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Deep Sleep
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Can one ever truthfully say: “I am asleep?” This is the somnolent
version of the Cretan Paradox,1 with thought and being overlapping, but not entirely coterminous, and it also provides the
grounds for the distinction between being awake, and thoughtful, hence conscious and knowing, and what is sundered from
that state. In a line of thought mined by Augustine and Descartes,
sleep cannot be directly known in its native state. In order to
think about it we must be awake to know something, to use
devices for recording and analysis, and even then we must wonder what we know. Sleep, unlike any other part of culture has no
capacity for reflexivity within its own conditions. In sleeping
one simply sleeps, one does not know, anything. Sleep is ungraspable and unwritable, only perceivable at its edges or its outside.
There is no immanent critique of sleep, only embedded reporters who, necessarily, have no capacity of seeing. Sleep operates in oblique ways, arriving at reflexivity only by a detour
into awakeness.
Édouard Glissant suggests through his argument concerning
opacity in relation to the forced transparency of global domination that, at the scale of the infrapersonal, “It does not disturb me
to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to
me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it.”2
Sleep is the regular occurrence of our own opacity to ourselves,
a kernel of the posthuman inside the most apparently predictable
of habituations and needs.
1
That paradox coming down to the statement: “This sentence is false.”
2
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1997), 192.
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MATTHEW FULL ER
Whether it is cosy, or a physiological burden that exposes
one to danger, sleep is a third of human experience, an unknown. Arguments for the posthuman have tended to find
their evidence in the most exciting science or the most
highly technical, adventurous activity. Sleep, by contrast, is
mundane. In its opacity, it is always both beyond the human
and at its core. As the kernel of the human it is hardly represented in culture, and in those places where it does leak out it
is exceedingly telling, sumptuary, overpowering, animal, incomprehensible: an escape and idyll and yet the subject of
intense politicking and enculturation. In all of these it is ambivalently cathected to the posthuman, where it also forms
another potentially potent kernel, an abandonment of
thought, of self, a relinquishment to the status of complex
active matter.
Sleep is a means, by which people turn themselves into objects, or by means of which they become most object-like,
but it also figures in contemporary and modern literature as a
means of reproduction for work, as a form of escape or a
means of accessing the marvelous. More recently, sleep has
become a means of mobilizing the brain or of putting it to
work for the purposes of problem solving. But in relation to
work and the state of everyday life, it is also often a means
of escape, some kind of refuge from the incoming signals of
the nervous system—and the wider systems they touch, border on and work through. Psychology and neuroscience as
disciplines ‘own’ sleep, and indeed this is where the bulk of
the sleep literature is produced, but sleep should also be examined and experimented with as a cultural and social phenomena, one that is somewhat infrequently theorized, and
indeed, one that produces its own kind of conceptuality.
Sleep as a state is something that immediately ironizes the
alert, productive, learned body. It is profoundly democratic of
course to recognize the sleep of one snoring, farting philoso-
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pher, factory worker, princess (equipped with pea or otherwise) or administrator as the same as any other, but perhaps
there are modes of distinction that can ruin this generic figure
for us.
Sleep as a form of protest, as the straightforward display of
bodies in refusal became a symbol of the Occupy movement,
and a point of contention for the movement’s veridiction.
As a hoax, heat-detection images of apparently empty tents
gathered outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2011 were
made. The machine did not pick up traces of body heat (being
incapable of doing so) and was touted—by the right-wing
newspaper that lead on the story—as evidence that the tents
were left empty overnight rendering the protest null and void.
As a form of veracity, sleep is about the aggregation of bodies
willing to undergo discomfort in order to make an argument,
but as a form of protest it also asserts the rhetoric of primality,
putting the human body in a vulnerable everyday state at the
core of political action. This staged opacity of the tents in turn
revealed the difficulty not only of reasoning with instruments
but of even entering representation.
Sleep acts
In contemporary social thought sleep is shown as being inextricably influenced by society. However, in its most common
form the traffic only goes one way: from social norms, configurations and problems onto sleep. Whilst earlier critical thought
had congealed the undignified figure of the sleepwalker as that
most adequate to describing the members of modern societies
with all their stereotypic behavior, in contemporary capitalism
sleep has lost any sense of its own dignity. Contemporary capitalism will thrust its shovel into any untouched place in order
to prepare the fracking out of value. Emails and information
are squirted in under high pressure in order to flush out any
pockets of trapped consciousness that can be turned into fuel.
