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

“This short, bracing polemic is very timely and important,” states Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian’s review of 24/7, “leading one to marvel anew at the ways in which neoliberalism manages to be an affront to everything that is decent in humanity.”¹ I have to read the sentence again to take in the hubris of its assertion. “Neoliberalism manages to be an affront to everything that is decent in humanity.” It’s true that Jonathan Crary’s short book—subtitled Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep—is a paean to what Crary sees as the last bastion of resistance to the late capitalist profit engine. Sleep, he claims, “in its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity . . . will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe.”² Sleep is unprofitable, an embarrassing defect to the temporalities of a round-the-clock labor system, “an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.”³ “The stunning, inconceivable reality,” declares Crary, “is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”⁴ While Crary’s interest in sleep, then, is clearly a response to the exploitation associated with contemporary “neoliberal” economics, Lezard’s broad brushstroke fails to wash. It clings to me all day.

When I sleep, I dream. I find myself inside the Guardian itself—or, more specifically, at its cutest g-spot, the broadsheet’s own caféin-a-shipping-container at the heart of yuppie East London, whose very name is a hashtag: #guardiancoffee. I find myself not seated at one of its white, g-stamped benches gazing into the free-to-use iPad that protrudes from each tabletop, nor at the coffee bar, staring at the twitching Twitter feed and senseless infographics on today’s top drink. I’m in the cozy bit at the back, in a red padded armchair, warmed by the ambivalent irony of a log fire flickering on a flat-screen TV. Lezard sits opposite me, sipping a flat white. Behind him, multiple screens blink news tickers and price alerts. It’s impossible to sleep in this armchair, but it does at least gesture toward a haven from the hard, shiny surfaces of Apple products and social media, from the unrelenting pressure of proactivity and cognitive production. It’s the momentary illusion of respite that keeps our work ethic ticking over, the feel of leisure time that keeps freelancers constantly on the job. As Crary reminds us, however, the worker is just one target in the assault on sleep: more terrifyingly, the spectrum of current research on sleep-resistance finds its specter in the US military’s investigations into the sleepless soldier, the human drone. The book opens with a series of chilling vignettes: research in Wisconsin on the brain activity of migrating birds that can go for up to seven days without sleep; an unrealized 1990s Russian-European space scheme that aimed to use sun-reflecting satellites to create a constant state of daylight on Earth; and most shockingly, details of the sleep deprivation used in torture at Guantánamo Bay.

These acute examples foreshadow a more generalized pattern, as Crary prophesies: “As history has shown, war-related innovations are inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere, and the sleepless soldier would be the forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer.”⁵ This is the world that Crary is more substantively concerned with: a kind of #guardiancoffee macrocosm in which leisure and rest have become humiliating weaknesses that are either minimized or absorbed into the more exploitable categories of consumption time and marketing time. When we are not working, he reminds us, we are producing capital for corporations like Google and Facebook, just by virtue of being plugged in. Unsurprisingly, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s analysis of “connexionist” capitalism is a key referent. Crary shares their concern with a society fixated on activity, the urgency of networking, project building, and...