The Plenitude of Distraction PDF Download
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Author: Marina Van Zuylen
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0997567449
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from perambulation. The wanderings documented in these pages carry none of the stigma of attention deficit. Quite the opposite. In Montaigne's words, there is a marvelous grace in letting thoughts be carried away at the pleasure of the wind. It is time to side with some of the great propagandists of so-called wasted time and cultivate controlled mental mayhem. Come join the ranks of the great hedonists of meandering thought.
Author: Marina Van Zuylen
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0997567449
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from perambulation. The wanderings documented in these pages carry none of the stigma of attention deficit. Quite the opposite. In Montaigne's words, there is a marvelous grace in letting thoughts be carried away at the pleasure of the wind. It is time to side with some of the great propagandists of so-called wasted time and cultivate controlled mental mayhem. Come join the ranks of the great hedonists of meandering thought.
Author: Alessandra Aloisi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350342963
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
From Pascal to contemporary anxieties about attention, we have constantly been urged to avoid distraction if we want to live and work better. But Alessandra Aloisi argues that we are missing the point.Drawing on a broad range ofEuropean philosophy and literature, this book considers distraction not as an expression of human imperfection, but as a creative, subversive, and aesthetic capability. In contrast to the traditional accounts, from Saint Augustine to Robert Burton, which either associated distraction with sin or considered it as a symptom of melancholy, Aloisi argues that it is often precisely when we stop thinking about something that inspiration finds us. Why else are artists described as having their heads in the clouds? This book demonstrates the serendipity of distraction through close readings of cultural and visual sources ranging from the mathematician Poincaré to the Netflix show, Black Mirror. With inspiration from La Bruyère, Rousseau, Leopardi, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and others, Aloisi further examines the political value of distraction. After all, in an age of ubiquitous technology and 24/7 availability fighting for our attention, distraction provides what Bergson called a 'slight revolt' from the codes and behaviors that society dictates. Combining philosophy, literature, art, and politics, The Power of Distraction encourages us to think differently about our attention and considers just how productive daydreams can be.
Author: Paul North
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804778973
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
We live in an age of distraction. Contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology insist on this. They often suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. Yet they almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this argument, not as quintessentially thought-bearing, but as subject to repeated, causeless blackouts of mind. The Problem of Distraction presents the first genealogy of the concept from Aristotle to the largely forgotten, early twentieth-century efforts by Kafka, Heidegger, and Benjamin to revolutionize the humanities by means of distraction. Further, the book makes the case that our present troubles cannot be solved by recovering or enhancing attention. Not-always-thinking beings are beset by radical breaks in their experience, but in this way they are also receptive to what has not and cannot yet be called experience.
Author: Tyson E. Lewis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438477538
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is the first comprehensive analysis of educational themes across the entirety of the critical theorist's diverse writings. Starting with Benjamin's early reflections on teaching and learning, Tyson E. Lewis argues that the aesthetic and cultural forms to which Benjamin so often turned—namely, radio broadcasts, children's theatrical productions, collections, cityscapes, public cinemas, and word games—swell with educational potentialities. What emerges from Lewis's reading is a constellational curriculum composed of minor practices such as poor teaching, absentminded learning, and nondurational studying. This curriculum carries political significance, offering an antidote to past and present forms of fascist manipulation, hardness, and coldness. Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is a testimony to Benjamin's belief that "everyone is an educator and everyone needs to be educated and everything is education."
Author: Damon Young
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317488210
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Most of us struggle with distraction every day: the familiar feeling that our attention is not quite where it should be. We feel it at work and at home and it can be frustrating and uncomfortable. But what is distraction? In his lucid, timely book, Damon Young shows that distraction is more than too many stimuli, or too little attention. It is actually a matter of value - to be distracted is to be torn away from what is worthwhile in life. And for Young, what is most worthwhile is freedom: not simply rights or legal liberties, but the capacity to patiently, creatively craft one's own life. Exploring the lives of such luminaries as Henri Matisse, Karl Marx, Seneca and Henry James, Young exposes distraction in work, technology, art, politics and intimacy. With warmth and wit, he reveals what is most valuable, and what is best avoided, in the pursuit of a life of one's own.
Author: Geraldine Markel
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 059547540X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
Are distractions sabotaging your efforts to get ahead? Do you feel like you're constantly plagued by technology or interruptions by others? Lurking around us are forces-labeled demons-that interrupt our flow of attention and psychic energy . and it's time to fight back! This book is designed to arm workforce employees, independent professionals, and family managers with simple, yet powerful strategies to defeat the 8 Demons of Distraction. Whatever your special life circumstances, you can use this book to reduce everyday distractions and needless mistakes. Find an in-depth description of each Demon, its sources, and insidious effects. Learn to: reduce distractions increase productivity enhance work/life satisfaction decrease stress Practical, step-by-step strategies will help you rid your life of formidable enemies such as: The "Technology Demon", The "Unruly Mind Demon", The "Activities Demon", and five others. Find a research-based, proven plan of attack to decrease stress and increase your daily effectiveness at home and on the job.
Author: Michael Wood
Publisher: Critical Inventions
ISBN: 9781845192501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Starting with Walter Benjamin's idea of 'reception in a state of distraction' and looking briefly at some antecedents for Benjamin's thinking, this book develops a working model of distraction in interpretation. Examples are taken from film (Benjamin's test case), literature, music, painting and photography; the book closes with a 'distracted' reading of a classic work of concentration: Milton's Paradise Lost.
Author: Monique M Doyle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780648483106
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Let me entertain you Can good distraction lead to a more creative, fun-filled life? Award-winning mother and distraction expert Monique Doyle will entertain you with laugh-out-loud true stories, reflective poems and inspirational ideas on how a little distraction in your day can unleash creative riches inside you. HAVE FUN and BE INSPIRED!
Author: Dodie Bellamy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901588
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment. So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart. --Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture" This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.
Author: Enrico Campo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040017290
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and care. Above all, The Politics of Curiosity asks us to consider the nature and ambivalence of the curious forms of politics that might be taking shape in the shadow of our current attention economy. The “attention economy” has become a household name: we all know our attention is being harvested, commodified and packaged to be sold to advertisers by capitalist platforms. We all complain about it; some of us dream of disconnection; others call to fight back. By focusing on attentional deficits, and by reducing attention to being focused, however, the common view may miss wider stakes, and more promising opportunities. This collective volume provides a new frame of analysis based on three displacements. First, it relocates attentional issues within a triangulation that explores a continuum between attention, distraction and curiosity. Second, it invites us to investigate into the mental infrastructures that socially condition our perceptions and understandings of the world. Third, it points towards emancipatory politics of curiosity to provide alternatives to the attention economy. Contributions range from pedagogy to media theory, via digital studies, epistemology, sociology, political philosophy, literary history, aesthetics, film and dance studies. They gather some of the leading scholars who shaped the study of attention, questioned the values of distraction and explored the potentials of curiosity over the recent years. They extend across nine countries, four continents and seven languages, to provide a multicultural approach to these debates. Together, they help us understand how our current mental infrastructures have taken shape, under specific regimes of power and authority, in a world dominated by capital, colonialism and patriarchy. But they also sketch what can be done to redeploy them around imperatives of respect and care – from a better awareness of our mental biases, online behaviors and bodily movements, to our collective capacity to restructure classroom interactions, to launch alternative digital platforms, to build democratic movements. The first platform for discussion of the politics of attention and curiosity – and an essential point of reference for future debate – this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and psychology.
