Abstract
Any attempt to grasp or grapple with the politics of sleep in the contemporary developed world today needs to place these issues in the context of broader social, cultural, economic and political trends and transformations during the closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the twenty-first century.
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Notes
See Castells’ (2000/1996), for example, for a sustained sociological analysis of the ‘information age’ and the ‘network society’ — a new ‘techno-economic system’ of ‘informational capitalism’, in his view, including new forms of ‘timeless time’, facilitated by new information technologies and ‘embedded in the structure of network society’ (Ibid. 464). Thrift (2005) also usefully refers here to a new phase of ‘knowing capitalism’ in which ‘capitalism has begun to consider its own practices on a continuous basis’ and hence started to ‘make business out of, thinking the everyday’ (Ibid. 1). See also Massumi (2002) on this new phase of capitalism and the associated transformations of power and control which he succinctly summarises in terms of power no longer embodied in the ‘billy club of the policeman but the bar code or the PIN number’ as ‘checkpoints’ rapidly multiply and society becomes an ‘open field’ of ‘thresholds’ and ‘gateways’ a continuous space of ‘passage’ and ‘flows’.
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© 2011 Simon J. Williams
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Williams, S.J. (2011). Restless Times: Wired Awake in Fast Capitalism?. In: The Politics of Sleep. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305373_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305373_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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