Daydreaming While Reading Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Edward Curtin
“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”
Shakespeare, Macbeth
People often laugh when I tell them that I go to sleep at 8:15 P.M. They laugh harder when I say it’s been a lifetime habit, with unavoidable exceptions of course. And that I wake up long before dawn.
Not because I am a dairy farmer or a baker, but because I love to sleep and all the best things I have written have been written in my dreams and refined during reveries while walking or in the early morning when all is silent still and I am alone with my musings.
I have always felt that sleeping and being awake were a seamless whole, contrary to the go-getters’ attitude that sleep and dreams are a waste of time, and I have been blessed with the ability to fall asleep as soon as I crawl into my crib and usually to remember my dreams in detail when I wake.
Jonathan Crary, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, agrees that sleep is profoundly important and under assault today. To enter his book, 24/7, Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (which was first published in 2014) is for me to discover a kindred spirit, but also to enter a mind so capacious and profound that I wish to share his insights while I dream in words.
If what William Wordsworth (what a name!) wrote in 1802 was true then,
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
What possibly could one say about today? That shopping or thinking about shopping – things or propaganda or the latest useless buzz – is all we know? That we have become completely insane, bamboozled by a capitalist techno-electronic madness that has not only seized our hearts but convinced our minds that it is good to spend our lives – our sleep and dreams and time and praxis – in tending to machines that destroy our souls night and day without interruption.
When fifty plus years ago the monk Thomas Merton wrote that “someday they will sell us the rain,” he could today add that the hard rain that Dylan sung of then has already fallen and they now need not sell us anything because we have eaten the bitter fruit of our own corruption.
People say they want peace while they fill their nights and days with digital dreams, eliminating what Crary calls “fugitive anonymity” for the bait of 24/7 capitalist drug addiction and being “with it.” All the clichés have it that peace begins with “you,” yet you has become them or it, the tech-life 24/7. I hear Sinatra singing Cole Porter’s lyrics today as
Night and day, you are the one
Only you ‘neath the moon or under the sun
Whether near to me or far
It’s no matter, cell phone, where you are
I think of you day and night
And such love is reciprocated, of course, as the electronic machines help so many distracted and restless souls make it through the night. Sort of. Not the kind of help Kris Kristofferson sang about, but a fleshless flashing gizmo colder than a frozen heart.
It is well known that sleep disorders are widespread today with technologically produced sleep drugs (and now marijuana) used by vast numbers of people. Such drug-induced sleep, the flip side of the frenetic passivity that precedes and follows it, occurs within a larger 24/7 sleepless framework that Crary accurately notes happens “…within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, [for] sleeping is for losers.”
Yet what’s to be won is never enunciated because the winners’ faces are always well-hidden as they execute the prodigious capitalist machine of control that creates docility and separation in people who find the machine life irresistible – even as it drains them of easy-going vitality and the joy of dawdling, even for an idle while. Doing nothing has become a crime.
Last night I stepped outside an hour after sunset and was startled by a massive full moon eyeing me as it rose over the eastern hills. Here where I dwell there are no city or factory lights to block the moon and stars as they illuminate our nights.
But most people are not so lucky, for what our ancestors once took for granted – that we are part of nature, part of the Tao – has been lost for so many as artificial lights, urbanization, and a 24/7 linguistic mind-control ideology block the thrill of being transfixed by the moon’s loving gaze, an invitation to taste the sweetness of the north wind’s cookie.
Maybe the sight of her face might rattle the televised images lodged in people’s “memories” of mechanical misbegotten men in ghost suits trampling her peaceful countenance.
The 24/7 digital life, essential to neo-liberal financialized capitalism with its day and night markets and infrastructure that allow for continuous consumption and work – total availability – is the culmination of a long process that began with the invention of artificial lighting that allowed the English cotton mills to run 24/7.
Crary brilliantly illustrates this point through the 1782 painting, Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, by the British artist James Derby. This painting shows the windows of the massive mills lit like pin-points in the rural night, watched over by a full moon that illuminates the sky.
Incongruous time indeed!
