Angels of history: reception, distraction and resistance【翻译】

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distraction serves at once to create a space for the social dream and to re-inscribe the
subject at the moment of reception through an insistence on its unruly, embodied
presence. “Reception in Distraction” creates a cognitive space for disengagement from
ideology, modeling what Michael Denning called the “dream work of the social.”
Critical theory is thus available to the mass public in the form of the “dream of
history” that is solely available to a distracted apperception and whose subject is the faint
possibility that the crisis of the present may be redeemed and repaired in the future. This
project attempts to locate this dream of history in the autobiographical writings of
Gertrude Stein, the detective fiction of Kenneth Fearing and the late silent cinema of
Charlie Chaplin, each of which illustrates clearly the manner in which “distraction”
functions to generate contradiction in the face of ideology’s mass cultural form. Stein’s
experiments with the autobiographical form call for exactly this manner of reception, for
which “Alice B. Toklas” becomes a key model. Similarly, Kenneth Fearing’s Marxist
detective novel The Big Clock and Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s final silent film,
reflect on the possibility of a productive reception-in-distraction that may co-opt the
social forms of capitalism into a project of resistance and counter-discourse.
“Distraction” is therefore more than merely an attitude of reception: it occasions a
cognitive distance from ideology that is a key form of critical theory in the modern
period.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The paradoxical nature of writing is that it only feels solitary. A project such as
this one, spanning many years and many different shapes, necessarily bears the mark of
countless unnamed, uncredited contributors over the years and without whose help it
would likely never have come to fruition. With the full expectation that an inclusive
roster of these people would itself be a dissertation, I will attempt to name a few of the
people to whom I am grateful; inevitably there will be a few people who should be listed
here and are not, and I humbly beg their forgiveness and understanding of the limitations
of space and memory.
First, I would like to thank Professor Adalaide Morris, without whose editorial
guidance this project would have been twice as long but only half as good. Her patience
and wisdom through every stage of this process was invaluable, as was her willingness to
help me see my way to the difficult decisions that needed to be made in order to usher
this project into its final phase. A great many others read part or all of this dissertation
and offered their editorial guidance, and I will name just a few: Kevin Kopelson, J.P.
Craig, Kimberly Cohen, Guðrùn Jörundsdóttir, Austin Adams, Adrienne Benediktsson
and Joe Zizek. However, I am especially grateful for the eleventh-hour editorial help of
my sister, Helga Kristìn Hallgrìmsdòttir, which was truly above and beyond the call of
duty.
I also received unsolicited but invaluable help from Professor Cheryl Nixon at the
University of Massachusetts-Boston, where I briefly worked as an adjunct instructor.
Professor Nixon, in her capacity as Literature co-ordinator, invited me to teach an
advanced English Literature elective in the Spring of 2009 called “Readership and Mass
Market Literature.” Her instruction was simple: the class should reflect the research I
had done for my dissertation. This process prompted me to clarify and crystallize my
own murkiest ideas, and also allowed me to find an unexpected but welcome synthesis
between my duties as a teacher and a researcher.
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I must also thank the 24 students in that class, who indulged me with remarkable
patience and wisdom as I explained my project to them over the course of fifteen weeks.
In particular, I am grateful to Brett Greene, James Contrino and Emily Pahud: they may
never read these words, but I wish nevertheless to recognize their valuable and
astonishing insights into this project, and as two of them are now graduate students in
Literature, I wish them all manner of success in their own scholastic careers.
In some cases, support for the writing life takes other forms. In that case, I am
incredibly grateful for the friendship and support of Jeff Charis-Carlson and Michael
Neff, who kept my attention on my other duties, both creative and editorial, when
prospects seemed bleakest for this project. Benedikt Hallgrímsson provided me with a
quiet office space, along with a not inconsiderable number of lattes and big-brotherly
professional advice; I’m not sure which helped more. To my younger sister Ingunn
Benediktsson I owe a special thanks as well; on many occasions she volunteered her own
valuable time to care for my daughter so that I might work on this dissertation. For
support both emotional and financial and occasionally editorial, not to mention Job-like
patience, I am thankful beyond words to my parents, Guðrùn Jörundsdóttir and
Hallgrímur Benediktsson, and my in-laws, Norman and Myrna Miller.
Lastly, I am thankful to my wife Adrienne Benediktsson, whose confidence that
this day would some day come has sustained me. And to my daughter, the young
princess Magdalena Eva Marie Benediktsson, I dedicate this dissertation: you have
thrown open the doors of the real to shed the final light upon the import of this project, by
demonstrating to me the power of attention in distraction to shape the authority that
attempts to control it.

