Text page
Deep Sleep
"Deep Sleep" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 16
That is, an assemblage of parts held together in the face of strife, to the stress, demands, and sometimes fatal requirements of other scales of being that may be coded as economic, famil- ial, aesthetic, or military.26 Much sleep research is financed and carried out to the requirements of the military. This results in a full-spectrum Keynesianism underlying the creation of ma- terials for secondary civilian markets with anti-sleep drugs such as Provigil/Modafinil.
Definition · paragraph 18
When an economic force is thinking through your flesh, calculating its capacity of becoming, sleep becomes an obstacle to the self-realization of capitalism. However, perhaps an econ- omy may make strategic or tactical alliances, even accidental ones, with particular organs.
Definition · paragraph 18
Sleep occupies a seam of time that is to be mined by the employer, its satisfactory exploitation leaving the baker, at that time, with an average life expectancy of forty- two. When an economic force is thinking through your flesh, calculating its capacity of becoming, sleep becomes an obstacle to the self-realization of capitalism.
Stakes · paragraph 4
These in turn have their own particular and specific qualities and propensities and that in turn are shaped, fatigued, propitiated and enhanced by their interactions with other kinds of entities and relations at multiple scales. 3 See: Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013); Alexei Penzin, “Sleep, Capitalism and Subjectivity,” in eds.
Stakes · paragraph 4
3 See: Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013); Alexei Penzin, “Sleep, Capitalism and Subjectivity,” in eds. Anke Hoffman and Yvonne Volkart, Subverting Disambiguities (Zurich: Verein Shedhalle, 2012); Matthew J.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.