Intervals

Author: Yue Yu

“Intervals,” as Jonathan Crary proposes in his book Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, is an “instant of disorientation” and “site of crisis” in the global present which can disrupt the order of the 24/7 control society (11, 89). As the trait of global capitalism, “the 24/7 control society” investigated by Gilles Deleuze or “the global integrated spectacle” of Guy Debord generates multiple symptoms with the assistance of apparatuses including nighttime lighting systems, televisions, global information networks, and so forth (79). Intervals are crucial for individuals to shield themselves from the infection of these symptoms and open up potential space for “dreaming” an alternative future without capitalism. As Crary implies, “dreams of sleep” here can be interpreted not only literally but also metaphorically. Intervals are the places where “absent-minded introspection,” reverie, and “drift of consciousness” can occur and resist the penetration of efficiency, speed, and productivity commanded by capitalism; experiencing quotidian intervals in individuals’ life resembles dreaming during sleep (88).

This paper intends to explore the theoretical value of Crary’s concept of “intervals” and its interaction in contemporary novels with the 24/7 demands of daily life: how do “intervals” in those routines that take the form of a damaged present or moments of disorientation impact the symptoms of and resist the 24/7 control society? Can reading novels per se can be considered as a practice of “dreaming in intervals?”

Stages

According to Crary, theorists have theorized different stages of social regulation and suggested a gradual erosion and final deprivation of “the everyday.” Foucault’s theory of disciplinary institutions accounts for the incomplete modernization during one and a half centuries before World War II. Although Foucault proposes the “carceral continuum” as the method to discipline the entire society, there are still “unadministered” and “unsupervised” times and places in individuals’ life that to some extent avoids control (qtd. in Crary 68). In the 1950s, as theorists including Lefebvre and Debord point out, everyday life was increasingly invaded by consumption and spectacle; there were also rebellions of the late 1960s in Europe and North American to retrieve the uncontaminated sites of everydayness (70). Since the 1980s, the advent of neoliberalism and the financialization of capitalism signal the ensuing disappearance of unregulated everyday life and the formation of “societies of control” outlined by Deleuze: while disciplinary power still functions within institutions such as schools and workplaces, the previous unmonitored spaces and times between these disciplinary institutions are now also penetrated by “mechanisms of command” and “effects of normalization” (71). Similarly, Debord argues that, at this stage, spectacle is no longer diffuse and inhabits outside certain kinds of “relatively autonomous areas of social life”; Instead, “a global integrated spectacle” is everywhere (qtd. In Crary 73).

This society of the spectacle implies that global capitalism has mutated from a society based on production to an information society that now operates at a microscopic and individual level, owing to mass diffusion of television and the development of global information networks (71). Television as a post-World War II apparatus regulates people’s private time and space and, in so doing, transforms the culture of leisure into homogenous and habitual viewing behaviors (79). Such construction of behavior generates various symptoms, including 1) inactivity or “anti-nomadic” effects – individuals are physically fixed and isolated from each other; 2) political powerlessness – viewers would accept any inequality in the global system which is naturalized by televisional representation, and citizenship is replaced by viewership; 3) technical addictiveness – viewers only repeatedly return to a “neutral void” without receiving any pleasure or “affective intensity” (79-81, 87). Under these circumstances, “habit” or “routine” becomes a quite problematic notion because of its complicity with social control in capitalist profit-making. The habitual mode of life established by television viewing creates the conditions for the dominance of an “attention economy” in the twenty-first century (80). Viewers’ continuous exposure to illuminated screens, new communication technology, and electronic transactions of all kinds blur the boundary between not only entertainment and information but also the private and public (75). The interest of those programs to fix people’s eyeballs is prescribed by the cultural industry so the crisis of consumers’ autonomy emerges since the available options are always predetermined by the outside (75). Individuals are also required to construct a digital identity catering to the capitalist logic if they are to participate in the competition for online attention and career building. Consequently, people tend to take on fragmented breaks while their machines are loading information or connecting with sources of information, which differ from intervals because they are not the result of introspection or reverie and do not sustain it (88).

