The Habits of Distraction

The thoughts traced in this book may seem a little complicated but the project itself is simple. It is to see what sort of weight and extension Walter Benjamin's phrase 'reception in distraction' can be seen to bear in changing contexts. The book first looks at the theoretical contours of the phrase, and several of its relatives, in the work of Benjamin and Barthes, with a glance at a prehistory in Proust and others. It then closely considers some different objects of reception and different forms of distraction: in jazz, classical music, poetry, painting, art house film and popular film. The hope is that distraction in interpretation - listening, reading, viewing, watching - will come to seem less vague and regrettable, and may serve as a corrective to narrow, expert and over-explicit modes of response. But this hope itself depends on readers who will take what is shown here as an invitation to choose their own examples and explore some of these possibilities for themselves.