24/7: late capitalism and the Ends of Sleep Jonathan Crary verso 2013

1)  white-crowned sparrow      US Defense Department has spent large amounts of money to study.. the brain activity of the birds during their long sleepless periods of migrations
the initial objective, is the creation of the sleepless soldier
The sleeplessness research should be understood as one part of a quest for soldiers whose capabilities will more closely approximate the functionalities of non-human apparatuses and networks.

p.10 In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.

P.13 Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization.

P.12 for Locke, sleep was a regrettable if unavoidable interruption of God's intended priorities for human beings: to be industrious and rational. In the very first paragraph of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, sleep is lumped together with fever and madness as examples of the obstacles to knowledge. By the mid nineteenth century, the asymmetrical relation between sleep and waking began to be conceptualized in hierarchical models in which sleep was understood as a regression to a lower and more primitive mode in which supposedly higher and more complex brain activity was "inhibited."
2)
p. 29    24/7 announces a time without time, a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations, a time without sequence or recurrence. In its peremptory reductiveness, it celebrates a hallucination of presence, of an unalterable permanence composed of incessant, frictionless operations.

3) congealed present
p. 33 Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense incapacitation of visual experience. It coincides with an omnipresent field of operations and expectations to which one is exposed and in which individual optical activity is made the object of observation and management...
p 34-35  we are swamped with images and information about the past and its recent catastrophes —but there is also a growing incapacity to engage these traces in ways that could move beyond them, in the interest of a common future. 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 archive ability, end up never being discarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futureless present.

4) p.39  the particular operations 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.
(my note:    but are networks and machines merely related to consumption? )

5) p. 46 The rhythms of technological consumption are inseparable from the requirement of continual self-administration. Every new product or service presents itself as essential for the bureaucratic organization of one's life, and there is an ever-growing number of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen.

6) P47-48
Most of he historically accumulated understandings of the term "observer" are destabilized under such conditions: that is, when individual acts of vision are unendingly solicited for conversion into information that will both enhance technologies of control and be a form of surplus value in a marketplace based on the accumulation of data on user behavior.
eye-tracking scanners

7) critique of Bernard Stiegler
P.52-53
    More important now is not the capture of attentiveness by a delimited object — a movie, television program, or piece of music— whose mass reception seems to be Stiegler's main preoccupation, but rather the remaking of attention into repetitive operations and responses that always overlap with acts of looking or listening. It is less the homogeneity of media products that perpetuates the separation, isolation, and neutralization of individuals than the larger and compulsory arrangements within which these elements, and many others, are consumed. Visual and auditory "content" is most often ephemeral, interchangeable material that, in addiction to its commodity status, circulates to habituate and validate one's immersion in the exigencies of twenty-first-century capitalism. Stiegler tends to characterize audiovisual media in terms of a relatively passive model of reception, drawn in some respects from the phenomenon of broadcast television.....But this notion of reception disregards the status of current media products as resources to be actively managed and manipulated, exchanged, reviewed, archived, recommended, "followed." Any act of viewing is layered with options of simultaneous and interruptive actions, choices, and feedback. The idea of long blocks of time spent exclusively as a spectator is outmoded. This time is far too valuable not to be leveraged with plural sources of solicitation and choices that maximize possibilities of monetization and that allow the continuous accumulation of information about the user.
(my note: but does Stiegler really mean passive role of the audience? or rather the reduction of the possibilities of reflexivity? )

p. 53  Nonetheless, against his idea of the industrial homogenization of consciousness and its flows, one can counterpose the parcellization and fragmentation of shared zones of experience into fabricated microworlds of affects and symbols.... However, the vast majority of these microworlds, despite their patently different content, have a monotonous sameness in their temporal patterns and segmentations.

p. 57 (b)ut 24/7 should be understood not simply as a homogenous and unvariegated time, but rather as a disabled and derelict diachrony. Certainly, there are differentiated temporalities, but the range and depth of distinctions between them diminishes, and an unimpeded substitutability between times becomes normalized.

Teresa Brenna,    Globalization and Its Terrors: Daily Life in the West      London: Routledge, 2003
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello     The New Spirit of Capitalism       London: verso
Giorgio Agamben     What is an Apparatus?      2009   Stanford Univeristy press