Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Of late, I came across an article which talked about young analysts at wall street being unable to cope up with stress and long hours at work leading to suicides, which of course is the nature of perform or perish nature of modern capitalism at work.
In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary unravels a thorough yet concise account of “the injuring of sleep” in contemporary society. To illuminate his discussion, Crary invokes both historical and contemporary illustrations of the “24/7,” citing research and critical theory and offering incisive film analysis. Crary approaches his subject with combined theoretical rigor and poetic expression akin to Guy Debord (whose work informs Crary’s discussion), supplemented by concrete investigative dispatches à la Naomi Klein, as he navigates curious and haunting convergences of neuroscience with military and economic interests. For Crary, 24/7 denotes more than a recent trend in globalized neoliberal economics. It represents a totalizing principle of late capitalism in which personal, social, and economic functions of time coalesce, where human subjects are assimilated into an unreflecting, sleepless, consumer-driven, and data-crunched reorientation of life. “The modeling of one’s personal and social identity,” he writes, “has been reorganized to conform to uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems” (9). In this process life is made ever more mechanistic as natural cycles are disrupted, if not destroyed. One of the more unique contributions of Crary’s book is the compelling manner in which he pits the intrinsic nature of sleep against the logic of capitalism. Accordingly, sleep antagonizes market exploitation by imposing boundaries to capital that otherwise cannot abide limits. Sleep thus remains the last of what Marx termed “natural barriers.” While present titans of technology prepare to sacrifice sleep at the altar of market efficiency, sleep—in Crary’s phrase—“is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism” (10), thereby eluding both execution and overt exploitation but not injury. Not only does sleep interrupt the field worker’s ability to pick, the factory worker’s ability to assemble, and the consumer’s ability to purchase, but it also remains fundamentally unexploitable by more recent trends commercializing private life. Crary explains, “Irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms” (10). In other words, whether we’re working or not, wherever we go we are increasingly inundated with advertisements intended to attract our gaze, to entice our consumption. Even given our contemporary condition of invasive commercialization, however, the space of sleep remains uncolonizable by market imposition (though we might imagine a future in which dream states are interrupted: “This dream brought to you by …”). As it stands, the natural impossibility of in-sleep encroachment appears safe. This characteristic of sleep renders it a literal natural enemy to the logic of late capitalism, which explains the encroachment of market forces on sleep: if it can’t itself be exploited, it must be prevented to the furthest extent possible. Crary bolsters his conception of the 24/7 by extending his analysis beyond sleep (or the growing lack thereof), at one point using Hannah Arendt’s distinction between “public activity” and “private life.” Arendt held that substantive political activity in civil society depends on balancing these two realms of experience. For Arendt, one cannot meaningfully contribute to public discourse without stepping out of “the implacable bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene” (1988, 71). Private life offers time not only for sleep but also for waking recuperation—time during which individuals’ intimate thoughts, experiences, and close relationships are not intruded upon, during which thoughtful reflection is possible. In the context of the 24/7, however, private life is eviscerated. Individuals spend their days at work staring at computer screens, and they return home to stare at either computer or television screens. All the while, individuals are subjected to constant intrusions of advertisements that preclude solitude, reflection, regeneration, and finally sleep. Crary’s 24/7 succeeds in providing the reader with a concise survey of historical and contemporary thought concerning the social and political significance of sleep. But where the book really excels is in Crary’s ability to relate philosophical, literary, political, and otherwise conceived notions of sleep to substantive political discourses happening today. A potent example is when he challenges the tendency of (predominantly young) thinkers to see the technological advancements that rob us of our sleep (as well as mediate our interactions, among other things) as inherently liberatory and egalitarian in nature. “The myths of the … nature of this technology have been cultivated for a reason,” he writes, later explaining, “Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitably be historically ephemeral and inconsequential” (121). Tenuous images of political activity online are shadowed by the ubiquity of sleepless one-click consumerism. “Social media” become a strange paradox whereby actual social interaction, let alone the prospect of substantive political engagement, is replaced with technologically mediated interaction. Images increasingly mediate our unceasing 24/7 experience. The prominence of the spectacle (in the Debordian sense) is the static feature of social networks and mass media in general. As with material consumerism, the driving force of mass media is imagery over essence. The appearance of being, in our society of the spectacle, replaces being. To this effect, the real power possessed by social networks is their ability to simulate a hollowed-out appearance of empowerment in their users—an elaborate pretense that only perpetuates underlying corporate power structures. This real power of media corporations is exposed in recent studies, to which Crary refers, that show exponential increases in people waking up in the middle of the night to check social media accounts, a “private” and “social” experience within which commercial advertising is fully integrated. In this topsy-turvy state, we discover that ours has become a world in which we are robbed of our sleep only to engage commercialized nonsocial activity on so-called “social networks” during what used to be the intimate hours of private life. Crary’s 24/7 is an essential read for those who are the least bit concerned with discerning the metastasizing dynamics of a sleepless economy
