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24/7: Late Capitalism And The Ends Of Sleep (2013)

by Jonathan Crary(Favorite Author)

3.82 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1781680930 (ISBN13: 9781781680933)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Verso

review 1: I first encountered Jonathan Crary in graduate school - his "Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century", an astonishingly read. The premise of 24/7 is compelling: sleep is the last barrier that capitalism faces in its quest to control all of human life. And today, sleep itself is in great danger. Crary, however, disappoints somewhat - the book lacks a clear structure, and the author seems to mistake interdisciplinarity for "let me quote every major French and German theorist of the twentieth century". Sure, it makes the reader feel smart, but the relevance/connection to the subject matter is often tenuous. Intelligent, but overly pompous, Crary's book will appeal to academics more than to the highly-educated general public. And this is u... morenfortunate.
review 2: “The phenomenon of blogging is one example – of many – of the triumph of a one-way model of auto-chattering in which the possibility of ever having to wait and listen to someone else has been eliminated. Blogging no matter what its intentions, is thus one of the many announcements of the end of politics” 24/7� page 124.This is so wrong it has to be right! Or rather it would have been wrong in 2007 but might be right in 2013 – now that spam comments have become such a problem that many bloggers turn off the comment function on their posts. And this quote could be applied with even more accuracy to books than blogs, and in particular the tomes written by academics. It might also be turned into a really astute comment about the hierarchical university teaching model that ensures academics are rarely contradicted and that their students learn nothing worthwhile but are instead condemned to parrot half-truths handed down from on ‘high’ – the wrong kind of high that is, since most students would learn far more if they attended lectures and seminars after ingesting psychedelics.Like a lot of academics Jonathan Crary has followed the wrong career, he should have been a comedian who took straight man roles! If 24/7 were stuffed to the gills with the overblown rhetoric of which Crary is capable (like the lines quoted above) it would have been a laugh-a-minute groove sensation, but unfortunately our ‘learned’ hack falls back on a hackneyed academic canon. Like does anyone giving a flying fuck about Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Frederich Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, Fredric Jameson, Guy Debord, Raymond Williams, Laura Mulvey, Ernst Bloch and company? I certainly don’t! I was already bored with most of this stuff half-a-lifetime ago and now it just sends me to sleep. ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.Crary’s ‘arguments’ are illustrated with discussions of ‘highbrow’ films by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker – movies we’ve all seen at least one time too many (just as we’ve probably all read virtually every author Crary cites). Yawn! But maybe this is a clever move on Crary’s part since he believes the land-of-nod is about the last site of resistance to capitalism and his text certainly sent me to sleep. Wow! Sexy subversion on a stick Buttman!. Is Crary right to think sleep hasn’t been commoditised or monetised? Actually one reason toffs pay to stay in expensive hotels and buy detached housing is for ‘a good night’s sleep’. This is also a slogan used to sell ‘memory foam mattresses’. A more dialectical approach might have made Crary’s silly academic rant about shut-eye slightly more convincing.So to move from the particular (Crary) to the general (Marxist academics AKA bourgeois ideologists as a whole) – ultimately these bozos are still churning out the same old conservative-dressed-up-as-progressive ‘resistance’ that Adorno and Horkheimer indulged themselves with when they wrote Dialectics of Enlightenment (yawn) and lived in Hollywood – although they might as well have been living in cloud-cuckoo land. Adorno hated jazz, Crary hates the internet. He probably hates all the movies I love too – if he’s ever actually seen them – from Master of the Flying Guillotine and Scorpion Thunderbolt on down. Communudism is too ludic for Crary and before the eighties someone of his ilk would have been as unlikely to quote Debord (because Debord hadn’t been canonised) as s/he is now to cite the likes of Amadeo Bordiga or Juan R. Posadas. Academics really are a sad bunch of skunks! less

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