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Suspensions of Perception

Crary's 1999 extension of his framework to the history of attention — the capacity that was simultaneously the foundation of individual freedom and the managed resource of industrial capitalism.

Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (MIT Press, 1999) traces a paradox at the heart of modernity: attention was celebrated as the capacity that made autonomous thought possible, and it was simultaneously the resource that industrial capitalism required, managed, and exploited. The history of modernity, Crary argued, could be read as the progressive refinement of techniques for capturing, directing, and sustaining attention in service of institutional demands — occurring in tandem with the celebration of attention as the basis of free, creative, individual consciousness. Through readings of Manet, Seurat, and Cézanne, alongside archival work on the scientific study of attention from Wundt's laboratory forward, Crary showed how the aesthetic and the managerial converged on the same cognitive capacity.

In The You On AI Field Guide

The book's central move was to refuse the opposition between distraction and concentration — to show that both states are products of the same attentional economy, differently calibrated for different purposes. The scattered attention of

In The You On AI Field Guide

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