#jonathan crary

[twinkubus]

Everyone, we are told—not just businesses and institutions—needs an “online presence,” needs 24/7 exposure, to avoid social irrelevance or professional failure. But the promotion of these alleged benefits is a cover for the transfer of most social relations into monetized and quantifiable forms. It is equally a shift of individual life to conditions in which privacy is impossible, and in which one becomes a permanent site of data-harvesting and surveillance.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary

[funeral]

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception

[twinkubus]

There is an effective prohibition not only on the critique of mandatory technological consumption but also on the articulation of how existing technical capabilities and premises could be deployed in the service of human and social needs, rather than the requirements of capital and empire. The narrow and monopolized set of electronic products and services available at any given moment masquerades as the all-enveloping phenomenon of “technology.” Even a partial refusal of the intensively marketed offerings of multinational corporations is construed as opposition to technology itself.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary

[funeral]

The only consistent factor connecting the otherwise desultory succession of consumer products and services is the intensifying integration of one's time and activity into the parameters of electronic exchange. Billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to reduce decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time of reflection and contemplation. This is the form of contemporary progress—the relentless capture and control of time and experience.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

[funeral]

The promotion and adoption of wireless technologies, and their annihilation of the singularity of place and event, is simply an aftereffect of new institutional requirements. In its despoliation of the rich textures and indetermination of human time, 24/7 simultaneously incites an unsustainable and self-liquidating identification with its fantastic requirements; it solicits an open-ended but always unfinished investment in the many products for facilitating this identification. It does not eliminate experiences external to or unreliant on it, but it does impoverish and diminish them.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

[milksockets]

tricks of the light: essays on art and spectacle - jonathan crary

[dog-uncrushed]

...attention is the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception its own, and attention is at the same time a means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies.

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception 5

[probablyasocialecologist]

We are living amid the mounting consequences of believing human actions to be independent of the world of which we are a part. But, as long as we conceive of our task as the staving off of an impending planetary catastrophe, we fail to understand, as Walter Benjamin and many others have said, that the real catastrophe is the perpetuation of the way things are and have been, of all the forms of imperial violence, economic injustice, racial and sexual terror, and ecological ravagement. It’s a moment when the continuities and habituations of the present need to be disrupted and when gradualism in political praxis is no longer an option.

Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World