부산대학교 도서관

Walter Benjamin’s lifelong engagement with the interplay between attention and distraction included not only photography but also film as well as literature, visual art, and history. Indeed, his work represents one of the most complex and sustained engagements with the dynamics of attention and distraction in the twentieth century. The chapter puts this engagement into a wider context, starting with the attentional research published in the psychology journal edited by William Stern, the inventor of psychotechnics, who was also Benjamin’s cousin by marriage. Benjamin encountered this research, which emphasizes the constructive role of distraction in enhancing mental focus, while still at university; it underpins his own writings on this complex subject, where Benjamin engages with the dialectical nature of attention, which can arise out of or give way to contrasting states. Another formative influence is the work of his sister Dora Benjamin, whose mental health exhibition, which opened in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1929, used new, experimental techniques to bait visitors’ attention and prevent passive consumption. Benjamin’s exhibition review praises these innovative strategies; he returns to this issue in his writings on modern culture and technology, particularly in his essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935). Here, Benjamin rejects traditional contemplation and endorses distraction as the mindset most appropriate for the challenges of the modern age; the final part of the chapter, however, looks at his essays on literature and his historical writings, where contemplation is rehabilitated and discussed alongside Geistesgegenwart (presence of mind) as a vital tool of intellectual enquiry and critique.