Suspensions of perceptions (Jonathan Crary)
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## Introduction
[1]{}I am interested in how Western modernity since the nineteenth century had demanded that individuals define and shape themseleves in terms of a capacity for "paying attention," that is, for a disengagement from a broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the ake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli.[]

[1]{}"reception in a state of distraction", as indicated by Walter Benjamin and others.[man har länge antagit att från mitten av 1800-tal är blir subjektet och des förnimmelser mer och mer fragmenterat] I argue that modern distraction can only be understood through its reciprocal relation to the rise of attentive norms and practices [...] an imperative of a concentrated attractiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consupmtion and an ideal of ssutained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creativ and free subjectivity.

## Modernity and the Problem of attention

[12]{}[Om den nye observatören] One of the consequence of this shift was that the functioning of viion became dependent on the complex and contingent physiological makeup og the observer, rendering vision faulty, unreliable, and, it was ometimes argued, arbitrary. [...] the understanding that vision, or any other senses, could no longer claim an esential objecivity or certainty.

[12]{observatör, subjektivt seende, kropp, yttre, inre}The idea of subjective vision---the notion that out peceptual and sensory experience depends less on the nature of an external stimulus than on the composition and functioning of our sensory apparatus---was one of the condition for the historical emergence of notions of autonomous vision, that is, for a severing (or liberation) of perceptual experience from a necessary relation to an exterior world.[]

[]{}Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation. This was the decisive achievment of the science of psychophysics in the mid-nineteenth century, which, by apparently rendering sensation measurable, embedded human perception in the domain of the quantifiable and the abstract [Alltså: en ny modell för perception/ny observatör->ett mottagligt subjekt->risk för överlastning OCH formbarhet/förutsättning för manipulation]

[12f]{}The disintegration of an indisputable distinction between exterior and exterio becomes a condition for the emergence of spectacular modernizing culture and for dramatic a expansion of teh possibilites of aestethic experience.[]

[13]{}[Attention] It was a problem whose centrality was directly related to the emergance of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input.

[13]{} Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of large-scale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was often the very modernized arrangements of labor that produced inattention.

[17]{associationer}Attention for Nordau, and in a less extreme way for many other, was a repressive and disciplinary defense against all potentially disruptive forms of free association[]

[19-21]{}[Two conditions]The frst was the collapse of classical models of vision and of the stable, punctual subject thoe models presupposed. The second was the untenability of a priori solutions to epistemological problems. This entailed the los of any permanent or uncondiitonal guarantees of mental unity and synthesis.

[25]{kinds of attention} [...] a range of positions [...] 