Description
Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.
"A polemic as finely concentrated as a line of pure cocaine" - Los Angeles Review of Books
About the Author
Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and is a founding editor of Zone Books. His publications include Techniques of the Observer, Suspensions of Perception and 24/7.
Reviews
The 24/7 phantasmagoria of digital exchange impresses the commodity deep into the body's tissues, leaving only sleep as a partial respite. Jonathan Crary updates Marcuse's One Dimensional Man with a vigilant critique of the totality of the seemingly eternal present of this pseudo-world. -- McKenzie Wark, author of The Spectacle of Disintegration
Crary's polemic against the demands of 24/7 capitalism brilliantly illuminates the devastating effects of our changed temporality. Enjoined to constant productivity, we consume ourselves, our world, and our capacity collectively to imagine a common future. This is a crucial commentary on the format and tempo of contemporary life. -- Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon
Crary updates Leninist understandings of the expansion of capitalism in his phenomenal book 24/7, which is well worth a read for a clear understanding of the role of time in the continued and deepening exploitation of the working class under digital capitalism. -- Garrett Pierman * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books *
Book Information
ISBN 9781781683101
Author Jonathan Crary
Format Paperback
Page Count 144
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 164g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 10mm