24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

The practico-inert was thus Sartre’s way of designating the sedimented, institutional everyday world constituted out of human energy but manifested as the immense accumulation of routine passive activity.

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.

The conditions of communication and information access on an everyday level ensure the systematic erasure of the past as part of the fantasmatic construction of the present.

political activism means creatively using available tools and material resources, but it should not entail imagining the tools themselves to have intrinsic redemptive values.

Experience now consists of sudden and frequent shifts from absorption in a cocoon of control and personalization into the contingency of a shared world intrinsically resistant to control. The experience of these shifts inevitably enhances one’s attraction to the former, and magnifies the mirage of one’s own privileged exemption from the apparent sh

But this whole category of figures and metaphors is now incongruous in the face of a global system that never sleeps, as if to ensure that no potentially disturbing awakening is ever necessary or relevant.

It also poses the question of whether current forms of electronic separation and perceptual management are part of conditions that would inhibit or deflect the processes Sartre details.

The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.

Appearing during the early Reagan-Thatcher years, Blade Runner is an outline of a reconfigured relationship to an emerging global consumer culture that would be more securely in place by the 1990s. Rather than tracking any kind of split between the self and this milieu, the film affirms a functional assimilation of the individual into the circuitry