He writes, “The artificial lighting of the factories announces the rationalized deployment of an abstract relation between time and work, severed from the cyclical temporalities of lunar and solar movements.” This radical break from the traditional relation between time and work and the earth was later noted by Karl Marx as essential to the advance of capitalism since it disconnected the laboring individual from all interdependent connections to family, community, etc. while reorienting people’s feelings for time.
The English art critic John Berger, who knew that time with its corollary to place was a key to understanding so much history, put it this way: “Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those it exploits. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment.”
Dreaming of imprisonment, I just remembered that although it seems like a delusion from so far away and long ago, I once worked in a factory by day with its huge blast furnaces, in a NYC Police precinct jail on the 4-12 P.M. shift, and all-night as a nightwatchman. All good lessons in how American society works, although I hated them all and labored simply for the pay. But each in its own way taught me about imprisonment, especially the watchman’s job, since it involved a jolting sense of time and staying awake all night and sleeping by day. I was always exhausted and felt I was violating my deepest nature.
Sleep deprivation is a central component of the torturers’ methods, as so many victims of the U.S. war machine have learned. And the Pentagon (DARPA) has spent vast sums trying to create a sleepless soldier who can go at least seven days without sleep.
As Crary notes: “…scientists in various labs are conducting experimental trials of sleeplessness techniques, including neurochemicals, gene therapy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.” The war against sleep is being waged on many fronts by well-armed maniacs intent on controlling human beings for nefarious ends. To control sleep is to control time is to confound minds, which is the goal.
Ovid, the most sensual of Roman poets, would be shocked, I imagine, to learn that Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams from his Metamorphoses, would be attacked so relentlessly by today’s madmen who never heard of his poetry. My mind drifts to my college days translating Ovid under a weeping willow. “My cause is better: no-one can claim that I ever took up arms against you,” he wrote and I read.
These words come back to me as I muse on the arms taken today against sleep, but I’m not sure if it’s Ovid or Bob Dylan’s lyrics in his song Workingman’s Blues #2 (from the album Modern Times) that fly to mind, for Dylan also sings “No-one can ever claim/ That I took up arms against you.”
Poor Morpheus, so many people in these modern times yearn for your arms but instead of that balm, they toss and turn in a time out of mind and out of sleep.
Crary tells us that the amount of sleep the average North American adult gets has gone from ten hours in the early twentieth century to eight hours a generation ago to six-and-a-half today. And although people will always have to sleep, I think we can expect further reductions. To say it is a form of torture is probably an exaggeration, but not by much. He writes:
Behind the vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life…A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness… 24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits. It is aligned with what is inanimate, inert, or unageing. As an advertising exhortation it decrees the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment.
In other words, 24/7 is a form of linguistic mind control tied to cell phones, computers, and the digital life of the Internet whose purpose is to convince people that sleep and the human body is somehow unnatural and the future lies with people accepting their marriage to machines in a disenchanted and transhuman world. It is a lie, of course, for if that is a future people accept, there will be no future, just a desert.
“Deleuze and Guattari went to the point of comparing the order-word [24/7] to a ‘death sentence,’” writes Crary. Such an order-word or imperative is similar in this respect to the term “9/11” which was coined to send an instant message that emergencies will now be endless so we will have to monitor you forevermore. Keep your cell phone ready. Be on your toes, stay alert, the terrorists come at all hours – keep awake!
Crary makes a profoundly important point at a time when there is much justifiable focus on propaganda and the lies of governments and the media. This is the power of habit involved in the acceptance of the naturalness of various devices – today, electronic screens that are omnipresent – that we semi-automatically accept as normal.
He says, “In this sense, they are part of larger strategies of power in which the aim is not mass-deception, but rather states of neutralization and inactivation, in which one is dispossessed of time. But even within habitual repetitions there remains a thread of hope – a knowingly false hope – that one more click or touch might open onto something to redeem the overwhelming monotony in which one is immersed. One of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time.”
This is part of a modern process of psychological reductionism and a changed understanding of the nature of wishes that have excluded dreaming and daydreaming from any connection to a traditional magico-theological framework. Science and especially the neuro-sciences have reduced all life to what is empirically provable, attenuating life and the creation of art in the service of human life.
