noir realism

exploring the edge worlds of contemporaryposthumanism(s), science(s), and materialism(s)

The Age of Insomniacs: 24/7 and thePosthuman Dilemma

Posted by Craig Hickman on April 7, 2014Amid the mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism, images have become one ofthe many depleted and disposable elements that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never beingdiscarded, 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 finalsecurity deposit that is no longer secured for us time bound creatures of late capitalist society. Likethose objects that Graham Harmann tells us continuously withdraw from all relation we too have beencut 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 Solitary and isolated, withdrawn from all relation, we too feel like those precarious,depleted, and disposable elements of an inhuman system that no longer needs us.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 authorinto 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 hiswife. It describes “in minute detail the events of his personal and professional life. It seems that he wasalready aware of the erratic nature of his behaviour and of the recurrent fugues, each lasting severaldays, 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 theinterstices of its victims’ lives, in the slightest changes of habit and behaviour. Invariably there wasthe same reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike ofdaylight, 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 thepresent and clasped themselves to him. (Ballard, 1064)” Each of these stories implies the notion that thecharacters involved are somehow trying to elude historical linear time for some alternative world oftime, 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 andnature, rather the digital worlds of our posthuman systems are nature – nature as Nature vanished intodarkness long ago and was replaced by a facsimile, a dark progenitor, a liquid double of electroniccircuitry 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 inwhich 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! Wehave 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 particularlytelling, and anything written with the same goal today will become dated in far less time. At present, theparticular operation and effects of specific new machines or networks are less important than how therhythms, speeds, and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption are reshaping experience andperception.2 Governments and private corporations are spending billions in R&D seeking mechanismsand new technologies that will reduce the time interval between decision making processes and theactions affected by these decisions. As Crary reminds us this is what progress means in ourcontemporary 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, tocontemporary liquid modernity through differing phases. In modernist conceptions the production ofnovelty and the new were part of a continuous series of innovations and experiments which were linkedover 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 postmodernage to now the future seemed to implode as time accelerated to the speed of light and became the 24/7realm 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 handthat it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in theshallowest of presents” (Crary, 41).

Yet, as Crary reports it we must not see this modulation between modernist and postmodern 24/7 timeas separate, but rather as part of a system that forms a continuous loop or modulated performance ofcapitalism in our age. Some of the key features of early-twenty-first-century capitalism can still belinked 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 andmaximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much morecomprehensively throughout the twentieth century” (Crary, 41-42).

Yet, in our time of the unsleeping consumer new forms of social regulation and subjection, new modesof management of the economic behavior of individuals towards compliant docile consumers.Corporations arelinking the individual’s needs with the functional and ideological programs in whicheach new product is embedded. One’s status is defined by the services and interconnections oneinhabits, which in turn become the “dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality”(Crary, 43). The individual as dividual or encoded application or datafeed connected to the systems andcontrolled 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 amultiplication 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 theprocesses 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 commoditiesto be incorporated in the machinic system of capital as part of the process rather than as isolated andwithdrawn 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, whocannot 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 furtherthat 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 partssuggest that the outer limit of disposability can be profitably enlarged to meet the demands of newmarket sectors.(Crary, 44)

We are all products of the new media systems that have become naturalized inside us. The assertion bysome neoliberal pundits that technology is neutral that it actually provides new forms of emancipatorypolitics and services to counter the effects of consumerism are according to philosopher GiorgioAgamben lies, he refutes such claims as Crary explains saying that “today there is not even a singleinstant 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 rightway.’ Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the mediaapparatus in which they are captured.”(Crary, 46-47)

Critics of the neoliberal world order are quickly marginalized or silenced by the new mediatainmentsystems. As Crary reports any questioning or discrediting of what is currently the most efficient meansof producing acquiescence and docility, of promoting self-interest as the raison d’être of all socialactivity, is rigorously marginalized. To articulate strategies of living that would delink technology froma logic of greed, accumulation, and environmental despoliation merits sustained forms of institutionalprohibition.(Crary, 50).

Crary points out philosopher Bernard Stiegler who believes we are living in a fugue time, a time fullysynchronized and synchronizing consciousness and memory. An age of amnesia in which humans areforgetting themselves. He calls urgently for the creation of counter-products that might reintroducesingularity into cultural experience and somehow disconnect desire from the imperatives ofconsumption.(Crary, 51) Yet, as Crary defines it is not the capture of consciousness by things, but israther the reprogramming of consciousness itself to become a system of repetition and responseembedded in an ever present milieu of narrowed consumptions.

Ultimately we are becoming passive followers of the new order, no longer questioning our role withinthis new economic world of products of which we, too, are one among many. Soon our DNA will bepatented and owned by some synthetic biotech corporation to be used in some future R&D project toclone or mutate or splice. We “choose to do what we are told to do ; we allow the management of ourbodies, our ideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to be externally imposed. We buyproducts that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then wevoluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject whosubmits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water andlives near nuclear reactors without complaint. The absolute abdication of responsibility for living isindicated by the titles of the many bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies tosee before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before wedie.” (Crary, 60)

Who needs a Bucket List in such a world that is already manufactured for you? Planned obsolescencenever 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.

This entry was posted in Control Society, dystopian reflections. Bookmark the permalink.

4 responses to “The Age of Insomniacs: 24/7 and thePosthuman Dilemma”

dmf says:April 7, 2014 at 1:14 pmhttp://www.onthemedia.org/story/18-armys-robot-recruiter/

ReplyNellaLou says:April 7, 2014 at 4:06 pmIn the paragraph beginning “Marshall McLuhan in Counterblast..” do you mean “life imitates art”(Wilde’s anti-mimesis) rather than “art imitates life”?

Replynoir-realism says:April 7, 2014 at 4:57 pmYea, got to typing too fast mind went right by dyslexic that it is

Replysyndax vuzz says:April 20, 2014 at 8:46 pmReblogged this on syndax vuzz.

Reply

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. | The Piano Black Theme.