In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary unravels a thorough yet concise account of “the injuring of sleep” in contemporary society. To illuminate his discussion, Crary invokes both historical and contemporary illustrations of the “24/7,” citing research and critical theory and offering incisive film analysis. Crary approaches his subject with combined theoretical rigor and poetic expression akin to Guy Debord (whose work informs Crary’s discussion), supplemented by concrete investigative dispatches à la Naomi Klein, as he navigates curious and haunting convergences of neuroscience with military and economic interests. For Crary, 24/7 denotes more than a recent trend in globalized neoliberal economics. It represents a totalizing principle of late capitalism in which personal, social, and economic functions of time coalesce, where human subjects are assimilated into an unreflecting, sleepless, consumer-driven, and data-crunched reorientation of life. “The modeling of one’s personal and social identity,” he writes, “has been reorganized to conform to uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems” (9). In this process life is made ever more mechanistic as natural cycles are disrupted, if not destroyed. One of the more unique contributions of Crary’s book is the compelling manner in which he pits the intrinsic nature of sleep against the logic of capitalism. Accordingly, sleep antagonizes market exploitation by imposing boundaries to capital that otherwise cannot abide limits. Sleep thus remains the last of what Marx termed “natural barriers.” While present titans of technology prepare to sacrifice sleep at the altar of market efficiency, sleep—in Crary’s phrase—“is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism” (10), thereby eluding both execution and overt exploitation but not injury. Not only does sleep interrupt the field worker’s ability to pick, the factory worker’s ability to assemble, and the consumer’s ability to purchase, but it also remains fundamentally unexploitable by more recent trends commercializing private life. Crary explains, “Irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms” (10). In other words, whether we’re working or not, wherever we go we are increasingly inundated with advertisements intended to attract our gaze, to entice our consumption. Even given our contemporary condition of invasive commercialization, however, the space of sleep remains uncolonizable by market imposition (though we might imagine a future in which dream states are interrupted: “This dream brought to you by …”). As it stands, the natural impossibility of in-sleep encroachment appears safe. This characteristic of sleep renders it a literal natural enemy to the logic of late capitalism, which explains the encroachment of market forces on sleep: if it can’t itself be exploited, it must be prevented to the furthest extent possible. Crary bolsters his conception of the 24/7 by extending his analysis beyond sleep (or the growing lack thereof), at one point using Hannah Arendt’s distinction between “public activity” and “private life.” Arendt held that substantive political activity in civil society depends on balancing these two realms of experience. For Arendt, one cannot meaningfully contribute to public discourse without stepping out of “the implacable bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene” (1988, 71). Private life offers time not only for sleep but also for waking recuperation—time during which individuals’ intimate thoughts, experiences, and close relationships are not intruded upon, during which thoughtful reflection is possible. In the context of the 24/7, however, private life is eviscerated. Individuals spend their days at work staring at computer screens, and they return home to stare at either computer or television screens. All the while, individuals are subjected to constant intrusions of advertisements that preclude solitude, reflection, regeneration, and finally sleep. Crary’s 24/7 succeeds in providing the reader with a concise survey of historical and contemporary thought concerning the social and political significance of sleep. But where the book really excels is in Crary’s ability to relate philosophical, literary, political, and otherwise conceived notions of sleep to substantive political discourses happening today. A potent example is when he challenges the tendency of (predominantly young) thinkers to see the technological advancements that rob us of our sleep (as well as mediate our interactions, among other things) as inherently liberatory and egalitarian in nature. “The myths of the … nature of this technology have been cultivated for a reason,” he writes, later explaining, “Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitably be historically ephemeral and inconsequential” (121). Tenuous images of political activity online are shadowed by the ubiquity of sleepless one-click consumerism. “Social media” become a strange paradox whereby actual social interaction, let alone the prospect of substantive political engagement, is replaced with technologically mediated interaction. Images increasingly mediate our unceasing 24/7 experience. The prominence of the spectacle (in the Debordian sense) is the static feature of social networks and mass media in general. As with material consumerism, the driving force of mass media is imagery over essence. The appearance of being, in our society of the spectacle, replaces being. To this effect, the real power possessed by social networks is their ability to simulate a hollowed-out appearance of empowerment in their users—an elaborate pretense that only perpetuates underlying corporate power structures. This real power of media corporations is exposed in recent studies, to which Crary refers, that show exponential increases in people waking up in the middle of the night to check social media accounts, a “private” and “social” experience within which commercial advertising is fully integrated. In this topsy-turvy state, we discover that ours has become a world in which we are robbed of our sleep only to engage commercialized nonsocial activity on so-called “social networks” during what used to be the intimate hours of private life. Crary’s 24/7 is an essential read for those who are the least bit concerned with discerning the metastasizing dynamics of a sleepless economy
Comments
Post a Comment