Jonathan McCrairy - 24/7

Gave 24/7 a read last week sometime and this may be of help for the essays. However, I didn't agree with the book in many places and didn't find the content that interesting, so I did skim-read portions of it. Perhaps Aldo can give us a greater understanding of it.

I found the most intriguing/thought-provoking part was about the manifestation of the weekend. There were other cultures that had different length weeks/weekends, however we have inherited the current system.

A few bits I found interesting:

p1) White-crowned sparrow, US defence spends large amounts of money studying them because they can fly for 7 days without sleeping while migrating. Both Universities and the US government have spent extremely large amounts of money to replicate this, in order to create a super-soldier.

P4) Russian/European space consortium in the 1990’s planned to build a reflective mechanism to instil light upon entire cities because it is cheaper than lighting. 

- A giant mirror in space

P13) "One seemingly inconsequential but prevalent linguistic figure is the machine based designation of “sleep mode”. The notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationally and access. It supersedes an off/on logic, so that nothing is ever fundamentally “off” and there is never an actual state of rest."

P15) Teresa Brennan coined the term “biodregulation” to describe the brutal discrepancies between the temporal operation of deregulated markets and the intrinsic physical limitations of the humans required to conform to these demand

P18) Emmanuel Levinas is one of the several think-ers who have tried to engage the meanings of insomnia in the context of recent history. Insomnia, he argues, is a way of imagining the extreme difficulty of individual responsibilities in the face of the catastrophes of our era. Part of the modernized world we inhibit is the ubiquitous visibility of useless violence and the human suffering it causes. This visibility, in all its mixed forms, is a glare that ought to thoroughly disturb any complacency, that ought to preclude the restful unmindfulness of sleep. Insomnia corresponds to the necessity of vigilance, to a refusal to overlook the horror and injustice that pervades the world. It is the disquiet of the effort to avoid inattention to the torment of the other. But its disquiet is also the frustrating inefficacy of an ethic of watchfulness; the act of witnessing and it monotony can become a mere enduring of the night, of the disaster. It is neither in public nor fully private. For Levinas, insomnia always hovers between a self-absorption and a radical depersonalization; it does not exclude a concern for the other, but it provides no clear sense of a space for the other’s presence. It is where we face the near impossibility of living humanely. For sleeplessness must be distinguished from an unrelieved wakefulness, with its almost unbearable attention to suffering and the boundlessness of responsibility that would impose.

P46) Giorgio Agamben, “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modelled, contaminated or controlled by some apparatus.”

Aldo, perhaps would be great if you could send us your politics of vision essay relating to this book?