The most luxurious thing these days is probably sleep

Human life has, by and large, been locked into a state of ceaseless continuity, the norm of which is perpetual motion. In this state, time no longer passes, outside clock time. Behind the empty buzzword, 24/7 marks a kind of static redundancy that denies connection to the rhythms and cycles of human life. It is meant to be an arbitrary uninflected schema, cut from complex, varied or precipitated experience. "24/365," for example, is completely different, because it implies a dull, undulating timeliness in which real change and the unexpected may occur. Many institutions in the developed world have been operating on a 24/7 basis for decades. It is only in recent years that our personal and social identities have been reshaped and reshaped to accommodate the constant workings of markets, information networks and other systems. The 24/7 environment dresses up as a social world, but it's really a typical machine world, a life stop that doesn't let the world know how much it costs to keep it functioning effectively. It must be distinguished from time as discussed by early 20th-century thinkers like Lukacs, the hollow, homogenous modernity of time in the form of measures or calendars that serve the functioning of the state, finance and industry, to the exclusion of individual hopes or plans. What is new is that this pretence is completely abandoned, that time is no longer tied to any long-term undertakings, and that even the illusion of "progress" or development is broken down. The 24/7 world, illuminated by day and night and removed from shadow, is the last illusion of post-capitalist history, with the otherness removed as the driving force of historical development.

The age of 24/7 is indifferent, fragile human life is increasingly unable to adapt to it, and sleep is no longer a necessity or necessity. In the field of labor, it makes the concept of work without breaks and limits reasonable, even normal. It is no different from anything that is lifeless, lifeless or eternal. As the AD says, it promises to get you whatever you want, endlessly stimulating your insatiable needs. Such unrestrained spending is not new. We are long past the age of accumulating stuff. Today, our bodies and oneness absorb an ever-growing and excessive amount of services, images, programs, chemicals to the point of poisoning and even killing us. Even if alternative schemes indirectly allow for periods of non-shopping or non-selling, the long-term survival of the individual is always irrelevant. 24/7 is also inextricably linked to environmental catastrophes, requiring endless consumption, endless waste, and ultimately disrupting the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.

Sleep will always be at odds with the requirements of the 24/7 system because sleep is intrinsically unproductive and the cost to production, circulation and consumption is incalculable because the compulsion to sleep is intrinsically determined. We spend a large part of our lives sleeping, and during this time we are freed from the mire of desire, and humanity has greatly challenged the greedy nature of capitalism. Capitalism steals time from us, and sleep intercepts that process without compromise. Most seemingly inextinguishable basic physical needs -- hunger, thirst, lust and, more recently, the need for friendship -- have been reinvented and transformed into commodities. The existence of sleep means that there are human needs and intervals that cannot be colonised or absorbed by the great profit engine, making it a source of untimely eccentricities and crises in a globalised world. Despite all the scientific research in this area, none of the strategies that have tried to develop or reshape sleep have worked. The shocking and incredible reality is that not a drop of money can be wrung out of it.

The erosion of sleep is now widespread, which is not surprising given the huge financial stakes in sleep time. This erosion deepened throughout the 20th century, cutting into sleep. The average North American adult sleeps about 6.5 hours a night today, up from eight hours a generation ago and (though hard to believe) 10 hours at the turn of the 20th century. "We spend a third of our lives sleeping" was an axiom in the mid-20th century, but it has since lost its force. Sleep is a subtle reminder that we have never fully surpassed the pre-modern era, and that the agricultural world that began to decline 400 years ago has not completely disappeared. One of the SINS of sleep is that it inserts into our lives rhythmic cycles of alternation -- light and darkness, activity and rest, work and rest -- that have been annihilated or suppressed elsewhere. As with anything considered a natural phenomenon, sleep certainly has a rich history. It was never monolithic or uniform, and took on many different forms over centuries and millennia. In the 1930s, Marcel Mauss's work on the "body technique," referring to sleep and wakefulness, revealed that many seemingly instinctive behaviors were actually learned in a variety of ways through imitation or education. We can still say that pre-modern agricultural societies, for all their complexity and diversity, had some key traits in common when it came to sleep.

