Jonathan Crary

Metropolis  and  Our  Uncanny  Reality
Both Crary and Burch discuss the varying degrees and progression of different cinematic techniques and their effects on entertainment itself and the viewer. The progression of monocular and one-dimensional film into a more uncanny and three-dimensional experience creates disorientation between the subject and the viewer as experienced in Lang’s 1927 version of the acclaimed film Metropolis .

Finire dentro un vortice e farsene risucchiare, ci sembra una disgrazia, come inciampare su un sasso o ricevere una tegola in testa. Invece è un evento molto quotidiano, non facciamo che incontrare vortici, anche noi siamo vortici. Il vortice allaccia momentaneamente l'uno all'altro flussi che fino a quel momento si ignoravano. Dentro un vortice i flussi si rincorrono, si stringono, si sciolgono. La teoria della complessità ha scoperto nel vortice uno dei comportamenti fondamentali della materia fisica ma il vortice è una struttura energetica che riconosciamo anche nella società e nella vita dello spirito. Per studiare l'articolazione vorticosa dell'esperienza diventa utile ripercorrere con un nuovo sguardo alcune tappe filosofiche, letterarie e artistiche: il binomio volumen-rivoluzione di Sade, la sensazione in Merleau-Ponty, la visione mescalinica di Henri Michaux, gli ideogrammi poetici di Ezra Pound, il cinema zenoniano dei fratelli Safdie. Una corrente fatta di mulinelli attraversa i corpi e le idee, le azioni e le esitazioni, gli slanci e le ricadute, è capace di formare e distruggere mondi, stringere e sciogliere i nodi di cui è fatta l'esperienza, ogni esperienza.

The animation’s studies are still base on dichotomies such as fact/fiction, real/fake, natural/artificial. Such dichotomies characterize the animation’s studies from the beginning, even before the emergence of the moving image. New concept are growing today which are undermining the aforementioned concepts: changes characterized by a technological and an anthropological shift.
The essay aim at apply a media archaeology approach to animation creating a link between the pre-cinema era to the current era. Tracing back and re-read the theories and the story of animation could help us to better understand the new media landscape we are about to live.

ABSTRACT: This assay aims to make a brief review of 24/7 Late capitalism and the end of sleep by Jonathan Crary considering the thesis that every time the capitalist society tries to eliminate the dream/sleep and that the only counterpoint to capitalism would be in the dream atmosphere. In the contrast to Crary analysis, I suppose that the Western dream is not a counterpoint to capitalism, in this way, to criticize Crary analysis I turn to the Amerindian dream, to shamanism. It is taking into account the book The falling sky, by David Kopenawa and Bruce Albert that I think it is possible to deepen the criticism on Crary and propose another type of dream, the amerindian dream.

On Thomas Ruff’s “Jpegs,” the internet as an archive, mass media imagery, and photography after 9/11. Other artists: Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close, Louise Lawler, Laura Poitras, Vik Muniz, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and more. Theorists and writers: Vilém Flusser, Umberto Eco, Jonathan Crary, Benjamin Buchloh, Susan Sontag, David Levi Strauss, Nancy Princenthal, Don DeLillo, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, and more.

Introduction: In the Archive
Chapter One: Access / Absence
Chapter Two: Pixel Mosaic
Chapter Three: Snapshot Aesthetics
Conclusion: What Lies Behind the Image?

This essay both draws on and extends materialist efforts at rehabilitating the category of “nature” from critical disparagement and/or erasure. It does so by linking nature both to sleep and to the temporal heterogeneities that contemporary capital’s construal of time seeks but fails to eradicate. To explore these matters, I bring together Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018), and Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers (2019). These are works that trace how capital’s assault on nature is also an assault on temporal modalities that cannot be subsumed within homogeneous, empty time. They suggest that any reckoning with contemporary capitalism must include a retrieval of temporalities that are “natural” in the sense of belonging to biophysical processes predating and shaping human practice, yet historical inasmuch as they introduce the possibility of punctures into capital’s smooth functioning: pausing, interrupting, refusing to be swallowed by, or otherwise disturbing the temporal homogeneity required and enforced by the commodity form. Crary’s text and Walker’s novel are especially compelling for the way they tether these intimations to a collective experience of sleep.

