Just a year ago, when the Great Resignation was well underway, fueled by the sweet taste of having no choice but doing nothing, it seemed like the goal of a certain lineage of anti-work artists and revolutionaries had finally come to fruition. The masses were, at long last, reconsidering relationships to work, leisure, sleep, and time in the clutches of capital.
In China the “touching fish” movement saw people posting pictures of themselves laying down and getting drunk on the clock as a way to resist the standardization of the “9-9-6” work week (9am-9pm 6 days a week). In the UK, 4 day work week pilots are in progress and many companies are permanently adopting them. Zoom meetings, no matter where you are, can be taken with video and pants off if you simply blame the poor connection.
But the precarity of life and employment still persists. For some reason, I’m more tired, physically and spiritually, than ever before, and the voice of obligation—to constantly do more, to see more, to read more, and to always make up for lost time—keeps me up at night. In Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep he locates sleep on the margins of digital capitalism, a final frontier still necessary to reproduce productivity. “Sleep,” Crary writes, “poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability.” From there he goes on to describe how we try nonetheless to conquer it with “sleep modes” on our phones, pharmaceuticals, and in Russian factory towns, massive city-wide artificial lighting systems to zap workers out of natural circadian rhythms. More profoundly than the technology, however, is the deeply conditioned feeling within ourselves that sleep is a waste of time.
So, caught between motivational Instagram quotes reminding me to “rise and grind” and a long reading list of socialists calling on me to read more about “rest as resistance” (while resisting a lazy political conscience), I made this playlist so that I can do it all more efficiently. “Sleep Faster” is a few hours of political texts read over ambient sleep music, so that I can learn, sleep, do both, and sometimes neither.
Here’s what’s on it:
1. The sound of a woman sleeping in church from this video, mixed into Annea Lockwood’s Tiger Balm. A seminal track in the “tape music” genre meant to evoke ancient and communal memories through field recordings of a purring cat, a heartbeat, gongs, slowed-down jaw harp, a tiger, a woman’s breath, a plane passing overhead.
2. Excerpt from Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society on self exploitation. Han makes the point in this essay that power today is maintained by our own self-policing imperative towards excess. Whereas in “disciplinary societies” of the past we were governed by limitations, modern society, he says, is characterized by the illusion of limitless potential irreconcilable with the reality of our material insufficiency.
3. Created by Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry became hugely popular alongside the BLM movement during the pandemic. The Nap Ministry provides safe places to rest in public, syllabi on rest and revolution, and playlists. Hersey has since gone on speaking tours, written a book, and presented her work in museums. In the first clip she speaks out against “grind culture”, in the second she wonders what it means that Breonna Taylor was killed in her sleep. Hersey’s insistence on communities, especially of women of color, gathering around sleep reminds me of this quote from Siobhan Phillips on 24/7 by Johnathan Crary:
“‘As the most private, most vulnerable state common to all, sleep is crucially dependent on society in order to be sustained.’ Sleep, he emphasizes, is ‘one of the few remaining experiences where … we abandon ourselves to the care of others.’ The ineradicable need for sleep can be our nagging reminder of community. ‘Sleep can stand for the durability of the social,’ Crary writes.”
4. Self-care culture, however, gets reduced to corny Instagram captions and crafty products. More Byung-Chul Han from The Burnout Society, talking here about neuro-pathologies and the rise of a new classification of illnesses exclusive to cultures of excess.
5. Tiktok zoomer banger, S0phie Powers’ Nozebleed.
Wake up, study, good grades, money
Look good, party, perfect body
Living, laughing, loving, happy
We know what you want, but
Yeah, we don’t care at all
Just another phase and another Adderall
Yeah, we don’t care at all
And we feel nothing, even though we feel it all
6. From Stanley Schtinter’s audio series of children reading manifestos, Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children), here’s a 9-year-old girl from Shropshire reading The Use of Free Time by the Situationist International. A reminder from those flaneur-fetishizing frenchies that leisure can be radical art. And a reminder from a child that every manifesto is always still waiting for a future yet to come.