Sleep had a stable place in the Aristotelian to Renaissance frame of thought, but this frame of understanding is outdated today, and its place began to loosen in the mid-17th century. It was gradually realized that sleep was incompatible with modern ideas that emphasized productivity and rationality, and that Descartes, Hume, and Locke were just a few of many philosophers who denigrated sleep on the grounds that it did not help us use our reason or our knowledge. Sleep loses its value compared with the primacy of consciousness and will, and the worship of utilitarian, purposeful and self-interested agency. In Locke's view, sleep interrupts God's will and instruction that humans should work hard and be rational, a process that is tragic but inevitable. Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature" begins by pointing out that sleep, along with mania and madness, constitutes an obstacle to the pursuit of knowledge. By the middle of the 19th century, the unequal relationship between sleep and wakefulness had become a hierarchical one, with sleep thought to degrade into lower, more primitive patterns and "inhibit" higher, more complex brain activity. Schopenhauer, an outlier among the thinkers of his time, upended this hierarchy by suggesting that only in sleep could humans grasp the "true core" of existence.

In many ways, the precarious status of sleep has to do with the peculiar movement of modernity, in which reality is no longer organized in binary complementary ways. The homogenizing power of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent binary structure: sacred and profane, carnival and the workday, natural and cultural, mechanical and organic, to name a few. As a result, any insistence that sleep is "natural" becomes unacceptable. People still sleep, of course, and even in sprawling megacities there are still periods of relative quiet at night. But sleep is no longer seen as an inevitable or natural experience. Instead, it is seen as a mutable managed function that, like many other things, can only be defined instrumentally and physiologically. Recent studies show a huge increase in the number of people who wake up in the night to check their texts or data once or more. Electronic devices have "sleep mode" Settings, and this change in language may seem trivial, but it is common. The notion that electronic devices can operate in low-power hibernation has transformed sleep into a state of merely delayed or attenuated activity. The opposing logic of on/off is so outmoded that nothing can be completely shut down and there is no real rest.

Sleep proves that there can be only a limited harmony between human life and the inexorable march of modernity, a confirmation that is regarded as irrational and intolerable. One of today's critical thinking platitudes is that there is no such thing as nature that cannot be changed -- not even in death -- and some predict that soon our thoughts will be downloaded from our heads and made into digital versions that will last forever. If one believes that human life functions have essential properties distinct from machines, eminent critics tell us that such an idea is naive delusion. They will cite counterexamples: if a new drug can make people work 100 hours straight, why oppose it? Wouldn't more flexibility and less sleep give us more personal freedom and the ability to follow our own needs and desires? Wouldn't less sleep give us more time to "live life to the fullest"? But some people might argue that people are meant to sleep at night, that our bodies are designed to keep pace with the earth's rotation, and that almost all organisms respond to the changing seasons and the length of sunlight. A critic's response to this might be: New age nonsense, sinister; Or, more maliciously, that the desire to recreate Heidegger's flesh-flesh connection with the earth is ominous. More importantly, in the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleep is for losers.

Industrialization in Europe was accompanied by the most brutal exploitation of workers. Later in the 19th century, the operators of the factory began to realise that if guarantee workers the right amount of time to rest, they will be more efficient, can work in a more lasting longer time intervals, and it will bring more profits, Anson rabin Bach (Anson Rabinbach) study of fatigue has revealed that very well. But from the 1990s until now, with the collapse of the controlled-or conciliatory models of capitalism in Europe and the US, there was no longer a need for the retreats that had been a component of economic growth and profitability. Time for rest and renewal is now simply too expensive to co-exist in a structural sense with contemporary capitalism. There was a cruel contradiction between the manipulation of time by unfettered markets and the inherent physiological limitations that humans face when they are required to obey them, which was known as bioderegulation, to use a term coined by Teresa Brennan.

As the recent debate over health care shows, the decline in the long-term value of live work has not made rest or health a prime economic goal. These days, there are almost no discernible gaps in human life (sleep is a special case). They are all interrupted or occupied by work, consumption, or marketing. In their analysis of contemporary capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello point out that the forces that are prized are those who can consistently engage, connect, communicate, respond to or process things in an information environment. This is already happening, they note, in the richer parts of the planet, where most boundaries have collapsed: private time and work time, work and consumption. In their connectionist paradigm, what is most valuable is activity for activity's sake, "always doing something, moving, changing -- that brings you prestige, not stability, which is often synonymous with inaction". This activity pattern is not a shift from the previous work ethic paradigm, but rather a new set of normative models that require 24/7 timeliness to be implemented.