Crary uses Jean Paul Satre’s inelegant but insightful neologism, “practico-inert,” to explain people’s inability to see the nature of the social worlds they are part of with any clarity. “The practico-inert was thus Sartre’s way [in Critique of Dialectical Reason] of designating the sedimented, institutional everyday world constituted out of human energy but manifested as the immense accumulation of routine passive activity.”
To repeat, this frenetic passivity serves to obscure the negative historical reality of life in a 24/7 electronic spectacle that is advertised as amazingly empowering but is the reverse.
For direct experience has fallen on hard times as life today has come to be mediated through electronic gadgets. Surprises must be googled in advance or photographed to prove their reality. Living is never easy, not in the summertime or any other season. Tension, inattention, exhaustion, and constant busyness are the order of the day. This should be self-evident but isn’t. People feel it but can’t see it.
Commenting on the dying art of storytelling, Walter Benjamin, in an essay called “The Storyteller,” said the following about people’s ability to listen and remember stories that they can integrate into their own experience so they can pass them on [my emphasis]:
This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation, which is becoming rarer and rarer [written in 1936]. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places – the activities that are intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift of listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.
We have gone beyond rustling in the bushes to a cacophonous electronic world that makes one deaf to all else. That it will come crashing down around our ears is hard to imagine, but it will. It already has in the damage that it’s done.
Once upon a time . . . well, I will spare you. It might just seem like the dream of a ridiculous man, or something Dostoevsky would write, not your normal story or even daydream.
So read Jonathan Crary’s brilliant, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep and its sequel, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. They will get you to think about your sleep habits and whether or not you are ever turned off and tuned out but just sometimes only in “sleep mode.”
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Really appreciated this article. I miss the times when the collective took certain days off. Sunday was the most obvious, whether religious or not. Many stores were closed. It almost feels like a betrayal sometimes to see people working on Sunday. I feel an irritation in my soul. “Frenetic passivity” summed up this great article/review for me.
Next they will be trying to read and walk at the same time, and I thought chewing gum was a challenge.
Most people are sleepwalking, dreaming they are awake.
Great article. If I’m not mistaken, the body requires sleep for the brain to put things in order so you remain functional. Dreaming is an essential part of the process. Hard core drunks lose their capacity to dream. That is why they get DTs (Delirium Tremors) while they’re awake. The hallucinations stem from this as the brain must have dreams, so the body is making them dream in an awakened state. The ancient Chinese had a torturous method of killing someone. They used whatever methods necessary to keep the victim awake around the clock. In a matters of days, exactly how many depending on certain factors, the victim dies from lack of sleep. In most cases, it doesn’t take very many.
‘Islam’ translates as ‘submission’
So too does ‘Capitalism’ – submission to The Market
(to The Economy), obedience to Economic Dictates…
So too does ‘Christianity” – submission to God…
It would seems all the Slaves are fighting over whose
Submission is Better ?
God’s Order, or Hell’s Anarchy ?
There is safety in Submission…
To serve is not to be a slave. To serve is to serve a higher vision, a civilisation, a divine purpose.
An Architect serve his society by building comfortable houses, an Engineer serve us by securing these houses dont break down in our heads, a garbage man serve us by collecting our garbage.
The idea of specialisation is rationalisation and called civilisation. God’s order, a divine vision. Otherwise we should each make it all by ourselves, costly and time consuming keeping us on a low civilisation stage..
Hell’s Anarchy is the beast’s disorder, the animal’s survival of the “fittest”.
Thank you Mr. Curtin; your writings are always thought provoking.
Many people submit to Capital and its gadgets in the hope, one day, they or more likely their children can afford a home in a residential area where they can enjoy constitutional walks (highly recommended by old folks for digestion and a good night sleep) and fresh air in the peace of the night, and where no building or factory smoke can hide from their sight the beauty of the moon.
