‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’ At the 2012 Conservative Party Conference, this evocative image was used by the Chancellor George Osborne to establish a political dividing line. The worker or the sleeper: whose side are you on? At the 2013 conference, Osborne followed this with a policy requiring the unemployed to visit a Jobcentre every morning, as a condition of receiving benefits. This punitive approach only makes sense—given the shortage of vacancies—when viewed in the context of a government cracking down on slumber and restfulness. The re-moralization of unemployment that is underway in Britain casts the jobless not so much as drunken delinquents, as the Victorians depicted them, but as insufficiently alert or awake.

It is an interesting piece of rhetoric which appears to confirm the thesis at the heart of Jonathan Crary’s essay and lament, 24/7. Sleep, he argues, is our last bastion of otherness and refusal, in an age of always-on-everywhere media, accumulation, surveillance and management. And for this reason, sleep has been targeted by various technologies and regimes of power. He introduces this proposition with a series of disturbing examples of how a war on sleep is being waged: by scientists seeking a cure for tiredness, military interrogators using sleep deprivation as a form of torture, and engineers hoping to overcome night-time by putting reflective mirrors in space. Less violently, the era of smartphones and ubiquitous digital surveillance means that we now dwell in a world of constant monitoring and visibility, in which ‘sleep mode’ has come to refer to a machine that is becalmed but not actually switched off. Gilles Deleuze’s claim, that the Foucauldian society of panoptical and periodic ‘discipline’ has been usurped by one of synoptical and permanent ‘control’ hovers in the background here. The signifier ‘24/7’ is used to capture this syndrome in all its relentlessness, its limitlessness and its sheer awfulness. But what exactly does the term represent?

Crary’s answer draws on a somewhat unstable amalgam of Marxism, Web 2.0 Kulturkritik and, of course, Foucault–Deleuze, along with a Weberian critique of rationalization as having escaped any meaningful human purpose or control. Briefly, 24/7 represents the ‘constant continuity’ that Marx identified in the Grundrisse as crucial to the capitalist circulation process. But it has taken 150 years for this temporal order to fulfil itself on a world scale—‘the accelerations of an always globalizing capitalism only slowly imposed themselves on social and individual life.’ Technologies of social control appeared for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century, in the context of management; yet by 1900, Crary points out, only a tiny proportion of the globe was fully enmeshed in capitalist relations. The Second World War brought giant strides towards a homogeneous global present, forging a new alliance between science, the military and multinational corporations, and new paradigms of communication and control; yet large areas of social existence retained pre-capitalist rhythms. By the 1960s, ‘everyday life’ (in Lefebvre’s sense) was becoming increasingly colonized (in Debord’s) by consumption and ‘organized leisure’, with tv playing a crucial transitional role—millions spending their evenings huddled before ‘flickering, light-emitting objects’, subjected to uniform modes of duration and narrowing sensory response. The 1980s saw a fresh assault on everyday life, corresponding to ‘the shift from production to financialization’ and the ideological offensive of neoliberalism: the individual was now redefined as a ‘full-time economic agent’.