The attached PDF is the author's final version. It differs from the printed version in some points such as page numbers and even some paragraphs. Please refer to the original version when you cite this. Thanks.
https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5051-8/violence-perception-video-games/

Au croisement des Quatre-Chemins, Katinka et Clara Gensburger, qui travaille aux Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, ont identifié un certain nombre de commerçants à qui elles ont proposé un échange. Katinka leur a remis une sculpture, le pliage d’une feuille de terre cuite, et en échange, chacun leur a donné un objet prélevé dans sa boutique (le boucher leur a donné une queue de bœuf, la boutique de mariage leur a remis un grand chapeau blanc, le magasin d’optique leur a donné une monture rouge, le papetier leur a donné une pile de feuilles de papier cadeau, la boulangerie une baguette au pavot, l’épicerie fine, une boîte de thé…). Ces objets, Katinka les a soumis à une nouvelle opération de pliage, les emballant dans une nouvelle feuille de terre cuite, et le tout a été envoyé au four pour être cuit. Voilà le processus de la pièce intitulée Zarba Lonsa.
L’opération n’est évidemment pas commerciale, et pourtant, elle s’inscrit dans le domaine de l’échange. Elle y fait entrer des éléments dont la valeur n’est en aucun point commensurable, des personnes qui ne sont jamais amenées à communiquer entre elles. Elle s’insère dans le lieu de l’échange, la boutique, mais en modifie les attendus autant que les résultats. Elle crée du lien, mais, à nouveau, un lien excessivement faible. Éphémère, cette rencontre est sans lendemain. Asymétrique, elle met en relation des éléments incapables de réellement communiquer. Elle repose sur l’incompétence de tous les acteurs.

Nosso estudo tem como proposta analisar o informe, conceito formulado por
Georges Bataille, aplicando-o nas obras Cent mille milliards de poèmes, de Raymond
Queneau, Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son, de Ken Jacobs, e Patterns: Divided, Mirrored,
Repeated, de Gerhard Richter. Essas obras se abrem, através de dilaceramentos, para a
impossibilidade de lhes fixar limites, uma vez que elas geram excessos de significados, que
têm como fundamento a instabilidade da forma. Nesse sentido, o paralelo entre literatura,
cinema e pintura se desenvolverá a partir das relações que o informe nos oferece, no momento
em que o percebemos como um processo de decomposição não apenas da matéria, mas do
próprio ato de ver, que se volta contra si mesmo, ao se amparar na violência do nonsense
contra a estabilidade das normas científicas e acadêmicas.

There is a relationship between modernity and boredom. People in modern society are more bored than people in previous societies. But why? Other authors have identified a number of candidates (alienation, atomization, disenchantment, rationalization, and so on). However, in this article I present a far more straightforward explanation: modern boredom is caused by the new ways in which people in modern society were made to pay attention.  If you cannot pay attention, you get bored, and the distinctly modern ways of paying attention created a distinctly modern form of boredom. This is a story about the turn-of-the-20th with obvious implications for today.

Quotes:

"Thumb-twiddling and bubble-wrap popping are the most effective forms of protest under the conditions imposed by global capitalism."

"In the twenty-first-century, only the bored are free."

"Modern boredom, we will conclude, is a result of the way we were separated from tradition, forced to pay attention to our lives rather than to simply live them, and the way we were disciplined and made autonomous and self-directing."



To appear in Boredom Studies: Postdisciplinary Inquiries, edited by Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn. London: Routledge, 2016.

This paper was written for the online workshop “Connecting the Dots: Conceptualising the Trace in the Nexus of Novels and Readers’ Sensory Imaginings’, convened by Monica Class and Natasha Anderson, Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, September 24-25, 2020. The paper comes from the book I am currently writing titled “Brow Network: Programs and Promises,” which investigates 21st century “brow” as both an embodied perspective and a social process. This paper is from chapter one of the book, focusing on Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018).

