24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

For Locke, sleep was a regrettable if unavoidable interruption of God’s intended priorities for human beings: to be industrious and rational.

The privatization and compartmentalization of one’s activities in this sphere are able to sustain the illusion one can “outwit the system” and devise a unique or superior relation to these tasks that is either more enterprising or seemingly less compromised.

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

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

Dreams may well be the vehicles of wishes, but the wishes at stake are the insatiable human desires to exceed the isolating and privatizing confines of the self.

Schopenhauer is one of the rare thinkers who turned this hierarchy against itself and proposed that only in sleep could we locate “the true kernel” of human existence.

There is a pervasive illusion that, as more of the earth’s biosphere is annihilated or irreparably damaged, human beings can magically disassociate themselves from it and transfer their interdependencies to the mecanosphere of global capitalism.

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.

For King Henry, the relevant distinction is not simply between sleep and wakefulness, but between a perceptual vigilance sustained throughout “the all-watched night” and the sound slumber and “vacant mind” of the yeomen or peasant.