ABSTRACT
A key term in the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin is his notion of “reception
in distraction” as an antidote to ideology’s domination over the mass society in the
modern age. This dissertation attempts to illuminate this idea by offering case studies of
three projects that summon into existence a new kind of reader, one capable of a trained
apperception we may describe as “distracted.” One objective of the mass society
according to a Frankfurt model of culture is the erasure of the subject; reception in
distraction serves at once to create a space for the social dream and to re-inscribe the
subject at the moment of reception through an insistence on its unruly, embodied
presence. “Reception in Distraction” creates a cognitive space for disengagement from
ideology, modeling what Michael Denning called the “dream work of the social.”
Critical theory is thus available to the mass public in the form of the “dream of
history” that is solely available to a distracted apperception and whose subject is the faint
possibility that the crisis of the present may be redeemed and repaired in the future. This
project attempts to locate this dream of history in the autobiographical writings of
Gertrude Stein, the detective fiction of Kenneth Fearing and the late silent cinema of
Charlie Chaplin, each of which illustrates clearly the manner in which “distraction”
functions to generate contradiction in the face of ideology’s mass cultural form. Stein’s
experiments with the autobiographical form call for exactly this manner of reception, for
which “Alice B. Toklas” becomes a key model. Similarly, Kenneth Fearing’s Marxist
detective novel The Big Clock and Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s final silent film,
reflect on the possibility of a productive reception-in-distraction that may co-opt the
social forms of capitalism into a project of resistance and counter-discourse.
“Distraction” is therefore more than merely an attitude of reception: it occasions a
cognitive distance from ideology that is a key form of critical theory in the modern
period.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... ix
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS..............................................................................................x
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: DISTRACTION AND THE MODERN
SUBJECT .........................................................................................................1
1.1 Angels of Historicity: Reception in Distraction and the Reemergence
of the Subject from Domination..............................................1
1.2. Reception as Formal Praxis: Three Case Studies in Distraction .......8
1.3 Understanding “The Art of the Present”: Benjamin’s Notes on
Distraction ...............................................................................................10
1.4 Notes on Distraction: Recovering the Identity of the Disparate........17
1.5 “Keeping a Finger” on the Index of the Real ....................................24
CHAPTER 2. EASY LISTENING: DISTRACTION AND HISTORY IN
GERTRUDE STEIN.......................................................................................31
2.1 Stein and the Popular Historical: The Historicity of the
Nonserious...............................................................................................31
2.2 Alice in History: The Receptive Distraction of Alice B. Toklas.......39
2.3 Easy Listening: Alice B. Toklas and the Modernist Aesthetics
of the Non-Serious...................................................................................46
2.4 Automatism and History: Distraction and the Project of a New
Modern ....................................................................................................55
CHAPTER 3. THE POEM AND THE POT-BOILER: RECEPTION IN
KENNETH FEARING’S THE BIG CLOCK .................................................68
3.1 Hard-Boiled Historicity .....................................................................68
3.2 Producing the Non-Productive Subject: Kenneth Fearing’s
Popular Dialectics....................................................................................73
3.3 The Golem of History: Intoxication and Resistance in The Big
Clock........................................................................................................77
3.4 “Steering in the Other Direction”; The Shape of Resistance in
the Age of Totality...................................................................................83
3.5 “Three Criminals, or Three Hundred?”: The Big Clock and the
Arithmetic of Domination .......................................................................90
3.6 Everyone’s a Critic: The Democratization of Negative Poetics........96
CHAPTER 4: THE MASK OF NONINVOLVEMENT: CHARLIE CHAPLIN
AND THE DREAM OF TECHNOLOGY...................................................111
4.1 Silent Film’s Mute Promise: Nostalgia, Farce and the
Trenchant Critique of Modern Times ....................................................111
4.2 Chaplin and the Gastronomic: Food and the Body in Modern
times.......................................................................................................126
4.3 The Silent Film and the Talkie: Progress and the “Little
Tramp”...................................................................................................135
4.4 Speech Acts: The Mute Tramp and the Voice of Resistance ..........138
viii
CHAPTER 5. WEATHER REPORTS IN THE NUCLEAR AGE: GERTRUDE
STEIN’S APOCALYPTIC POETRY ..........................................................150
5.1 Distraction and Destruction: Modernity and Crisis.........................150
5.2 The Crisis of the Ceremonial Present: Distraction and
Apocalypse ............................................................................................158
5.3 The Arithmetic of Domination: A Reflection on the Atomic
Bomb .....................................................................................................169
CONCLUSION: THE DREAM OF HISTORY IN STEIN, FEARING AND
CHAPLIN.....................................................................................................173
NOTES ......................................................................................................................182
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................195

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