The paper explores what I call the ‘being asleep’ of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018; henceforth referred to as My Year)--a novel that narrates its protagonist's year of sleeping and retreating from her world. ‘Being asleep’ names the elusive place of the sleeper when she is asleep, removed from tracks of conscious thought and to a great extent untraceable. In Moshfegh's novel, ‘being asleep’ is part of, yet irretrievably separate from, the nameless, first person, fictional narrator who recounts her year of sleep. Touching on theories of sleep--including Jonathan Crary's work on sleep in our present time of thoroughgoing, digital mediatisation--I think about who or what is a ‘being asleep’ in the context of non-stop, culture-industrial mediatisation and monitoring of everyday life. This paper asks not only whether the narrator's being asleep makes her capable of retreating from the mediatised world she inhabits, but also whether she can know where she retreats to or emerges from when she drifts or falls to sleep. With reference to Jacqueline Rose's reading of sleep as a dark pathway to artistic invention, moreover, it explores the idea that it is through the untraceable tracks of ‘being asleep’ that Moshfegh's narrator moves toward creative affirmation of her world.

By explicitly hinting in my title at Erwin Panofsky’s essay “Perspective as symbolic form” (1991 [1927]), I try to understand in this article if it is possible to develop a discourse on the situation of contemporary visual culture that echoes the one proposed by the German art historian.

A first attempt at a rational linguistic distinction of the real that separates the determination of characteristics from the absence of this determination—this being an attempt to assign the real to another space other than the reality in which it currently exists, which one might suspect is only a construct—is the same as the distinction between the representational and the nonrepresentational. This ex negativo concept of the real would fall into the latter category, as it is the coded denotation, the characteristic-filtering gaze, and the eyes schooled by the conventions of seeing and the desire for categories that give any form of realism the ability to deceive us with its temporal and stylistic artificiality. Either from a Kantian concept of a fundamentally unapproachable reality or from the constructivist view of artificiality that is void any reality whatsoever, if when looking at something the viewer takes into consideration the means of viewing, the methods, or the experime...

Recebido em: 11 out. 2019. Aprovado em: 26 mar. 2020. Publicado em: 2 dez. 2020. Resumen: La concepción clásica de la Bildung se construía sobre actividades culturales, sobre todo la de la lectura, que presuponían un grado alto de con-centración, silencio y soledad, a partir de las cuales se esperaba producir una subjetividad reflexiva, autónoma y formada que era idealmente el sujeto de la Modernidad clásica. Los cambios tecnológicos y de hábitos sociales que se han producido paralelamente al orden neoliberal contemporáneo han erosionado ese tipo de actividades culturales, sobre todo la lectura, introduciendo un modo de vida acelerado y deudor de la inmediatez que, siguiendo a teóricos contem-poráneos (Harmut Rosa, Jonathan Crary, Byung Chul Han) presentaremos como alienación. Sobre todo, la pérdida de la capacidad de atención y concentración, ligada al uso de las nuevas tecnologías, supone un reto para la Bildung clásica y obliga a una reformulación de esta. Palabras clave: Bildung, atención, aceleración, lectura, sociedad disciplinaria, sociedad del rendimiento. Resumo: O problema da formação na sociedade acelerada e na expropriação da atenção. A concepção clássica de Bildung foi construída sobre atividades culturais, sobretudo a leitura, que pressupunha um alto grau de concentração, silêncio e solidão, a partir dos quais se esperava produzir uma subjetividade re-flexiva, autônoma e formada de acordo com o ideal de sujeito da Modernidade clássica. As mudanças tecnológicas e de hábitos sociais produzidos paralelamente à ordem neoliberal contemporânea têm deteriorado esses tipos de atividades culturais, sobretudo a leitura, introduzindo um modo de vida acelerado e deve-dor da imediatez que, de acordo com teóricos contemporâneos (Harmut Rosa, Jonathan Crary, Byung Chul Han), apresentaremos como alienação. Sobretudo, a perda da capacidade de atenção e concentração, relacionada ao uso das novas tecnologias, supõe um desafio para a Bildung clássica e obriga sua reformulação. Palavras-chave: Bildung, atenção, aceleração, leitura, sociedade disciplinar, sociedade do desempenho. Abstract: The problem of education in the accelerated society and the expro-priation of attention. The classical conception of Bildung was modelled on cultural activities, especially reading, which presupposed a high degree of concentration, silence and solitude; they were expected to produce a reflective, autonomous and formed subjectivity that was ideally the subject of classical Modernity. The technological changes and social habits that have taken place in the last decades, simultaneously to the contemporary neoliberal order have eroded this type of cultural activities, particularly reading, introducing an accelerated way of life that is dominated by immediacy and that, according to some contemporary theorists (Harmut Rosa, Jonathan Crary, Byung Chul Han) can be considered as a form of alienation. Above all, the loss of capacity for attention and concentration, linked to the use of new technologies, represents a challenge for classical Bildung and requires a reformulation of it. El problema de la formación en la sociedad acelerada y la expropiación de la atención O problema da formação na sociedade acelerada e na expropriação da atenção The problem of education in the accelerated society and the expropriation of attention

