The Problem of Distraction

We live in an age of distraction, yet contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology often only suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. They almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the mere opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this argument, not as quintessentially thought-bearing, but as subject to repeated, causeless black-outs of mind. North presents the first genealogy of the concept from Aristotle to the early 20th-century efforts by Kafka, Heidegger, and Benjamin to revolutionize the humanities by means of distraction. He makes the case that our present troubles cannot be solved by recovering or enhancing attention. Not-always-thinking beings are beset by radical breaks in their experience but are also receptive to what has not and cannot yet be called experience.