24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

by Jonathan Crary

For over two decades, the strategic logic of US military planning has been directed toward removing the living individual from many parts of the command, control, and execution circuit.

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. Non-sleep products, when aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option, and eventually, for many, a necessity.

The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.

A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness.

24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.

The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.

More importantly, within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers.

Teresa Brennan coined the term “bioderegulation” to describe the brutal discrepencies between the temporal operation of deregulated markets and the intrinsic physical limitations of the humans required to conform to these demands.

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has refuted such claims, countering that “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated or controlled by some apparatus.”

Over the last two decades, a growing range of emotional states have been incrementally pathologized in order to create vast new markets for previously unneeded products. The fluctuating textures of human affect and emotion that are only imprecisely suggested by the notions of shyness, anxiety, variable sexual desire, distraction, or sadness have been falsely converted into medical disorders to be targeted by hugely profitable drugs.

Because loss is continually created, an atrophied memory ceases to recognize it as such.

Agriculture, Marx insisted, “could never be the sphere in which capitalism starts, the sphere in which it takes up its original residence.”2 The cyclical temporalities, whether seasonal or diurnal, around which farming had always been based constituted an insurmountable set of resistances to the remaking of labor time on which capitalism depended fundamentally from the start.

World War II was the crucible in which new paradigms of communication, information, and control were forged, and in which connections between scientific research, transnational corporations, and military power were consolidated.

Sleep is the only remaining barrier, the only enduring “natural condition” that capitalism cannot eliminate.

The cathode ray tube was a decisive and vivid instance of how the glare and gossip of a public transactional world penetrated the most private of spaces, and contaminated the quiet and solitude that Arendt believed essential for the sustenance of a political individual.

The 1980s are often characterized as a period during which there was an abandonment of the merely receptive or passive role of the original television viewer. In its place, according to this version, emerged a more creative user of a far larger field of media resources, who was able to intervene purposively in the utilization of technological products, and by the early 1990s able to interface with global information networks.

How does one remain human in the bleakness of this world when the ties that connect us have been shattered and when malevolent forms of rationality are powerfully at work?

“True affluence is not needing any thing.”

One of the superficial but piercing truisms about class society is that the rich never have to wait, and this feeds the desire to emulate wherever possible this particular privilege of the elite.