В статье анализируется камера обскура как источник метафоры идеологии в работе Карла Маркса и Фридриха Энгельса «Немецкая идеология» (1846). Гипотеза Джонатана Крэри о том, что обращение к камере обскуре было обусловлено развитием физиологической оптики и нового вида наблюдателя-зрителя, была частично доказана посредством исследования рукописного наследия основоположников марксизма до 1846 года. В результате было выяснено, что физиологическая оптика, как и некоторые другие социальные факторы (визуальноемкие сферы труда, офтальмология), действительно выступили наиболее общим контекстом для этой метафоры, но не могут объяснить обращение К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса именно к камере обскуре. Было доказано, что непосредственными источниками обращения к камере обскуре стали работы Жана Поля и Джона Локка, а основаниями для обращения: 1) антиромантизм (критика дереализации посюстороннего мира), 2) антиэмпиризм (критика гносеологической теории отражения) и 3) антифейербахианство (критика созерцательного, внеисторического материализма). На основании проведенного исследования был сделан вывод относительно понятия идеологии в теории К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса до 1846 года: камера обскура как источник метафоры идеологии иллюстрирует активность искажения действительности в идеологии и пассивность идеологии в общественной практике.

The article provides an analysis of a camera obscura as the metaphor of ideology in «The german ideology» (1846) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The hypothesis of Jonathan Crary that the appeal to camera obscura was due to the development of physiological optics and a new kind of observer, was partially proved by studying the handwritten heritage of the founders of Marxism before 1846. As a result, it was found that physiological optics, like some other social factors (visual-intensive spheres of work, ophthalmology), became the most common context for this metaphor, but cannot explain a turn to the camera obscura. It was proved that the works of Jean Paul and John Locke were the immediate sources of a turn to a camera obscura, and the grounds for this turn were: 1) anti-romanticism (criticism of the derealization of this world); 2) anti-empiricism (criticism of the epistemological theory of reflection); and 3) antifeuerbachianism (criticism of the contemplative, non-historical materialism). On the basis of the study, a conclusion was drawn regarding the concept of ideology in the theory of K. Marx and F. Engels until 1846: the camera obscura as a source of the metaphor of ideology illustrates the activity of distortion of reality in ideology and the passivity of ideology in social practice.

This paper argues for the legitimacy of daydreaming as an important condition of a liberatory political vision, using a Marcusean framework to supplement and extend the critique of productivism recently made by Kathi Weeks. By differentiating free time from mere pastime, I show that daydreaming not only builds our political imagination, but it also reminds us of the value of unproductive free time. Situating Marcuse within a survey of the role of play and leisure in Aristotle, Schiller, and Marx, I show how Marcuse's theory integrates neglected historical possibilities for reconceptualizing leisure as a right and not a luxury.

The present paper is a result of a two-year intensive ethnography of an intercultural Japanese company. While most of the literature on the anthropology of work in Japan regarding foreign workers tend to focus mainly on two types of experiences - those of global companies in which foreign workers and expats take up on international careers in Japan; and those of low-skilled jobs in which foreign migrants usually take up undesirable occupations in Japanese society - this ethnography, however, focuses on a middle level company, in which white collar workers in precarious contracts seek for visa guarantees and some small income to help them sustain their lives in Japan without much chances of a career development. By situating this type of experience within the current discussions on precarity, 24/7 capitalism, and Japanese internationalization efforts, the present paper provides results that both confirm some of the assumptions embedded in these discussions, informs new pathways for potential developments, and challenges some mainstream images about foreign employment and labor in Japan.

