Radway’s research has enabled us to treat romance reading not as an isolated and fragmented act but as an everyday activity that derives its meaning from its
incorporation in the reader’s specific historical and social positioning and context. A final point that needs to be pointed out concerning the turn-of-the-century mass female reader is her immersion in a culture of visual variety and distraction, reflected both in her reading matter and in her surrounding urban context.
This paper has established earlier that the mass publications of the 1890s have been marked by an unprecedented degree of miscellany, trivia and visual stimulation that is unseen in previous journals. This is, to a large extent, attributable to the rise of a visually-oriented mass urban culture at the late years of the 19th century. Since the lower-middle-class and working-class masses constitute the bulk of the readership for the mass publications of the 1890s (Wright 282), a large part of these publications are now consumed during short daily railway or bus rides to and from work, typically by
“clerks and artisans, shopgilrs, dressmakers, and milliners” (Reppelier 210). The rise of public transport like buses and suburban trains as means of connecting home to work, wherein the mass public grab a few minutes of reading whilst on board, to
“beguile the short journey” and the “few spare minutes of a busy day” (ibid), has contributed enormously to the popularity of these mass readings but has also necessitated the prevalence of the “two-inch” miscellany format. Condescendingly
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lumped by critics as variations of the “railway literature”, these mass serial
publications were seen as “redolent of the manufactory and the shop”, full of “articles of an ephemeral interest and of the character of goods made to order”, enticing the
“hurried passenger” with “violent stimulants” and “something hot and strong”, promising “temporary excitement to relieve the dullness of the journey” while cultivating a “perverted and vitiated taste” for the extravagant and sensational
(Mansel 1863: 483). The form, style and content of these mass readings point to their close incorporation in mechanized forms of industrialization, wherein, as Benjamin writes of a later mass cultural form – the film, the rhythms of reception is the “rhythm of production on a conveyor belt” (Work of Art 240). That the women’s mass
publications are intricately linked to the urban commodity culture, in particular to that culture’s quintessential spatial icon -- the department store, is further confirmed when a contemporary writer claimed that the magazines were to literature “what a magasin
des modes is to dress, giving us the latest fashion and little more” (31).
The rise of the mass women’s publications is thus an integral part of this new urban experience where visual stimulation, rapidly succeeding scenes and
commodities and the influence of mechanization have brought about a fundamental change in cultural and perceptual experiences. Benjamin, writing in his famous article
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in 1936, crystallizes this new experience as reception in distraction.13 The rapid succession of moving images in films, which interrupts any attempts by the audience to stop and reflect and leaves the latter in a perpetual state of heightened stimulation or shock, is an experience of distraction increasingly noticeable in all areas of mass art, and is also a quintessential experience of the violent impact, tactility and visual dynamics of urban modernity.
This idea of distraction is attributed to Siegfried Kracauer’s study of the 1920s Berlin moving-picture palaces, where he points out that the “stimulation of the senses succeeds one another with such rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the slightest contemplation” (1987: 94). Kracauer’s main departure from traditional dismissals of distraction as negative and superficial is that he notices the positive potential residing in this new mode of distraction which characterizes the relationship between modern mass culture and the popular audience. The “fragmented sequence of splendid sense impression” of the picture shows conveys a momentary sense of the disorder of society by exposing to the audience, instead of hiding, its own fragmented reality. Such distraction would thus have a “moral significance” (1987:
94).
Benjamin inherits and elaborates on Kracauer’s positive approach to distraction.
Distraction, symptomatic of “profound changes in all apperception” (1968: 240), is
13 For a discussion of the relevant German writings on distraction, see Allen, Eiland, Hake.
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intimately tied to the historical transformation of sense perception brought about by urban, mechanized, industrialized existence, where individuals learn to parry the shock factor of day to day existence while unreflectingly making sense out of a whole array of visual data. Distraction thus involves a mastery of certain skills and a covert ability to perform new tasks of apperception, though in an unreflecting, habitual way born out of long acquaintance. To Benjamin, distraction is no longer seen as mindless inattention or stupefaction, but importantly as collective mastery, as tactile
appropriation, and also as entertainment and pleasure, wherein harbors the possibility of sober recognition and of breaking up petrified social conditions.
It is Benjamin’s ideas of the ontologically as well as epistemologically changed nature of modern cultural experience which the concept of distraction straddles over, that is of particular significance to our study of turn-of-the-century mass women’s publications. Though photography and film, modern cultural forms that occupy Benjamin’s attention, did not gain popularity until the 1920s, already there was an accelerated trend of technologization of life and things in the 1890s. Benjamin writes about the concept of distraction as proceeding from the social space of the modern city, and indeed the rapidly changing scenes and traffic, the accelerated pace of life, the press of commodities and their programmed obsolescence are all trends seen in the 1890s. If the film of the 1920s acts as what Sabine Hake terms the “melting pot”
for an alienated but fashionable city audience and a sensory “training ground” (152), then in the 1890s, it is the mass journals that played that role, a role that exercises modern readers’ ability in the appropriation and appreciation of modernity. This also seems to be confirmed by Kracauer himself, when he attributes the increasing visualization, the “increasing amount of illustrations in the daily press and in periodical publications” to the same worship of distraction and display of pure
externality, by the movies (1987: 94). Benjamin’s concept of distraction has to be seen in reference to a social body and socially conceived modes of entertainment, in
contrast to the traditional bourgeois aesthetic experience of immersion and
concentration by a private, individual bourgeois subject toward an auratic work of art.
