Rest is a state that is characterized by the cessation of labor and the absence of exertion of any kind. Rest structures our lives and furnishes them with rhythm—we constantly alternate between phases of activity and repose, which are manifest most notably in our waking and sleeping patterns but also in the ways in which we organize our weeks by distinguishing between workdays and weekends, and by interrupting longer periods of work with vacations. Rest is an interval of inactivity of a specific duration from which we expect to emerge restored, with our energy replenished and our spirit renewed. It is a necessary counterpoint to human activity, during which we recover both physically and mentally from life’s exertions. The fact that our energies are exhaustible and that we need periodically to rest is precisely what makes us human and what distinguishes us from zombies and robots.
Many religions explicitly prescribe a specific day of rest. The fourth of the Ten Commandments, for example, states:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day
is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God:
in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that
is within thy gates: For
in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them
is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.
1The fact that the Sabbath rule features so prominently in the Decalogue, a list featuring only the most indispensable of laws (the others proscribing murder, theft, adultery, jealousy, and blasphemy), illustrates how seriously the human need for rest was taken in the past. Indeed, it suggests that even an almighty and omnipotent God needed a break after having created the heavens and Earth. The importance of rest in biblical times was probably motivated by the desire not so much to enhance people’s productivity, which is the primary modern justification of rest, but to strengthen the bonds of community—when everyone rests on the same day, rest becomes an experience that brings people together, imposing a shared, communal rhythm on their lives.
Many theorists of exhaustion bemoan the loss of the natural rhythm of life in the age of modernity and look back nostalgically to periods when, they imagine, lives were structured by clearly demarcated periods of rest and activity. Agrarian societies, for example, are assumed to have been dominated by entirely natural rhythms: before the advent of gas lamps and electricity in the nineteenth century, the diurnal cycle of daytime and nighttime produced by Earth’s orbital motion remained undisturbed by artificial interventions. Working hours ended naturally with the fading of daylight and the setting of the sun. The seasons, moreover, also dictated periods of increased activity at certain points in the year (for example, during planting and harvest time), which were counterbalanced by periods of relative inactivity (notably, the cold winter months during which nature itself rests and nothing grows). While nature appeared to dictate the patterns of rest and activity in the premodern era, modernity saw the introduction of artificial lighting and clock time. In the industrial age, the pace and rhythm of work were increasingly dictated by external factors, and workers had to bow to the dictates of productivity and efficiency.
Among other things, fatigue can be understood as a warning sign emitted by the body to indicate when it is being overtaxed. It signals limits and that the body requires rest. In workplaces where the tempo of work is externally determined, such warning signs can often be ignored and the body’s needs overridden. Many exhaustion theorists, moreover, have declared that the conditions of modernity more generally imposed an externally regulated pace on people’s natural rhythms, a pace that many experienced as too fast and that relentlessly assaulted the individual with new stimuli and demands, no longer allowing for properly restorative periods of rest.
A characteristic feature of cases of chronic exhaustion is that they cannot be relieved by normal periods of rest. Many neurasthenics, for example, experienced what we would now describe as postexertion malaise. Even the simplest, seemingly least taxing physical activities would result in states of complete exhaustion, from which it took them a disproportionally long time to recover. Yet, as the influential American physician Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) points out, the problem becomes even more troubling when we consider the issue of mental exhaustion. Unlike the body, the mind very rarely sends clear fatigue signals, and it is more difficult to determine when enough is enough and when the mind needs to rest. Moreover, “an excess of physical labor is better borne than a like excess of mental labor,” since physical labor encourages positive collateral activities that mental labor discourages: physical labor quickens the heart, drives the blood “through unused channels,” hastens the breathing, and increases the secretions of the skin. Brain work, in contrast, impoverishes all these functions and requires a much higher “expenditure of nerve material.”