Este texto procura refletir sobre a questão da representação nas imagens fazendo uma análise sobre a dicotomia entre arte e realidade: como uma obra de arte visual se relaciona com a realidade que ela representa? Busca-se entender quais seriam as influências artísticas na modernização da percepção das representações imagéticas na sociedade ocidental – segundo o conceito de Jonathan Crary –, focalizando-se a mudança nas formas de perceber e sentir a arte que ocorre simultaneamente ao advento da arte moderna. Estuda-se os regimes de formação de sentido no campo das imagens e é proposto um enfoque na questão da representação da realidade através das imagens da arte dialogando-se com os autores...

What if Carnival was born at sea to sailors and others mariners rather than on land to masters and planters, their serfs and slaves? How was Carnival reborn in the Americas in the colonial era following its development in feudal Europe? What if Carnival, like the Ship of Fools of old, had set sails towards uncharted territories, called at previously inhabited locales and made landfall to nonetheless vaguely familiar landscapes? Carnivalscape charts the movement of Carnival through times and space and the socio-political conditions of its reemergence. It also inserts Carnival within the narrative of Modernity and shows how contemporary art and activist practices borrow from Carnival today.

Recent scholarship around the topic of 3D mainly deals with the visual developments that have occurred in the medium during the 21st century. A common perception in these strands of research is that in comparison to the production workflows employed in the analogue era, the 3D compositions that are being crafted through the aid of the ever-evolving digital technology have made 3D develop for the better. Yet a question that nevertheless remains is how the technology itself employed to craft these compositions has evolved.

Rather than focusing on the visual developments, the primary aim of this thesis is to render visible the processes and operations of the stereoscopic technology employed to realise this 3D imagery in the first place. Utilising a media archaeological approach indebted to Wolfgang Ernst’s notion of “reverse engineering” technical media objects, I intend to analyse the primary technical components of digital and analogue 3D recording, projection and viewing devices utilised in the production of stereoscopic motion pictures. Moreover, Jonathan Crary’s writings on “the observer” will be used to highlight the important role of the human subject in relation to these binocular media technologies.

I conclude that despite the varying production contexts and traditions the digital and analogue formats have been developed in, the primary methods and techniques that characterise digital 3D recording, projection and viewing systems are not specifications simply invented from scratch during the digital age. Through close scrutiny of the stereoscopic systems’ configurations with the aid of Ernst’s media archaeological approach, we are able to trace these supposed developments of the digital age back to the 19th century, when 3D was first realised.

RESUME : La formule « l'âge de l'enquête » est un propos zolien qui lui permet de caractériser son époque, en 1880, dans Le Roman expérimental. La formule zolienne a été tout récemment reprise dans un livre de Laurent Demanze qui s'attache à la création contemporaine en voyant en ce début du XXI e siècle, dans de nombreuses productions narratives-fictionnelles ou factuelles-un ancrage dans un « nouvel âge de l'enquête ». Il s'agit donc de repréciser ce que sont les enquêtes et leurs enjeux, dans les pratiques des romanciers du XIX e siècle comme dans l'histoire des idées et des disciplines du temps, afin de saisir ensuite la spécificité de l'enquête zolienne.
Mots-clés : Emile Zola, Jonathan Crary, roman, enquête, réalisme, naturalisme, « art de l'observateur », régime de singularité, observation participante.
ABSTRACT: "L'âge de l'enquête" is a phrase Zola coined in 1880 in Le Roman expérimental to characterize his time. This phrase has been mentioned recently in a book by Laurent Demanze dealing with contemporary creation, seeing a connection to a "nouvel âge de l'enquête" in many narrative productions-fictional or not-of the beginning of the XXIst century. The goal is then to define precisely what enquêtes or enquiries are and to explore their meanings in the practices of XIXth-century novel writers as well as in the epistemology of the time, in order to grasp the singularity of Zola's enquete.
Keywords : Emile Zola—Jonathan Crary—novel—enquiery—realism—naturalism— « Techniques of the Observer »—singularity regime—participant observation.

