In his new book, Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, Caleb Smith explores how a diverse set of writers and thinkers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century raised alarms about a crisis of attention and distraction. Read our interview with him below.
Tell me about your title. Why did you choose it?
Smith: Well, one thing about the axe is that it didn’t really belong to Thoreau. He borrowed it from a friend. In Walden, he tells a little story about breaking this axe. One day he, he says, while he had been building his house, his axe “had come off.” In other words, the head of the axe got separated from the handle. This happens when you are working with an old-fashioned axe, especially if you’re not paying attention. It happened to Thoreau. He had to make a new piece for his axe, a part called a wedge, to hold the axe head securely in place.
Thoreau doesn’t say much about breaking the axe, but I think the incident bothered him. He was out there in the woods because he wanted greater self-reliance, and breaking his friend’s axe must have been a reminder of the debts he owed to other people. He went on to brag that the axe was in better shape when he returned it than it had been when he borrowed it. I liked the idea of the axe as a token of this ongoing dependency.
Most significantly, though, the broken axe was testament to inattentiveness. Thoreau’s mind was somewhere else, not on the task at hand. As he was repairing the tool, Thoreau tells us, he saw a little snake slide across the ground, into some water near his worksite. He describes the snake as “torpid,” and he thinks about how most people, most of the time, go through their days in that kind of dull, inattentive state. So I read the story of the axe in Walden as a parable about distraction. Thoreau was not just building himself a house. He was trying to repair his damaged mind.
Is there a throughline from your first book to this one? An interest or theme that recurs or unites them all?
Smith: Discipline is the throughline. In The Prison and the American Imagination, I looked at the origins of the modern penitentiary systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead of hanging, or torture, or public humiliation, the state started incarcerating people by the thousands, with the purported aim of rehabilitating them for work and social integration. The book began as my dissertation. I was reading Michel Foucault and George Jackson and other radical thinkers who had tried to understand the genealogy of prisons. At the same time, I was trying to help build a new interdisciplinary field, critical prison studies, which has become a major research program over the past two or three decades.
My training was in literary studies, so I was especially focused on the rhetoric of prison reform, and I wanted to understand the social imaginary—the shared repertoire of values and stock images and common sense—that made prison seem like a promising idea. I also found that American writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Faulkner and Jimmy Santiago Baca, had taken an interest in the prison as an institution that transforms the people it holds captive.
Later, I authenticated and edited Austin Reed’s prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (1858), a story about coming of age as a “free” Black man who was in fact confined, for most of his life, in the juvenile reformatories and industrial prisons of New York State. More recently, my American Quarterly essay on Jack Hodges took up a set of popular publications from the 1830s and forties—trial reports, children’s books, sermons, and a spiritual biography—that depicted another free Black man’s prison conversion. Most of my work on prison discipline was in the mode of interdisciplinary critique, in a more or less Foucauldian style. I was showing how the promise of rehabilitation entailed a premise of submission. You may imagine that you are training yourself, becoming the master of yourself, but at the same time you are internalizing the discipline that has been imposed on you by some outside authority.
When I started working on Thoreau’s Axe, I was thinking along these lines. We are always being told to pay attention, to take responsibility for our own focus; when we get distracted, we feel guilty for it. But making people pay attention is part of institutional discipline—in prisons, churches, schools, and so on. So I had a perverse impulse to do a critique of attention, in the midst of all this moral panic about distraction.
In the end, though, the book became something else. It still has a lot to say about punishment and social control. I do think that we have to see that part of the story. But in Thoreau’s Axe I ended up wanting to describe the kind of discipline that I do believe in. Along with the critique of top-down social control, along with the history of the economic and political forces that shape a culture of distraction, I needed to affirm the kinds of counter-discipline that give us some measure of control over our time and work. The book comes around to a wary embrace of figures who found, in spiritual exercises and disciplines of attention, some weird, alternative ways of life, labor, and intimacy. And so it is a return but also a revision, in a more ambivalent key.
