Jonathan Crary - 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

24/7

Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Jonathan Crary

First published by Verso 2013

Jonathan Crary 2013

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN: 978-1-781-68311-8 (e-book)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Electra by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the US by Maple Vail

for Suzanne

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,

Loose ends and jumble of our common world

W. H. Auden

I am especially gratefully to Sebastian Budgen for his support of this project and for his valuable suggestions during its completion.

The opportunity to test out parts of this work in lecture form was enormously helpful to me. I would like to thank Jorge Ribalta, Carles Guerra, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art for providing me with the venue where I first presented some of this books content. Im also grateful to Ron Clark and the participants in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program for their challenging responses to my seminars. Others who generously extended speaking invitations include Hal Foster, Stefan Andriopoulos, Brian Larkin, Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, Anne Bonney, David Levi Strauss, and Serge Guilbaut and the Fine Arts students at the University of British Columbia.

Thanks also for help of many kinds to Stephanie ORourke, Siddhartha Lokanandi, Alice Attie, Kent Jones, Molly Nesbit, Harold Veeser, Chia-Ling Lee, Jesper Olsson, Ceciliz Grnberg, and the late Lewis Cole. Im indebted to my sons Chris and Owen for all they have taught me. This book is for my wife Suzanne.

Anyone who has lived along the west coast of North America may well know that, each year, hundreds of species of birds migrate seasonally up and down for various distances along that continental shelf. One of these species is the white-crowned sparrow. Their route in the fall takes them from Alaska to northern Mexico and then back north again every spring. Unlike most other birds, this type of sparrow has a highly unusual capacity for staying awake, for as long as seven days during migrations. This seasonal behavior enables them to fly and navigate by night and forage for nourishment by day without rest. Over the past five years the US Defense Department has spent large amounts of money to study these creatures. Researchers with government funding at various universities, notably in Madison, Wisconsin, have been investigating the brain activity of the birds during these long sleepless periods, with the hope of acquiring knowledge applicable to human beings. The aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently. The initial objective, quite simply, is the creation of the sleepless soldier, and the white-crowned sparrow study project is only one small part of a broader military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep. Initiated by the advanced research division of the Pentagon (DARPA), scientists in various labs are conducting experimental trials of sleeplessness techniques, including neurochemicals, gene therapy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. The near-term goal is the development of methods to allow a combatant to go for a minimum of seven days without sleep, and in the longer term perhaps at least double that time frame, while preserving high levels of mental and physical performance. Existing means of producing sleeplessness have always been accompanied by deleterious cognitive and psychic deficits (for example, reduced alertness). This was the case with the widespread use of amphetamines in most twentieth-century wars, and more recently with drugs like Provigil. The scientific quest here is not to find ways of stimulating wakefulness but rather to reduce the bodys need for sleep.

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. Untold billions are spent developing robotic and other remote-operated targeting and killing systems, with results that have been dismayingly evident in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. However, despite the extravagant claims made for new weaponry paradigms and the constant references by military analysts to the human agent as the anomalous bottleneck in advanced systems operations, the militarys need for large human armies is not going to diminish in any foreseeable future. The sleeplessness research should be understood as one part of a quest for soldiers whose physical capabilities will more closely approximate the functionalities of non-human apparatuses and networks. There are massive ongoing efforts by the scientific-military complex to develop forms of augmented cognition that will enhance many kinds of human-machine interaction. Simultaneously, the military is also funding many other areas of brain research, including the development of an anti-fear drug. There will be occasions when, for example, missile-armed drones cannot be used and death squads of sleep-resistant, fear-proofed commandos will be needed for missions of indefinite duration. As part of these endeavors, white-crowned sparrows have been removed from the seasonal rhythms of the Pacific coast environment to aid in the imposition of a machinic model of duration and efficiency onto the human body. 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.

24/7 markets and a global infrastructure for continuous work and consumption have been in place for some time, but now a human subject is in the making to coincide with these more intensively.

In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch into orbit satellites that would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme called for a chain of many satellites to be placed in sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1700 kilometers, each one equipped with fold-out parabolic reflectors of paper-thin material. Once fully extended to 200 meters in diameter, each mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-square-mile area on earth with a brightness nearly 100 times greater than moonlight. The initial impetus for the project was to provide illumination for industrial and natural resource exploitation in remote geographical areas with long polar nights in Siberia and western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round the clock. But the company subsequently expanded its plans to include the possibility of supplying nighttime lighting for entire metropolitan areas. Reasoning that it could reduce energy costs for electric lighting, the companys slogan pitched its services as daylight all night long. Opposition to the project arose immediately and from many directions. Astronomers expressed dismay because of the consequences for most earth-based space observation. Scientists and environmentalists declared it would have detrimental physiological consequences for both animals and humans, in that the absence of regular alternations between night and day would disrupt various metabolic patterns, including sleep. There were also protests from cultural and humanitarian groups, who argued that the night sky is a commons to which all of humanity is entitled to have access, and that the ability to experience the darkness of night and observe the stars is a basic human right that no corporation can nullify. However, if this is in any sense a right or privilege, it is already being violated for over half of the worlds population in cities that are enveloped continuously in a penumbra of smog and high-intensity illumination. Defenders of the project, though, asserted that such technology would help lower nocturnal use of electricity, and that a loss of the night sky and its darkness is a small price to pay for reducing global energy consumption. In any case, this ultimately unworkable enterprise is one particular instance of a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation. In its entrepreneurial excess, the project is a hyperbolic expression of an institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of visibility.