O trabalho realiza uma breve reflexão sobre como a experiência visual, influenciada pelo racionalismo moderno, se relaciona à uma reconstrução do observador. Com base na discussão sobre o acúmulo de conhecimento sobre a visão e a concepção histórica do corpo, partimos à compreensão do terreno em que se concebe um sujeito observador como causa e efeito dos processos de modernização do século XIX. Tendo em vista os modos pelos quais a visão foi discutida, controlada e incorporada em práticas culturais e científicas, o trabalho se aproxima, então, a desvendar as conjunções que o observador estabelece com o mundo do conhecimento – conforme assume diferentes modos de visão perante a realidade visual que o envolve. Dessa maneira, devido as diversas áreas de conhecimento envolvidas no tema, a pesquisa tem uma proposta de rastrear alguns desdobramentos acerca destas questões e assim traçar uma possível trajetória do observador.
Palavras chave: Visão. Percepção. Corpo. Sujeito. Imagem. Modernidade.

El propósito de este texto es examinar las implicaciones de la conjunción de los derechos a la no discriminación y a la ciudad para una idea de espacio público que refleje las características de la noche urbana. Lo anterior en el entendido de que la noche urbana no es lo contrario de la visibilidad y luminosidad con que Hannah Arendt caracterizaba al espacio público; sino, más bien, otra forma de experimentarlo y que se crea, en buena medida, a partir de la interacción entre las identidades y modalidades de adscripción grupal que, a causa de su historial de discriminación, han incursionado y creado la noche urbana a partir de una lógica incluyente y desmitificadora de los prejuicios y estigmas. Como ha señalado Bradley Garret, “a través de la historia, la noche se ha convertido […] en un tiempo para ‘la trasgresión, la fantasía y la experimentación’, cuando los distintos públicos irrumpen para desplegarse en el mundo común”.  Para este propósito se procede en tres momentos. Primero, se revisa la narrativa de Guillermo Osorno en su libro "Tengo que morir todas las noches" (2014), sobre la colonización de la noche urbana en la Ciudad de México por la diversidad sexual durante la década de 1980, como una manera de comprender la configuración espacial del derecho a la no discriminación. En segundo lugar, se contrasta esta imagen con la noche urbana perpetua y artificial que Jonathan Crary describe en su libro "24/7. Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" (2014) como el objetivo de una razón neoliberal que busca crear urbes donde los turnos laborales se sucedan de manera continua, el consumo sea constante y se erradiquen las interacciones lúdicas. Finalmente, y a partir de las intuiciones de ambos autores, se ofrecer una respuesta a la pregunta sobre lo que significa hacer de acceso universal, es decir, sin discriminación, el derecho a la ciudad durante la noche urbana.

This paper was presented in the session ‘ Autofiction and its Persistent Others: Gender, Sexuality and the Long HIstory of the Novel,’ which was convened by Marcie Frank at the MLA, January 2021. The paper comes from the book I am currently writing titled “Brow Network: Programs and Promises,” which investigates 21st century “brow” as both an embodied perspective and a social process. This paper is from chapter one of the book, focusing on Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018).

A partir da análise interpretativa das obras Um dia na vida de um consumidor (1993), Eu pensei que estava vendo condenados (2000), Olho/Máquina (2000-2003) e Os criadores dos impérios das compras (2001), de Harun Farocki, este texto busca desenvolver uma aproximação entre as formas de organização social e seus sistemas armamentistas, especificamente considerando o uso de imagens técnicas em conflitos de guerra ao longo do século XX. A análise será complementada por considerações de Paul Virilio e Jonathan Crary, autores que constatam um uso crescente de dispositivos e imagens técnicas como meios de controle da percepção.

WAR OF LIGHTS: VISION AND SIGHT IN THE WORK OF HARUN FAROCKI

From the interpretative analysis of the artworks A Day in the Life of a Consumer (1993), I Thought I was seeing Convicts (2000), Eye/Machine (2000-2003), and The Creators of the Shopping Worlds (2001), by Harun Farocki, this text connects forms of social organization to their armament systems, specifically considering the use of technical images in war conflicts throughout the 20th century. The analysis will be complemented by considerations of Paul Virilio and Jonathan Crary, authors who see an ongoing use of technical images and devices as means of perception control.