What led you to the study of American literature? Person, place, or text?
Smith: I was led to the study of literature, first of all. I thought “America” was kind of a corny idea. When I was growing up, in a college town in Arkansas, I was part of a little rag-tag bunch of anti-Reaganite kids who rode skateboards, played in bands, and poured our hearts out in poems and stories for our public high school’s literary magazine. For us, literature was not high cultural capital. The power belonged to business and churches. Literature—Ginsburg, Plath, Dostoevsky, whatever—was for nerds and freaks. It took us to another realm. In Thoreau’s Axe I mention one of my friends who used to skip school to play his horn all day. He would go until his lips were bleeding. He became a great musician. He was treated as a delinquent, but he was practicing his own kind of discipline.
All through college and graduate school, I guess I nurtured this romantic idea, a fantasy if you want to call it that, that reading and writing was not some pre-professional training, and definitely not preserving a high cultural tradition, but an artform for outsiders. I saw literature as continuous with dissent and mischief and spiritual rebellion.
I did end up dwelling with American literature, not literature in general. I always felt that I could understand it best. American accents, American habits of thought and phrasing—I was raised with those, and I had a feeling for their subtleties. When I tried to write about literature from somewhere else, I worried that I was missing some connotation or some shade of meaning that would have been obvious to a more fluent reader.
I was in the middle of graduate school in 2001, during the September 11 attacks. And that was a political reawakening. My friends and I got involved in protesting the War on Terror. Sites like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were on my mind; I touched on them in my first book. American literature was bound up with the political conditions that felt most pressing and intolerable to me.
What current trends excite you about literary criticism, especially those happening in the field of American literature?
Smith: I still light up when someone makes a serious effort to theorize discipline, power, and subjection. Saidiya Hartman’s work has been a constant source of illumination and provocation for me. Kyla Schuller’s The Biopolitics of Feeling was a real step forward, bringing Foucault’s analysis of biopower to bear on antebellum American race science and reform. Keith Greene’s Bound to Respect surprised me, even after I thought I knew the terrain of antebellum incarceration very well. Jeannine DeLombard’s In the Shadow of the Gallows is a monumental achievement; if you want to understand the development of a multiethnic American literature from the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries, you have to read the crime genres and the conversion narratives.
Along the way, I have become more and more interested in new work on literature and religion. Critics are moving beyond the old secularization narrative, taking religion more seriously as a force in American culture. John Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America, Emily Odgen’s Credulity, Ana Schwartz’s Unmoored—these books are models of thinking but also of writing.
When Thoreau’s Axe came out I organized a celebration with three of my intellectual heroes who published new books at the same time: Jennifer Fleissner’s Maladies of the Will, Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something, and Virginia Jackson’s Before Modernism. Those are three big, scholarly books, deeply learned in traditions of philosophy and aesthetic theory. These days, academic writing is routinely denigrated, by journalists and anti-intellectuals but also by a lot of academics themselves. But when I read these books, or when I come across a new journal article by Sianne Ngai, I see the erudition, the subtlety of argument, and the sustained reflection on a difficult problem, and I remember that there is nothing else like it.
The book casts a critical eye at the role that discipline played in the fight against distraction. Because many of us practice it or aspire to practice it, we are familiar with individuals attempting to reclaim their fractured attention by devoting themselves to one disciplinary regime or another. But discipline plays a much more sinister role when it comes not from within but from without. Talk, if you would, about the role that prisons played in the battle over attention and distraction.
Smith: This was one of the main justifications for putting people into solitary cells: In there, you won’t be distracted. You’ll be away from the bad influences and temptations that got you into trouble. You can break your old, bad habits and learn new ones. You can focus on your penitence (the root of penitentiary).
Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary was a radical experiment in these principles: every convict in a solitary cell. Over time, the design fell out of favor because it didn’t allow for industrial production. You can’t operate a factory around solitary cells. You have to bring the men into workshops; you have to coordinate their labor.
