24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

[논둑길맨발로]

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

By Joseph Nechvatal.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary, Verso, 2013

Book Description

Release date: June 4, 2013 | ISBN-10: 1781680930 | ISBN-13: 978-1781680933 | Edition: 1

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression‎, damaging the fabric of everyday life.

Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1781680930/counterpunchmaga

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

I have long admired Jonathan Crary’s elegiac style (in the interests of full transparency: in 1985 Jonathan Crary wrote a stunningly insightful review of my art exhibition at Brooke Alexander Gallery published in that year’s January issue of Art in America). His books Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture are masterful introductions to modern visual culture and have been irreplaceable references for me concerning my investigations into the immersive aspects of (first) virtual reality and (secondly) noise. His editorial work at Zone Books is laudatory.

It is then with immense regret that I cannot enthusiastically praise his newest book 24/7 here, as I cannot accept some of the most grandiose assumptions and claims that he makes in this examination of human perception within the operations of today’s global information and communication network. In a nutshell, he seems to view 24/7 digital access as mandatory and de-humanizing — using at times negative-priest technophobic hyperbolics similar to those of Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard — and I don’t. I recognize the subjective costs of 24/7 digital access to artistic attention as the dynamic working arena; not as a given to be either surrendered unto or escaped from by looking backwards and moaning.

The book is slim (indeed the material seems better suited for a blog, website or e-book than a 144 page tree-killing hardback), and at first glance I told myself that I would read it all within the next 24 hour period. This proved to be impossible as, I am sorry to say, I frequently battled with falling to sleep in my chair while attempting to read it.

The first chapter on human sleep started out very well: a nice mix of arcane scientific research (that needed more citations) and post-68 political opinion. It has the zing of a good long essay from The New Yorker magazine, weaving in juicy details about sleep-deprivation torture and panopticonic lighting conditions with historic philosophical, filmic and literary references and reflections. I was riding high, alert and stimulated, for the first 28-page chapter. Jonathan has much of worth to convey there.

But then the gas went out of the Zeppelin, as chapter 2 turned turgidly reactionary in its anti-digitalization and anti-commercial screed. Un-nuanced polarities are left unquestioned and straw men arguments are executed in ceremonial fashion. Ho Hum.

There were a few exciting parts, most notably his incomplete claims concerning recent emerging strategies of control and surveillance, now already outflanked and outdated by the historic revolutionary actions of Edward Snowden. But extensive sections of the book dwell on the well-worn argument that laments ubiquitous consumerism of entertainment and leisure distraction. There is a good deal of explaining how digital 24/7 communications makes political solidarity and uproar less likely, rather than more. Again opinionated information made redundant by the real time images and internet reports of the Egyptian uprising and overthrow on the electronic digital network.

So chapter 2 put me in the bummer mood I feel when reading books like Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) by Neil Postman. That sort of over-reach-scare rhetoric can’t help feeling but like the over-heatedness of a delusional gold sales-pitch scam right wing fanatic. As both of us are, or were, based in New York City (The City That Never Sleeps) the claim that “the marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression‎, damaging the fabric of everyday life” feels to me more like provocative pumpkin hyperbole than a threat to the sensibilities of human perception. Yes we can shop on the internet all day long every day, but you are not required to do so. The colonized mind is just another option among so many others (including net abstinence).

Sorrowfully for me to say then, the general tone of the book’s rhetoric is that of a technophobe posturing to be a savvy (but jaded) technophile. Of course, for me by now, both polar positions are rather pathetic intellectual stances. Especially vexing, Jonathan seems deeply concerned in recovering a mythical search for drop-out separation. I do agree with many of the observations he makes in the book, but a return to separation as a way of overcoming the impairment of perception within the (supposedly) compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture I find doomed to failure – and a waste of time. We are not getting back to a Thoreau-like fabled garden or some equally mythical original “actual” reality.

Anyway, most of this attitude towards media excess and the actual has already been covered in scenarios of totalitarian governmental seizures of individual rights by hippies inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we don’t have to theorize about that any more. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution Bill of Rights (which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any search warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause) has been voluntarily superceded by the fear of 9-11 like terrorist networks and the coupling of search engines with artificial intelligence algorithms. Drawing an analogy with the Huxley scenario, Jonathan sees 24/7 access as a present-day soma.

Of course, he is right about how unfettered capitalism has disturbed public spaces and financial safety nets, and how capitalism’s ever-more-closer-to-total consumption of the planet is a reality, but he seems ideologically blinded to new ways of using our never off attention spans as a means of détournement.

