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Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso 2013)
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...