The Symbolism of Modernity and the Expulsion of the Night

Robert Kurz

Even today, after more than 200 years, we are still blinded by the beautiful glow of the bourgeois enlightenment. The history of modernization revels in metaphors of light. The radiant sun of reason is supposed to penetrate the darkness of superstition and make the disorder of the world visible, in order to finally organize society according to rational criteria. Darkness does not appear as the other side of the truth, but as the negative realm of the devil. Even the humanists of the Renaissance polemicized against their enemies by calling them “obscurantists” [Dunkelmänner, which translates literally to dark men]. “More light!” Goethe is said to have shouted on his deathbed in 1832. As a classicist, he had to go out in style.

The Romantics resisted this cold light of reason and turned back to religion in a synthetic way. Instead of abstract rationality, they propagated a no less abstract irrationalism. Thus, instead of metaphors of light, they indulged in metaphors of darkness. Novalis wrote his “Hymn to the Night.” But this mere reversal of Enlightenment symbolism actually missed the point. The Romantics were unable to overcome the suspicious one-sidedness of the Enlightenment; they merely occupied the other pole of modernization and thus truly became “Dunkelmänner” of a reactionary, clerical way of thinking.

But the symbolism of modernization can also be criticized the other way round: as the paradoxical irrationality of capitalist reason itself. Because strangely enough, the Enlightenment metaphors of light reek of overcooked mysticism. The idea of a glistening supernatural source of light, as suggested by the idea of modern reason, is reminiscent of the descriptions of the realms of angels illuminated by the radiance of God, and we are also familiar with the concept of “enlightenment” from the religious systems of the Far East. Although the light of Enlightenment reason is an earthly one, it has nevertheless taken on a strangely transcendental character. The celestial splendor of an ultimately incomprehensible God has merely been secularized into the monstrous banality of the capitalist end in itself, whose cabalism of earthly matter consists in the senseless accumulation of economic value. This is not reason, but higher madness; and what shines there is the brilliance of absurdity that hurts and blinds the eyes.

The irrational reason of the Enlightenment wants to make the light total. However, this light is by no means merely a symbol in the realm of thought, but has a hard socio-economic meaning. It is precisely in this respect that it is fatal that Marxism and the historical labor movement have seen themselves as the true heirs of the Enlightenment and its social metaphor of light. In the “Internationale,” the anthem of Marxism, it says of the wonderful socialist future: “Then the sun will shine without interruption.” A German caricaturist has taken this line literally and shows sweating people in the “Empire of Freedom” who stare up at the glowing sun and moan: “It has been shining for three years now and never sets.”

This is not just a joke. In a way, modernization has indeed “turned night into day.” In England, which is known to have set the pace for industrialization, gas lighting was introduced in the early 19th century and soon spread throughout Europe. At the end of the 19th century, electric light replaced gas lamps. It has long been medically proven that the inversion of day and night caused by the blanket of cold light from artificial suns disturbs the biological rhythm of humans and leads to psychological and physiological damage. So why the widespread planetary illumination, which today reaches the furthest corners of the Earth?

Karl Marx, himself an heir to the Enlightenment, quite rightly stated that the restless activism of the capitalist mode of production is “boundless.” In principle, however, this boundlessness cannot tolerate a time that remains “dark.” For the time of darkness is also the time of rest, of passivity, of contemplation. Capitalism, on the other hand, demands the expansion of its activity to its extreme physical and biological limits. In terms of time, these limits are determined by the rotation of the earth on its axis, i.e. by the full 24 hours of the astronomical day, which has a light side (facing the sun) and a dark side (facing away from the sun). The tendency of capitalism is to make the active sunny side total and to occupy the entire astronomical day. The night side interferes with this urge. The production, circulation and distribution of commodities should therefore run “around the clock,” because “time is money.” The concept of “abstract labor” in modern commodity production therefore includes not only its absolute extension, but also its astronomical abstraction. This process is analogous to the change in spatial measurements. The metric system was introduced by the regime of the French Revolution in 1795 and spread as quickly as gas lighting. In Germany, the transition to this system took place in 1872. The spatial measures based on the human body (feet, cubits, etc.), which were as varied as human cultures, were replaced by the abstract astronomical measure of the meter, which is said to correspond to a forty-millionth part of the earth’s circumference. This abstract standardization of the measure of space corresponded to the mechanistic world view of Newtonian physics, which in turn became the model for the mechanistic economy of the modern market economy, as analyzed and propagated by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the founder of national economics. The image of the universe and nature as a single great machine coincided with the economic world machine of capital, and astronomical measurements became a common form of the physical and economic world machine. This applies not only to space, but also to time. The astronomical meter, the measure of abstract space, corresponds to the astronomical hour, the measure of abstract time; and these are also the measures of capitalist commodity production.

Only this abstract time made it possible to push the day of “abstract labor” into the night and eat up the time typically used for rest and relaxation. Abstract time could be detached from concrete things and relationships. Most old timekeepers, e.g. sand or water clocks, did not indicate “what time it is,” but were calibrated to concrete processes in order to show their “measured time.” They could perhaps be compared to an egg timer, which emits a buzzing sound to indicate when an egg is hard or soft boiled. The quantity of time here is not abstract, but is oriented towards a certain quality. The astronomical time of “abstract labor,” on the other hand, is detached from any quality. The difference also becomes clear when we read in medieval documents, for example, that the working hours of servants on large estates were to last “from sunrise to noon.” This means that working hours were not only shorter in absolute terms than today, but also in relative terms, varying according to the season and being shorter in winter than in summer. The abstract astronomical hour, on the other hand, made it possible to set the start of work “at 6 o’clock” regardless of the season and physical rhythms.