In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, the RETORT Collective published a collection of essays that revisited Debord to analyze the annihilation of bodies as a spectacular repetition of the society of spectacle's logic. Some 20 years before, T.J. Clark, a member of the American Situationists had published a groundbreaking study of Manet as the painter of Modern Life echoing Baudelaire and Guys, and Benjamin on them. Between the two publications, a body of work has emerged on the visual arts and the bodily dimensions of spectatorial experience. This essay will explore Debord's Society of the Spectacle from the vantage point of the body in modernity. I will firstly show how Debord's notion of spectacle (like Lukacs of reification) is marked by a process littered with risks and contingencies. The aim of this first section is to underline the less than stable, far from achieved state of the society of spectacle. Secondly, by comparing Clark's writings on painting and modernity with Jonathan Crary's Foucauldian construction of perception and painting, I will situate the problematic place of the body in relation to a visualization of the social order. In particular, I will establish and undermine any fixed relation between visuality on the one hand, and the nexus established between the painted body, the spectatorial body and the social body. This central section of the essay insists - contra the ongoing discourse of affect, libidinal intensities and a body without organs - that a critique of the society of spectacle is furthered by maintaining the tension between visuality as a sensorial and cognitive experience, and the inherent tensions between the represented, spectatorial and social body. The Crary-Clark comparison will exacerbate these tensions to paint a picture of visuality as a political practice of social critique. The body's unavailability must be understood not as the ground for an embodied escape from rationality, cognition and judgement. The tensions between the three bodies provide the conditions for a social and political critique of the stabilization of the social body by incessantly exposing the triple body's instabilities.
These instabilities triggered by the tensions between the represented, social and spectatorial body provide the ground for insisting on the relevance of the concept of spectacle by paradoxically exploring the contingencies on which spectacular society must rest. Visuality exposes the body to the paradox of representation. In its brilliant representation as object and experience, the painted body points toward what the society of spectacle must keep out of sight - what Foucault, reading Manet called "the brilliance of invisibility".

Breve ensaio que parte da leitura do livro 24/7 de Jonathan Crary... Questiona-se a principal função do ecrã na actualidade: a vigilância das massas para a imposição de um sistema contínuo de produção-consumo... Talvez um tema recorrente hoje em dia, mas que me é interessante...

En 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), el crítico de arte y profesor de la U. de Columbia, Jonathan Crary, describió con provocadora lucidez las trayectorias del que, por entonces, podía considerarse el obsesivo blanco de la institución capitalista: el espacio del sueño. Dando cuenta de algunas iniciativas militares estadounidenses para suprimir el descanso y privar del sueño-tanto a víctimas como a victimarios-, Crary sostiene que, como ha sido habitual en la historia occidental, las innovaciones de la guerra acaban por asimilarse irrenunciablemente a esferas sociales más amplias. De esta forma, así como en operaciones bélicas el sueño podría determinar ciertas desventajas, la maquinaria global de producción y consumo lamenta una gran cantidad de horas de inactividad. Y es que el sueño, ostracismo que no exige recursos, ha sido instancia esquiva-que no imposible-a los ardides de un mercado que busca renovar la propuesta de sus discursos ante una ciudadanía cada vez más crítica y suspicaz.

In our 24/7 society (Crary 2014) with cities and economies that never sleep, resting and sleeping have become endangered goods. Moreover, the all-encompassing tendency towards commodification and performance leads to the consideration of sleep both as a product and a tool to be used by companies such as Google to enhance their employer’s productivity. Verdonck’s performance EXIT reflects on the capitalisation of sleep and the possibility of true sleep offered within the time frame of a performance. The audience is hypnotized to sleep in EXIT (2011). This performance is connected to the installation Sleeping Cells, a set of mobile hammocks placed in public space, allowing one to take a nap. However generous Verdonck’s offering of sleep might appear, there is also an apparatus behind EXIT which makes the performance not as innocent as it looks. This article provides a twofold reading of EXIT and Sleeping Cells, an analysis of sleep as a negative space to the 24/7 society ‘outside’ and of EXIT as a sleep machine, a manipulative apparatus influencing the audience. This ambiguity will be considered EXIT’s critical potential, offering reflection on performativity, work, rest, dreams and the apparatus of theatre as such. I suggest there is a positive and negative sleep, a commodified and a potential rest, that are both implied in Verdonck’s performance. Agamben’s notion of potentiality, along with Jonathan Crary’s and Byung Chul-Han’s analyses of today’s permanently performative meritocracy, provide the theoretical framework for the interpretation of this performance and installation.