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3 The narcosis of light: on the night of capital

The metaphysics of light have followed a long journey in the West, leading from the common wakefulness to an exclusive and systematic knowledge. This is an unstoppable re-formation of the day, which expands and dilates to become much more than a simple interval between two nights. The dark areas are reduced, while the continuum of certainty illuminates all things in a whole of crystalline self-evidence. There is nothing, or almost nothing, that universal Reason does not unveil and bring out into the open. Thus, it decrees the triumph of the explicit over the concealed, of the present over the absent. What is no more, or not yet, degrades to a mere no-thing, by way of a stubborn ontology that chases away all otherness.

With a renewed Promethean endeavour, one can attempt to glimpse the perpetual light of the world beyond, in order to translate it – down here – into a constant enlightenment. This latter maintains the same uniform intensity without ever lighting up or going out. This is a decisive response – and it claims to be a definitive one – to the pavor nocturnus which has shaken the history of the world over the centuries. Better a narcosis of light, as a pre-emptive measure against the imminent apocalypse.

In the Book of Revelation, it is said: ‘And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon … the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there’ (21, 23–5 KJV). The fight against concealed powers reached its peak in the modernity of the age of Lights. Then, it was put on pause when, rather than incriminate the night, the first Romantics lamented its loss. In his Hymns, Novalis proclaimed the night ‘holy, ineffable, mysterious’.¹ The night is the robust ally of that interiority which otherwise threatens to vanish. But then this fight resumed its onward march, now with an accelerated rhythm, guided by science and underpinned by technology, which promised to do battle to the last against darkness. Metaphysical lights took concrete form and became electrical installations. The city, floodlit by the positive thought which guaranteed a pragmatic way of life, could forget the night. Or, better, mindful of what the Romantics had warned, it could recover the night, entrusting whatever was left of it to psychoanalysis’s field of competence. The overcoming of the night decreed and ratified the victory of the day which aspires to become permanent, expanding in a circadian continuum.

What would Heraclitus have said about this metaphysical illusionism, which transforms night into day, takes away opposites and erases the pulse and rhythm of the ancient cycle of sleep and wakefulness? Certainly, he would not have applauded all this. He dreaded the political night, with its capacity to disintegrate the communism of vigilance. But he would not have been inclined to approve that narcotic light which brings only sleepwalking and not high alert. For sure, he could not have imagined hundreds of millions of individuals sat up at night in front of bright screens, with such magnetic powers of attraction, which would forever compromise their imagination – meaning, that sublime human faculty of dreaming eyes-open, of losing oneself in one’s own thoughts.

They call it 24/7 – the concept of time bent to boundless production and consumption, imposed by the market system. It refers to the non-stop, ceaseless industriousness that stretches out over twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Only through a willing, mocking ambiguity does it refer to weeks at all. For on closer inspection, 24/7 repudiates any rhythm, erases any scansion of time.² If the globe aims to be always-operational, why should human existence not itself adapt to this?

It would be mistaken to confuse 24/7 with modernity’s desolate rush into homogeneity, as critiqued by Lukács, Benjamin and others at the dawn of the twentieth century. For that time still had its rhythm set by the agenda of progress, linked to the illusion of growth. 24/7 is the time-without-becoming of post-history, the permanent day, capitalism’s final mirage. And fundamentally, such an outcome was part of its plans.

This was true already with the first electric city lights, a guarantee of security and a projection of success. The intense, brilliant lighting which spread across the universal supermarket seemed to fulfil this initial promise. The fight against darkness, blackness, the shadows, phantasms, mystery, the unknown, is the paroxysmal result of a stubborn and prolonged Enlightenment spirit which opened up a new sky: an atmosphere of disaster. Blanchot has emphasised the etymology of disaster:³ an expanse without stars, without the points of reference which would allow one to orient oneself. Even if there were stars, they would no longer be visible, for they are hidden by the artificial lighting that never turns off. Under that empty sky, the planetary shopping mall continues its tireless operations with its infinite variety of offers.

No obstacle seems to hold back the 24/7, if not human fragility itself. Capitalism eliminates all difference: between sacred and profane, between mechanical and organic. Already in his time, Karl Marx grasped this violent bid to knock down natural barriers. The 24/7 abolishes the boundary between light and darkness, day and night, activity and rest. Sleep, then, seems to be an outright affront to the incessant industriousness the market imposes; it appears an undue resistance to the adaptation which digital networks demand. The planet has sped up the pace, projecting itself, exultant, toward the non-stop – and existence ought to be no exception to this.

So, what is sleep, this ‘outside’ the world, this dark retreat from existence, in which the world itself pulls back, disappears for a bit, takes a pause? No, the long night of capital, lit up like daytime, cannot allow any pause, any absence. Especially because acosmia – the world’s temporary escape – is, at the same time, an illegitimate flight from the world, a dangerous interruption, an anomaly of the individual existence which, even just by sleeping, tacitly stands opposed to the law of the planetary non-stop.

It cannot be granted that sleep is a natural necessity. For that would be to accept this vast quantity of time being wasted, hours and hours lost in an irrecuperable void, from which no profit is drawn. All the other human needs – hunger, thirst, sex drive, not to mention love and friendship – have been reviewed and proposed in commodified versions. Hence this process must finally affect even sleep, the final frontier of human finitude. In open contrast with the 24/7 universe, sleep seems all the more scandalous – both because it is the trace of an almost pre-modern era which ought to have been overcome already, but also because it is the body’s tie to the alternation of light and dark, beating the rhythm of activity and rest. This is the alternation which capitalism wants to erase or, at least, neutralise.

This is visible also when one takes in the full sweep of the transhumanist project. This project no longer accepts unalterable natural givens; it takes every barrier for a challenge and has declared war even on the ultimate limit – death. For transhumanism, sleep becomes almost a new pathology, to be eradicated with new substances. It does so even if only to have the advantage of more time, which is ever more lacking in the third-millennium life-form. The attack on sleep thus seems almost legitimate.

Insomnia is a chronic condition for the inhabitants of the extra-temporal 24/7 universe – this routine of the always-the-same, the intensely illuminated artificial environment. This is not, however, only a matter of the insomnia caused by an alert wakefulness, full to the brim with responsibilities. It does not spring from the refusal to overlook – in the oblivion of sleep – the violence that shakes the world. It is not born of worry for the pain of others, of impotence in the face of disaster – as Levinas masterfully described.⁴ The appropriate term for this new insomnia is sleep-mode – that is, the setting for some technological device which is neither off nor on. It is sleep in a deferred or reduced form, harbouring a constant alertness made visible by the dim light of the screen. Into the darkness it insinuates a time protected from the night. Here prevails a lack of sensitivity, a denial of memory, a limiting of the faculties of perception, the impossibility of reflection. It is a prolonged trance state, a mass sleepwalking. In this almost inert half-sleep, in this pervasive torpor, is it possible to wake up again?

Notes

1 1. Novalis, ‘Hymnen an die Nacht’ (1800), in Werke, ed. G. Schulz, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1969, p. 41.

2 2. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, 2014.

3 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

4 4. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Boston: Dordrecht, 1991.