Distraction action

 

So… I’m sitting in the classroom of one of my son’s science teachers at the College and we are “conferring”. It is a parent-teacher conference, one of the many that night,  all being scheduled before the Winter vacation. And we talk of this and that, grades, behavior, when the angel of the Zeitgeist passes above us and the science teacher talks about concentration and distraction in terms of teaching. Students now, she says, with their permanent cell phones, can search and find answers almost immediately. But when you are teaching something, that something only gradually becomes an answer to a question on a test – it doesn’t immediately start out as one. It requires a certain amount of time. That amount of time is in contradiction with the immediate answer time of Google. And as the immediate answer time becomes the norm, the old latency between teaching some content and that content, in some form, becoming an answer begins to seem more like frustration than like initiation.

So…  I have lightly translated what she said into my own Hegelian speak. But this is the essence of it, and I found it really interesting. Frustration and distraction are, after all, the highly political bywords of our time. And we all associate it with our machines – the phone that is no longer a phone, the channels on social media, etc. This right here – this post right here, which I fling into the “internet” thingy – is machine driven, a little bubble of messaging from an old swimmer in the internet from forever – is tied down to the machines more thoroughly than Gulliver was tied to the ground by the Lilliputians.

Jonathan Crary is the man for the attention problem of the nineteenth century, whose book – Suspensions of Perception – threads an amazing path through the interface between sensation and psychology  that seemed, when it was published in 2000, to give us a useable past and seems, in 2026, to be the cry of woe of a doomscroller outside the walls of Ninevah.

I take this oddly optimistic – even Whitmanesque – bit about Mallarme:

“In the summers of 1871 and 1872, while in England, he wrote a

series of short, pseudonymous articles reporting on the first two of the four London

International Exhibitions (1871–1874).85 The firsthand and clearly disorienting experience

of a world’s fair, especially of the exhibits in the interior of the newly

completed Royal Albert Hall, disclosed to him a smooth space on which the

boundaries between the domains of art and industry had collapsed. Mallarme´ does

in fact characterize the proliferation of products on display within the historical

problem of “decadence,” but there is a complete absence of Ruskinian censoriousness

of manufactured shoddiness or any nostalgia for artisanal craft in his account.

Instead, Mallarme´ declares his intention to explore the new “double-sidedness”

of modern commodities: the paradox that machine-made, hastily produced mass

objects can nonetheless possess an aggregate aura that is as affecting as the aura

of singular and rare objects of premodernity. Rather than lamenting the disintegration

of an older model of authenticity, Mallarme´ sees the delirious array of hybrid

and historically eclectic products, such as clocks, armchairs, tapestries, lamps, mechanical

toys, candelabras, dishware, perfume burners, pianos, even exotic live

animals, as a tantalizing surface of experience. “I predict the following: the word

authentic, which was for many years the sacramental term of antiquarians, will no

longer have any meaning.” What a joy, he continues, that “Grand Art” has been

displaced from our domestic living spaces by “the irresistible virtue of Decoration

itself.”87 For Mallarme´ the ocean of bric-a-brac he observed at the London exhibitions

and the panorama of fashion commodities he detailed in La Dernière Mode

were part of a compensatory decorative veneer both concealing and announcing

the absolute vacuity at the heart of everyday life. The distracted quality of this

unintelligible contiguity of styles, cultures, and forms was, for Mallarme´, a reprieve

from a primal intuition of absence.”

 

So…  right up to a point, Stephane! Sure, existential dread lifts. But as the flood becomes an environment, we replace dread with panic. We even seek out panic, living with panic-making objects produced, as we can all see, by companies run by the worst people for the worst purposes. At one point, when neoliberalism was a rosy little baby, the triumphalists looked about and told us don’t worry! If evil people make stuff people don’t like, they won’t make a profit and the market, acting as the best little guard dog ever, will eat them up! But now we know that the market will just keep betting on them even when they make nothing, zip, a big trillionish negative – because the market can be a bubble longer than you can breath. And not being able to breath is definitely a primal intuition of absence.

You try it, Mr. Mallarme.