In places like Auburn State Prison, the real model of industrial prison discipline, the officials solved this problem by imposing a strict rule of silence. No talking, no eye contact, no passing notes. The idea was that you would be spiritually isolated, even while you were working in a group. If you broke the rules, you could be flogged or put through all kinds of awful punishments. All this in the name of cultivating a perfect focus.
Teaching in prisons today, I have also seen how they devolve into an atmosphere of chaos and confusion and arbitrary enforcement. The old ideal of the penitentiary was a quiet, regimented atmosphere. The reality of our overcrowded system is often the opposite: noise, violence, an absence of mental and physical security. In this context, people find ingenious ways to create time and space for focused study. So you might say that the old form of penitentiary discipline is being reinvented, spontaneously, as a form of counter-discipline.
I want to ask you about the form of the book. You liken it to a book of devotions, wherein writers take brief passages from the Bible or other religious texts and use them as occasions to reflect upon the spiritual life. In your book, you draw from an archive of individuals writing about attention and use the passages to reflect on the disciplines of distraction that grew up around them. In effect, you practice (very well I might add!) a form of close reading. Yet elsewhere in the book—if I am reading you right—you worry that close reading is itself a discipline of distraction. Did the relationship between the form of the book and its argument give you pause? Or did one lend itself to the other? Where do you stand now on the possibilities and limitations of close reading?
Smith: I’ve published three books now, and I’ve had the same experience each time: After a few years of research and drafting, I find the right structure. I see the form that the book will take, how the pieces fit together, so that it moves in a clear way from the beginning to the end. For me, this shape is more than a container for the book’s argument. The shape is the argument. This form that I compose, this sequence of thought, is my answer to the question that the book has posed.
The same thing happened with Thoreau’s Axe. When I saw that I could compose it in these 28 short exercises, arranged into four sections, I found the form that suited my idea. And in this case it really is an idea about reading, not just about the history of attention and distraction.
In college and graduate school I learned about the canon wars and theory wars and method wars that played out in literary studies. I read attacks on the New Criticism that described close reading as a reactionary idea, trying to detach poetry from politics. I became a historicist partly because I wanted to think about those things together (and also, if I’m being honest, because historicism allowed me to write my little narratives, which felt something like writing literature, even as I was also making arguments).
But like I said, I wasn’t really raised in an environment where rich, powerful people aligned themselves with “the canon.” So those debates, for me, were part of a professional discourse, strictly academic. I only learned about the political criticism of literature once I had made my way into prestigious universities. I can’t really imagine reading without thinking about power and history, but then I also wouldn’t want to think about anything at all without routing my thinking through the best kind of beautifully crafted writing.
The form I used in Thoreau’s Axe, the scheme of the old-fashioned book of devotion, was originally designed for spiritual exercises. I wanted to understand these spiritual exercises, or what I call disciplines of attention. But I also wanted to practice them, in my own peculiar and maybe perverse style—reading as a counterdiscipline of attention.
We might imagine that religious reading was always stupid or embarrassingly submissive. In American schools, we talk about “critical” reading in terms that go back to the enlightenment notions of detachment and secular reason. I think that’s why The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible were in the curriculum of my public schools: we were supposed to be horrified by the repressiveness of the theocratic past. The school is disciplining you, telling you to do your homework and stay quiet in your seat and all of that. But at the same time it is teaching you how to become a critical reader, how to be rational. Education is part of the long liberation from the religious domination of the Dark Ages, or Puritan morality. So you are supposed to see the school discipline not as repressive, but as part of your emancipation.