There is a plan to wipe out the darkness of night by launching large orbital reflectors that reflect sunlight like mirrors. It sounds preposterous, like the low-tech mechanical schemes preserved from Jules Verne or early-20th-century science fiction. In fact, the first test launches mostly failed -- once because the reflector didn't open in place, and another time because heavy cloud cover over the test city failed to show the world what it could do. The project is ambitious and seems to have something to do with a wide range of open panorama practices that have developed over the past 200 years. That is, it points to the importance of lighting for bentham's model of an opioropic prison, which requires filling the space with light, eliminating shadows and creating a state of complete visibility, an effect similar to control. But for decades, other satellites have managed to monitor and gather information in more sophisticated ways. Modern optical-viewing prisons have extended beyond the visible wavelengths of light to other parts of the spectrum, not to mention a variety of non-visual scanners, thermals, and biochemical sensors. The satellite project is best understood as a continuation of the more overtly utilitarian practices invented in the 19th century. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's study of the history of lighting technology shows how the extensive installation of urban streetlights in the 1880s achieved two interrelated goals: It reduces longstanding worries about the dangers of darkness and increases the length of time many economic activities take place, boosting profits. Night lighting symbolically confirmed what apologists for capitalism had promised throughout the 19th century: that it would be a double guarantee of security and increased wealth, and that improvements in the social fabric would benefit everyone. In this sense, the smooth arrival of the 24/7 world means that the earlier plan has come to pass, but the benefits and prosperity have largely gone to a powerful global elite.

24/7 gradually Narrows the distinction between day and night, light and dark, action and rest. It's a zone of loss of consciousness, amnesia, making experience impossible. According to Maurice Blanchot, it is both during and after a disaster, characterized by an empty sky with no visible starlight or sign, and disorientation and inability to reorient. More specifically, it is like a state of emergency, as if something extreme had happened, and a row of searchlights suddenly went on in the middle of the night, but never went out again, frozen into a permanent state. The planet is reimagined as a never-ending workplace or a never-ending shopping mall, with an endless supply of goods to choose from, giving you the illusion of temporary diversion. In the state of wakefulness, production, consumption and waste never stop, accelerating the consumption of life and the exhaustion of resources.

Sleep is the only major remaining obstacle to the full realization of 24/7 capitalism -- indeed, the last of what Marx called "natural obstacles." Sleep cannot be eliminated, but it can be disrupted and deprived, and the means and incentives for disrupting sleep are all in place. The damage to sleep is part of the ongoing dismantling of social security in other areas. Just as universal access to clean drinking water across the globe has been destroyed by pollution and privatisation, along with the commodification of bottled water, it is not hard to see how sleep has been constructed as a scarce resource. All this encroachment on sleep creates a state of sleeplessness that must be purchased (even if the quality of sleep can be improved by buying chemicals, the effect is only close to that of actual sleep). Data show a sharp increase in the use of sleeping pills, with about 50 million Americans prescribed pills like Ambien or Sulazepam in 2010, and millions more buying over-the-counter sleeping pills. But it would be a mistake to assume that the current situation will improve and that you will sleep soundly and wake up refreshed. Now, even in a world free of severe oppression, insomnia is impossible to eliminate. Insomnia has acquired historical significance and a special emotional texture because of its relationship with external collective experience, and is now inseparable from other forms of deprivation and social destruction around the globe. In the present, insomnia as an individual "lack" is consistent with general worldlessness.

...

A current in contemporary political theory is to view exposure as an essential or eternal characteristic of a person's becoming a human being. The individual is not autonomous or self-sufficient, and the individual cannot be understood except in relation to the other which lies outside him and which faces him. It is precisely because individuals are in such a fragile state that interdependence between people is needed. It is this interdependence that sustains society. Yet we are now at a point in history where this state of naked exposure has become detached from the public that, at least temporarily, gave us protection and care. Of particular relevance is the work of Hannah Arendt, who explores these issues. For many years, she used bright and visible imagery to argue about what was necessary for any substantive political life. Individuals who want to be politically effective need to maintain a balance, moving back and forth between the bright, even starkly exposed, public activities and the protected areas of family or private life, which she calls "living in the protected darkness." Elsewhere, she notes that "twilight fills our private and private lives." Without that private space or time, it is impossible to develop a distinctive self, one that can make substantial contributions in exchange for the common good, outside the "extremely bright public space where others are always present."