That is why the era of capitalism is also the era of the “alarm clock,” the clocks that woke people from their sleep with a shrill signal tone in order to drive them to their artificially lit “workplaces.” And once the start of work had been brought forward into the night, the end of work could also be pushed back into the night. This change also has an aesthetic side. Just as the environment is to a certain extent “dematerialized” by abstract economic rationality, in that matter and its interrelations have to submit to the criteria of profitability, it is also de-dimensioned and de-proportionalized by the same rationality. If old buildings sometimes seem somehow more beautiful and cozy than modern ones, and if we then notice that at the same time they seem somehow irregular in comparison to today’s “functionalist” buildings, then this is due to the fact that their dimensions are adapted to the body and their forms are often adapted to the landscape. Modern architecture, on the other hand, uses astronomical spatial dimensions and “decontextualized” forms, “detached” from the surroundings. But this also applies to time. The modern architecture of time is also de-proportionalized and decontextualized. It is not just space that has become ugly, but time as well.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, both the absolute and relative extension of working hours through the introduction of the abstract astronomical hour were still perceived as torture. For a long time, people desperately resisted the night work associated with industrialization. Working before sunrise and after sunset was considered downright immoral. In the Middle Ages, if craftsmen had to work at night for scheduling reasons, they had to be fed lavishly and paid princely wages. Night work was a rare exception. And it is one of the “great” achievements of capitalism that it succeeded in making torture by time the norm in human activity.

The reduction in absolute working hours since early capitalism has done nothing to change this. On the contrary, so-called shift work has become more and more widespread in the 20th century. Two or even three-shift operation means that machines should run as continuously as possible, interrupted only by short breaks for setup, maintenance and cleaning. The opening hours of stores and department stores should also be pushed as close as possible to the 24-hour limit. In Germany, we had a dispute this year about the statutory closing time for stores, which was previously set at 6:30 p.m. and has been extended to 8 p.m. since November 1, 1996. In many countries, such as the U.S., there is no statutory closing time at all and many stores display the sign: “Open 24 hours a day.” Since microelectronic communication technology has globalized the flow of money, the financial day of one half of the world has seamlessly merged with that of the other. “The financial markets never sleep,” says the advertisement of a Japanese bank.

The light of Enlightenment reason is the illumination of the night shift. To the same extent that competition becomes total, the external, social imperative is also transformed into an inner compulsion of the individual. Sleep becomes as much an enemy as the night, for as long as one sleeps, one misses opportunities and is helplessly exposed to the attacks of others. The sleep of the market-economy man therefore becomes as short and shallow as that of a wild animal, and all the more so the more “successful” this man wants to be. The externally determined work torture of the mechanical night shift appears at the management level as a “voluntary” renunciation of sleep. There are even management seminars where sleep minimization techniques can be practiced. Today, schools of self-management claim in all seriousness: “The ideal businessman never sleeps,” just like the financial markets!

However, the subjugation of people to “abstract labor” and its astronomical measure of time is not possible without equally total control. All-round control, in turn, requires equally all-round observation, and observation is only possible in the light: in much the same way as the police direct a blinding lamp onto the face of the delinquent during interrogation. It is not for nothing that the word “reconnaissance” [Aufklärung, the same word used to refer to the Enlightenment] has a military connotation in German, namely “scouting out the enemy.” And a society in which everyone becomes the enemy of others and of themselves, because everyone has to serve the same secularized god of capital, logically becomes a system of total observation and self-observation.

In a mechanical universe, man must also be a machine and be processed by machines. The light of the Enlightenment has prepared him for this and made him “transparent.” In his book Discipline and Punish (1975), the French philosopher Michel Foucault shows how this total “visibility” has become a historical trap. At the beginning of the 19th century, capitalism still practiced total observation through a “pedagogy of the penitentiary,” as developed by the liberal “utilitarian philosopher” Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) as an elaborate system of organization, punishment and even architecture for prisons, factories, offices, hospitals, schools and reformatories.

The market economy public sphere is not a sphere of free communication, but a sphere of observation and control. This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s negative utopia 1984. Whereas in the totalitarian dictatorships this control was external, exercised by the bureaucratic state and police apparatus, in democracy it has become internalized self-control, supplemented by the commercial media, in which the spotlights of the concentration camps have been transformed into the lights of a monstrous fairground. Here there is no free discussion, but merciless illumination. In commercial democracy, this system has become so refined that individuals obey capitalist imperatives all by themselves and habitually follow the well-worn path like programmed robots.

Contrary to its own social aspirations, Marxism became a protagonist of “abstract labor” by falling prey to the mechanistic thinking of the Enlightenment and its perfidious symbolism of light. Everything that was despotic about Marxism came from Enlightenment liberalism. Conversely, the Romantics, who wanted to give the dark side of truth its due, allied themselves not with social emancipation but with political reaction. Only when night, sleep and dreams are freed from this reactionary captivity can they become slogans of an emancipatory social critique. Resistance to the total market perhaps begins where people ruthlessly take the right to get a good night’s sleep.

Originally published in Folha de São Paulo on 01/12/1997