Jonathan Crary > Quotes

“Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“According to the Tiqqun collective, we have become the innocuous, pliable inhabitants of global urban societies.7 Even in the absence of any direct compulsion, we choose to do what we are told to do; we allow the management of our bodies, our ideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to be externally imposed. We buy products that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then we voluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject who submits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water and lives near nuclear reactors without complaint. The absolute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by the titles of the many bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies to see before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before we die.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. Even as a contemporary colloquialism, the term “eyeballs” for the site of control repositions human vision as a motor activity that can be subjected to external direction or stimuli. The goal is to refine the capacity to localize the eye’s movement on or within highly targeted sites or points of interest. The eye is dislodged from the realm of optics and made into an intermediary element of a circuit whose end result is always a motor response of the body to electronic solicitation. It is out of this context that Google and other corporate players now compete for dominance over the remains of the everyday.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Stiegler cites the advent of widespread internet use in the mid 1990s as a decisive turning point [...] in the impact of these industrial audiovisual products. Over the last two decades, he believes, they have been responsible for a 'mass synchronization' of consciousness and memory. The standardization of experience on such a large scale, he argues, entails a loss of subjective identity and singularity; it also leads to the disastrous disappearance of individual participation and creativity in the making of the symbols we all exchange and share.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“[...] whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than in one's immediate actual circumstances. It is now a given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communications or exploration of ideas.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“In the very first paragraph of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, sleep is lumped together with fever and madness as examples of the obstacles to knowledge.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“One of the goals of Google, Facebook, and other enterprises [...] is to normalize and make indispensable [...] the idea of a continuous interface--not literally seamless, but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response. Of course there are breaks, but they are not intervals in which any kind of counter-projects or streams of thought can be nurtured and sustained. As the opportunity for electronic transactions of all kinds becomes omnipresent, there is no vestige of what used to be everyday life beyond the reach of corporate intrusion. An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary

“As I indicated initially, many institutions have been running 24/7 for decades now. It is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling of one's personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems. A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living tha does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness.”
― Jonathan Crary

“Obviously, political activism means creatively using available tools and material resources, but it should not entail imagining the tools themselves to have intrinsic redemptive values.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The more one identifies with the insubstantial electronic surrogates for the physical self, the more one seems to conjure an exemption from the biocide underway everywhere on the planet. At the same time, one becomes chillingly oblivious to the fragility and transience of actual living things.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The myths of the egalitarian and empowering nature of this technology have been cultivated for a reason. Police agencies of the global order can only be gratified by the willingness of actives to concentrate their organizing around internet strategies, by which they voluntarily kettle themselves in cyberspace, where state surveillance, sabotage, and manipulation are far easier than in lived communities and localities where actual encounters occur. If one's goal is radical social transformation, electronic media in their current forms of mass availability are not useless -- but only when they are subordinate to struggles and encounters taking place elsewhere. If networks are not int the service of already existing relationship forged out of shared experience and proximity, they will always reproduce and reinforce the separations, the opacity, the dissimulations, and the self-interestedness inherent in their use. Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitable he historically ephemeral and inconsequential.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Por trás do vazio da frase de efeito, 24/7 é uma redundância estática que contradiz sua própria relação com as tessituras rítmicas e periódicas da vida humana. Remete a um esquema arbitrário e inflexível de uma semana de duração, subtraído do desdobramento de qualquer experiência variada ou cumulativa. Dizer “24 / 365”, por exemplo, não é a mesma coisa, pois a expressão sugere, com certo preciosismo, uma temporalidade estendida ao longo da qual algo pode de fato mudar, e ao longo da qual eventos inesperados podem ocorrer. Como indiquei acima, muitas instituições no mundo desenvolvido funcionam 24/7 há décadas. Apenas recentemente a elaboração e a configuração da identidade pessoal e social foram reorganizadas a fim de se adaptarem à operação ininterrupta de mercados, redes de informação e outros sistemas. Um ambiente 24/7 parece um mundo social, mas é na verdade um modelo não social de desempenho maquínico e uma interrupção da vida que não revela o custo humano exigido para sustentar sua eficácia. […] 24/7 é um tempo de indiferença, contra o qual a fragilidade da vida humana é cada vez mais inadequada, e dentro do qual o sono não é necessário nem inevitável. […] Da mesma forma, 24/7 é inseparável da catástrofe ambiental, dada a exigência de gasto permanente e desperdício sem fim para sua manutenção e a interrupção fatal dos ciclos e estações dos quais depende a integridade ecológica.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contempo­rary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism...Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Many who celebrate the transformative potential of communication networks are oblivious to the oppressive forms of human labor and environmental ravages on which their fantasies of virtuality and dematerialization depend. Even amonth the plural voices affirming that 'another world is possible,' there is often the expedient misconception that economic justice, mitigation of climate change, and egalitarian social relations can somehow occur alongside the continued existence of corporations like Google, Apple, and General Electric. Challenges to these delusions encounter intellectual policing of many kinds. there is an effective prohibition not only on the critique of mandatory technological consumption but also in the articulation of how existing technical capabilities and premises could be deployed in the service of human and social needs, rather than the requirements of capital and empire. The narrow and monopolized set of electronic products and services available at any given moment masquerades as the all-enveloping phenomenon of 'technology.' Even a partial refusal of the intensively marketed offerings of multinational corporations is construed as opposition to technology itself. To characterize current arrangements, in reality untenable and unsustainable, as anything but inevitable and unalterable is a contemporary heresy.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“It is now a given that limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communication or exploration of ideas.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense incapacitation of visual experience.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“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.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep