Simon J. Williams - The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age

The Politics of Sleep

Also by Simon J. Williams

SLEEP AND SOCIETY: Sociological Ventures into the (Un)known

DEBATING BIOLOGY: Sociology Reflections on Health, Medicine and Society (co-edited)

EMOTIONS AND SOCIAL LIFE (co-edited)

EMOTION AND SOCIAL THEORY

GENDER, HEALTH AND HEALING: The Public/Private Divide (co-edited)

MEDICINE AND THE BODY

HEALTH, MEDICINE AND SOCIETY: Key Theories, Future Agendas (co-edited)

MODERN MEDICINE: Lay Perspectives and Experiences (co-edited)

PHARMACEUTICALS AND SOCIETY: Critical Discourses and Debates (co-edited)

THE LIVED BODY: Sociological Themes, Embodied Agendas

CHRONIC RESPIRATORY ILLNESS

The Politics of Sleep

Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age

Simon J. Williams

University of Warwick, UK

Simon J. Williams 2011

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First published 2011 by

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ISBN: 9780230223660 hardback

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To the memory of my Dad, Alan George Williams (17 October 192031 January 2008), who lives on through me and my boys Jacob and Adam

Contents

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Philippa Grand at Palgrave Macmillan for encouraging me to write this book and to the University of Warwick for the study leave granted to do so. Thanks too to various friends, colleagues and acquaintances over the years who have shaped in innumerable ways the arguments and ideas, still in progress, that follow in the pages of this book, particularly Jon Gabe, Nick Crossley, Peter Conrad, Kenton Kroker, Philip Hancock, Mathew Thomson, Tom Crook, Steve Kroll-Smith, Brigitte Steger, Lodewijk Brunt, Sara Arber, Rob Meadows, Jenny Hislop, Sharon Boden, Clive Seale, Pam Lowe, Cathy Humphreys, Gill Bendelow, Paul Martin, John Abraham, Nigel Thrift, Nick Lee, Steve Fuller, Paul Higgs, Stephen Katz, Wendy Martin and Deborah Steinberg apologies to anyone Ive missed out here! Thanks also to Jon Gabe and Gill Shreir for comments on various bits of this book, to Angela Munro for her professional guidance, good humour and support and to Ruth Charity (as always) for putting up with me both during the writing of this book and in general!

At a rough guesstimate, I have consumed around about 840 cups of coffee and 560 cups of tea during this writing project, many in cafes I frequented if not colonised or squatted in during my sabbatical, so thanks are also probably due on this count to those friendly folks, particularly Monia Smielewska, who have fuelled and indeed benefited from my caffeine consumption and, in so doing, kept me alert/awake or wired enough courtesy of this popular drug of ours to complete this book project more or less on schedule, give or take a few months!

Last but not least, a nod in the direction of my two young boys and aspiring superheroes, Jacob and Adam (aka Batman and Robin), those saboteurs of my sleep and regular intruders into my office space, whom I love to bits but without whose help this book would undoubtedly have been finished oh so much sooner! Thanks a bunch, boys. I owe you ...

Introduction: The Politics of Sleep?

To speak, let alone to write, about the politics of sleep may appear strange if not absurd. Is there indeed, one might justifiably ask, by any stretch of the imagination, a politics of sleep we can meaningfully point to, or even expect, in the near future?

The central argument of this book is that a politics of sleep is indeed not simply possible but evident in a variety of ways. Sleep, I will argue and demonstrate, is political through and through. Political, that is to say, in the sense that sleep is clearly implicated and imbricated in relations of power, authority and expertise as a site and source of claims-making, if not crisis, contestation, controversy and critique. We may in this respect, as with other aspects of the body, speak of the regulation or governance of sleep and associated socio-political issues regarding the problems, promises and prospects of sleep. This, for example, includes the rights, risks and responsibilities associated with sleepy, sleeping and sleepless bodies and, in a more critical if not radical vein perhaps, the ways in which sleep, qua unconscious somatic state, constitutes not simply a vital albeit temporary corporeal release but a potentially potent site or source of corporeal protest, refusal or resistance in an increasingly relentless if not restless or ravenous age: a wired awake world indeed we might say. In our fast, flexible, work-dominated, efficiency-driven societies, moreover, as Hoffman comments, sleep problems are no longer a purely personal idiosyncrasy a symptom,

To consider sleep in this way, then, invites or encourages us to reflect upon the complex regulatory fields that govern not simply our waking but our sleeping lives as another problem or facet of power, politics and personhood, both past and present. My use of the term politics, as this suggests, is intentionally broad and wide-ranging, extending far beyond the formal political sphere or familiar references to the sleep-deprived lives of those weary or bleary-eyed politicians, to encompass many issues which, on closer inspection, turn out to be not simply political but biopolitical in character: vital political matters, that is to say, to do with the governance of bodies and hence the politics of life itself (cf. Rose 2007; Rabinow and Rose 2006; Foucault 1991). If sleep after all is another vital part of life, then its governance unsurprisingly perhaps is biopolitical through and through, particularly in the neo-liberal if not bio-liberal era where life itself is subsumed and capitalised upon in a multitude of ways as yet another asset or value.