The reading experience of the 1890s mass publications has also a decidedly collective dimension that sets it apart from the basically private nature of traditional
novel-reading. Though the actual reading act may be enjoyed alone, as is seen in Gissing’s Ada or Monica, the popular correspondence columns and the many letters to editors and advice to other readers attentively carried by all women’s magazines, for instance, testify to the increasingly collective nature of journal-reading, and to the journals’ role as a site fostering a collective sense of female community. As
lower-middle-class and working-class girls, mostly busy shopgirls and female clerks, increasingly constitute the majority of the readership in the 1890s, more and more are
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such journals read in bus rides amid other daily urban activities. This also increases the sense of collective support whereas the reader, already buoyed by the sense of sisterly community and interaction conveyed by the magazines’ correspondence columns, literally immerses herself in the thronging, cosmopolitan ambience of the cityscape.
Like film, composed as it were of fragmentary and rapidly succeeding images, the mass journals of the 1890s are characterized increasingly by fragmentation as
“two-inch” articles, one-page romance serializations, miscellaneous themes and the ubiquitous picture ads are thrown together to form a heterogeneous hodge-podge.
Kracauer’s 1920s Berlin picture-shows may still disappoint him, despite their
disclosure of disintegration and fragmentation, by eventually attempting a false show of unity (1987: 95), yet the 1890s mass women’s publications, with their many sliced-up serializations, their never-ending on-going nature, their “bits of stories, bits of descriptions, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery” that Gissing so mockingly dismisses in New Grub Street (376), seem the very picture of fragmentation that thwarts any attempt at closure or unity. Gissing lambastes the
“great new generation” of popular readers as “incapable of sustained attention”
“beyond two inches” (376), but a fundamental departure from the traditional aesthetic experience of concentration and sustained contemplation has obviously already occurred in the 1890s. This is the new collective cultural reception in distraction found in all mass forms of culture, among them the mass journals. As the popular women readers flip through the pages of the mass publications, familiarly, stimulated, yet also somehow absent-mindedly, where text and ads mingle and mix and the dazzling visual images interact and succeed each other to create a slide-like effect, their mode of reception is a mode of distraction, similar in nature to filmic distraction.
It would be naïve, of course, to conceive of such distraction by the mass women readers as all empowering or emancipating, especially where textual manipulation is concerned. Adorno, for instance, argues that distraction does not involve any technical expertise or any genuine enjoyment or pleasure but simply the demise of the subject’s critical ability, wherein the subject masochistically desires his or her own
manipulation and succumbs to the mind-numbing mechanization and atrophied sensibilities of the modern city (1974: 235-38; 1980: 123). Both Adorno and Benjamin agree on the modernity’s ontological changes in aesthetic perception, whereby the technological and the apparatus have invaded the human and the natural, subjecting the “human sensorium to a complex kind of training” (1968: 175). Where the two depart is their evaluation of the sociological consequences, when Benjamin, to put it rather simplistically, sees distraction as an emancipatory form of collective experience while Adorno laments a collective stupefaction manipulated by corporate
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capitalism. Of course the importance of Adorno’s ideas is not to be ignored. The blurring of text and ads in the women’s magazines that this paper addressed earlier, their standardization of format and ideas, for instance, all do point to forces that act against the active exercise of reader’s critical capacity, and against individuality and qualitative differences. The objectifying and manipulative forces that operate on the reading process of the mass women’s publications are indeed great, but it would risk totalization if distraction is only seen as manipulation by an undifferentiated mass culture to a dazed mass public. Implied in Adorno’s arguments is the belief that an authentic aesthetic experience of esoteric, individual concentration in the traditional sense is still possible. Adorno may acknowledge the ontologically changed nature of the modern mass cultural forms, but that change, reflected also in the experience of modernity itself, in the technologization and commodification of things and in a crisis of the traditional metaphysics of meaning, requires new forms of aesthetics that the traditional concepts of artistic autonomy, of closure and integration, probably no longer adequately address.
Benjamin’s idea of distraction, without romanticizing or overstating its optimistic evaluation, may be more fruitfully utilized to address the new change. In fact
Benjamin is not unaware that distraction could give rise to Adornoean complacent self-surrender and oblivion, especially in his passages on commodity fetishism in The
Arcades Project. The person who enters the world exhibitions is elevated “to the level
of the commodity”, and knowingly absorbed in and carried along by the cult of the commodity, “surrenders to its manipulation while enjoying his own alienation from himself and others” (1999: 50-51). Yet here in The Arcades Project, the more positive dimension of distraction that is set out in the “Work of Art” essay is also mingled and mixed with distraction as mere diversion, giving rise to a concept that seems to blur and transcend the duality of positive and negative distractions. Howard Eiland calls this ambivalent simultaneity of positive and negative valorizations of distraction a“defining feature of The Arcades Project” (62). It is this sense of distraction that our study of the mass women’s publications is also going to utilize.
