24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“The practico-inert field is the field of our servitude . . . to mechanical forces, and to anti-social apparatuses.”

To Sartre’s celebrated examples of standing in line to board a bus, being stuck in traffic, and shopping at the supermarket could be added the unfathomable amounts of human time expended today in desultory electronic activity and exchanges. Whether in the mid twentieth century or today, seriality is the numbing and ceaseless production of the same.

Just as the nighttime lighting in Arkwright’s factories was an early hint of future alignments of lived temporalities with market needs, so the mass diffusion of television in the 1950s was another turning point in the market’s appropriation of previously unannexed times and spaces.

Because one cannot literally enter any of the electronic mirages that constitute the interlocking marketplaces of global consumerism, one is obliged to construct fantasmatic compatibilities between the human and a realm of choices that is fundamentally unlivable.

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 planet becomes reimagined as a non-stop work site or an always open shopping mall of infinite choices, tasks, selections, and digressions. Sleeplessness is the state in which producing, consuming, and discarding occur without pause, hastening the exhaustion of life and the depletion of resources.

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.

However, even amid such changes, everyday life is the repository onto which abiding rudiments of premodern experience, including sleep, are relocated.

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.