Idle Attentions: Modern Fiction and the Dismissal of Distraction

Idle Attentions challenges a long critical tradition that regards distraction as the default state of the modern subject. I argue that, far from leading inevitably to distraction, the culture of industrial capitalism trained individuals to treat their own attention as a scarce resource. Distraction, in this framework, was recast as a form of imprudent squandering. By bringing original analyses of the history of science and political theory to bear on four quintessentially distracted novels, I demonstrate that these texts’ unfocused form constitutes itself in opposition to an ever more ubiquitous demand for productive attention. In these novels, I reveal, distraction appears not as the necessary outgrowth of modern life, but as an increasingly marginalized cognitive mode. Contemporary discussions of distraction tend to follow a narrative first established by critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who saw it as a condition both endemic to and emblematic of their age. If reactionary writers like Max Nordau denounced distraction as a symptom of the modern individual’s weak willpower, Marxists like Theodor Adorno saw it as a lamentable consequence of the proliferation of the commodity form. Even leftist theorists who found value in distraction—arguing, like Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, that it exposed the unsustainable tensions of modern life—understood it as the corollary of industrial modernity. Idle Attentions offers a different account. The novels I consider locate distraction not in the bustling centers of modern capitalism, but at its margins: for Charles Dickens, among abjected working-class subjects; for Bram Stoker and Joseph Conrad, at the colonial edges of the British Empire; for James Joyce, in private spaces set apart from civic life. By bringing to light distraction’s status as a marginalized phenomenon, I am able to give a new account of the novel’s evolution during this period, from the teleological narratives of serialized Victorian fiction to the associative forms of modernism. I argue that novelists develop radically experimental forms not in order to represent the new realities of modernity, but rather to reactivate a distractible, spontaneous mode of perception out of sync with the demands of the capitalist market. In historicizing the imperative to maintain control over one’s own attention, my project also challenges the value of willful concentration assumed in disciplines from art history to philosophy. I propose that distraction, by accommodating spontaneous impressions and unforeseen realizations, offers a vital means to move outside reified structures of thought and perception