Speaking of Distraction

Guess this distracted reading thing isn’t all that new:

In Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson was already on to the idea that “quick reading” is a side effect of modernity. The mass production of the written word from the mid-nineteenth century onwards has generated a distracted mode of reading that can be aggressively undialectical. Words and images are consumed like candy and then forgotten. Siegfried Kracauer, in his analysis of Weimar cinema, argued that capitalism thrives on this kind of “distraction”: when people are distracted, they tend not to think about the problems caused by capitalist modes of production, or their own position in the machine. Jameson’s density is best understood as a deliberate attack on the distraction that comes with capitalism. It is an expression of intellectual intransigence that serves as “a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking”.

Links

Close reading with Fredric Jameson

The Modernist Papers by Fredric Jameson

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