2Paradoxically, the core symptom of the overworked brain, abused by too much activity and too little rest, is precisely that it becomes unable to rest. It is not surprising that sleeping disorders loom large in the list of symptoms that accompany exhaustion in various diagnoses, including neurasthenia, depression, burnout, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Mitchell aptly describes this vicious circle in the following terms:
At last we stop and propose to find rest in bed. Not so, says the ill-used brain, now morbidly awake; and whether we will or not, the mind keeps turning over and over the work of the day, the business or legal problem, or mumbling, so to speak, some wearisome question in a fashion made useless by the denial of full attention. Or else the imagination soars away with the unrestful energy of a demon, conjuring up an endless procession of broken images and disconnected thoughts, so that sleep is utterly banished.
3Mitchell devised an infamous and highly influential therapeutic regime that would shape the treatment of the chronically exhausted for decades: it was appositely called the “rest cure.”
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
The woman who commits to paper this cautious disagreement with her physician-husband’s recommendations experiences a form of nervous weakness that makes her feel exhausted and hopeless. Her ostensibly well-meaning husband, John, orders her to stay in bed and rest, deprived of all stimuli, company, and the activity she cares for most—writing. He ushers her away to a country manor for the summer months in order to isolate her from her familiar surroundings and friends, and he forces her to undergo an aggressive rest cure. In spite of his wife’s protests, her husband compels her to occupy a room at the top of the house, which is decorated with yellow wallpaper on which are printed disconcertingly complex and flamboyant patterns.
Lonely, ailing, and deprived of all sensual and intellectual input, the woman becomes increasingly obsessed with the strange pattern of the yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper’s color, a sickly and “smouldering unclean yellow,” repels her.
5 It quickly turns into a source of delirious optic horror, its irrational structure morphing into a torturing puzzle she is desperate to solve.
Soon she thinks that she can detect a second layer of meaning behind the mystifying arabesques: at night in the silvery moonlight, she can make out the faint shapes of a woman behind the pattern. The wallpaper woman creeps and crawls to and fro and sometimes shakes the pattern as though it were bars through which she is trying to break. Eventually, the narrator decides to free the person behind the wallpaper, but when she has finished ripping it off the walls she finds that it is she herself who is liberated in a strange way—she has shed all pretenses and creeps along the walls of her room like an animal. When her horrified husband eventually finds his creeping wife and faints, she does not change her path and creeps right over him.
The plight of the exhausted woman, whose mental health declines sharply as a result of a wrongly administered “rest cure,” is explored in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860–1935) famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), one of the most influential feminist texts of the modern period. Like all great works of literature, the story invites various interpretations: Are we to understand the woman behind the wallpaper as a psychological projection, a symbolic representation of the narrator’s pain and her sense of entrapment? Or does the text simply chronicle a descent into madness, a gradual loss of sanity that results in obsessive delusions and hallucinatory visions? Is the wallpaper woman a cipher for all women who are oppressed by an incomprehensible and stifling patriarchal system, a system that seems designed to prevent women from independent thought and the free play of the imagination? Is she an externalization not so much of the nervous narrator’s psychological pain but of her socioeconomic plight, caused by unsympathetic and oppressive figures of authority, epitomized by her physician-husband?
6“The Yellow Wallpaper” can be interpreted in all these ways. Yet it is also an important semiautobiographical document detailing the horrors that patients in the late nineteenth century could suffer at the hands of insensitive physicians, who were not yet properly able, or indeed willing, to respond to the mental suffering of women. It is, above all, a textbook case study of a gender-biased misdiagnosis. It illustrated the plight of the female patient whose voice was being ignored, and it shows the dangerous consequences of medical arrogance. It also illustrates the ways in which theories of exhaustion and its origins translated into concrete medical practice, and how these could affect the lives of real people.
