Let’s Talk about Jennifer Love Hewitt

Posted on May 13, 2015 by leggette@uoregon.edu under distraction

Anytime I leave my office door open, I can expect to see my department head, Dr. Ken Calhoon, standing in the doorway with an expectant look. For most people, the sight of your supervisor awaiting your attention might cause alarm; but for me, it is a welcome distraction.

Ken wants to talk TV – usually True Detective, which he knows mostly by heart. I’m pretty sure that the common reference of the show is just bait for me to give my own performance, Cajun impressions and colorful descriptions of what life is “really like down there.”

It’s reassuring to me, somehow, that an old scholar of German, a “serious” man with an intimidating intellect, could spend so much time streaming Netflix. I treasure these awkward office transactions as positive distractions: sure, I fill far too many 50-minute segments of my life by consuming stuff that other people have made, like my girl crush Jennifer Love Hewitt’s show (don’t judge!), rather than creating something in this world (a change of mind, a poem, an idea, inspiration, laughs, memories, what I will not imagine because I am too busy with empty, avoidant distraction), BUT I also find meaning in the distractions that I choose when they are enriching, when they lead to something beyond themselves, even if that it just a conversation.

TV can be the most insulating and numbing of distractions, if we are doing it to avoid thinking about our own lives, much less the world. But it can also provide connections to deepening relationships or interested participation in culture.

Distractions drive your desire to live your life – they are how we “get drunk,” and they are how we fill the painting that one day we will stand back and admire, if we’re lucky. So choose wisely.

The flaneur, it’s not easy being free

Posted on April 28, 2015 by leggette@uoregon.edu under Uncategorized

We’re now familiar with the ways of the flaneur, having followed the poet Baudelaire through the city, along the movement of his consciousness, stimulated by life happening in every corner of Paris, but we first encountered the figure of the flaneur in connection with the glass ceiling — the arcades, where it may not have clear to what extent the position of the flaneur — his mobility, his access to experience, his freedom of thought– is an exclusive privilege.

If we take the claims of Hollaback! seriously (and we should), this difference in social positioning remains a glass ceiling.

To focus on what the flaneur’s activity can reveal to us about our own conditions for being-in-the-world, I want to highlight a few keywords in this feminist critic/art historian’s definition of the flaneur:

One of the key figures to embody the novel forms of public experience of modernity is the flaneur or impassive stroller, the man in the crowd who goes, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “botanizing on the asphalt.” The flaneur symbolizes the privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas of the city observing but never interacting, consuming the sights through a controlling but rarely acknowledged gaze, directed as much at other people as at the goods for sale. The flaneur embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic. (Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” 67 )

What does it mean to be an “impassive stroller”? You certainly can’t give off the impression that you are seeking interaction. But as we discussed in class, the gendering of dress comes with the kinds of assumptions that prompt unwanted attention and unsolicited acknowledgement. The distraction of catcalling is a title IX issue, to some extent; objectifying or, worse, sexualizing another person draws their attention away from what they are pursuing as a subject out in the world, such that there is no longer equal opportunity. “Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere” from the Daily Show offers some solutions, including the bitch face!

As we discussed in class, this is not just a gender issue. Our social position is the intersection of multiple identity categories, the most visible ones (race, class, age) being the most active ones.

Next time you’re walking down the street, think about what your gaze is really saying — are you avoiding contact? are you inviting it? what assumptions are you making about other people? what assumptions are people making about you? what captivates you and what does this say about what you’re most interested in? etc. The flaneur would never be occupied by such thoughts, but it might prove to be a worthwhile distraction.

Why We’re Way Beyond the Culture Industry

Posted on April 9, 2015 by leggette@uoregon.edu under consumerism, culture industry, network politics, new media

Although we can still point to many robust industries that produce what we call “our culture” (e. g., the film industry, the television industry, the tech industry), we have gone way beyond “the culture industry” of Adorno and Horkhemier’s Marxist critique of the capitalist system.