Somehow, I see no contradiction between a 24/7 technology addict and the person depicted above; the former points to the latter and the difference between the is just elapsed time, that is, no difference at all considering the long duration. Also, the quiet residential neighbourhood our walker is enjoying was made possible only by past deafening noise, sickening dust, and labour exploitation – even perhaps tragedies, – and lots of machinery of course; there or elsewhere. “[T]he rationalized deployment of an abstract relation between time and work, severed from the cyclical temporalities of lunar and solar movements” ironically made possible to our night walker and to many others to experience what it feels to be more in tune with their circadian rhythm. Marx is perfectly right; only Marx does not, as it were, distance himself from the experience of a disorderly cycle of human activity; he stares into it, embraces it, doesn’t negate it as something that shouldn’t be experienced on a “moral” basis, and assumes it as a necessary stage of human development; as our own. And thus, there is no “negative historical reality of life” in a moral sense; only necessary experience IMO.
The mode of production that preceded Feudalism, Slavery, has lasted many centuries and many might have thought then that it was eternal, but it’s now gone because it was one-sided; it conceived of certain human beings, and others too, in a very partial way. It couldn’t withstand the test of time, for time sweeps away everything one-sided. Same with Feudalism: Kings believed that the social organisation they ruled over was the will of God on earth for eternity, they sincerely belieed they were the representatives of God o earth. Gone with the wind, because it was one-sided; it couldn’t encompass the whole of society. The problems were not the Kings or the slave owners; those are just cogs which are changed every now and then; the problem is the one-sidedness of the corresponding social organisations that came about through the historical movement for which no one particular person or group of persons is truly responsible.
We are traveling a one-way trip in the sense that understanding, as we accumulate experience, is not compartmentalised by eras in a way that we can speak of some eras we can go back to or others we want to rule out. I see our travel as an accumulation of experiences thereby our conception of where we stand as a human community at a given stage, instead of sanding alone in opposition to previous conceptions, encompasses and integrates them, and thus it takes a fresh but not nostalgic look at the past.
Precisely, the “ability to listen and remember stories that [we] can integrate into [our] own experience” is a human ability which not only applies to a particular biological function, or aspect of the individual’s life; it applies also to the conception we form of our social organisation as made of, thus considering the longer historical duration we wish to integrate into our understanding, as a continuous movement of one-sided but increasingly encompassing stages; not of opposing ones, among which we may choose those we wish to return to or those we want to distance ourselves from.
Our quarrel is not with a minority IMO; it is with the system we all use. And our criticism of the torturing minority is made possible only through our longstanding use of this system; use that is mediated by this very minority; hence a contradiction arises in our criticism of the system whenever we conceive ourselves as outsiders to whom a tragedy occurred and which caused by very distant persons we can only point out to as through a telescope.
one can certainly have legitimate dispute with the minority/manager, but if objections are rejected, the cause of disharmony, then continued compliance is as good as carte blanche approval to recurring injustice….thus a neglect of life and a waste of time that allows insufficient space to progressively power the unavailing frippery that appeases the nothingness that remains.
Yes, and the incessant bombing of Gaza is a case in point (Thierry Meyssan asserts that no example in modern Warfare since the XXth century of such an intense bombing over such a minuscule area). Nothingness is the expected result indeed and by then, as you suggest, it would be too late to negotiate or appease anything or anyone, perhaps just the dead.
But these are the words of us as private individuals who can do very little, if anything, to counter a mouvement of History of an international scale moved by its own inertia. Beyond the obvious, only too human, outrages we all need to express, and the protestations and agitation we feel impelled to make, there is no room for us, as unorganized individuals, to do much more. This is not an admission of absolute helplessness, nor does it imply approval or justification of tragedies; it is the realisation of a fact, and our daily experience provides us with many analogous examples whereby we are practically, as individuals, of little help to affect change.
Otherwise, for events at our individual level, we are thrown daily into their contradictions and we do take sides and fight for what we subjectively think is our right. Thus, the admission of our incapacity to affect a huge historical mouvement, doesn’t imply a pessimistic, passive or fatalistic character.
