"We Become Death": An Essay on Distraction

Abstract

Abstract

Distraction is often held by the relevant literature to be an environmental factor, a nuissance at best, at worst a danger that must be suppressed and eradicated. Through our essay, we seek to outline an alternative approach to the aesthetics of distraction. We argue that deviant noise has an important role to play in philosophy, aesthetics and media studies, for it is more than mere distraction. Distracting, noisy entities, in actuality, bring to our attention the finitude of our existence, highlighting the everpresent immanence of death. We may even arrive at a kind of community with the Otherness of noise, cutting through networks of control and arriving at acceptance of impossibility. The deviant that distracts is actually an invitation for us to rethink our relation to the environment and, indeed, the at times rigid borderlines separating subjectivity from the ecology of its own finitude.

Keywords 

chaos, death, distraction, noise, redundancy