Gilman, who was an author, a feminist, and a social reformer, experienced both mental and physical exhaustion, as well as what might now be diagnosed as severe postpartum depression, after having given birth to her first and only child in 1885. She was treated by Mitchell, who was not only the inventor of the “rest cure” but also the author of
Wear and Tear: Or, Hints for the Overworked (1871) and
Fat and Blood and How to Make Them (1877). Mitchell and his cure are clearly the targets of “The Yellow Wallpaper”
—he is even mentioned by name when the narrator’s husband threatens to send his wife to Mitchell in the autumn if her condition does not improve. Mitchell’s rest cure required the patient’s complete isolation, strict bed rest, deprivation of any intellectual stimuli, and rapid weight gain. He wished to renew the vitality of feeble people by “a combination of entire rest and of excessive feeding.” Conjecturing that the loss of fat impoverished the blood, he assumed that weight gain would improve “the color and amount of the red corpuscles.” “To gain in fat,” he declares, “is nearly always to gain in blood.”
7 His rest-cure patients, most of whom were female neurasthenics, were confined to bed for a period of six to eight weeks. Serious cases were not even allowed to relieve themselves or to turn over without the doctor’s permission. During this period of enforced rest, they also had to consume large quantities of milk (at least four pints a day), mutton chops, beef tea, bread and butter, malt extract, and iron supplements.
After Gilman had spent nine weeks at his clinic, submitting herself completely to his rest regime, Mitchell sent her home to her husband with the following instructions: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time…. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.”
8 Gilman attempted to follow his instructions for a while but, after her condition worsened, finally abandoned his advice, divorced her husband, dedicated herself fully to her various intellectual projects, and swiftly recovered.
Its dubious benefits notwithstanding, Mitchell’s rest cure was soon prescribed to patients all over Europe. Virginia Woolf, for instance, who was also diagnosed with neurasthenia, was subjected to the same regime of bed rest, avoidance of excitement, and excessive milk and beef consumption by a doctor called George Savage, who followed Mitchell’s theories.
9 Like Gilman before her, Woolf was certainly no fan of this cure. In 1910, in a letter to her sister Vanessa Bell, she complains bitterly about her treatment:
I really dont think I can stand much more of this…you cant conceive how I want intelligent conversation—even yours…. However, what I mean is that I shall soon have to jump out of a window. The ugliness of the house is almost inexplicable…. Then there is all the eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark.
My God! What a mercy to be done with it!
10
Throughout her adult life, Woolf battled with mental health problems and alternating states of extreme exhaustion and manic activity, until she committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse in 1941. In 1922, she was (rather poetically) diagnosed with a “tired heart.” In June of that year, she also had three of her teeth pulled—this was supposed to lower the body temperature of “overheated” hysterics and neurasthenics, because it was assumed that nests of germs were clustering under the roots of the teeth, generating feverish excitement.
11 Like Gilman, Woolf fiercely criticizes the male medical establishment and its attitudes toward mental health in her writing. In
Mrs.
Dalloway (1925), for example, she pens a scathing portray of an arrogant, judgmental psychiatrist called Sir William Bradshaw, whose lack of sympathy ultimately leads to the suicide of a shell-shocked and severely distressed war veteran. In her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Woolf defiantly sings the praises of the sick, whose unique sensibility and imagination she contrasts favorably with the restless activity- and project-driven “army of the upright.”
12Mitchell’s rest cure has not just attracted the wrath of various writers but also become a much-discussed case study in feminist debates about the ways in which medical diagnoses can be bound up with assumptions about “natural” and “unnatural” gender roles and behavior. George M. Beard’s neurasthenia diagnosis is based, above all, on classist and racist beliefs—that is, the idea that only refined, upper-class “brain workers,” in particular American citizens and those of other “civilized” and “advanced” nations, can fall prey to this disease. Mitchell’s therapeutic regime, in contrast, rests primarily on traditional conceptions of appropriate gender roles. It is not difficult to see the dubious gender ideology that lurks behind his “medical” recommendation to Gilman—a woman is to return home to her husband, abandon all intellectual pursuits, focus on motherhood, and resume her “natural” place in the kitchen and in bed.