The symptoms generated by television viewing mode are only intensified during the information era, as suggested by Crary’s use of Sartre’s concept of “practico-inert” to describe the present “institutional everyday world” as “the immense accumulation of routine passive activity” (116). The individual’s mobility and perceptual ability are reduced, Crary contends, if one becomes obsessed with monotonous reproduction. The infinite pursuit of speed renders “waiting” intolerable. The result is a cocoon of control that limits patience in the face of relentless self-interest, which eliminates the possibility for inter-subjective communication and thus the building of a genuine community of mutual caring (118). Hence, as Debord contends, “encounter” between subjects is substituted with “a social hallucination, an illusion of encounter” (120). The stories in Kehlmann’s Fame, including “Voices,” “The Way Out” and “The East,” expose how strangers are connected by shared information until finally their images are homogenized and their identities become interchangeable. Such reproduction of sameness and erasure of intersubjective differences even do not require “encounters” in the virtual world.

To resist the society of control and retrieve our lost human capabilities, Crary emphasizes sleep as the last remaining barrier to a total 24/7 takeover of the “inner self.” Yet, sleep can also suffer appropriation by late capitalism, as we see in some fictional works which demonstrate the externalization and reification of dreams as spectacles and objects of consumption (104). In this sense, the differentiation between “machines and humans,” between “living and inanimate,” and between “human memories and fabricated memory implants” are meaningless (104).

For Crary, sleep and moments when one is lying on the bed waiting for falling asleep, are the “unvanquishable remnants of the everyday” that are “incompatible with capitalism” (127). In contrast to Sartre’s destructive “practico-inertness,” “the restorative inertness” of sleep is indispensable for individuals to regain mobility to act when awake (127). Sleep as a pause disrupts and postposes capitalist accumulation and reproduction (128). Sleep entails our trust in and the care from others, which is essential for community formation (126). For the moments waiting for sleep, we recover our perceptual capacities by attending to our sensations and external surroundings (126). Intervals as such are not only an interruption of the present but also enable us to imagine an alternative future and freedom (126). Nevertheless, the intervals provided by novels can be more radical, violent, and devastating than what Crary perceives here – for instance, the loss of self in Fame and the unethical crimes in the dreams of Kafka on the Shore. Rather than the monotonous everyday activities like sleep, intervals such as would break the continuous control and shatter the routine of normalcy outrageously and then transform the characters into the damaged subjects, seeking an explanation or a way out.

 

Fame: Intervals as Losing

In the story “Voices” and “How I Lied and Died,” Kehlmann shows how information and communication technology permeates into the characters’ private life and creates double routines and a subsequent dualized self for them. The author designates both protagonists of these two stories as workers in industries relevant to telecommunication. In “Voices,” the protagonist Ebling is an engineer of a computer company who examines and repairs defective computers. “I” in “How I Lied and Died” whose name we never know is the head of the department of administration and assignment of phone numbers in one of the large cellphone companies. Before he buys a telephone, the capitalist 24/7 temporality has already transformed Ebling’s life through occupying his private time by his thoughts pertinent to work and technology:

He often thought about just how much in the world depended on these machines, nearing in mind what an exception, even a miracle, it was if they actually did the things they were supposed to. In the evenings, half asleep, he was so troubled by this idea – all the airplanes, all the electronically guided weaponry, the entire banking system – that his heart began to race. That’s when Elke snapped at him, saying why couldn’t he just lie there quietly …” (Kehlmann 6)

While the interpersonal relationship with his wife has already been undermined by his restlessness in the sleeping time, his private and professional life are both impacted after he establishes a dualized self with the used telephone number and the social network it mediates. Because of an assigning mistake made by the telephone company, Ebling receives a second-hand phone number and consequently numerous calls and messages looking for its previous users. Unable to address this trouble by resorting to the Consumer Service of the telephone company, Ebling plays the role of that “Ralf” and inserts a different routine of life – built by the “voices” from the phone and the breaks of waiting for them – into his previous one. However, rather than coexisting in harmonies with Ebling’s initial life routine, the new fictive life created by the role play detaches him from the former which is supposed to possess more physical connection with him: he suddenly realizes he is sitting at home and watching frustrating TV shows and has totally forgotten to go to work; he also feels that his wife “came from another life, or a dream that had no connection with reality” when he encounters her in the kitchen (14).