But not only us; isn’t it remarkable that, besides the timid and slow mediations that are taking place, even the powerful nations that otherwise have always displayed and used their might against other nations seem of no more help to stop a clear decimation of a people than their population? I’m thinking of course of the US, but also the EU, Russia China, … as States? Doesn’t that illogical realisation invite us to think, to investigate what other forces are in play here that allow an open air genocide to go on?
When we start thinking about it, as individuals, we are left no other choice than to widen our analysis and consider the current event as simply an episode within a larger historical mouvement, and to try to grasp the nature of that mouvement. We are led to consider, economic, geopolitical, historical factors as the first motives, rather than actors, for the changes of actors of diverse political colours doesn’t alter State policies in any significant way; we are led to transcend the present emotions because we want to understand how, in 2023, there are still States that are acting, as Erdogan said, like common criminal organisations which in any other nation would have come under the competence of the ministry of interior.
Through that study, we can’t but appreciate that events have their causes in the past; that they are part of a major setting, swarming with conflicting interests and balanced powers, and, without justifying nor approving any of it, we can understand their logic and the ways they resolve themselves. We discover the forces, economic in nature, such as those which provoked past wars; and we deduce that just like the ongoing tragedies, those wars were bound to happen, under the rule of Capital and the way conditions were evolving. Stating that, combined with our blatant incapacity as individuals to force abrupt changes in international development, is not equivalent to give carte blanche, or approve of that mouvement: one doesn’t approve of one’s painful illness, though one can understand its occurrence as an ongoing experience (not as an intellectual exercise), and how previous circumstances led to it. This line of thinking is an intellectual stance when we otherwise have exhausted our means of action, and can do practically nothing more to change an ongoing situation, such as an actual international war or tragedy, and is a stance that is not inconsistent with, has already gone through, and matured beyond the initial mere feverish and sterile protestations; and one can adopt this stance even when one is actively engaged in those conflicts.
Hence, when I mentioned that Marx embraced the consequences of the industrial revolution with its toll of deaths, misery and child labour; he does so while those consequences had already taken place as a large historical mouvement and in crescendo, and against which he can do practically nothing; and he does so as an intellectual stance, as an acknowledgment of that mouvement as a whole of which he grasped the nature, not in the least of its particular instances (Marx would never allow, if he could help it, his children or any other child to work in those insalubrious factories), nor approving of it in a moral sense as the desirable status quo; precisely, in his understanding, just like flu, it was a historical stage soon to be overcome by its own contradictions.
capitalism has answer to anything
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/melatonin-use-and-poisoning-reports-surging-children-revealing-concerning-problem
Awesome, thank you. As a visual artist and lover of music, space, is as important as thing. In fact without space, thing occupies totally. Thing can’t exist without the space to exist in, space can’t exist without things to define it. Music-sounds don’t exist without being contained within space, and spaces. Thing has pulverized space in the Parent’s 21st C, as the elite use non-stop things to herd Humanity around like cattle, heading us into the pens of their open air digital prison.
“Doing nothing has become a crime.” Thinking, which requires space, is not allowed, as it will deliver the return of space for commoners to think, design and create solutions to the disasters created by the elite.
The parental elite are now overclocking (to adjust settings to increase performance beyond the limits of Mother Nature, Universe) everything to create the continual state of more which they desire but which Universe does not have capacity to produce. A form of dangerous magical thinking has possessed an unauthorized Parent class to prosecute autonomously without consent of Humanity. Transhumanism, AI, virtual “realities” (?), lightspeed operating digitalized things, mining asteroids, long term human space travel, mmWave 5G, GE, GM, blanketed satellite replacement of stars, centralized global control & monoculture, free virtual “money” for the Parents and infinite debt for the Children, and a near infinite list of MORE, is all nonsense. Cooked-up by coked-out Parent tweaker brains, that have Humanity overclocked into WW3 externally and internally.
Imho, timely withdrawals, turn-offs and non-participation while turning-on localized energetic creativity, will disempower and defund the GREAT MACHINE and the Parent class behind the curtain. Look at their next-level behavioral mandates, consentless policy, treaties and behavioral surveillance used to keep the giant flywheel from losing energy. If we don pay it, feed it, or vote for it’s managers …just pull the plug, one at a time and in may ways, start over.
