Page 221 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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206 Critical Theories of Mass Media
The problem with distraction

Let Proust have his madeleines. We have ads. Some of my
students are embarassed … that cultural junk food is what they
share … Yet it is precisely the recognition of jingles and brand
names, precisely what high culturists abhor, that links us as a
culture. More than anything else this paper-thin familiarity is
what gives Adcult its incredible reach and equally incredible
shallowness. It is a culture without memory and hence without
depth.
(Twitchell 1996: 7)
Benjamin chose to be optimistic about the kind of distraction that
more critical commentators such as Duhammel saw in terms of a
theft of thought ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My
thoughts have been replaced by moving images’ (cited in Benjamin,
Essay: Section XIV). For Benjamin, distraction educates humanity en
masse bypassing the hierarchies encoded in traditional knowledge,
and therein resides its emancipatory potential. Similarly, cinema
imposes shock, but in training the sensorium of viewers it provides
them with a means of representing an environment of shock, of
mastering it. But beyond this rather vague formulation, Benjamin
fails to fully develop the concept of distraction – especially its
potentially negative cultural implications. Despite the differences
between Benjamin and the Frankfurt School’s much more negative
assessments, both approaches do recognize the dialectic of techno-
logically facilitated social developments and the profound cultural
change they induce. In Benjamin’s Essay, the new media technolo-
gies of his time provided the vehicle for the undermining of
traditional, oppressive social forms. In contrast, Fascism represented
the non-dialectical reification of tradition. It sought to use tradition
in a mythic, totalizing and oppressive manner. In this context,
Benjamin’s optimistic interpretation of media effects can be viewed
as being inevitably affected by a desire to find counterweights to
Fascism’s malign use of aura. This laudable aim however, blinded
Benjamin to the manner in which the dialectical process generated
not only new modes of mass reception, but also correspondingly
novel modes of mass subordination – friendly fascism.
Adorno’s reservations about Benjamin’s theories are recorded in
their correspondence, and prefigure his own culture industry thesis.
Adorno accused the Essay of various forms of romanticism, arguing
that: ‘I do not find your concept of distraction convincing – if only
for the simple reason that in a communist society work will no
longer be organized in such a way that people will no longer be so
tired and stultified that they need distraction’ (Adorno, cited in
Jameson 1980: 123). Gilloch neatly summarizes the characteristic
bluntness with which he supplemented this critique:

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