Here are some ways of thinking about how we’re transforming the processes of production that shape our interactions and identities:
1. We are a culture of YOUs.
When Adorno and Horkheimer talk about culture, they’re really just talking about “mass culture,” as it was emerging through mass media like radio, magazines, and film. They saw this kind of one-to-many communication as a threat, as a means of manipulating people into buying into one message; remember, these two German theorists had just witnessed the Nazis’ brilliant use of propaganda to carry out mass murder.
New media opens the lines of communication, addressing each of us individually and collectively as YOU, not simultaneously and en masse, but on-demand, through our own agency in selecting the content we interact with — when, where, and how. For example, YouTube and Netflix alone have changed the role of film in cultural production in ways that Adorno and Horkheimer could not have seen coming when they feared that film would monopolize the imagi(in)ing of social reality in its unified production.
2. We are users and prosumers (forgive me, I hate this word but it works).
Like it or not, we produce when we consume (on Facebook, when we like and even when we don’t like something). This fundamentally changes the top-down producer-consumer paradigm that Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory relies on. Users and prosumers appropriate products for their own purposes, beyond their intended or advertized uses, and participate actively in identity formation through search-enabled consumer practices. We can instantly compare prices and reviews of products and receive recommendations based on the data we produce when we make choices. Sure, the algorithms limit our agency, but the flow of influence and information is no longer one way.
3. We are a network.
From the perspective of the network, “individually, we are nothing,” as a space monkey would put it, but we are the sum of dynamic relationships. We are no longer fixed, labeled, and packaged in ready-made categories like any other product of the culture industry; we are linked in more ways than we can see at any one time, and we can shape our identities and organize by our interests.
That’s one side of the “black mirror”…

Exiled from Plato’s Republic (An example of a distraction blog post)

Posted on April 1, 2015 by leggette@uoregon.edu under distraction, productivity

I am sitting in a graduate seminar this term — just for fun – and we’re discussing Plato’s Republic, specifically why Socrates calls for poets to be banished (even though he loves them).

I am very familiar with this text and with the professor’s take on it; he is one of my academic idols and I could just bask in his intellect all day long. I’m also fascinated by the power of poetry – I’ve staked years of my own life on it – and how its place in society has been argued for and against ever since Plato’s Republic. Needless to say, this is my shit!

But as we get further into the reading, about 2 hours into the seminar, I feel my eyelids getting heavy, and I let my vision blur on the page – not even the page that we’re on.

When I notice that I’ve been drifting, I try to force myself back into at least some appearance of alertness, but my focus is gone.

Rather than return to the text and to the voices in the room, my thoughts turn to the memory of seeing someone in our first COLT 211 class struggle to keep his eyes open (this student dropped, by the way, so I’m not shaming anyone!). At the time, it made me a tiny bit sad – that I could be THAT boring.

But now that I am experiencing the difficulty of staying awake when I am absolutely invested in what’s happening and yet can’t keep my fucking eyes open … I have empathy. I don’t take it personally. This realization brought a flood of memories from my 7 years of teaching at the U of O, and I start delighting in how far I’ve come, how much I’ve grown as a teacher and a person, that I could be here now, no longer caring what my students think about me so that I’m giving every ounce of my energy to what we’re doing as a class.
Then I recognized that I was not at all present in this class, and that being in this class – in academia – is such a privilege and I’m not making the most of it. Because I can only talk about theory for so long before … I’m ready to get back to real life, to my life. As Socrates himself (allegedly) said, you are what you do.

In a sense, I just enacted point of Plato’s Republic: to get rid of distraction (poetry) from the task of serving a society based on reason.

For so many reasons, I would have been banished, too.

But I did manage to produce something in the margins, SOME NOTES FOR THIS EXAMPLE POST!

Learning to Read with Distractions

Posted on March 30, 2015 by leggette@uoregon.edu under distraction, productivity, reading

Is distraction an idle threat?

The word comes with the negative connotations of lost concentration, attention deficit disorder, even cultural degeneration, raising alarms about the future of practices that have shaped human society since the invention of language.

But distraction can also be positive; it can put forward ideas that could never have happened otherwise, under conditions of focus.

This potential for productivity in distraction is what we will be exploring in this class, COLT 211, taking our cue from the words of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar:

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”

Not all distractions are created equal – or rather, create equally – and some distraction, as we’ll see, can be strategic, intentionally opening certain doors that we wouldn’t see without getting lost.

Rather than think of distraction as derailing your reading, we will learn how to read with distractions, and see that perhaps all reading is distracted reading.

When has distraction turned out to be productive for you?