These views are particularly evident in
Wear and Tear, in which Mitchell rails not just at the general “thoughtless sinners against the laws of labor and of rest” but, above all, against the dangerous consequences of educating young women. Using metaphors very similar to those deployed by Beard, he articulates fears about exhausting “a capital of vitality” painfully accumulated by generations of healthy, outdoor-living men. Mitchell, too, bemoans the “cruel competition for the dollar, the new and exciting habits of business, the racing speed which the telegraph and railway have introduced into commercial life,” but he is particularly concerned with “the overeducation and overstraining” of girls. The various nervous ailments that result from submitting young girls to the pressures of an education that goes beyond teaching them about household economy, sewing, and cooking results in their failure to “fulfill all the natural functions of mothers.” He is particularly worried about the age of puberty, during which girls should be kept away from school altogether.
13“Overuse,” he sternly warns, “or even a very steady use, of the brain is in many dangerous to health and to every probability of future womanly usefulness.” Education makes a girl “unfit for her duties as woman” and unable to deliver what “nature asks from her as wife and mother.” This lack of “future womanly usefulness” has, of course, frightful consequences for the biological and psychological capital of the nation: “[T]here comes a time when the matured man certainly surpasses the woman in persistent energy and capacity for unbroken brain-work. If then she matches herself against him, it will be, with some exceptions, at bitter cost.”
14Moreover, Mitchell generally seems strongly to dislike his female neurasthenic patients, as remarks such as the following indicate, in which he compares them to tyrants, malingerers, and vampires, as well as describing them as selfish and morally despicable: the female invalids who are destined for “the shawl and the sofa,” we are informed, have produced “untold discomfort in many a household.” These “self-made invalids” can make entire households “wretched,” destroying “generations of nursing relatives” in the process.
15 He gravely alleges: “I have seen a hysterical, anaemic girl kill in this way three generations of nurses.” The exhausted woman is “like a vampire, sucking slowly the blood of every healthy, helpful creature within reach of her demands.”
16 The undisguised misogyny and hostility that is evident in these remarks render his resting and fattening regime even more sinister. By confining women to their beds and, above all, by suggesting that it was their attempt to seek an education and to compete with men in the workplace that made them ill in the first place, Mitchell is essentially trying to put a halt to a social process with which he clearly felt uncomfortable—the emancipation of women.
Various feminist critics have commented on gender-political assumptions that often influence the construction of medical diagnoses. Nervous weakness and, in particular, hysteria were at the forefront of ailments that were primarily associated with women. Lisa Appignanesi and Elaine Showalter, for example, argue that women whose views and behaviors were at odds with established norms were frequently medicalized—labeling their socially deviant actions or troubling opinions as “mad” was effectively a strategy designed to silence them.
17 Mitchell is, of course, not the only physician to have put forth dubious medical claims about the origins of nervous exhaustion in women. Beard, too, famously lists “the education of women” as one of the five main factors that led to the epidemic spread of neurasthenia. Even Richard von Krafft-Ebing constructs a similar argument: the emancipation of women, he writes, is a primary “source for the emergence of nervousness that is not to be underestimated”:
Although women might now be capable of competing with men in various fields, for millennia, their destiny has been a different one. Only over the course of many generations can the capacity of the brain that is necessary for succeeding in formerly exclusively male scientific or artistic professions be acquired by a woman. Only a few singular, unusually strong, and advantageously equipped female individuals can already successfully assert themselves in the intellectual work-place competition that is enforced by modern social circumstances. The vast majority of women who accept this fight risk losing it. The number of the defeated and the dead is simply mind-blowing.