In “How I Lied and Died,” the protagonist experiences a similar sense of being lost after dualizing his life, with the assistance of the “ultra-sophisticated technology,” in order to maintain his marriage and extramarital affair simultaneously (147). Questing “who I was” and “what labyrinth I’d strayed into,” the man seems to confront a severer crisis of the collapse of his life at the end of this story than that of Ebling’s. After realizing his incapability to orient and manipulate his doubled life, he decides to expose to everyone a “bare” self – the self “without secrets, pretences, illusions, and deceptions” which is symbolized by his nudity (163). Both Ebling in “Voices” and “I” in “How I Lied and Died” believe that the embodied encounter with the people who are unwittingly constructing the dualized life with them would reveal their secrets. Avoiding physical encounters and indulging in fictional encounters on digital mediators suggest the virtuality of life achieved by the information technology which is indispensable for the 24/7 control society.

While the end of “How I Lied and Died” implies an imminent crisis once the highly virtually-constructed lives encounter each other in an embodied way, the story “The Way Out” and “The East” position their characters in more chaotic situations and suggest possibilities of “freedom” generated from “intervals.” The characters of both stories are celebrities whose personal images are publicized on mediums and engaged in the attention economy. Except for the “original” one, there are multiple versions of the character Ralf Tanner in “The Way Out”: the impersonator in the discotheque Looppool, the Angeleno and Chinese “Ralf” reported by anonymous netizens in the MovieForum, and Ebling who has appropriated Ralf’s virtual social network by sharing the same phone number with him. After Tanner creates new life by naming himself as Matthias Wagner, renting a new apartment, and claiming his occupation as an impersonator of himself, the “original” Ralf Tanner as the movie star is replaced by his impersonator who “live[s] as him” for many years and even like “Ralf Tanner” on the screen more than Ralf Tanner himself (71). Yet, the novel reveals that the “original” Ralf Tanner is also a fiction imitating his screen image who is a big star fabricated by “so much work and so much makeup, so much effort and remodeling” to be competitive in the attention economy (68). Through fabrication and imitation catering to capitalist demands, different versions of the Ralf in this story become homogenized, which signals that the vulnerability of the self as another symptom of the attention economy era: “selves” of different people are interchangeable and replicable due to such homogenization.

However, as the title of the story shows, Ralf Tanner’s existential crisis and final loss of the property that he used to possess, including his name, apartment, career, and social network, lead him to “the way out” and his “freedom,” which, although, are not further explained by the author. Similarly, in “the East,” the protagonist Maria Rubenstein, also suffers a sense of disorientation and gradually slides into the verge between a routinized present and another future of “no way back.” As a writer who replaces Leo Richter to attend a trip to a place in Central Asia, Rubenstein is left by the delegation alone in this foreign place when she is supposed to depart for home with the group. Futilely seeking help from the police, she gradually lost mediators which could bring her back to the normalized life and connect her with memory and past: first, intelligible language and her name; then, money, her watch, and her sense of time; her telephone, phone charger, and phone service; people including her husband in the remote place; her valid visa on the passport and political support from police and embassy. The last case suggests that Rubenstein not only disconnects from the private dimensions of life in the control society but also is excluded by the state apparatuses and disciplinary institutions. Compared to the other three stories, “The East” evokes a more drastic departure from normalcy by disorienting its character cognitively and displacing her as a bare life in a foreign space remote from her state.

If we interpret the crisis of disorientation confronted by the two characters in “The Way Out” and “The East” as intervals in which they gradually lost multiple mediation to connect with their past, memory, and previously routinized life, what the stories pose to us is not an alternative and promising future where we can inhabit but more of a question which evokes anxiety and dread and does not lead us to anywhere: where do we attach ourselves to if we lose all the mediation that we rely on previously? Will we fall into another pattern of routines and ultimately be assimilated and controlled by them? In “The Way Out,” readers do not know what kinds of “freedom” or new life Ralf Tanner will finally have after he is free from the artificial “Ralf Tanner” image. Moreover, in “The East,” Kehlmann demonstrates the danger of being controlled by a new set of routine, by portraying how, after receiving food and water from a woman and an old man, Rubenstein starts to work for them by imitating their acts (99-100).

