Jonathan Crary: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999)

“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.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
October Books series
ISBN 0262531992, 9780262531993
397 pages

Reviews: Juliet Koss (CAA Reviews, 2000), Jodi Brooks (Screening the Past, 2000), Steven Z. Levine (Bryn Mawr College, 2001), Kimberly Lamm (Cultural Critique, 2002).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2024-3-3)

Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010)

“Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.

Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.”

Publisher Knopf, 2010
ISBN 0307269647, 9780307269645
224 pages

Reviews: Adam Thierer (Technology Liberation Front, 2010), Clive Thompson (Bookforum, 2010).

Book website
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-4-3)
EPUB, EPUB (added on 2012-7-15, updated on 2019-4-3)

Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2006)

Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan’s work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan’s seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.

Translated by Bruce Fink
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2006
ISBN 0393329259, 9780393329254
Length 878 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF