Distraction and Action: