tung-hui hu, after exhaustion, a door — review
in the first parargaph of "after exhaustion, a door" sleep streaming is introduced as a pandemic-era phenomenon where platforms reverse their bans on idle content following an abrupt change in the logic of modernity when it comes to its understanding of transitionality and productive capture. already from the start, hu is wondering about the ways in which the commodification of the self under capital (new subscribers to a streamer's only fans) relates to the way in which we view unrelated practices under capitalism - circadian rhythms, dissapointment from watching an overblown movie, weed as a substite for factory work or for avoiding a type of insomnia that is a direct relic of existing practices under modernity and etc. hu promises to investigate both the ways in which the attention economy and platforms weaponize and leverage unrelated behaviors against us, and the ways in which commodification itself is a symbolic tool that is used for inter-social symbolic communication and for imagining alternative futures.
in the second paragraph, crary's thesis that sleep is capitalism's last unconquered territory is raised only to be dismantled. hu argues that mit's dormio project and the dream-hacking industry reframe sleep as underutilized productive time, collapsing the one remaining sanctuary into an extension of the workday. this entire narrative angle is questionable, given that as it stands, capital already reifies subjects unevenly depending on their dispositions and territories, and as even hu himself notes, the middle zone between passivity and arbitrary labour (graeber's bullshit) is itself a fantasy partially cultivated by subjects under capital themselves, hu's piece is easier at making us question how much of the temporality we associate with sleep as leisure and rest away from the labour of everyday existence itself is a reified experience already sold to us under modernity by our own desperations rather than something to be politically weaponized and conquered by an external process of history or by the high class.
hu, contrary to his intentions, shows us that sleep as a diagnostic category is sociologically discriminate and widely mutable, even when biologically it seems to be the hardest imposed human limit, it simultaneously is precisely shown under capital that far from being economically harmonious, a zone of passivity, or an unalienable aspect of human experience, it's simply a form of behavior that under certain systems such as this one, becomes something that even the capitalist subject himself feels is in the way rather than something he is afraid to allow to be conquered, even if it absolutely still serves as a weapon (even if the "factory" concept is more about labour as a basic expectation rather than having to do anything with the actual aesthetic logic of a factory). hu isn't afraid to steer away from this topic himself, because even he drops and chooses not to develop one of his sharpest sociological critiques that briefly appears in the sevent paragraph about the class distinction between strong and weak sleepers and the way in which these divides shape the character of labour itself.
what follows between the fifth and ninth paragraph is the expositional development of the narrative that capitalism has only recently commodified sleep. it starts off by arguing through paul heintz's film sleep work that structural exclusion produces the commodification of sleep through its three subjects — a veteran, an entrepreneur, a depressive — each of whom arrives at sleep streaming through a different form of structural exclusion, framing the practice as a last-resort capitalism rather than a lifestyle choice. it then passes through dottea's game show metaphor which shows the essay's central tension: sleep streaming promises passive income but delivers humiliation-as-entertainment, and the electric shock wake-up option makes explicit that the audience's pleasure is purchased at the streamer's expense.
the first chapter then ends with hu's brief attemp to theorize the way in which we could combat the "factorialization of sleep" through a crip framework which is cited innocuously and remains undeveloped. alexander and hedva are invoked as ethical cover for the disability angle but never metabolized into the argument's structure, which may partially be due to the fact that hu later plans to mostly abandon the labour-related normative angle to argue through aesthetics and rhythmic theory instead. in a sense, this argument is less about the normative standpoint of different subjects under capital and more about the ways in which the institutional forms under capital end up "creating" subjects that then have to consider their own immanent condition as related to the very tools of their opression. in certain ways, hu seems unsure of himself, interested in both defending the way in which modernity destroys the subject, yet hoping to figure out exactly how the modern subject still has options. this antithetical reading is the least productive option, given that it disables both the creative potential of capital and the creative potential of the anti-capitalist subject.
in paragraph 11, hu argues that sleep streams in the form of "queer" infrastructure have a similar effect as asmr, being a communal activity, where streamers are half-awake and also self-spectating as they wake in and out of sleep and view themselves in the third person. hu says "the image registers with gaps in it, in moments of being half-awake." - which makes it sound like he's about to enter into a phenomenology here but doesn't commit to this task unfortunately as the conceptual anchor deflates immeditely into more research in the next paragraph. there are some fascinating ideas here, i even propose a concept myself, self-spectatorship in sleep could be framed as self-discovery if the reflective act can only be mediated through a second half perspective, as in if cultural expectations mutated so much as to only allow contemplation if it is first processed by external viewership, something that has so far never existed in a widespread manner save for a few rare online cases.
in paragraph 12, sermon's telematic dreaming and weerasethakul's sleepcinemahotel are read together as precedents for a shared exhaustion that weakens individual autonomy, and jean ma's argument that this weakening is generative rather than threatening reframes vulnerability as the condition of possibility for new forms of collectivity.
the half-spectatorship mode mentioned earlier is supposed to be a property of this shared autonomy, but hu never explains how it's any different from the ontic participation of self-awareness produced by waking up to check the time on your phone and seeing yourself in the glass as you close it, because the communal event of "sleeping together" doesn't seem to actually involve streamer participation, being explained by him only through the statement that "it’s one of the few places where live online chats are possible on modern social media platforms".
most sleep streamers then either fall into an entertainment category where the stream either ends when the streamer actually falls asleep, or its more of a gimmick event that doesnt actually interfere with his real sleep time, or its an actual sleep stream that doesnt allow a communal event to realistically interfere with the streamers sleep schedule. the rare middle ground between these is simply medically dangeorus scientific experimentation or a form of soft-torture commodification where dromological violence is executed on the sleeping subject akin to frat party initiation rituals, something that doesn't have a communal character precisely other than hu's interesting point that it's a form of projected shared exhaustion
in paragraph 13, hu argues that the rush to interpret streamers sexually is reread as an anxious displacement of our growing discomfort with social meanings as a result of the way in which capitalism interferes with sleep culturally and the way in which racialized subjects get institutionalized in different formats as a result of their varying economic enviornments, social media "ties" a racialized subject to an enviornment and then builds an image of this enviornment backwards through its assumptions about its happenstance rather than forwards as comprehensive of the causal reason behind it.
danielle wong's "sleepy asians" which is cited here even begins with " the sleepy asian meme can be read as providing a visual grammar for the attention economy’s measurement and production of circadian rhythms at a time when rest had become more evidently scarce and commodified." hu's reading here is interesting because he inadvertently pushes past racialization and genealogical rhetoric in a sense better understands why this happens than wong herself, he implicitly seems to be arguing (although it is never stated) that the attention economy is a communal event of recognition which, albeit absolutely polices the work-rest dichotomy, also feels uncomfortable about its existence and seems to be "processing" it by sending it through cultural assembladges which involve not only memes but oversexualizations.
in a sense, every symbolic inference carries with it an implicit load of cultural messaging that manages the entire burden of any setting, a "profiling" happens to a race because the social apparatus does indeed need to manage itself and to make sense of its environment even if it doesnt want to be "involved" in such an activity, but in another sense, even the racial profiler and digital commodifier experiences this very same event as tragic, because every social experience is a collective mechanism, every new social machine turns into a stable market only after a certain amount of reified bodies have passed through it painstakingly, and only after the image has not only been weaponized against its subject of portrayal, but has been used to communicate a disavowal or an overcoding of the subject's condition, almost affirmatively even if harmfully.
paragraphs 14 to 16 begin with hu's curious use of plan c's "we are all very anxious" that argues among other things that a "social factory" uses precarity to "force people into an expanded field of labour" which reifies even their social experiences and ends the boring-job-for-security fordist offering of the 20th century, replacing rebellious institutional forms like raves into corporate nightclubs and diversifying workplaces experiences by reifing worker's subjectivities into ever increasing micro-managed identities or avatars that require upkeep and inward-facing consumption cycles.
in response, hu softly argues that boredom is still used as a divide between the middle and high class and as a weapon turned against labourers exhaustion through the weaponization of high art and steryotyped depictions of boring characters that are unable to enter gimmick economies. hu is clearly using boredom in a different sense here, because sociologically as a "state" it appears in plan c as an entire institutional or structural format that preserves artificial job enviornments as a compromise for middle class existence, whereas hu argues that its being turned from a structure into an applied condition, yet he lacks the analytical fervor to actually land this argument, making it seem as if he rushes past plan c's point. even though the argument and its briefly psychologized turn don't fit into plan c's rhetoric, it does manage to serve as a fair bridge between the attention economy's weaponization and racialization of sleep and rancière's defense of sentimental poetry as an ability to aestheticize and find value in boredom as gaps inbetween the individual requirements of capital.
