Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

“This book is based on the assumption that the ways in which we intently listen to, look at, or concentrate on anything have a deeply historical character” (1). Crary argues that the Western modernist project changed the ways in which individuals engaged visual or auditory information. Wants to link changes in perception and attention to social, philosophical and aesthetic developments in the late 19^th century and to link all this to broader (political) developments in the 20^th century. Attention, as Crary argues, is “a means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies” (5).

Crary speaks of ‘perceptual field’ which includes discursive objects, material practices, representational strategies, ‘ways of seeing’ and which is involved in the production of effects of power and new types of subjectivities (7). It allows for his justification why modernist artists are a good empirical material in his case: “each of them engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field” (9). “Attention thus became an imprecise way of designing the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world” (17). By the late 19^th century, “attention was not part of a particular regime of power but rather part of a space in which new conditions of subjectivity were articulated, and thus a space in which effects of power operated and circulated” (24). “In the late nineteenth century attention became a problem alongside the specific systemic organization of labor and production of industrial capitalism” (30). “The later nineteenth century saw the onset of a relentless colonization ‘free’ or leisure time… at the end of the twentieth century, the loosely connected machinic network for electronic work, communication, and consumption has not only demolished what little had remained of the distinction between leisure and labor but has come, in large arenas of Western social life, to determine how temporality is inhabited” (77-78).