24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Rather, if circulation was an essential process of capital, it was because of “the constant continuity of the process.” In effect, Marx is positing 24/7 temporalities as fundamental to the workings of capital; he understood that these durational processes were also metamorphic. Within this “constant continuity” occurs “the unobstructed and fluid tr

The cyclical temporalities, whether seasonal or diurnal, around which farming had always been based constituted an insurmountable set of resistances to the remaking of labor time on which capitalism depended fundamentally from the start. The “natural conditions” of agrarian life prevented the necessary control over the time of production;

Blogging, no matter what its intentions, is thus one of the many announcements of the end of politics.

For him, the 1990s opened onto a hyper-industrial era, not a post-industrial one, in which a logic of mass production was suddenly aligned with techniques that, in unprecedented ways, combine fabrication, distribution, and subjectivation on a planetary scale.

One of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time.

24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.

The social and dialogical milieus of the fair or marketplace are displaced by shopping, the periodic occurrence of festival is replaced by commodified leisure time, and an endless sequence of specious needs are fabricated to debase and humiliate the simple acts of sharing through which human appetites had long been gratified or fulfilled.

24/7 denotes the wreckage of the day as much as it concerns the extinguishing of darkness and obscurity.

Television was only the first of a category of apparatuses with which we are currently surrounded that are most often used out of powerful habitual patterning involving a diffuse attentiveness and a semi-automatism. In this sense, they are part of larger strategies of power in which the aim is not mass-deception, but rather states of neutralization

However, if one accepts that a meaningful notion of everyday life is inseparable from its fugitive anonymity, then it would be difficult to grasp what it might have in common with time spent in which one’s gestures are all recorded, permanently archived, and processed with the aim of predetermining one’s future choices and actions.