Book Review

Method/Theory

In this book, Jonathan Crary continues the meditation he began in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Ninteenth Century (1990), on the changes modern society and culture have effected in our manner of perceiving the world, both in theory and in actuality, and on the reflections of these changes to be found in visual art. Crary is a luminary of the school of art and cultural history associated with the journal October, and his approach combines a still-confident and assertive Marxism with ideas and schemas taken over from Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Those readers who believe that the paths blazed by these figures promise great discoveries will likely think that Crary's work throws powerful new light on important regions of modern culture, while those who worry that such pathways are brightly lit culs-de-sac may find that the intellectual energy expended is largely wasted. Even the latter, however should be impressed by the range and depth of Crary's knowledge and interests and by the vigor of his imagination.

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Crary's argument is that the central place given to the notion of "attention" in psychology and aesthetic practice starting in the second half of the nineteenth century was (and remains) a response to the growing disorder and incoherence of social experience under advanced capitalism: attentiveness was a self-defeating strategy for salvaging stability and wholeness where none could be maintained. Modernity spawns an ongoing "crisis of attentiveness," as "the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds." But "the articulation of a subject in terms of attentive capacities simultaneously disclosed a subject incapable of conforming to such disciplinary imperatives" (pp. 13–14). The problematic of attentiveness "is a sign, not so much of the subject's disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality" (p. 45).

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