24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary (review)

Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep is a short, sharp polemic against the dehumanizing conditions of neoliberalism, the non-stop marketplace, and the concomitant demands for constant productivity and attentiveness. Crary, a professor of art history and a distinguished cultural theorist, reflects on the ways that these conditions are reshaping notions of temporality, intensifying the management and surveillance of individual subjectivities, and undercutting the possibility for dissent and political expression.

Although it is not a conventional work of history, 24/7 is a compelling effort to historicize the always-on character of our contemporary world. This short book, really an essay in four parts, is the most recent installment in Crary’s extensive genealogy of attentive norms in the West. Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) and Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) chart the emergence, rationalization, and normalization of the “observing subject” across the 19th century, revealing new techniques of discipline, such as the regulation of attention in industrial labour and later the pathologization of deviant forms of perception and attentiveness. In 24/7, Crary adds an analysis of the shifts in attention brought about in the mid-20th century, particularly relating to postwar consumption and television, while mainly focusing on the period from 1990 to the present. This periodization is important as it highlights the concurrence of the political reorientations of the post–Cold War period, the financialization of global capitalism (Crary quotes Gilles Deleuze who calls it “a mutation in capitalism” [71]), and the expansion of the public Internet and other networked technologies that proposed to remake the self in its relationship to the world. Crary notes that by the late 1990s, the vertically integrated corporations that controlled these technologies were expressly competing for the “eyeballs” of consumers in the new “attention economy” of the 21st century. (75)

Crary begins and ends 24/7 by arguing that sleep is our last refuge from the affront of neoliberalism and its “morass of simulated needs. … Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.… The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.” (10–11) This is a captivating argument and a rousing call for workers of the world to take a nap, but although sleep appears in the book’s title, it is not really its subject. Rather, it is used to point to other human temporalities that were first transformed by capitalism and then, Crary argues, obliterated by late capitalism and neoliberalism. Crary draws on Marx’s Grundisse to define capitalism as a reordering of time, a series of ever more elaborate “alignments of lived temporalities with market needs.” (79) The daily and seasonal cycles of agricultural labour long ago lost any meaningful capacity to organize production or consumption, but Crary argues that under late capitalism even the notion of everyday life – long a bastion of habits and rhythms beyond and beneath the regimentation of time by work and other institutions – has been thoroughly occupied by the logic of participation in an unremitting globalized economy.

Crary writes, “there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life. There are, for example, almost no circumstances now that cannot be recorded or archived as digital imagery or information.” (30–31) He is unequivocal about the “cumulative harm” of this condition. (31) Crary ruthlessly counters popular notions of the revolutionary potential of digital tools and social networks. He notes that political activism requires creatively using the tools at one’s disposal, but argues “it should not entail imagining the tools themselves to have intrinsic redemptive value.” (120) He provides a vivid reminder that these systems are owned and controlled by transnational, neoliberal corporations and that using them only perpetuates that system by increasing their profits. We cannot be beyond neoliberalism while our personal and professional lives are enmeshed in its novelties. Moreover...