18Although women were far from being the only group diagnosed with nervous exhaustion in the final decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries, there can be no doubt that conceptions of “natural” and “unnatural” gender behavior substantially shaped medical debates and diagnoses, and that certain diagnoses were used to submerge critical female voices and to stifle feminist activities. Moreover, Mitchell’s case illustrates once again how cultural critique and medical diagnosis can be fused together, often in insidious ways. Many theories of exhaustion are used as vehicles to express fears about social transformation—be they technical, cultural, or sociopolitical in nature. Often, unwanted developments are held directly responsible for specific psychosomatic symptoms—think of the railway spine or, more recently, the wind turbine syndrome. Mitchell’s rest cure articulates deep-seated anxieties about the emancipation of women, their entry into the world of work, and changing gender roles. Here, and elsewhere, culturally conservative views are presented in the guise of a medical treatise.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the famous British naturalist who first articulated the idea of natural selection and whose work On the Origin of Species (1859) directly influenced theories such as Krafft-Ebing’s that explained nervous exhaustion as a result of degeneration, experienced numerous physical ailments during his lifetime. These included attacks of dyspepsia, flatulence, vomiting, dizziness, and nausea and frequently resulted in extreme fatigue and prolonged states of exhaustion. Darwin suffered from severe seasickness during his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, which took him to the shores of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the Galápagos Islands. His physical distress is well documented in the diary he kept during this journey, as well as in his correspondence. In a letter to his father, written in February and March 1832, Darwin complains:
My dear Father
Nobody who has only been to sea for 24 hours has a right to say, that sea-sickness is even uncomfortable.—The real misery only begins when you are so exhausted—that a little exertion makes a feeling of faintness come on.—I found nothing but lying in my hammock did me any good.
19It was while on board the
Beagle that Darwin discovered a routine that enabled him to manage his physical ailments by alternating short periods of work with extended interludes of stillness and inactivity. Back on English soil, he would continue to follow a rigorous daily regime structured by carefully measured intervals of work and rest. After an hour of writing in the morning, for example, he would lie down on the sofa in the drawing room and listen to a member of his family reading out his correspondence or the papers. After another hour of work, he would go for a brief walk, withdraw to his bedroom to smoke and read novels, or lie immobile on the sofa once again.
20Many have speculated about the exact nature of Darwin’s disease. Some consider his ailments to be primarily of a psychosomatic nature and have suggested hypochondria, depression, nervous exhaustion, neurosis, and neurasthenia as possible diagnoses. Others argue that he contracted Chagas disease as a result of having been bitten by a bug in the Argentine pampas in 1835; yet others conjecture that he may have suffered from arsenic poisoning. Even chronic fatigue syndrome (which did not, of course, exist as a diagnosis during Darwin’s time) has been suggested as a retroactive explanation for his various malaises.
In addition to following his own personalized “rest cure,” Darwin found some respite in hydrotherapy and returned numerous times to spa establishments offering aquatic treatments, including in Malvern in Worcestershire, Ilkley in Yorkshire, and Farnham in Surrey. In October 1849, he sent a letter to his friend J. D. Hooker, describing the workings of the water cure in detail:
My dear Hooker
You ask about my Cold Water Cure; I am going on very well & am certainly a little better every month; my nights mend much slower than my days.—I have built a douche & am to go on through all the winter, frost or no frost—My treatment now is lamp 5 times per week & shallow bath for 5 minutes afterwards; douche daily for 5 minutes & dripping sheet daily. The treatment is wonderfully tonic, & I have had more better consecutive days this month, than on any previous ones.—The vomiting I consider absolutely cured. I am allowed to work now 2½ hours daily, & I find it as much as I can do; for the cold-water cure, together with 3 short walks is curiously exhausting; & I am actually
forced always to go to bed at 8 oclock completely tired.—I steadily gain in weight & eat immensely & am never oppressed with my food. I have lost the involuntary twitching of the muscles & all the fainting feelings &c black spots before eyes &c &c Dr Gully thinks he shall quite cure me in 6 or 9 months more.—
The greatest bore, which I find in the Water Cure, is the having been compelled to give up all reading, except the newspapers; for my daily 2½ hours at the Barnacles is fully as much as I can do of anything which occupies the mind: I am consequently terribly behind in all Scientific books.