For Arendt, there is a distinction between the private sphere and the pursuit of personal material comforts, in which the self is defined by possession and consumption. In "The Human Condition," she discusses these two areas in detail through The dynamic balance between exhaustion and renewal: The exhaustion of worldly labor or activity, and The closure and gloom of family life. Arendt was well aware that her model of a mutually supportive relationship between the public and private spheres had been realized only occasionally in history. But she sees serious threats to even that possibility as an economy emerges. In this economy, where "things are swallowed up and discarded as quickly as possible as soon as they come into the world," it is no longer possible to agree on common interests or goals. She wrote this in the 1950s, during the Cold War, with a keen insight: if "we were merely members of a consumer society, we would not be living in the world at all. We would be driven by a cycle of things coming and going." She is also aware that, in a consumer society, public life and areas of work are, for the most part, alienating.

There are many familiar associations, from William Blake's "God bless us from single vision and Newtonian sleep" to Carlyle's "Over our noblest minds hangs the spectre of sleep..." From Emerson's "sleep lingers before our eyes for life" to Guy Debord's "landscape expresses nothing but society's desire to sleep." It would be easy to cite hundreds of examples of this kind of reverse description of the sober state of modern social experience. Left and right, high and low, all paint a picture of a society of sleepers that has been a common feature of movies from "Caligari" to "The Matrix. The arousal of sleepwalking in others often leads to a deterioration or weakening of perception, which is associated with procedural, habitual, or trance-like behavior. In most mainstream social theories, the modern individual lives and acts entirely without sleep, at least occasionally -- a state of intense self-awareness, the ability to evaluate events and information, and to participate as rational and objective subjects in public or civic life. Any description of a person as inactive, passively subject to manipulation or behavior management is often seen as reductive or irresponsible.

At the same time, most ideas of political awakening are thought to be equally disturbing, suggesting a sudden irrational transformation. Just remember that in the early 1930s the Nazi Party's main election slogan was "Deutschland Erwache! Wake up Germany! You'll see. Or even longer ago, St. Paul wrote to the Romans: "Now is the time to wake up... Let us put aside ambiguity and put on the armor of light." Or, more recently and more prolimatously, Ceausescu's opponents in 1989 urged: "Wake the Romanians from their sleep and loosen the hands of the tyrants who have fallen upon you." Political and religious awakening is often expressed in the language of perception as a newly discovered ability to see through things as they are hidden from view, to distinguish an upside down world from an upside-down one, or to recapture lost truths that deny the world before awakening. Awakening is like a sudden Epiphany, breaking the numbing monotony of the orderly state of existence and rediscovering its authenticity as opposed to the unconscious emptiness of sleep. In this sense, awakening is deterministic: redemptive moments that break historical time, during which the individual undergoes a process of self-transformation and encounters a previously unknown future. But that whole set of images and metaphors now seems out of place in the face of a global system that never sleeps, as if to assure that any potentially dangerous awakening is unnecessary or pointless. If anything survives beyond dawn and sunrise, it is what Nietzsche calls Socrates's demand for the "light of eternal reason." But since Nietzsche's time, human "reason" has been largely and irresistibly transferred to the programs of the 24/7 information network, to the circuits of light transmitted by optical fibers.

Paradoxically, power meets least political resistance when it works on the subject in the sleeping state, which ultimately cannot be externally controlled and instrumentalized -- thereby avoiding or thwarting the demands of the global consumer society. As a result, it goes without saying that a lot of social and cultural discourse about sleep is rigid or silly. Sleep is deeply ambiguous and cannot be easily incorporated into a binary framework. Maurice Blanchot, Maurice MerleauPonty and Walter Benjamin were among the few thinkers in the 20th century who thought deeply about this question. Clearly, understanding sleep requires taking into account the differences between the private and the public, the individual and the collective, but always being aware that they are permeable and close to each other. My larger argument is that, in our current context, sleep can represent solid social stability, a kind of door guard that society can rely on to fend off or protect itself. For each person, social protection is essential for the continuity of sleep as the most private and vulnerable state.