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

JONATHAN CRARY

Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 397 pp.; 114 b/w ills. $39.95

The meaning of the title of this book is revealed in the epilogue. The phrase "suspensions of perception" is based on the words of Sigmund Freud. In his advice to the psychoanalyst, he counsels that a certain suspension of perception must be cultivated in order to make it through 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 sleep. The analogy intended by the title is to modern consciousness, which finds itself in a world of continual demand for attention and continual distraction in which it must participate, but toward which it may also adopt a reflexive posture. If we are unaware of the historical construction of our consciousnesses, then we are merely participant-victims of that construction and all it entails. If we are aware--and the long historical consideration of the question of attention that constitutes the substance of the book is a contribution to such awareness--then, at a remove from, and therefore more or less in opposition to the omnipresent and insistent blandishments of consumer capitalism, we may perhaps effect new unprecedented syntheses of self and world.

The book continues the project of the author's Techniques of the Observer (1991), descending from Michel Foucault's very influential vision of modernity as a pervasive system of panoptical surveillance and from Guy Debord's notion of spectacle. Debord's "society of the spectacle"--consumer capitalism--stands at the end of a neo-Marxist construction of universal history according to which the bourgeoisie effected the first successful revolution, undercutting all older hierarchies. The new historical and industrial world of the bourgeoisie, although false and repressive in its own right--that is, spectacular--is nonetheless a material ideology, and its practical (and not theoretical) critical negation must at some 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, but his arguments fit comfortably into this vision of modern history.

According to any definition, spectacle might be taken to imply attentive observers, 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 processes and mechanisms uncovered in the progress of natural science are never far from definitions of the normal and from therapy (among other current examples, Crary cites attention-deficit disorder), or from technological application--the ever-expanding, deepening, and intermeshing media of information, entertainment, and commerce. So in the 19th century the advance of physiological optics was paralleled by 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 culture (also a 19th-century idea) by means of mass production and distribution. Far from being confined to th e laboratory, scientific speculation and research were thus adapted to new social practices, which, while incorporating the understandings of modern science in various ways in the lives of millions of people in one or another mechanical representation, also created new spaces, institutionalizing and focusing new patterns for behavior. As Crary insists, in these ways the 19th century was the forerunner of the 20th and 21st. In order to participate in modern Western socioeconomy in the ways we do, we continue to learn new visual disciplines, which are continually refined by an ever-proliferating and ever more extensive apparatus of the media in which we take part more and more intimately. As this suggests, these issues are hardly abstract, and they continue to bear heavily in the present and in the foreseeable future, when the paradoxes of freedom and regimentation have become much sharper than they were in the 19th century. If freedom is self-realization, consumeristic freedom is the perfect fit between desire and its object, not coincidentally resulting in optimal economic behavior. And a life of such ideal personal consumption is a more or less precise construction of consciousness as attention.

The book 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 texts and images that might explain them. This interpretative gambit may be more or less stringently applied, of course, and Crary freely acknowledges that the issues raised by the works of art he discusses serve only as introductions to the broader historical and cultural investigations within which he finally nests 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 seem 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 ted the city). These limitations are avoided by keeping closely to the question of attention; whether or not Seurat or Cezanne read all of the authors discussed, we may see their paintings with new eyes for having had their intellectual and social historical circumstances so clearly and suggestively laid out, together with the foundations of our own contemporary attentions.