21
The water cure, alongside the rest cure, electrotherapy, tonic tinctures, and strict dietary regimes, was one of the most popular treatments prescribed to those experiencing nervous exhaustion. Darwin, like Woolf and Gilman, was forced to limit intellectual stimulation and “brain work” as part of the therapeutic regime to which he subscribed. However, in contrast to Woolf and Gilman, he seems to have been more or less at peace with the idea that he had to manage his energies carefully by permanently restricting his working hours, living a relatively secluded and quiet life, and building long periods of regular rest into his daily routine in order to avoid the dangers of more persistent states of exhaustion. Unlike Woolf and Gilman, he chose his own personal rhythm of work and rest—one that was tailored to fit with and enhance his own energy levels. It was, perhaps, precisely the “one-size-fits-all” recipe of Mitchell’s rest cure that jarred with so many of his patients, all of whom had unique needs, rhythms, and sensibilities.
The most obvious form of rest in which we regularly engage is, of course, sleep. We spend roughly one-third of our lives asleep. Sleep disturbances frequently accompany and sometimes cause states of exhaustion. Sleep scientists have established that a short-term lack of sleep can adversely affect mood, judgment, and concentration and may increase the risk of accidents. Chronic sleep deprivation can lead to much more serious problems, including cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, and even early mortality. In the 1990s, 20 percent of the American workforce slept for six hours or less, while the number of people not obtaining enough sleep on a regular basis had risen to 30 percent in 2007. Over the past century, the quality and quantity of our sleep has radically diminished.
22 When sleeping, we normally cycle through different phases and vacillate between two types of sleep—rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, during which our brain is relatively active and we dream most intensely, and non-REM sleep, which is deeper, and during which our brain is at its least dynamic.
One of the key hypotheses about why humans need sleep is the “energy conservation theory.” When we are asleep, our metabolism is significantly reduced, and we are less receptive to external stimuli. Our body temperature drops, our breathing becomes regular, our heart rate and pulse slow down, and we need fewer calories than when we are awake. A group of Harvard sleep scientists explain the theory in Darwinian terms: “[O]ne of the strongest factors in natural selection is competition for and effective utilization of energy resources. The energy conservation theory suggests that the primary function of sleep is to reduce an individual’s energy demand and expenditure during part of the day or night, especially at times when it is least efficient to search for food.”
23Another theory about why humans need sleep is the “recuperation hypothesis,” which is based on the idea that we undergo physical renewal during sleep and that our bodies repair the damage that occurs during waking hours. Aristotle was the earliest proponent of this theory, and recent studies have shown that there is some truth to it. Animals deprived of sleep, for example, lose all immune functions and die in the course of a few weeks. Moreover, the Harvard sleep scientists argue that this theory is further supported “by findings that many of the major restorative functions in the body like muscle growth, tissue repair, protein synthesis, and growth hormone release occur mostly, or in some cases only, during sleep.”
24 We also feel much more cognitively able and mentally alert after a good slumber, while cognitive abilities such as concentration are significantly impaired when we merely toss and turn in bed. Sleep, finally, is also vital in the development and structural changes of the brain.
It is interesting to note that formerly held assumptions about sleep, such as the idea that the brain is “switched off” and is completely inactive during sleep, have not proved to be correct. In fact, electroencephalograph scans have shown that sleep is actually a rather dynamic behavior: REM sleep, in particular, is characterized by high-frequency brainwave activity and anarchically broadcasting neurons and is associated with the production of a vivid and vibrant dream life. Psychoanalysts, moreover, would argue that the production of dreams is the very opposite of a restful or passive activity—Freud explicitly writes of “dream work” (Traumarbeit) when referring to the complex coding processes in which the unconscious engages when translating unconscious desires into dream imagery, and which include condensation, displacement, and symbolization.
Finally, it is also worth noting that the currently favored pattern of sleeping during darkness for an ideally uninterrupted period of eight hours, which most Westerners consider “natural” and healthy, is in fact both culturally and historically specific. In various cultures, in particular those in hot climates, sleeping in the afternoon is a common practice—think of the siesta tradition in Italy, Spain, and Mexico, for example, where many shops close during the afternoon and where people go home to their families to eat and then sleep, to avoid exhausting their energies during the hottest part of the day.
