24/7 Media Pump

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NT Issue 2 correspondence: "The End of the World", p. 100–103, "The Tyranny of the Clock", p. 96-99, "The Aims of Art", p. 130.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7, 2013:"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."

JJ Grandville was a prolific French illustrator and caricaturist Art historians and critics have called him and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary, and "the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination".

The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement. Wiki

J.J. Grandville's "Another World", 1844: The last chapter "The End of the World" (La fin) 

"Thought is now nothing but a machine. Men are now nothing but automatons.

We write mechanically.
Literature springs ready-made from a reel, like a piece of silk or cotton fabric.

Novels and serials are churned out in literary shops like galettes on a pastry shop counter.
Ideas flow drop by drop from a still, from which they emerge all twisted."

"Decadence of decadences, and all is decadence. Drama no doubt awaits, to regain its former influence, some good, big court trial that it can exploit in five acts, but not in verse. Poetry, "Is no longer the norm today"; only prose brings in money, and that's undoubtedly why we have so many prose writers.

Achieving glory now nothing more than a process. I'm surprised they haven't yet published the Manual of the Great Man, to follow the manual of the Pharmacist or the Grocer. The back page of newspapers will soon be filled with announcements of recipes for increasing fame and boosting celebrity. The size of a poster is how great a reputation is measured."

"The passion of actors, the voices of singers, paintings, statues, books, magazines, illustrations, music, dance -the numerous and vibrant flowers that make up the flowerbed of poetry-can only open in the sunlight of flattery, and only bloom under the fertilizing shower of the promotional material.

Before the warning signs revealed to me that the end of the world was near, I had invented a suction and pressure pump that could flood even the largest capital city with leaflets in less than a second.

This machine had been commissioned by a literary company that wanted to make a big splash with an invention that would be admired by future generations; for, as we told you at the beginning of this book, nothing perishes, everything is transformed."

1963 Edition:

Alexander Kluge on AI: Who will be faster? Those forces commercially using this new “apparatus” for fashion, counterfeiting or imitation? Or those who are already setting in motion the necessary counter-algorithms to supplement and correct the world of algorithms?

William Morris - The Aims of Art, 1886: 

The Aim of Art is to increase the happiness of man, by giving them beauty and interest of incident to amuse their leisure, and prevent them wearying even of rest, and by giving them hope and bodily pleasure in their work; or, shortly, to make man’s work happy and his rest fruitful. 

The world is everywhere growing uglier and more commonplace, in spite of the conscious and very strenuous efforts of a small group of people towards the revival of art, which are so obviously out of joint with the tendency of the age that, while the uncultivated have not even heard of them, the mass of the cultivated look upon them as a joke, and even that they are now beginning to get tired of.

For art, if it has to die, has worn itself out, and its aim will be a thing forgotten; and its aim was to make work happy and rest fruitful. Is all work to be unhappy, all rest unfruitful, then? Indeed if art is to perish that will be the case, unless something is to take its place; something at present unnamed, undreamed of.

I do not think that anything will take the place of art; not that I doubt the ingenuity of man, which seems to be boundless in the direction of making himself unhappy, but because I believe the springs of art in the human mind to be deathless, and also because it seems to me easy to see the causes of the present obliteration of the arts.

This, I say, is how a reasonable man would act if he were free from man’s compulsion; not being free, he acts very differently. He has long passed the stage at which machines are only used for doing work repulsive to an average man, or for doing what could be as well done by a machine as a man, and he instinctively expects a machine to be invented whenever any product of industry becomes sought after. He is the slave to machinery; the new machine must be invented, and when invented he must — I will not say use it, but be used by it, whether he likes it or not.

But why is he the slave to machinery? Because he is the slave to the system for whose existence the invention of machinery was necessary.

And now I must drop, or rather have dropped, the assumption of the equality of condition, and remind you that, though in a sense we are all the slaves of machinery, yet that some men are so directly without any metaphor at all, and that these are just those on whom the great body of the arts depends — the workmen. It is necessary for the system which keeps them in their position as an inferior class that they should either be themselves machines or be the servants to machines, in no case having any interest in the work which they turn out. To their employers they are, so far as they are workmen, a part of the machinery of the workshop or the factory; to themselves they are proletarians, human beings working to live that they may live to work: their part of craftsmen, of makers of things by their own free will, is played out.

At the risk of being accused of sentimentality, I will say that since this is so the work which produces the things that should be matters of art is but a burden and a slavery, I exult in this at least that it cannot produce art; that all it can do lies between stark utilitarianism and idiotic sham.

Postone: The treadmill dynamic is the initial determination of what Marx developed as central to capitalism: capitalism necessarily must constantly accumulate to stand still... expresses and constitutes This treadmill dynamic domination... intrinsic to a new form of social capitalism: it is the domination of people by time.