It was easy for me to accept that way of thinking about education, partly because in Arkansas in the 1980s the churches did have a lot of political power, and they have it again now. But then I learned from reading Foucault and Talal Asad how to see the disciplinary aspects of secularism itself. It’s naïve to think that either side, the rational or the spiritual, is going to liberate you once and for all. And when it comes to reading, the simply opposition between critical reading and religious reading (I might add, between critique and postcritique) finally traps our thinking in a limited, oversimple framework. Devotional reading, in the traditions that I look at in Thoreau’s Axe, was about trying to open oneself up to the power of scripture or some other religious text, but this practice was always imperfect. The practitioner was bound to experience distraction, confusion, and resistance. Paying attention to these aspects of the reading experience could become part of the devotional exercise in its own right.
The book is about attention and distraction in roughly the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It ascribes the anxiety about distraction in this period to the market revolution and new media, including and especially the popular press. As I read the book, though, I kept thinking of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction by Jamie Kreiner. For Kreiner, who studies monks in the early Middle Ages, distraction is not a modern phenomenon but part of the human condition. If so, then what leads one culture to worry about distraction more than another?
Smith: I think there are two common ways of telling the story about distraction. The most obvious one starts with smartphones, social media, and the Internet. Every day there are news reports about online bullying, porn, disinformation, and so on. There are epidemics of depression and loneliness. I think that these reports are really about capitalism, which keeps us constantly plugged in as workers and shoppers. But they are presented (misrepresented) as problems about our addiction to technology, so that business can appear to offer its own solutions in the form of mindfulness training, self-help books, and so on. That’s how moral panics work, ideologically.
Then there is a second story, which comes from religion: It says that we have always been distracted. Distractability is an innate moral weakness, part and parcel of our fallen human nature. And there is some truth to this story, as well: look at the early Christian ascetics, or look at the classical ethics that Foucault was studying at the end of his life, or look at Kreiner’s monks, and you will see that the whole history of self-culture, going back to ancient times, has had something to do with overcoming distraction and managing one’s own attention.
Distraction is a longstanding problem, and so is the anxiety about distraction. But I also think that something specific happened in the early nineteenth century. Something changed. People had always been distracted, but now they began to see and feel that they were being distracted in new ways, by new forces—not by the devil, or by their own unruly appetites and passions, but by the new economic and social infrastructure of their time. It was a key moment in the history of distraction because it was the moment when distraction came to be understood as historical. Distraction was a perennial danger, but it was intensifying with wage labor, the penny press, the urban marketplace of consumer goods. But this line of thinking, in American culture, only went so far. Even as people could see that the economy was causing their distraction, they still described the problem in moral terms and looked for personal, moral remedies. This is the dilemma that we inherited from them.
One of the delights of the book is learning about some of the more obscure figures from this period who took up the problem of attention and distraction. My favorite is Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette, a Creole mystic who sought a solitary life in the woods. You all but call him a proto-Thoreau. Do you have a favorite figure?
Smith: As far as I can tell, readers of the book have focused mostly on the famous writers—Thoreau, of course, but also Dickinson, Douglas, Poe, and Whitman. So I’m grateful to you for lifting up the minor figures. I do have a special affection for these obscure people, partly because I feel that I rediscovered some of them, such as Rouquette, whose work has hardly been studied at all. Jack Hodges, likewise: here is an incarcerated Black man whose life story was told in multiple versions and genres, who left a rich record in the archives, but scholars have not had anything to say about this case, partly because it does not conform to our familiar scripts about race and prison.
But since you asked me to pick one, I’ll choose the forgotten Pennsylvania poet Abraham Jacobs. He was a teacher in a rural school, and he suffered a stroke or some other debilitating event, so he went back home to live with his parents, on their family farm. He probably did some light work, whatever he was capable of. But his main labor was composing a book of devotional poems. He wrote 366 of them—one for every day of the year, including leap day, February 29. The poems are wild. Sometimes trite, sometimes apocalyptic. He tries out various forms and rhyme schemes. But what I really like about Jacobs is how he devised a way to live a monk’s life in a Protestant community. Out of his disability, he derived a special kind of authorization.