 

Kafka on the Shore: Subject as “Intervals” and the Reconstructive “Sandstorm”

In the preface of one of the Chinese translations of Kafka on the Shore, Murakami states that, in his novels, he always creates male characters who live outside the mainstream society and establish their systems which hold different values from other people (Murakami). In this novel, there are also many characters who, at least to some degree, do not fit in the “normal” society and are excluded or intentionally distance themselves from the latter, including the fifteen-year-old boy Kafka Tamura, the old men Satoru Nakata, Miss Saeki, Oshima and his brother, the car driver Hoshino, and the two soldiers living in the forest. Here, I hope to expand the concept of “intervals” to understand it not only as a temporal, spatial, or existential crisis. Rather, characters themselves in fictions can live as “intervals” to break the constant continuity of the 24/7 control society due to the misfitness of these subjects.

Take the character Nakata as an example. His specificity is precisely originated in the longer interval where he has remained than other children who also experienced the coma in the “Rice Bowl Hill incident” during the World War II. Later in the novel, Nakata explains this coma as a process of “[going] in and com[ing] out” and causing something out of place, therefore he has to open the entrance stone to “restore what’s here now to the way it should be” (270, 345). While “intervals” proposed by Crary are related to people’s perceptions and capabilities, the coma deprives Nakata of the abilities to read and write while enables him to talk with cats and the entrance stone. This transformation of dis/abilities incurs his exclusion from the society as a damaged and “abnormal” person, which also exempts him from being homogenized as other people, such as his two brothers, in the control society:

If I’d been my normal self, I think I would’ve lived a very different kind of life. Like my two younger brothers. I would have gone to college, worked in a company, gotten married and had a family, driven a big car, played golf on my days off. But I wasn’t normal, so that’s why I’m the Nakata I am today. It’s too late to do it over. I understand that. But still, even for a short time, I’d like to be a normal Nakata. Up until now there was never anything in particular I wanted to do. I always did what people told me as best I could. Maybe that just became a habit. But now I want to go back to being normal. I want to be a Nakata with his own ideas, his own meaning. (269)

On the other hand, Nakata is aware of the danger of living as an exceptional character losing part of the abilities to behave normally: “Nakata’s empty inside … like a library without a single book … [and] like a container with nothing inside” (268). Therefore, his empty body lacking its own ideas is utilized by Johnnie Walker and he involuntarily kills the latter. Compared to the other protagonist Tamura, Nakata is also a more functional character whose missions sever for other characters including Tamura and Miss Saeki. Realizing such danger, Nakata believes that “going back to being normal” is a way for him to recover his subjectivity, “his own ideas,” and “his own meaning” (269). However, the process of retrieving subjectivity ends at Nakata’s death in sleep as the novel shows.

But Nakata’s “abnormalcy” largely influences another character Hoshino who befriends him and finally inherits his characteristics including the ability to talk with cats after his death. To adventure with Nakata, Hoshino abandons his routine as a car driver of a truck company who does repeated works every day. Their trip always provides him with freshness because it has nothing to do with habits or repetitions and is always unpredictable. Every time Hoshino asks Nakata what to expect for the next, the latter who has “never been bored in his life” always replies by “I will know” or “I will think about it after I see it” rather than a specific plan (307, 317). The unpredictability of their trip is intensified by Hoshino’s irregular and excessive sleep, to disrupt the habitual sense of continuity.

Nakata’s unpredictable style offers freedom but also a sense of disorientation and discomfort to the driver who is so disciplined by the prescribed life and work routine:

“Anywhere is fine,” Nakata replied. “Just circle around the city.”

“You sure?”

“You can go wherever you like. I’ll just enjoy the scenery.”

“This is a first,” Hoshino said. “I’ve done my share of driving — both in the Self-

Defense Force and with the truck company — and I’m a decent driver, if I say so myself. But every time I get behind the wheel, I know where I’m going and beeline it right there. That’s just the way I am, I guess. Nobody’s ever told me, You can go wherever you like — anywhere is fine. You’re kind of baffling me here.” (318)

There are still repetitions in their process of approaching Miss Saeki – the activity of the second day repeats that of the first day – but they finally make progress after futile searching not because of the repetition but of Hoshino’s mistake which leads them to deviate from the initial plan and arrive at a new place (321). Therefore, the mistake turns out to be “a scary chance” (322). The intervals of staying with Nakata and escaping from the routinized life also enables Hoshino to reflect on his own life and past, which he has rarely practiced before.

