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The Age of Insomniacs: 24/7 and the
Posthuman Dilemma
Posted by Craig Hickman on April 7, 2014
Amid the mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism, images have become one of
the many depleted and disposable elements that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never being
discarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futureless present.
- Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
If as Berardi argues in Time, Acceleration, and Violence (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/time-
acceleration-and-violence/)that time is what we store in our bank accounts, then time is the final
security deposit that is no longer secured for us time bound creatures of late capitalist society. Like
those objects that Graham Harmann tells us continuously withdraw from all relation we too have been
cut off from our own accumulated time, set adrift upon the sea of things without the ability to connect,
link up, relate. Solitary and isolated, withdrawn from all relation, we too feel like those precarious,
depleted, and disposable elements of an inhuman system that no longer needs us.
J.G. Ballard in Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown recounts the slow withdrawal of an anonymous author
into a final fugue state of pure insomniac bliss. It is purported that the journal is actually by one Dr.
Robert Loughlin who kept a speculative diary of his experiences just before the untimely death of his
wife. It describes in minute detail the events of his personal and professional life. It seems that he was
already aware of the erratic nature of his behaviour and of the recurrent fugues, each lasting several
days, from which he would emerge in an increasingly dissociated state (851).1 In another short story
Myths of the Near Future we discover that this fugue state is a form of space sickness:
At first touching only a small minority of the population, it took root like a lingering disease in the
interstices of its victims lives, in the slightest changes of habit and behaviour. Invariably there was
the same reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike of
daylight, a gradual loss of weight and retreat into a hibernating self.(Ballard, 1064)
In another instance we discover that this fugue state is brought on by a particular implosion of Time:
Time was condensing around him a thousand replicas from the past and future had invaded the
present and clasped themselves to him. (Ballard, 1064) Each of these stories implies the notion that the
characters involved are somehow trying to elude historical linear time for some alternative world of
time, trying to find a way out of time and into a time Outside.
Marshall McLuhan in Counterblast reminded us that our new media is not a bridge between humans and
nature, rather the digital worlds of our posthuman systems are nature nature as Nature vanished into
darkness long ago and was replaced by a facsimile, a dark progenitor, a liquid double of electronic
circuitry and lightspeed. McLuhan agrees with Oscar Wilde. Life imitates art, not the other way around.
We are all living in an art world, a world of artifice, and artificial world. We are all performative artists,
creators of our own fictional lives; or, more bluntly we have been created by the mechanized media in
which we live. We are no longer individual, but as Deleuze and Guattari have iterated we are
dividuals. Or as McLuhan tells us: Our bridges are gone and the Rubicon is yet to be crossed! We
have either to assume a large new role or to abdicate entirely. It is the age of paratroopers.
That books and essays written on new media only five years ago are already outdated is particularly
telling, and anything written with the same goal today will become dated in far less time. At present, the
particular operation and effects of specific new machines or networks are less important than how the
rhythms, speeds, and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption are reshaping experience and
perception.2 Governments and private corporations are spending billions in R&D seeking mechanisms
and new technologies that will reduce the time interval between decision making processes and the
actions affected by these decisions. As Crary reminds us this is what progress means in our
contemporary world: the relentless capture and control of time and experience (Crary, 40).
As Crary implies futurism itself has a history, and that it has changed from modernist, postmodernist, to
contemporary liquid modernity through differing phases. In modernist conceptions the production of
novelty and the new were part of a continuous series of innovations and experiments which were linked
over time with empowered visions of global prosperity, automation benignly displacing human labor,
space exploration, the elimination of crime and disease, and so on (Crary, 40). But from the postmodern
age to now the future seemed to implode as time accelerated to the speed of light and became the 24/7
realm of pure illuminated time in which individual goals of competitiveness, advancement,
acquisitiveness, personal security, and comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand
that it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in the
shallowest of presents (Crary, 41).
Yet, as Crary reports it we must not see this modulation between modernist and postmodern 24/7 time
as separate, but rather as part of a system that forms a continuous loop or modulated performance of
capitalism in our age. Some of the key features of early-twenty-first-century capitalism can still be
linked with aspects of the industrial projects associated with the early pioneers of technological capital.
As he states it the consequences of these nineteenth-century models, especially the facilitation and
maximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much more
comprehensively throughout the twentieth century (Crary, 41-42).