Seems to me that most people dream day and night. The dream is always the same: we are here to make society work. We are part of some great machine that makes society work. We should do our bit. Our promotions, status, gadgets, vacations, are the rewards we reap from being a cog. The bigger the cog, the more you reward society and the more society rewards you. The only thing that is useful to society is to become a bigger cog in the wheel. You try to that for as long as you can, and then you wake up.
Some people never wake up.
You got some big dreams, baby, but in order to dream you gotta still be asleep..
Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots..
You got unrighteous doctors dealing drugs that’ll never cure your ills..
You think He’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires..
They tell you, time is money..
-Bob Dylan, When You Gonna Wake Up
Off topic but of maximum urgency for your health over the Christmas period:
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1731630260284755979
Our dedicated team of scientists have carried out intensive tests on various Christmas decorations and have established a clear link between pathology and morphology i.e. that normally harmless plastic and tinsel can become dangerous when contorted into certain shapes – primarily those of trees and stars. The mega biowaves of the fundamental universal vibration become seriously deviated from their organic utility this way. The result looks suspiciously like a heart attack but that’s just a coincidence.
A song
Joseph Arthur – Ceasefire Now – YouTube
Brilliant.
I was quite enjoying this until I got to the death sentence “Deleuze and Guattari….” when my heart just sank. All words are order-words (mots d’ordre) and every sentence is a death sentence. As Hannah Arendt was fond of putting it “All speech is action and all action is speech” (before Austin). So everything we do is a performative speech-act ordered (transformed) by words in the form of critical judgements we enact. I’ve got no intention of elucidating the sequence of “judgement – thinking – action” excepting in its most basic form. We make critical judgements based on moral-ethical criteria (of superior and inferior) and we enact them as an interventionism in a shared world; an irrational economic interventionism that is a massively destructive death-drive organised and ordered by the word (logos.)
If anybody is looking for the fount and source of world-alienation, individual isolation and totalitarianism – the ur-fascism is in the order-words. More specifically: it is in the grammar of separation and truth-logic of sublimation – not in the rhetorical; whichever is merely “compelled” (Barthes) propagation and proliferation of the underlying deep-structure (la Langue) as the original divide et impera. Hence, every word and every possible combination of words is an imperative and intentional “9/11” – not just some.
It’s the langue, stupid!: whichever renders sleep, daydream, and introspection “practico-inert” unless the word is silenced or completely ignored (vijnaptimatrata – the word as toxic “representation-only” of nothingness.) In fact all forms of inner and outer speech-act are transformatively toxic unless people want to think them through holistically. Until when, the “abstract machine” of representations is the root of authoritarianism and anything but silent meditation is dangerous. Nobody controls the language: the language controls everybody. Nobody creates the language: the language creates everybody. The inner fascist is always present in inner speech-act.
Particular thought-provocation should be given to the concept of a “collective assemblage of enunciation” when order-words speaking throughout people becomes totalitarianism. Following Hjelmslev, D&G treated language as a holistic system or “regime of signs” active everywhere and irreducible to any participant performance, let alone any participant order-words or any participant death sentence. Individuals think they have sole use of the language when the language has sole use of the individual as an alien animism.
Everybody enacts an economic world in synchrony with everybody elsewhere according to a totalised integration and introjective internalisation of critical judgement, rationalisation and enactment as an anthropogenic singularity. I’ll stop their cos people can’t handle reality. They’d rather just remain turned off, tuned out and entering sleep-mode in imaginary-symbolic control of the inner voice: when it was always the inner voice in control as a collective anthropogenic “neoliberal narratisation” of industrialised growth civilisation irreducible to anybody in particular – hence mots d’ordre.
Sleep is dangerous for any ruling order because it marks a time when people’s minds are unregulated, uncontrolled. Dreams can come to them. And the very thought of dreams is worrying to the rulers. Dreams suggest alternatives.