Again I wish to stress that 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep does have an excellent analysis of the commodification of sleep in it. One that once again brought back to my mind Tatsuo Miyajima’s 1996 installation at La Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, where he made two large installations which dealt with the abstract constitution of time in the digital age. Both installations consisted of abundant LED signal-lights that flashed a countless bevy of over-excited digital numbers in what appeared to be a never ending random order. One installation, Time Go Round, had twenty green and red digital modules spinning in various circular orbits against an imposing dark wall. One discerned there a mystifying data constellation in transit, reminiscent of passages from William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Time Go Round was an attempt to delineate the crisis of time in relationship to the dispersed ontological self in the information age (where digital time as the only time has become non-problematic in computational work environments). Like Miyajima’s artistic sense of time in crisis, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep served to encourage me to value the freedom of my own interior sense of time. Perhaps that is its central lesson and benefit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since 1986 Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991-1993 he worked as artist-in-resident at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation’s computer lab in Arbois, France on The Computer Virus Project: an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. In 2002 he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora. Dr. Nechvatal presently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA). His book of essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) was published by Edgewise Press in 2009. In 2011 his book Immersion Into Noise was published by the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office in conjunction with the Open Humanities Press. His archive is housed at The Fales Library (Downtown Special Collection) at N.Y.U. in New York City.

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printMore Sharing Services

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, July 10th, 2013.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/247-late-capitalism-and-the-ends-of-sleep/

 

Insomniac Capitalism

Posted by stclair - July 22, 2013 - Other News

Article provided by CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Most of us are familiar with the fact that the global financial markets run twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week with just a few exceptions.  This is due in part to the incredible improvements in technology which have enabled trading to occur at rocket speed and across national borders.  Also important in this scenario is the loosening of laws restricting financial trading to domestic markets. The combination of these phenomena has helped create a world where the machinations of capital never stop, with the consequence that the insecurity natural to capitalism is enhanced exponentially. Economies are more fragile, jobs more temporary, and working people’s lives with even less meaning. The only members of the capitalist economy and society that benefits in both the short and long term are those at the top: the executives at financial houses, corporations and media outlets and those entities’ owners.

A new book simply titled 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, addresses this latest modification of the capitalist world. The author, Jonathan Crary, begins his essay with a description of some ongoing attempt by scientists and military services to create a medication that eliminates the need for sleep from the human body. Unlike amphetamine type drugs, which wear one’s body out by keeping it going beyond its natural ability, these drugs would just eliminate the need for the body to rest. Not only would this create an ideal soldier (hence the military’s participation in the research) it would also create the ideal worker, whether that worker is a well-paid trader at the NYSE or an assembler on a factory floor in China. Crary moves past his anecdote to examine the relationship between regulated time and capitalism. He explains how once time was mechanized capitalism was also bound to come along. Or was it the other way around?  Chicken and egg questions aside, it can be safely stated that capitalism has certainly decided how we spend our time since it began to dominate our lives and how we perceive them. Given this fact, Crary continues his discussion of sleep, stating that it may be the only bodily function that modern capital cannot colonize. Indeed, it may be the only aspect left in modern society’s daily routine that can truly be considered part of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the private sphere.

Arendt is but one of the twentieth century philosophers Crary refers to in this intelligent and intriguing discussion of how modern monopoly capitalism insinuates itself into the most intimate aspects of our lives. Another is the Frankfurt School essayist and New Left thinker Herbert Marcuse, who wrote extensively on the nature of freedom in modern society and was among the first to conclude that the modern capitalist economy had taken away our freedom and replaced it with a freedom of choice between different consumer goods that were in reality essentially the same product. Besides philosophers, Crary introduces the reader to filmmakers and artists and his particular perception of their works in relation to the ever increasing commodification of our time and the subsequent loss of independence the modern citizen has experienced. He also examines the increasing use of medicinal sleeping aids and their relation to the 24/7 capitalist express. Tangentially, he discusses the current pharmaceutical determination to designate every human psychology that differs from what is good for that express as outside the norm and therefore requiring some kind of pharmaceutical solution.

24/7 is a masterful exploration of the place of the human individual, their dreams and the future of the species in today’s age of nonstop neoliberal capitalism and its multitude of manifestations. The text provides a historical survey of capitalism’s growing encroachment on individual human life and the reasons this occurs, yet emphasizes the current scenario where that encroachment has increased in a manner previously impossible, but now matter of course thanks to today’s technological advances. Although this book is a philosophical treatise, it rarely wanders into a verbal density that would render it unreadable. In other words, it definitely will not put the reader to sleep.

Ron Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of  The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden.  His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

http://joelcmagnuson.com/insomniac-capitalism/