hu uses caleb murray-bozemann analysis of a webcam threesome to arrive to the conclusion that boredom as a state is the constant deferral of gratification and its eventual synthesis back into a desire, and lands through tolstoy with the conclusion that its the "purest expression of content". this view necessitates that content itself is artificial and its purest moments are the cracks between the viewing experience and the reality behind setting it up, however that may also be the case because of the way in which precarity actually interferes with content rather than content as a totality being a political vechile emptied of naturally expressive substance.
there are two aspects to this analysis that make it weaker though - first - the idea that the threesome is a deferral of meaning only partially works due to the way in which sexual content and especially migrant content works as a constant hyper-fetish, in that everything happening on the screen including exahustion and fatigue can actually be subsumed by the audience (unlike boring streams of other sorts, which, depending on the content type may allow way less structural patience) - and second - pornography itself neuropsychologically already is a deferral of pleasure due to the way in which reward prediction centers get postponed - literally becoming an artifact of the diferral of pleasure. hu's analysis doesn't entirely collapse precisely because of the way in which this differal may absolutely be a compulsive and symbolically heavy addiction for pornographic viewers, however, this analysis doesnt appear in the text, even with the wonderful aesthetic turn which is undoubtedly the optimal way to view pornographic content - as an aesthetic logic that subsumes and reterritorializes existing symbolic territories into sexual metaphors.
it is also possible that hu simply doesn't want to arrive at a clean take on sexualization as an aesthetic experience and does instead want to leave the question around boredom and fetish open to possibility, although as can be seen in the remaining three paragraph from the second chapter, his treatment of heint'z film where streamers ask eachother to reveal their dream fantasies and his treatment of techno-oligarchic "misread" fantasies surrounding the space race reveal that he collapses these aesthetic questions either into a metaphor for the communal synchronization of fantasies or for the work-related mental fatigue and its failure to inspire itself past its own condition, in a way that makes hu's analysis appear underargued in comparison to the heavy and aesthetically promising cultural fragments he draws from. this partially does owe to the fact that the third chapter is where hu aims to generate most of his response to his own analysis.
paragraph 20 begins with his re-reading of heinz' "sleep work" as a movie that never quite allows the unconscious to proliferate, where streamers "true sense of spare time" could resemble the daytime when they're performing the least even if they are far more burdened on average during it, similar to night-shift workers who's societal expectations don't map cleanly to fatigue patterns. hu argues that the movie shows how even this isn't the case, and the streamers are performing their spare time as yet another aspect of the increasingly demanding workplace acquisition, showing how "knowing yourself" may not at all resemble a psychoanalytic requirement, but a regression into states that demand that you never come to terms with whatever part of you is not commodifiable. "refusing to see the world, pessimistic as that may be, is another way of seeing the world differently" claims hu.
in "unconscious/television", lucas ferraco nassif writes "the unconscious is a diagram of the forces of language and of lalangue. we are materialists and we need to remember that we are analysts because we looked for analysis, because we operated historically with unconscious assemblages, reorganizing representations and libidinal investments as analysands before becoming analysts. we are on the factory floor of the libido." this in a sense shows that psychoanalysis is already prepared to integrate this critique into its wider narrative by being aware of the way in which the requirement for analysis only occurs after the necessary reorganizations have occured that allow that analysis to actually behave, however, as hu shows us, the "confessional" itself may not at all be possible to integrate with significatory value, not because of the workings of the unconscious but because of the way in which significance is quickly re-coded by the capitalist assembladge and commodified into behaving according to the existing requirements of the system, thus only allowing a refugee to the most deeply unsurfaced parts of ones being, ones that could never possibly even be put into an analytical frame.
paragraph 23 continues with hu's main concept in this work, afterness, which is the "indeterminate time of political exhaustion", the point being that the afterness of any finished cultural event especially in america (and the american entertainment machine now transported globally) is the whole point of the cultural artifact itself, echoing the way in which boredom, exhaustion and dissapointment are the actual libidinal expectations we have in these pieces, and even likely the demand that we inquire from them. you can even view this argument in a fourfold conceptual circle- the boredom is the transposed expressive state, the fatigue in ranciere is the bodily quality that serves precisely as the driving force of creative imagination or as the force that enables non-inspired but alternative acts in hu's case, exhaustion or the hangover it produces is the expected product and final goal of any cultural experience in capitalism, and dissapointment is the remaining locus of the desire.
