Quotes from Jonathan Crary

Part of the culture of modernity took shape around various affirmations that there could be individual gratification from emulating the impervious rhythms, efficiency, and dynamism of mechanization.

Nie ma nic dziwnego w tym, ?e obserwujemy systematyczne redukowanie czasu snu, je?li wzi?? pod uwag?, o jak? ekonomiczn? stawk? toczy si? gra.

Self-fashioning is the work we are all given, and we dutifully comply with the prescription continually to reinvent ourselves and manage our intricate identities. As Zygmunt Bauman has intimated, we may not grasp that to decline this endless work is not an option.

It is now a given that limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communication or exploration of ideas.

The truth is irrefutable: there are no revolutionary subjects on social media.

This is a decisive trait of the era of technological addictiveness: that one can return again and again to a neutral void that has little affective intensity of any kind.

In related ways, 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.

Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense incapacitation of visual experience.

As many have noted, the form that innovation takes within capitalism is as the continual simulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same.

Death, in many guises, is one of the by-products of neoliberalism: when people have nothing further that can be taken from them, whether resources or labor or power, they are quite simply disposable.

Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.

Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking had to be inverted into a risk-filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences. Now it has reached the point of laws being enacted in parts of the United States that criminalize giving food to the homeless or to undocumented immigrants.

There are now very few significant interludes of human existence (with the colossal exception of sleep) that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time, or marketing time.

Because one's bank account and one's friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience.

In many different ways, the attack on values of collectivity and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependence on others, while in fact we are experiencing a more comprehensive subjection to the "free" workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is "to be free of other selves.

The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.

One of the many reasons human cultures have long associated sleep with death is that they each demonstrate the continuity of the world in our absence.

since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life.

Como muitos já notaram, a forma que a inovação assume no capitalismo é a simulação contínua do novo, enquanto as relações de poder e de controle existentes permanecem, na prática, as mesmas.

To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it [24/7] is both of and after the disaster, characterized by the empty sky, in which no star or sign is visible, in which one's bearings are lost and orientation is impossible. p.17

Modernity, contrary to its popular connotations, is not the world in a sweepingly transformed state. Rather, as some critics have shown, it is the hybrid and dissonant experience of living intermittently within modernized spaces and speeds, and yet simultaneously inhabiting the remnants of pre-capitalist life-world, whether social or natural.

Of course, no individual can ever be shopping, gaming, working, blogging, downloading, or texting 24/7. However, since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life.

As disciplinary norms lost their effectiveness, television was crafted into a machinery of regulation, introducing previously unknown effects of subjection and supervision. This is why television is a crucial and adaptable part of a relatively long transition (or changing of the guard) lasting several decades, between a world of older disciplinary institutions and one of 24.7 control.

Dreams may well be the vehicle of wishes, but the wishes at stake are the insatiable human desires to exceed the isolating and privatizing confines of the self.