In the section on schools and prisons, but really throughout the book, you take reformers to task for advocating private solutions to the public causes of scattered attention and addling distraction. “Rather than regulating industries or redistributing wealth,” you write, reformers “offered regiments of personal improvement to the middle and laboring classes.” Or, more pithily, reformers sought to “change hearts, not the class structure.” Thinking about this line of argument, I was left wondering a couple of things. First, do you have anyone or any group in mind at this time who was trying to regulate industry and redistribute wealth? And second, how would changing the class structure cure distraction? Or is the anxiety about distraction really just an outgrowth of the class structure?
Smith: Well, the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848; it is more or less contemporary with Thoreau’s Walden. Part of the New England intellectuals’ world was Orestes Brownson, who had some radical ideas. My book deals in passing with some of the utopian communities, which were small-scale experiments, trying to figure out a way to organize themselves without private property. And Rouquette, who was living among the Choctaw people around Lake Pontchartrain, appreciated their economic and cultural practices by contrast to the “age of machines of money” that he saw taking hold of New Orleans. There was radical abolitionism, as advocated by Douglas; his proposals would have required a redistribution of wealth, since the enslaved were appraised as part of their masters’ wealth. So I think this was an era when alternatives to the existing economic structure were at least imaginable.
And then, if you look at it from another point of view, there was an active redistribution going on. It was not socialism or reparations. Instead, it was redistribution in the upward direction, going into the hands of the rich, through the dispossession of indigenous lands, the exploitation of slave labor, the shift to industrialized production, and so on.
My argument is not that distraction is an effect of the class structure, at least not of the structure as such. Distraction is not a mode of class resentment. Instead, I try to show how distraction is an effect of economic processes, or activities. Rather than a psychic or emotional sense of inferiority, it’s the cumulative distress of overwork and overconsumption. On one hand, accelerating demands for productivity. On the other, proliferating compulsions—or endless “options”—to buy stuff and consume.
Everyone knows by heart the crises facing the humanities in general and English in particular: the declining number of majors, the grim job market, the falloff of leisure reading among teenagers. Despite these crises, does anything give you hope? Or would any show of optimism now just seem, to coin a phrase, cruel?
Smith: Yes, the crisis if familiar, but it is also compounding and changing as we speak. I think that the situation in the critical humanities is going to keep getting worse, and most of us working in universities are very poorly equipped to respond. A lot of us have internalized the broader culture’s profound contempt for “academia.” And we have tended to redescribe problems of political economy as problems of method or ethics, so that we can deal with them by doing what we already know how to do, namely argue against each other. If I have any hope for the future, it might start with our being forced, very painfully, to give up this illusion. The political attacks on higher education are not going to be appeased by reforming how we read, write, or teach. We will have to organize and fight for the value of education itself. At my university we recently founded a new chapter of the AAUP, and those meetings, with faculty from across all of the disciplines, from law and medicine to analytic philosophy, all finding a common commitment, feel meaningful to me.
When you receive tenure at Penn State, you get to choose one book from the library and put a plate on the inside back cover explaining to students and anyone else who checks it out why the book mattered to you and why it should matter to others. Every year, the library displays all the newly selected books and their plates. The celebration restores some of my faith in the mission of the research university.
Which book would you choose and what would you say about it?
Smith: I’m going to indulge in a sentimental choice, in memory of one of my old teachers: The Political Unconscious, by Fredric Jameson, who died in September at the age of 90. This book is the strongest statement of Jameson’s critical philosophy. His view of “the political” comes from the tradition of dialectical thought, especially from Marxism. His idea of the “unconscious” comes from psychoanalysis. He teaches us how to analyze literature and cinema historically, as the dreamworks of the societies that created them. At the same time, though, this kind of critical reading requires that we open ourselves up to aesthetic experience, to the kinds of pleasure and desire that the artwork conveys. That’s where the power is: in the beauty.