The historian Roger Ekirch, moreover, found ample evidence that the dominant form of human sleeping–waking cycles before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of artificial lighting was segmented, which means that two or more periods of sleep were punctuated by periods of wakefulness during the course of a day.
25 In the Middle Ages, for example, it was common to sleep in two shifts and to get up for an hour or so in the middle of the night to pray, think, meditate on dreams, have sex, or even visit neighbors. Ekirch believes that this biphasal sleep model is in fact more “natural” than the eight hours of consecutive sleep model that we currently follow. The growing number of insomniacs who wake repeatedly during the night, he thinks, may simply be experiencing a return to the preindustrial manner of sleeping. Yet, since most of us consider waking up in the middle of the night as unhealthy, we become anxious and agitated, which then keeps us awake for too long and leads to genuine sleep disturbances and all their dire medical consequences.
Jonathan Crary’s
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep is a telling example of a present-day polemic against new technology and its perceived adverse impact on our lives and our energy reserves.
26 Crary, who is a cultural theorist and an art critic at Columbia University, argues that new technologies, especially the Internet, have eroded the natural rhythms of life, including those related to night and day and to the boundaries between work and rest. We have never slept as little as now in human history, Crary claims—average sleeping hours having slumped from ten in the nineteenth century, to eight at the beginning of the twentieth, and to six and a half in the early twenty-first century. He uses “24/7” as shorthand for the core evils of the global techno-capitalist machine, and especially for the process of incessant consumption and production of goods made possible by nonstop Internet connectivity and commerce. We can now shop twenty-four hours each day, no matter where we are, as online trading never sleeps. What is worse, it is of course the late capitalist workforce who have to keep this process going. As a consequence, the demands on workers have intensified: we are expected to be continuously connected and productive, in synchronicity with the nonstop networks of trade and surveillance.
The world of 24/7 consumerism, Crary argues, has created a new temporality that is continuous and therefore socially corrosive: it is no longer marked by communal caesura such as dawn and dusk, weekdays and weekends. We no longer share mutual patterns of work and rest, nor do we congregate in communal spaces when we do cease work. Instead, we all stare at the screens of our high-tech devices in isolation and for far too long. Experience itself, Crary argues, is restructured by this continuous, incessant, rhythmless rhythm of 24/7 culture, and not in a good way. We are the victims of a dull sameness that assaults us without any pause.
Sleep, Crary argues, has become the true enemy of capitalism, as the capitalist economy envisages a machine-like, willingly surveillable citizen who is always productive and perpetually engaged in the circulation and consumption of goods. Sleep is therefore the true nemesis of unlimited productivity and presents one of the last remaining forms of possible resistance to capitalist consumerism. The sleeping subject can neither produce nor consume and thus becomes useless to the capitalist economy. Sleep alone cannot be commodified.
While many of Crary’s micro theses are convincing, it is striking just how similar his high-theory, twenty-first-century jeremiad is to earlier exhaustion theories. Crary, too, assumes that ours is the most sleepless, and therefore most exhausted, age—a claim that many of the exhaustion theorists we have so far encountered also embrace. Second, he, too, is a traditionalist at heart, who looks back nostalgically to a lost past when life could be lived in a more natural, less exhausting way. The period that Crary romanticizes most is the 1960s, as this decade was marked by a wide range of anticonsumerist and countercultural activities that, he believes, posed a genuine threat to the capitalist system. Third, he blames the evils of the present on new technologies—above all, the Internet, which, he believes, not only drives the 24/7 global culture but insidiously restructures our modes of attention, our experiences, and even our perceptual faculties. Finally, his account also resembles those of George Cheyne, Krafft-Ebing, Mitchell, and Oswald Spengler, to name just a few, in that its tone is apocalyptic, diagnosing colossal paradigm shifts that have horrifying outcomes, which, if unchecked, will lead to the decline of the West. Looked at cynically, these overblown claims could, of course, be seen as simple rhetorical gestures aimed at securing attention, but it is certainly remarkable that many exhaustion theories are driven by visions that are ultimately nostalgic, apocalyptic, technophobic, and conservative in spirit.