The fragmentation, miscellany, visual dazzle and blurring of text and ads seen in the 1890s mass women’s publications do indeed seduce the female reader to
involuntary surrender and oblivious intoxication. But it would be a mistake to claim a simple opposition between concentration and distraction or to argue that the concept of distraction does not at all encompass a dimension of positive mastery and pleasure.
Nor would it be right to use taste as the dividing line and to argue that the elitist intellectual is immune to involuntary distraction. Baudelaire, for instance, “succumbs”
to the intoxicating experience of urban modernity, too (Benjamin 1999:11). And Gissing’s New Grub Street acknowledges that even clever people “really can’t fix
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one’s attention in traveling” and would find “even an article in newspaper” “too long”
(377), thus implying that the short attention span so scathingly mocked at earlier in the novel is probably caused not just by taste or education, but also by the context of the reading. Distraction is thus a collective experience that happens to all people immersed in the new mass culture. The content of the women’s mass reading may be steeped in manipulation, but the meaning of their reading process, of their use of the reading, cannot be divorced from its condition of reception, from their daily context of reading, and the nature of this reading as part of their immersion in cityscape and in rapidly changing urban scenes.
It is the concept of distraction not simply as inattention, but also as attention paid elsewhere, that is particularly useful here. In the “Work of Art” essay, distraction is seen as a habitual repetition of something often in the process of doing something else (Benjamin 1968: 242). While a competent performance of something without thinking about it implies certain mastery of skills, distraction also involves attention paid elsewhere, as one is distracted by something which fleetingly catches the eye, something readily recognizable but glimpsed in a new light. It is this combination of the familiar and the new that characterizes the reading mode of the mass women readers, who as new entrants into the modern urban scene, really use their mass reading as a crucial part of their reading and knowledge of the urban cityscape. The reading of the mass publications, often consumed during bus or train rides (New Grub
Street 376) while the women readers are physically immersed in an urban landscape
of commercialized spectacle, lead to a greater slippage between the literary text and the urban text. The distracted and fragmentary nature of their mass readings which often address them as shoppers, blends them into a greater urban experience that, though subjecting them to the additional forces of commercial manipulation, also contributes to their new insight into and knowledge of the urban landscape. Certainly here their experience is no longer simply distraction as oblivion and inability to get knowledge. Reading as part of their daily life activities, of going around in buses and trains, thus has to blend in with these activities and gains meanings from there.A final point worth mentioning is the hidden gender dimension behind the concept of distraction. For a concept attributed to the filmic experience of the 1920s, when a large part of such filmic audiences was distinctly female, the links between distraction and a specifically feminine way of reception seem to need more detailed exposure. Benjamin does not mention the linkage, but the term’s often negative connotations actually evade the urgent social issues behind, particularly the expansion of social and political freedom for women and the identification of the feminine as a threat to the male bourgeoisie, represented in Gissing, for instance, in the opposition between a masculine, individual and auratic way of reading and a feminine (by
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women or by a feminized, non-intellectual way of reading), mass and distracted way of cultural experience. Even Kracauer, in a less often quoted essay than “Cult of Distraction”, reveals the underlying sexism behind the concept. In “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies”, Kracauer dismisses tiller-girls, typists and shopgirls as devoid in judgment and giving themselves over to the “daydream” of films (292).
Here the utopian and radical possibilities of distraction as envisaged in his “Cult of Distraction” essay are given over to rather elitist disdain for the mass female audience whose tasteless, oblivious surrender is seen as responsible for the embarrassingly low standard of film production. Kracauer does acknowledge the new predominance of women among film spectators, but in envisaging a positive perception of distraction as the new mode of film reception, he obviously does not have the “little shopgirls” in mind.14
Yet if distraction in all its many nuances is to characterize the new collective mode of cultural experience, as both Kracauer and Benjamin argue, then it would be self-defeating to exclude women who constitute a large consumer of such forms of mass culture. In fact the “tactile appropriation” seen by Benjamin as a key trait of distraction applies to what is traditionally viewed as a specifically feminine way of reception, as the visual is seen to appeal to the senses, without going to the mind, and as women are usually seen as particularly prone to and good at such visual/sensual functions. Distraction is thus linked inextricably to a feminine or feminized mode of perception which also characterizes the new mass mode of modern cultural
experience. A discussion of distraction must therefore demonstrate awareness of the hidden though very significant feminine associations behind. It must also
acknowledge that the positive potential of distraction as set out by Benjamin and Kracauer, just as equally applies to the reception mode of the mass female audience.
The mass female reader, shopgirls and all, of the turn-of-the-century women’s publications, is no exception.
14 For more on Kracauer’s early writings on film, see Hake 155-63.