December 7th, 2021, was the last piece I wrote for this newsletter. It’s been four months since anyone on this platform heard from me. Crazy, I know. You’ve managed four months without me. Thing is, I haven’t really had much to share or that I can really talk about in much detail lately. January saw me teaching for the first time in a structured institution, as I started the second academic term as a post-graduate teaching assistant. It’s one of those experiences that is hard to put down in words, mostly because I don’t want to get in trouble, but one I might write about at a future date. Instead, I wanted to share with you something that has been going on with me, that I find fairly troubling—I can’t really seem to concentrate on anything anymore.
It’s a difficult feeling to describe, really. Especially as someone who, for at least six years of their life, was able to go on long runs—anywhere between 90-120 minutes—without any kind of music or podcasts or anything like that. I could easily give my brain over to a singular task, falling into a Zen-like focus. It was just second nature. Now? Well, let’s just say that it’s been a while since I’ve even felt focused on anything. I wanted to write about this for some time, but I just didn’t have the right context in which to approach it. I didn’t have a critical perspective that would let me step out of my head to re-frame my experience. Even just now, as I am meant to be writing this, I went off on a round-about search through the internet for twenty-minutes. Wrote two paragraphs, then boom, my mind wants other things. It was only when I began reading Rosi Braidotti’s Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming and listened to Philosophize This’s episode on Walter Benjamin’s “Age of Distraction” that a potential logic behind my attention deficit began to take shape.
To paraphrase and summarize, Braidotti introduces the reader to nomadology, a theory about attempting to reassess subjectivity in a reality where nothing is stable. Instability is the new norm, and society finds itself in a “permanent process of transition, hybridization”[1]. It is in thinking about myself as unstable that my own lack of focus becomes clear: through continual and perpetual “transition[s]”[2], my centralized singular sense of self, and the focus accompanying that, has now more or less come apart entirely. But what caused it? Braidotti’s position would appear to formulate that what I’m feeling is perhaps normal. How can any singular individual focus and function in a constant subjectivity of hybridity? This would track too with Benjamin’s “age of distraction”, where en-mass, the populace now no longer focuses on a work of art, no one “concentrates” on it in order to be “absorb[ed] by it”. Instead, we are distracted, unfocused, and therefore “absorb[..] the work of art”[3], consume it within our mass culture of consumerism.
Technology played a large role in this, and within the Philosophize This episode about Benjamin’s “Age of Distraction”, it is the creation of film which highlights how now, the solitary act of being exposed to art takes place on a communal level. The act of reading the book alone is not even safe in the age of social media where the book that you are reading must be shared with the world, one’s identity is tied to the progress and consumption of art on a high level to therefore be flaunted before the world on the digital stage[4]. To some degree, lately, I was definitely feeling this sort of pressure, though if you were to look at my Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram feed, you would see that I did not succumb to it. Though my Goodreads account would tell another tale. Instead, my anxiety surrounding my ability to consume art—perhaps not just for a social level but as well within my academic endeavors—manifested in a different way: through the act of scrolling either on Instagram or YouTube. I don’t really even know what drew me to these platforms in the first place, but in my memory a significant portion of my “distraction” stemmed from a significant increase in my consumption of Instagram and YouTube content.
Whether it was cooking shows or Let’s Plays[5], Instagram and YouTube became my daily and nightly routine of artistic consumption. Whether it was on my phone, computer or tablet, I was just compelled to absorb different works and videos, unsure as to what any of them in particular were offering me in return, outside of a deference towards whatever it was I needed to do, or felt like I needed to do, at the time:
"each gadget or electronic appliance represents the promise of enjoyment and consequently also its deferral. It is therefore caught in the spectral economy of the ghostly presence-absence fulfillment; as such it haunts us."[6]
I have come to rely on the “spectral economy” of the Instagram and YouTube algorithms, each one striving to fulfill a need and desire which ultimately, is impossible for them to meet. Impossible because neither myself, nor the algorithm, really know what I want. In my mind, I need to reclaim for myself an “Age of Concentration” while attempting to reject the distraction and figurations of our multiplicity of subjectivity. Easier said than done. But something that I feel is worthwhile, and needed, because admittedly, being unable to really concentrate on things, and allow myself to be absorbed by particular art has made me pretty miserable.
So, I’ve taken a few steps to get me going, and I hope that maybe, if you, dear reader, find yourself in a similar position, they could help you too. First, I’ve deleted Instagram from my phone. Pretty straightforward, but already it’s been instrumental in helping me reclaim time here and there. Second, watching a film at least once a week. This might sound like a strange one, especially to those who might read this and know me as a bit of a cinephile, but my film viewing has all but disappeared the past few months. And it used to be the art form that I think I was able to be absorbed into the most, but something just happened along the way where I couldn’t concentrate anymore. Third, stop reading things I don’t like. This seems pretty obvious, but I think I’ve lost a lot of time reading books, or short stories, or poetry that didn’t grip me in particular ways, and I continued reading them because it was topical, a classic, or somehow required of me from a critical standpoint. That doesn’t mean that I want to just stop reading things that I don’t entirely enjoy, because there’s room for growth and knowledge when confronted with something difficult or not entirely put together, but I just think a few sturdier guidelines put in place for somethings will just help me have more meaningful encounters with certain texts.
And finally, whenever I have the urge to shift from something to something else—the need for distraction being too strong—I try to make sure I distract myself with something more satisfying than YouTube or Instagram. This one’s been the most challenging, because as you work on a computer, it’s easy to just jump to YouTube and watch a quick video, but my hope is that if I can supplant that feeling with something that isn’t YouTube—like a few pages of a book, or something more substantial like a short episode of a TV show or even a work of criticism—I’ll be able to break that scrolling habit. Re-hone my taste for things that really impact me, and don’t just fill the “void”[7] of my own listlessness.
In light of that endeavor, writing this newsletter had, up until last year, been rather instrumental in helping me really reflect on art that I was interested in, as well as allowing me a type of bodily check-in with myself, and what was going on with me. To that end, I want to try and get back on top of this newsletter. So, I’m going to try to get back on the horse, as it were, of releasing something once a month. I’ve got a few things in the pipeline that are written, but need a heavy hand of editing, so hopefully this will serve as a good place holder for March, as I get April sorted. Until then, be well and stay safe: it’s wild out there.
[1] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Prologue’, in Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, p. 2.
[2] Which in my life are many: working freelance, never living in the same place for more than a year (at most), friends and communities formed yet separated internationally, traveling internationally to be able to be with family, etc.
[3] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn, Illuminations, 1969, p. 18 <https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf>.
[4] I’m grossly exaggerating a few of the parts here, but for more specifics, do see Stephen West, The Frankfurt School - Walter Benjamin Pt. 2 - Distraction, 163 vols (Spotify, 2021), cliii.
[5] The act of watching someone else play a video game rather than going to play the game yourself…yeah not too proud of this one…
[6] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Chapter 4 - Cyber-Teratologies’, in Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, p. 188.
[7] Braidotti describes postmodernity as a type of void. And delves a bit more into how the modern subject is caught up within a particular “web”, that being trapped within particular social constructions from the void. It’s highly gothicized and I’m here for it. See Braidotti…’Chapter 4’…p. 173