Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (October Books) - Hardcover

Crary, Jonathan

3.96

126 ratings by Goodreads

9780262032650: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (October Books)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262032651 ISBN 13: 9780262032650

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Winner, 2000 Lionel Trilling Award given by Columbia College.

Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle.

Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices.

Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. A founding editor of Zone Books, he is the author of Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990) and coeditor of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992). He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

From Publishers Weekly:

Is human vision universal and largely unchanging, or historically conditioned? What happened to the Western understanding of vision when the camera obscuraAa simple pinhole camera popular in the 17th and 18th centuriesAgave way to the Kodak? Columbia University art historian Crary brings a multidisciplinary approach to such questions, and though his work is densely written for an academic audience, it can be fun to read if only for the illustrations of such wacky 19th-century optical toys and devices as the phenakistiscope and the Kaiserpanorama. The book's focus is the cultural function and meaning of an ideal of "attentiveness," which reveals that the contemporary prognosis of "attention deficit disorder" has roots in much earlier anxieties about the failure of concentrated perception. Examining a vast range of scientific writings, works of art and objects from the world of early mass entertainment, Crary argues that 19th-century European culture became obsessed with a perceived breakdown in attentionAas focus and concentration seemed to give way to trance, reverie, monomania and hypnosis. At well over twice the length of Crary's earlier book (1990's elegant Techniques of the Observer), this volume is comparatively unfocused and loosely organized. Extended analysis of three central oil paintings by Manet, Seurat and C?zanne promisesAbut never quite managesAto unify all the heterogeneous material into a coherent whole.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.