Distraction

Are you paying attention? Or do you have this blog post open in the ninth of twenty-seven browser tabs, and even then only because you have Twitter blocked and so need something else to look at instead of doing whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing? In any case, you’re probably familiar with the idea that we are living through a uniquely distracted moment. One of the most resilient publishing trends of the last decade or so has been for books about distraction, warning of a twenty-first-century attention catastrophe brought on by new information and media technologies which sap and sever our focus. The problem is framed as an impending public emergency; increasingly alarmed titles vie with one another to grab, ironically, the attention of potential readers. The subtitle of Maggie Jackson’s Distracted (2008), for instance, goes as far as warning of ‘The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age’. There are more nuanced contributions to this genre, too — Julia Bell’s Radical Attention (2020) and Adam Phillips’ Attention Seeking (2019) — but the governing assumption remains that we are at a moment of novel, unique distractedness. The new threat is imagined as originating from outside of the mind, threatening to invade or seduce it.

Few would dispute the way in which technology frays and pulls at our attention. If our everyday experiences of distraction and scattered focus weren’t evidence enough, the market logic of commodified attention, driving profit for large tech companies, serves as a priori proof. But to attain a deeper, richer understanding of distraction — one that might better equip us to think about the attentional challenges we face — we should recognise that it has a conceptual history of its own, one that is deeply imbricated with politics and culture. In England at the turn of the sixteenth century, the focus of my research, anxiety about the dangers of distraction was exceptionally high. The growth of print gave rise to fears of information overload. Humanist pedagogues fretted over their scatter-brained students. Popular prayer manuals offered readers advice on eliminating disturbances from their devotional regimens. The language used to describe distractions was copious and colourful: ‘by-thoughts,’ ‘the froth of our braines,’ or the ‘importunate flies of worldly cogitations’. But early modern usage of the word distraction itself is harder to parse. Deriving from the Latin dis + trahere, meaning to drag apart or pull asunder, the word was used to describe all sorts of splits and ruptures: divided kingdoms, shattered objects, and, most importantly, the breakdown (a disintegrative metaphor which survives today) of the mind into madness.

Trilingual Compendium of Texts, Cambridge University Library MS Gg.1.1, C1300. © Cambridge University Library. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 3.0).

Raymond Williams spurs us to consider the ‘important social and historical processes’ that occur ‘within language’. Might the word distraction itself, with its complex and contested range of meanings, offer a focal point to think through the history of attention failure, up to and including the twenty-first century? In Distracted Subjects (2004), a book about early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely is keen to distinguish the more usual present-day meaning of distraction — ‘a temporary diversion of consciousness’ — from the early modern sense of ‘extreme...mental disorder’. On that basis, early modern instances of distraction aren’t much use for thinking about the smaller-scale mind-wanderings that we use the word to describe today. But these meanings may have been more closely linked than Neely suggests. In fact, the early modern period’s deep concern about ‘temporary diversion’ was partly rooted in the idea that it risked sliding into ‘madness’. Both senses of the term were based on the same underlying metaphoric logic: a mental division, disruption, severing, or pulling asunder. The single loose thread of a distracted thought, the reasoning went, might unravel into complete mental disintegration. Thomas Rogers, the controversialist and clergyman, fretted in 1580 that ‘I haue other thinges in my minde when I praie...I am woont greatlie to be distracted; and manie-times there am I not, where bodilie I sit, or stande, but whether my cogitations carrie me. Verelie there I am, where my cogitation is’. Distraction is here described in terms of unsettling self-transportation, the self disassembled and scattered: this is a serious psychic split.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the devotional handbooks which enjoyed ubiquitous popularity during this period catered to concerns about distraction. Many included chapters on ‘how wee are to resist Distractions’, or ‘Of the causes of Distraction in Prayer, and of the Remedies’. These sections usually opened by taxonomizing the causes of distraction. The Meditations of Luis de la Puente, a Jesuit meditation manual published in an English translation in 1610, offers a paradigmatic example. Distractions come, it tells us:

First, from the Divell to hinder us from the fruite of Praier. Secondly from our owne Imagination which is free, untamed, instable, and ill-governed. Thirdly, from some Affections unmortified, which drawe our thoughtes after them: for where the Treasure is, there is also the Heart. Fourthly from Cares which sting, and divide the hearte into a thousand partes. Fiftly from weakenesse, and coldenesse, thorough not inforcing, nor applying ourselves to this so noble Exercise. Sixtly from Ignoraunce, thorough not knowing how to discourse, nor meditate. (C2r)

Characteristically for this mini-genre, most of the roots of distraction arise from within, as opposed to pulling or disturbing us from without. Even the Devil was thought to induce distractions via our pre-existing wishes and weaknesses, as De la Puente goes on to write: ‘Hee tempteth them with Gluttonye to make them in Praier heauye, and sleepye. Hee tempteth them with Impatience to disquiet them: with Curiositye of the Senses to distract them’. The devil distracts his victims, in other words, by working with the tools that they offer him. This is quite distinct from our understanding of distraction as something which arises externally, from technology or media. According to the model of twenty-first-century distraction-crisis, distraction is less an individual moral or emotional issue, and more an unnatural, alien threat. Examining the historical valences of distraction suggests not only that this problem has always been with us, but that it might have always been within us, too.

James Waddell is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UCL.

Selected Bibliography.

Neely, Carol Thomas. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Cornell, 2004).

Puente, Luis de la. Meditations upon the Mysteries of Our Holy Faith … translated into English by F. Rich. Gibbons (1610).

Rogers, Thomas. Of the Imitation of Christ (London, 1580).

5 March 2021.