Yet, in our time of the unsleeping consumer new forms of social regulation and subjection, new modes
of management of the economic behavior of individuals towards compliant docile consumers.
Corporations arelinking the individuals needs with the functional and ideological programs in which
each new product is embedded. Ones status is defined by the services and interconnections one
inhabits, which in turn become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of ones social reality
(Crary, 43). The individual as dividual or encoded application or datafeed connected to the systems and
controlled by its algorithms becomes part of a continuous process of distension and expansion,
occurring simultaneously on different levels and in different locations, a process in which there is a
multiplication of the areas of time and experience that are annexed to new machinic tasks and demands.
A logic of displacement (or obsolescence) is conjoined with a broadening and diversifying of the
processes and flows to which an individual becomes effectively linked.(Crary, 43)
We as humans are slowly being purged of our humanity and slowly devolving into pure commodities
to be incorporated in the machinic system of capital as part of the process rather than as isolated and
withdrawn consumers of the process. Yet, not all former humans will become a part of this new
machine. As Crary relates:
At the same time, there are vast numbers of human beings, barely at or below subsistence level, who
cannot be integrated into the new requirements of markets, and they are irrelevant and expendable.
Death, in many guises, is one of the by-products of neoliberalism: when people have nothing further
that can be taken from them, whether resources or labor power, they are quite simply disposable.
However, the current increase in sexual slavery and the growing traffic in organs and body parts
suggest that the outer limit of disposability can be profitably enlarged to meet the demands of new
market sectors.(Crary, 44)
We are all products of the new media systems that have become naturalized inside us. The assertion by
some neoliberal pundits that technology is neutral that it actually provides new forms of emancipatory
politics and services to counter the effects of consumerism are according to philosopher Giorgio
Agamben lies, he refutes such claims as Crary explains saying that today there is not even a single
instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated or controlled by some apparatus.
He contends convincingly that it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it in the right
way. Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media
apparatus in which they are captured.(Crary, 46-47)
Critics of the neoliberal world order are quickly marginalized or silenced by the new mediatainment
systems. As Crary reports any questioning or discrediting of what is currently the most efficient means
of producing acquiescence and docility, of promoting self-interest as the raison dtre of all social
activity, is rigorously marginalized. To articulate strategies of living that would delink technology from
a logic of greed, accumulation, and environmental despoliation merits sustained forms of institutional
prohibition.(Crary, 50).
Crary points out philosopher Bernard Stiegler who believes we are living in a fugue time, a time fully
synchronized and synchronizing consciousness and memory. An age of amnesia in which humans are
forgetting themselves. He calls urgently for the creation of counter-products that might reintroduce
singularity into cultural experience and somehow disconnect desire from the imperatives of
consumption.(Crary, 51) Yet, as Crary defines it is not the capture of consciousness by things, but is
rather the reprogramming of consciousness itself to become a system of repetition and response
embedded in an ever present milieu of narrowed consumptions.
Ultimately we are becoming passive followers of the new order, no longer questioning our role within
this new economic world of products of which we, too, are one among many. Soon our DNA will be
patented and owned by some synthetic biotech corporation to be used in some future R&D project to
clone or mutate or splice. 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. (Crary, 60)
Who needs a Bucket List in such a world that is already manufactured for you? Planned obsolescence
never had it better. The new leisure society the perfect android: safe, secure, compliant.
1. Ballard, J. G. (2012-06-01). The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (p. 851). Norton. Kindle Edition.
2. Crary, Jonathan (2013-06-04). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (pp. 38-39). Verso Books.
Kindle Edition.
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4 responses to The Age of Insomniacs: 24/7 and the
Posthuman Dilemma
dmf says:
April 7, 2014 at 1:14 pm
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/18-armys-robot-recruiter/
Reply
NellaLou says:
April 7, 2014 at 4:06 pm
In the paragraph beginning Marshall McLuhan in Counterblast.. do you mean life imitates art
(Wildes anti-mimesis) rather than art imitates life?
Reply
noir-realism says:
April 7, 2014 at 4:57 pm
Yea, got to typing too fast mind went right by dyslexic that it is
Reply
syndax vuzz says:
April 20, 2014 at 8:46 pm
Reblogged this on syndax vuzz.
Reply
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