on disappointment as a concept, hu writes via marcus and barthes that it is rescued from negativity and reread as the persistence of desire for change, a desire that generates its own imaginaries by refusing its own object, similarly to his previous points about boredom, and what was drawn on him indirectly in this article about the unconscious.
underneath the theoretical schema that he never fully solidifies, hu brings to us a sheer and brutal argument, a decisive rupture point with clearly defined parimeters that is far more powerful than his aesthetic and associative prose suggests. on paragraph 26 you can see him setting us up for it "it goes without saying that this kind of work is exhausting, making those who do it too tired to be part of the day, oscillating between cycles of sleeping and working, with little time for anything in between, such as their own family. i have no way of redeeming this exhaustion.". hu is avoiding the cliched moral posturing of labour and the beaten "empirical" analysis of materialist political currents to give us a theory of imagination under modernity. he frames this through simondon as "rhythms" that, maybe incidentally mirroring deleuze and guattari's analysis of the refrain, resist the meter and grammatized units of time under capital.
the concept of afterness is evocative but undertheorized relative to its ambition. it borrows from marcus, barthes, chambers-letson, and simone simultaneously without fully distinguishing itself from any of them. what does afterness do that political disappointment or queer temporality doesn't already do? perhaps hu would be aided by a concept that i deem "capitalist time units", essentially the way in which afterness shapes temporal expansion and our understanding of our own continuity within capitalist time as especially related to the viewing of reels and mass processed content. continuity is messed with when the sounds, textures and ideas of the world we experience move more rapidly than our ability to "conquer" them internally, and the "afterness" produced by rapid informational loads essentially causes the type of jet lag that hu notes is "dissapointing" in the sense that it reframes our entire lived experience by expanding it into one specific speciality.
you cannot be passionate about reels as time blocks under capital in the same way you can be about movies or works precisely because as technical models they dont map the same rhythmic components or "forms of continuity" present elsewhere. as such, capitalist time blocks require the concept of afterness to explain the way that satisfactiom and boredom blend into pornographical viewing. using the same example hu himself uses, the viewing of particular forms of webcam footage that conquer empty space present a feeling of afterness as a revolt of what was experienced, but also as a seperation between the continuation of lived time and of fantastical time, whilst also being a transition into a differeny symbolic "realm", one where sex and sleep are essential constants that through altered arousal shape our perception of time.
in this way, afterness is distinct from dissapointment in that it can provoke an entire discontinuation between every libidinal layer of experience and every symbolic encoding of that same experience, serving less as a "diagnostic circadian map" as seen with the asian sleeping analysis, and less as a fragmentation between the worlds of sleep, sex and collective experience, and more as territories where dysregulation becomes a stable norm rather than a forced norm. when hu treats dysregulation as a forced norm, he evades his own approach towards queer temporality. capitalism, contrary to fighting our perceptions of fixed time blocks, is already interfering with them in much the same way that cosmic randomness or an especially keen trickster would, bridging us back into lyotard's much needed analysis in the same topic which hu doesn't pass us through.
for hu, the statement "i have been thinking of other forms of work that are “after,” follows the statememt "there are still people who can glean pockets of respite and survival within that exhaustion", which unfortunately kills his analysis immediately. his second to last paragraph villifies the streamer stephen from "sleep work" as somebody who "scavenges outdated materials to write a new kind of story". in this instance, hu is unable to discover whether he believes that capital is totalizing imaginative creativity and using time against workers who are forced to "survive" only in lackluster moments within it, or if he thinks that underneath capital there is a new type of logic forming that can de-rhythmicize existing practices.
hu sits in the middle here because to preserve his hauntological or fisherian analysis, he has to simultaneously frame capital as totalizing the conscious sfantasy and increasingly commodifying all aspects of life, but also as a vector for future modes of imagination currently inaccessible (due to the complexity and affirmationist thinking that would emerge as a result of imagining or encoding these practices directly onto subjectivities or characters within capital - or the fear that doing so is a part of capitalism's weapon in modernity). this positioning makes the analysis faithfully open-ended but slightly scared to reach into its own implications
"dwelling together in uninhabitable lands" rather than sounding like an evasion of time just reads like a sentimental metaphor for dying.