Repose beyond a bare minimum is not “productive”. Our self-appointed overlords would designate a wish for such rest a thought crime.
I’ve always found it odd that most people think something we do between 1/4 and 1/2 of the entire time we are alive is somehow a waste of time. (A lot of these same people sit around awake all day doing fuck all)
I love sleep, a refuge from the days machinations, a look inside without the incessant noise of anothers ego.
Long live sleep!
Sorry off topic, but this is a classic:
Johnny and 27 thumbs up, you are feeling it that way? You feel that you have been over shitted, been drowned in shit. Everybody shit on you? Thats the way you feel it.
But thats not the way you should feel it.Being shit on by a bird is a 1 in a billion chance, about the same as winning the lottery. You won in the lottery!
Many people says a bird shit saved their lives or caused luck. If you see it this way, the manager is the loser guy because he never gets shitted and receive only the farts going upwards from your arses…………………………LOL. That joke was so funny man…..farts from your arses…. 😄 .
Sleep
I have lost a lot of sleep over the genocide currently in progress.
indeed. I think lots of people have. Early bird here, too, and having a dog and 2 cats, early night as well. Beasts don’t understand change of time, just wake up as usual
Mornings, before the brain is assaulted by the ‘news’ of the day.
Before the world takes over.
Before our daily rituals and routine.
Many writers, poets, artists, musicians and songwriters will testify that mornings are the most creative time of the day. Being a songwriter, I can vouch for that.
Dunno if I could hit the sack that early Ed. Too many books to read.
Sleep no more. Time is everything, we are nothing, at most we are time’s carcass, as Marx observed. The market’s commodification and colonization of life as resources in machinery of production has become a 24/7 matrix. Data is the new oil, the energy which runs the techno-totalitarian engines of surveillance-security capitalism on a prison planet. The simulacra of the metaverse await our final assimilation into virtual reality of cyberspace, beyond losing ourselves on screens. We may still think by pushing a button we’ve turned off the machine, but it remains running in constant pursuit of colonizing our consciousness and being to the point of no return to any semblance of agency or autonomy. Where is Ned Ludd now that we need him more than ever?
To sleep perchance to WAKE.
(And SEE through the veil of lies).
Time is not on our side anymore. I first noticed the change when I first got what they called an ’email address’. At the time I had very little idea of it’s repercussions to my work life. Suddenly I was available to be conveyed to 7 days a week 24/7. No excuse was available for not reading a memo or acting on it. Then at the same time the mobile phone was added with voice mail and text. That’s when I knew I’d been trapped in my wilderness.
Today we exclusively live in this world of time management. Our time is more valuable to others than ourselves. We can’t make time so we make money instead which is somewhat okay with us. What we fail miserably to realize is that you can’t get that time back. You can’t go back in time or even buy it back.
It is simple. Employers violated laws or employment contracts, and subverted government officials evaded the issue until it became entrenched.
No, but you can buy time. Buy time enough to free yourself, and when you are free, its over.
CRACK ‘N’ DE CODE
9-1-1 7-11 4-1-1 24-7 3-65
The Last Obstacle
The Final Frontier:
Occupy Your Mind
Sleep is a ferocious battle for the old.
But, on a more apposite note, I hate how everything closes early now. Before covid, all the grocery stores were going 24 hour. The diners were 24 hour. Bars and grills were open till 2pm. You weren’t constantly checking closing times (which, btw, the computer is always, not sometimes, not often, but always, wrong about–so much for computer infallibility). I miss those halcyon days. I also hate holidays, which seem to have proliferated. Whenever I have to go to the library, or city hall, or some other institution, it’s a holiday. And you always get sick and your car always breaks down on Saturday, count on it. So I hate weekends too. Can’t they just stagger them? I thought people were complaining about the “too rational” nature of modern society. I say it’s not rational enough. Rational would mean they stagger weekends and holidays: your weekend is sat and sun, but mine is mon and tues, and his is wed and thurs. Your Xmas is dec 25, mine is 26, his is 27. Then at least we could get our life-saving, absolutely crucial medicine when we run out on Xmas Eve.