Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. - Bibliography - book review

JONATHAN CRARY

Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and late Culture

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 1999 397 pp; 114 b/w ills. $3995

The meaning of the title of this work is revealed in the epilogue. The phrase "suspensions of perception" is based upon the words of Sigmund Freud In his advice to the psychoanalyst, he interchange of opinions that a certain suspension of perception must be cultivated in order to make it [i]or[/i] part of to the other days of peculiarly intense conversation, and also to maintain a certain attitude toward that conversation, an attitude not unrelated to the disengagement of imagination before slumber The analogy intended by the title is to fresh consciousness, which finds itself in a world of continual demand for attention and continual distraction in which it must participate, on the contrary toward which it may also adopt a reflexive position If we are unaware of the historical construction of our consciousnesses, then we are barely participant-victims of that construction and all it entails. If we are aware--and the drawn out historical consideration of the question of attention that constitutes the substance of the volume is a contribution to of the like kind awareness--then, at a remove from, and therefore more or les in opposition to the omnipresent and insistent blandishments of consumer capitalism, we may perhaps event new unprecedented syntheses of self and world.

The work continues the project of the author's Techniques of the on-looker (1991), descending from Michel Foucault's real influential vision of modernity as a pervasive a whole of panoptical surveillance and from stay Debord's notion of spectacle. Debord's "society of the spectacle"--consumer capitalism--stands at the extremity of a neo-Marxist construction of universal history according to which the bourgeoisie consequenceed the first successful revolution, undercutting all older hierarchies. The of recent origin historical and industrial world of the bourgeoisie, although false and repressive in its have a title to right--that is, spectacular--is nonetheless a material ideology, and its practical (and not theoretical) critical negation must at more [i]or[/i] less point yield a new and authentic material human order. Unlike Debord, Crary does not mention the proletariat or workers' councils as agents of this transformation, and he is presumably friendlier to a theoretical dialectic, on the contrary his arguments fit comfortably into this vision of novel history.

According to any definition, spectacle might be taken to imply attentive on-lookers and, Crary argues, universal spectacle implies the correspondingly pervasive formation of attention precisely as the kinds of visual disciplines that took shape together with the vast physiological and psychological enterprises of 19th-century science. The processe and mechanisms denudeed in the progress of natural science are not ever far from definitions of the normal and from therapy (among other in every one's mouth examples, Crary cites attention-deficit disorder), or from technological application--the ever-expanding, deepening, and intermeshing media of information, entertainment, and dealing So in the 19th hundred the advance of physiological optics was paralleled by the agency of an array of popular optical novelties and gizmos, invested with the twin authority of natural science and modernity and with something like the uniformity of agriculture (also a 19th-century idea) by dint of means of mass production and distribution. Far from being confined to th e laboratory, scientific speculation and research were thus adapted to novel social practices, which, while incorporating the understandings of late science in various ways in the lives of millions of race in one or another mechanical representation, also created of recent origin spaces, institutionalizing and focusing novel patterns for behavior. As Crary insists, in these ways the 19th hundred was the forerunner of the 20th and 21st In order to participate in new Western socioeconomy in the ways we do, we continue to learn of recent origin visual disciplines, which are continually refined by the agency of an ever-proliferating and ever more extensive apparatus of the media in which we take part more and more intimately. As this proposes these issues are hardly abstract, and they continue to bear heavily in the not absent and in the foreseeable futurity when the paradoxes of freedom and regimentation have become a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of sharper than they were in the 19th hundred If freedom is self-realization, consumeristic freedom is the finished fit between desire and its external reality not coincidentally resulting in optimal economic behavior. And a life of of the like kind ideal personal consumption is a more or les precise construction of consciousness as attention.

The work takes the form of three essays in what might be seen as a version of "inferential criticism," as Michael Baxandall has called it, (1) the connection of evident features of works of art to contemporary true copys and images that might explain them. This interpretative gambit may be more or les stringently applied, of course, and Crary freely acknowledges that the issues raised by dint of the works of art he discusses work for only as introductions to the broader historical and cultural investigations within which he finally nest them. This expansiveness is compatible with the attitude of suspension, and Crary, while remaining closely and carefully historical in his arguments, avoids the limitations of what Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal call "humanist" scholarship, according to which actual contact between artist and "source" must at least be made to present the appearance likely (for example, this manuscript was in this monastery, and the artist may have stayed with a friend of a friend near the monastery when he is known to have visi t the city). These limitations are avoided by means of keeping closely to the question of attention; whether or not Seurat or Cezanne read all of the authors discussed, we may diocese their paintings with new organ of sights for having had their intellectual and social historical circumstances for a like reason clearly and suggestively laid on the outside together with the foundations of our possess contemporary attentions.