Abstract
Following a brief acknowledgements section, this book launches straight into the first of its four chapters. This initial chapter situates ‘sleep’ as the one remaining obstacle to the full realization of 24/7 capitalism. Sleep, it is suggested, is associated with passivity, uselessness and losses in production time. While sleep cannot be eliminated, it can be and is being wrecked. For Crary, more extreme evidence of this can be seen in US Defense [sic] Department efforts to create a ‘sleepless’ soldier and 1990s space consortium plans to launch satellites to reflect sunlight back onto earth. However, steady inroads were made against sleep over the course of the 20th century. The tone of the chapter is far from a neutral story-telling. Crary draws on Arendt, Hobbes, Levinas and others to highlight that ‘sleep can stand for the durability of the social, and that sleep might be analogous to other thresholds at which society could defend or protect itself’ (p. 25).
Chapter Two covers a significant amount of ground but is perhaps best characterized as concerned with ‘time’, ‘gaze’ and ‘technology’ within 24/7 societies. ‘24/7’ is conceptualized as an ‘order-word’ (following Deleuze and Guatarri). It lays bare the discrepancy between a human life-world and ‘the evocation of a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists’ (p. 30). Mental and perceptual capabilities are diminished under the glare of monotonous stimulation. For Crary, the shape of contemporary technological culture still corresponds to the logic of modernization (p. 41) while also representing a distinct range of forces and entities, including a heightened tempo of ‘improved’ systems and the role they play in remaking the subject.
Chapter Three discusses early anticipations of the ‘24/7 temporalities’ noted in Chapter Two. Forms of habit emerged which were inevitably 24/7 and tied to mechanisms of power, unbounded and continuous. Television, for example, was the omnipresent antidote to the shock of radical disruptions (such as Auschwitz); homogenizing and reorganizing human time and activity. Chapter Three sees a brief return to discussions of sleep – noting that, in retrospect, the after-midnight test-pattern appears to be a placeholder for the inevitable 24/7 encroachment to come.
Chapter Four begins with discussions of fiction and the concept of reification. For Crary, ‘reification has proceeded to the point where the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimizes or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds’ (pp. 99–100). The chapter then discusses ‘dreams’ and the ways in which dreaming has become marginalized and discredited. We are now in an era of prohibition of wishes other than those linked to accumulation and power. The 24/7 world is full of limits, imposed externally but also via self-regulation. The possibility of self-regulation results from developments which include the dismantling of the social achievements of the 1960s. Chapter Four ends with a discussion of sleep. Here ‘sleep’ takes on a revolutionary status. Crary writes that ‘it is possible that – in many different places, in many disparate states, including reverie or daydream – the imagining of a future without capitalism begins as dreams of sleep’ (p. 128). It is easy to see why one of the reviewers quoted on the sleeve of this book described it as an update of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. One finishes Crary’s book feeling that ‘sleep’ has taken on critical form. By reflecting on sleep and its incompatibility with capitalism, we can envision and enact new beginnings.
Crary’s book is thought provoking and stimulating. With that said, I have two negative observations. The first concerns form. At no point does Crary provide an introduction to his ideas or let us know what the main thrust of the argument is. We have four chapters (without titles or subheadings) and are left to piece together the main tenets of the argument. This is a challenge – at times because of the argument’s erudite nature, but also at times because it appears quite chaotic. The second reservation relates to the argument itself. It is best described as polemic and does not engage overly with other peoples’ ideas or references. For me, this is most problematic when situating sleep within capitalist society. It has been argued by others that both ‘sleep-negative’ and ‘sleep-positive’ positions exist within contemporary society (Williams, 2011). With respect to the latter, it would have been interesting to see Crary incorporate the burgeoning self-help business surrounding sleep and the rhetoric surrounding workplace naps into his argument a little more. While I would recommend Crary’s book, I would encourage any reader to keep a wider literature to hand, including Eric Hsu’s recent article (2013) on using sleep as an indicator of social acceleration.