The other protagonist Tamura is also an interval-type of subject who intends to escape from the control inflicted on his life and differs from average fifteen-year-old boys from the perspectives of other characters in the novel. After leaving his hometown and abandoning the routine of the previous life that he has to obey since he was born, Tamura himself establishes new routines of eating, reading, and exercising for his life in Takamatsu which is quickly interrupted by the bloody incident baffling him after he wakes up from the coma. In the ensuing plot, his life is intertwined with dreams to travel between past and present, “the real” and “the fictional.” If we understand Tamura’s story as a person’s struggle for his subjectivity and freedom, the statements of the character Oshima are revealing in this regard:

“Perhaps,” Oshima says, as if fed up. “Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real bind. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.” … So I want you to be careful. The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself. (277)

In the 24/7 society of control, freedom of people who strive for resisting being controlled and living outside the normal – like an interval in a continuity – is also dangerous, according to Oshima, because it can create another “real bind” and drive the rebels into “the wilderness” (277). This is also the crisis that the characters in Kehlmann’s stories confront after falling into the intervals of temporary freedom. In this sense, “intervals,” as a space between the status quo and a future-yet-to-come, or as a transition with no definite directions for changes, entail multiple tensions or even paradoxes between, such as freedom and bind, normalcy and wildness, and no rules and new rules.

This paper does not intend to offer solutions to these insoluble questions but wants to indicate that Kafka on the Shore shows another way to understand the intervals as “sandstorm” which is crucial for subject formation. The introduction of “The Boy Named Crow” claims that “sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions … and chases you,” and after you escape, struggle, resist, and survive, “when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in” – “That’s what this storm’s all about” (2-3).

From his conversions with Miss Saeki, we know Tamura’s escape from home is to avoid being destroyed by the curse, or the external control, imposed on his life:

“You ran away from home, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Was there some reason you had to do that?”

I shake my head. What should I say?

Miss Saeki picks up the cup and takes a sip while she waits for my answer.

“I felt like if I stayed there I’d be damaged beyond repair,” I say.

“Damaged?” Miss Saeki says, narrowing her eyes. …

“I mean I’d change into something I shouldn’t.”

Miss Saeki looks at me with great interest. “As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”

“But even if that happens, you’ve got to have a place you can retrace your steps to.”

“A place you can retrace your steps to?”

“A place that’s worth coming back to.” (218)

In other words, Tamura needs to retrieve the stolen thing of his childhood and restore the “place that he can retrace his steps to” in order to keep on living (218, 280). Therefore, the dreams of incest with his mother and sister are the mediator for the cursed subject to face his inner desire, fear, and anger; and the atemporal place in the heart of the forest is the space for him to introspect the self, forgive his mother who has abandoned him, and thus repair his damaged past (342, 356). These two symbolic representations – dreams and the entrance in the forest – of the “intervals” that he has experienced seem to be the “labyrinth” outside the character but indeed project his inside labyrinth while “the inside and outside are a reciprocal metaphor for each other,” as Oshima points out (313). At the end of the story, after the circuitous process of inner struggle and reconciliation, Tamura leaves the entrance, returns to his life, and will be “part of a brand-new world” (413). The intervals, or the sandstorm, in this novel, focuses on the subject formation of this resisting and also resenting character. They are not only moments of crisis and disorientation but also a process to restore the lost and damaged past, for the subjects to live with the present and a new future.

Conclusion

One effect of novel reading – as a practice of “restorative inertness” and experience of “intervals” – is its repair on our perceptual capability. In his piece, McGurl juxtaposes the concepts of “real time” and “quality time”: echoing Crary’s discussion of 24/7 temporality, “real time” for McGurl is the “technical expression of systematic impatience,” involving data management, media, markets, and so forth, while “quality time” emphasizes physical encounter and interpersonal intimacy (462). McGurl contends that contemporary novels are “the virtualization of quality time” and remove us from the real time of our present (465). The stories created by the authors to resist real-time regime are virtual resistance; but McGurl suggests that experiencing virtual quality time in novels can be understood as a sensory perception itself, recovered by our reading in real time (446).

I consider “intervals” as a helpful concept for reading novels in real time especially during the COVID-era where we are now. The pandemic breaks the continuity of previous routines and habits and creates intervals of disorientation and global crisis. But it seems that we have quickly taken reactions and established new routines and life patterns to normalize the “abnormal.” Therefore, novels and the act of reading novels expose and create “intervals” to defamiliarize us from the new orders and routines, to reflect on the symptoms of not only the pandemic but also damaged past, turbulent present, and potential future.