Drawing off of E.P. Thompson's influential work on the impact of the restructuring of concepts of work, time, and discipline dependent on both the clock and industrial production, we can think about the ways that sleep is regulated as something that is permeated by that logic, and structured by it. Lukacs' notion of reification also points to the ways that the commodity form transforms a whole series of social relations, institutions, and forms of knowledge. Even the call for something called equality in the way we think about today is deeply impacted by the forms of equivalence contained in the labor theory of value. Drawing on the language of Ernst Bloch, we might think about non-capitalist traces within the structures of capitalism, immanent to its survival, but exogenous to its logic, but those traces are deeply affected and shaped by that logic. Sorry for making my first substantial response back here so pedantic.
robert wood
> On May 11, 2012, at 4:12 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> I don't doubt that
>> sleep, for example, has a different 'meaning' in capitalist society
>
> Speaking of which, someone told me that pre-artificial light people would
> frequently get up during the night and visit with friends and/or screw and
> then go back to sleep. With artificial light, and no doubt the temporal
> discipline of the pig system, this all changed. Has anyone else heard
> this?
>
> Doug
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