24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep QUOTES

1 " In many different ways, the attack on values of collectivity and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependence on others, while in fact we are experiencing a more comprehensive subjection to the “free” workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is “to be free of other selves. "

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

2 " The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual. "

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

3 " This is a decisive trait of the era of technological addictiveness: that one can return again and again to a neutral void that has little affective intensity of any kind. "

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

4 " To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it [24/7] is both of and after the disaster, characterized by the empty sky, in which no star or sign is visible, in which one's bearings are lost and orientation is impossible. p.17 "

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

5 " Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. "

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

6 " Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking had to be inverted into a risk-filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences. Now it has reached the point of laws being enacted in parts of the United States that criminalize giving food to the homeless or to undocumented immigrants. "

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

7 " According to the Tiqqun collective, we have become the innocuous, pliable inhabitants of global urban societies.7 Even in the absence of any direct compulsion, we choose to do what we are told to do; we allow the management of our bodies, our ideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to be externally imposed. We buy products that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then we voluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject who submits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water and lives near nuclear reactors without complaint. The absolute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by the titles of the many bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies to see before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before we die. "

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

8 " Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience. "

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

9 " There are now very few significant interludes of human existence (with the colossal exception of sleep) that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time, or marketing time. "

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

10 " One of the many reasons human cultures have long associated sleep with death is that they each demonstrate the continuity of the world in our absence. "

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

11 " Stiegler cites the advent of widespread internet use in the mid 1990s as a decisive turning point [...] in the impact of these industrial audiovisual products. Over the last two decades, he believes, they have been responsible for a 'mass synchronization' of consciousness and memory. The standardization of experience on such a large scale, he argues, entails a loss of subjective identity and singularity; it also leads to the disastrous disappearance of individual participation and creativity in the making of the symbols we all exchange and share. "

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

12 " [...] whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than in one's immediate actual circumstances. It is now a given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communications or exploration of ideas. "

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

13 " An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. Even as a contemporary colloquialism, the term “eyeballs” for the site of control repositions human vision as a motor activity that can be subjected to external direction or stimuli. The goal is to refine the capacity to localize the eye’s movement on or within highly targeted sites or points of interest. The eye is dislodged from the realm of optics and made into an intermediary element of a circuit whose end result is always a motor response of the body to electronic solicitation. It is out of this context that Google and other corporate players now compete for dominance over the remains of the everyday. "

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

14 " since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life. "

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

15 " Como muitos já notaram, a forma que a inovação assume no capitalismo é a simulação contínua do novo, enquanto as relações de poder e de controle existentes permanecem, na prática, as mesmas. "

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

16 " Tiqqun kolektifine göre, küresel kent toplumlarının zararsız sakinleri olduk. Doğrudan bir zorlamanın olmadığı durumda bile, bize yapmamız söylenen şeyi yapmayı tercih ediyoruz; bedenlerimizin, fikirlerimizin, eğlencemizin yönetilmesine ve bütün hayali ihtiyaçlarımızın bize dışarıdan dayatılmasına izin veriyoruz. Elektronik hayatlarımızın izlenmesi sonucunda bize tavsiye edilen ürünleri satın alıyor, sonra da satın aldığımız şeyler hakkında başkaları için gönüllü olarak yorumlar bırakıyoruz. Her tür biyometri ve gözetleme ihlaline boyun eğen, toksik yiyecek ve suyla beslenip şikayet etmeden nükleer reaktörlerin yakınında yaşayan uysal tebaayız. "

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

17 " Modernity, contrary to its popular connotations, is not the world in a sweepingly transformed state. Rather, as some critics have shown, it is the hybrid and dissonant experience of living intermittently within modernized spaces and speeds, and yet simultaneously inhabiting the remnants of pre-capitalist life-world, whether social or natural. "

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

18 " Of course, no individual can ever be shopping, gaming, working, blogging, downloading, or texting 24/7. However, since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life. "

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

19 " Por trás do vazio da frase de efeito, 24/7 é uma redundância estática que contradiz sua própria relação com as tessituras rítmicas e periódicas da vida humana. Remete a um esquema arbitrário e inflexível de uma semana de duração, subtraído do desdobramento de qualquer experiência variada ou cumulativa. Dizer “24 / 365”, por exemplo, não é a mesma coisa, pois a expressão sugere, com certo preciosismo, uma temporalidade estendida ao longo da qual algo pode de fato mudar, e ao longo da qual eventos inesperados podem ocorrer. Como indiquei acima, muitas instituições no mundo desenvolvido funcionam 24/7 há décadas. Apenas recentemente a elaboração e a configuração da identidade pessoal e social foram reorganizadas a fim de se adaptarem à operação ininterrupta de mercados, redes de informação e outros sistemas. Um ambiente 24/7 parece um mundo social, mas é na verdade um modelo não social de desempenho maquínico e uma interrupção da vida que não revela o custo humano exigido para sustentar sua eficácia. […] 24/7 é um tempo de indiferença, contra o qual a fragilidade da vida humana é cada vez mais inadequada, e dentro do qual o sono não é necessário nem inevitável. […] Da mesma forma, 24/7 é inseparável da catástrofe ambiental, dada a exigência de gasto permanente e desperdício sem fim para sua manutenção e a interrupção fatal dos ciclos e estações dos quais depende a integridade ecológica. "

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

20 " One of the goals of Google, Facebook, and other enterprises [...] is to normalize and make indispensable [...] the idea of a continuous interface--not literally seamless, but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response. Of course there are breaks, but they are not intervals in which any kind of counter-projects or streams of thought can be nurtured and sustained. As the opportunity for electronic transactions of all kinds becomes omnipresent, there is no vestige of what used to be everyday life beyond the reach of corporate intrusion. An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. "

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