7. Played over 30 Minute Deep Sleep Music ★︎ Fall Asleep Fast ★︎ Binaural Beats, Delta Waves. This video claims to utilize science for better sleep:
“Sleep stages and other sleep parameters indicated that the 3-Hz binaural beat on a 250-Hz carrier tone can be potentially used to modulate sleep stage. Shortened N2 duration, extended N3 (NREM sleep) duration, and shortened N3 latency were presented after receiving the 3-Hz binaural beat on a 250-Hz carrier tone during sleep. Furthermore, the results also suggested that an auditory stimulus can be used to modulate sleep stage without disturbing sleep, which is in agreement with some studies on auditory pathways and sleep.” During the deep stages of NREM sleep (N3), the body repairs and regrows tissues, builds bone and muscle, and strengthens the immune system. As you get older, you sleep more lightly and get less deep sleep. Aging is also linked to shorter time spans of sleep, although studies show you still need as much sleep as when you were younger. During deep sleep, a variety of functions take place in the mind and body: -memories are consolidated -learning and emotions process -physical recovery occurs -blood sugar levels and metabolism balance out -the immune system is energized -the brain detoxifies”
8. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen summarized by a young woman in the Philippines in her second year as a poli-sci major. Published during the gilded age, Veblen looks at how the burgeoning bourgeoisie class, enjoying new-found leisure time, emulates the aesthetics of aristocrats who know nothing but leisure. Think fox hunting goes Ralph Lauren outlet store. This is the first known usage of the phrase “conspicuous consumption.”
9. Sigma male grind inspo quotes next to quotes from Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society over more binaural sleep music for sleep. The Sigma male inspo quotes and anti-inspo quotes of Han sound surprisingly similar, one describes an anti-social and sociopathic “hero” who lives in the other’s spiritually void and self-interested worlds of excess. When rest is mentioned in either, it is considered a failure.
10. Malevich, Laziness as the Truth of Mankind — A gem from the black square painter Kazimir Malevich, thinking about how capitalism carrot-sticks leisure time, always out of reach, while socialism condemns rest, urging all to rise to the most noble call: work for your fellow man’s well-being. But what is well-being if not rest?
11. Chapter 2 from 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary read by YouTuber andrestiasrevolt8557 describes pharma and a digital sociality as it pushes out against sleep. In the new world there is always the possibility of more, “something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive, than anything in ones immediate circumstances” and Crary argues we blindly comply with the rhetoric of more, “the absolute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by titles of the many best-selling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1000 movies to see before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before we die.”
Crary is less interested in sleep as a psychic theater to passively watch and then interpret, than first as a choice and as a refusal of the compulsion to do more.
12. An IMDB list of 100 Movies to Watch Before You Die read over Earth 2, the legendary doom/drone/ambient metal album from 1993.
13. Black work songs and spirituals from The Nap Ministry.
14. A Fiverr voiceover actor reads the poetry of Xu Lizhi (1990-2014) for me. These are poems found in a Foxconn factory worker’s diary after his suicide: https://libcom.org/article/poetry-and-brief-life-foxconn-worker-xu-lizhi-1990-2014
15. The Useless Tree (360 BC) by Chuang Tzu. A Zen parable on the virtues of uselessness.
16. A really fantastic and in-depth conversation with Abigail Susik about her 2021 book Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, about “what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Óscar Domínguez.” They start by painting the landscape of 1920s Europe as recognizably post-pandemic and inflation ridden, with many unemployed and the early interest artists take in Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy and the tripped-out social utopian, Charles Fourier. She finds these artists’ resistance to work, however, was not entirely “anti-work” but far more complex regarding the ways work, life, and art can interact…leaving me to wonder how often I trick myself into thinking I love my job and therefore I should work more.
17. Played over Loren Connors’ Lullaby.
18. Take Off Your Pants, a TV advertisement for a board game in which you finish your chores so that you can finally end your day by taking off your pants. By the artist Michael Smith.
Bonus:
Claire Fontaine, The Human Strike has Already Began & Other Writings
