Modernization could not proceed in a world populated with large numbers of individuals who believed in the value or potency of their own internal visions or voices.

It is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling of one’s personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems.

Stimulated by Freud’s work but aware of its limits, Breton outlined a creative reciprocity or circulation between waking events and dreams that would be part of a revolution on the terrain of the everyday life.

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

Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.

The consequences of these nineteenth-century models, especially the facilitation and maximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much more comprehensively throughout the twentieth century.

Marx understood how capitalism was inseparable from this reorganization of time, specifically the time of living labor, as a way of creating surplus value, and he cited the words of Andrew Ure, the Scottish advocate of industrial rationalization, to amplify its importance: it was “the training of human beings to renounce their desultory habits of

His work is one of the great literary accounts of the psychic costs of reification, of what he calls “a peculiar malign abstractness” within the culture of mid-twentieth-century capitalism.

The illumination of the nighttime was a symbolic demonstration of what apologists for capitalism had promised throughout the nineteenth century: it would be the twin guarantee of security and increased possibilities for prosperity, supposedly improving the fabric of social existence for everyone.