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MATTHEW FULL ER
Sleep is a new continent to colonize and establish intensive
means of capture or to degrade as a superfluous and primitive
wilderness.3
We may say that sleep, as a sociological category, is
something that is mainly acted on, rearranged and demarcated,
gnawed at or ablated by social requirements, turned into another category of need and anxiety for which consumer items,
services and treatments (including academic expertise) can be
flogged.4 These are operative as factors. However, as factors,
they modify something that is itself also active, a coefficient
that is itself internally differentiated as much as it is acted on.
The argument against the model of hylomorphism is familiar
enough by now.5 Matter, stuff, practices, and physiologies of
the world are not simply and identically molded by ideal forms
but exist in complex ranges of dialogic interaction and coemergence with patternings, ideals, categories, formalisms, and
so on. These in turn have their own particular and specific
qualities and propensities and that in turn are shaped, fatigued,
propitiated and enhanced by their interactions with other kinds
of entities and relations at multiple scales.
3
See: Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013); Alexei Penzin, “Sleep,
Capitalism and Subjectivity,” in eds. Anke Hoffman and Yvonne Volkart,
Subverting Disambiguities (Zurich: Verein Shedhalle, 2012); Matthew J. WolfMeyer, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Simon Williams,
The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age
(London: Palgrave, 2011).
4
A typology for such action drawing on a survey of social theory and sleep is
set out by Arber, Meadows and Venn who describe four modes of action on
sleep: “1. The shift from public to private sleeping, 2. The relationship between
work and sleep, 3. Sleep within consumer societies, 4.the medicalization of
sleep” Sara Arber, Robert Meadows, and Susan Venn, “Sleep and Society,” in
eds. Charles M. Morin and Colin A. Espie, The Oxford Handbook of Sleep and
Sleep Disorders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
5
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3 83
Sleep however is often figured as a form of dormancy, as
a state of passivity whose plasticity can only be mobilized by
constructions from outwith. An argument I would like to make
however is that sleep is a capacity, a power, that as it comes
into combination with other objects, kinds of relations and
capacities, becomes productive.6 This proposition is made as
an extension of arguments around biological power, the will
to power of Nietzsche where he addresses the capacities of
complexly or simply arranged matter, or other accounts that
acknowledge and work with the active capacities of matter in
its various states.
Heraclitus remarks in a well known fragment that, “Even
sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the
universe.”7 And this sense of sleep as something more profound
than a state of dormancy is important. Indeed, to trace this
movement, we can follow the way sleep science elaborates an
understanding of sleep arising out of the interaction of two
relatively discrete processes and systems, the circadian system
and the homeostatic system.8 This understanding of sleep as
dynamic, slightly out of kilter, and possessed of pulsions and
forces that have their own degrees and kinds of expressivity in
such interaction is key here.
In a survey of the changes to the spatialization of sleep in
the Victorian era, Tom Crook notes that in combination with
beds, bugs, sexual desire, poverty and other factors, sleep was
thought capable of producing moral contagion and pestilential
6
Something relevant is made at another scale in Feuerbach’s notion of species
being, and Marx’s re-reading of it.
7
Heraclitus, Fragment 124, available online at:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/Heraclitus.html
8
See: Derk-Jan Dijk and Alpar S. Lazar, “The Regulation of Human Sleep and
Wakefulness, sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythmicity,” in eds. Charles M.
Morin and Colin A. Espie, The Oxford Handbook of Sleep and Sleep Disorders
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 38–60
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MATTHEW FULL ER
atmospheres. Thus, it had to be contained, demarcated and then
spaced out through the disciplinary techniques of dormitories,
barracks, hospital wards, improved doss-houses, hygienic bedding, model dwellings and the separate bedrooms of middle
class housing.9 Sleep changes, but sleep as a force also makes
itself active in these places and as such there is a process of becoming between kinds of sleep and the artifacts, norms, experiences, organizations and understandings of sleep as well as
what is attendant to it.
It can be noted that sleep indeed produces problems, or what
might be termed expressions of its power - such as snoring and
apnea, key symptoms of concern in the medicalization of sleep.
And it does this in combination with the tissues of the throat, as
they become slack when horizontal. These in turn provide the
opportunity for the chemical and mechanical commodification
of sleep, through sleep drugs and treatments such as Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), in which the mouth and
throat are fed with a constant stream of air.
Sleep also produces the conditions for dreams, nightmares, night terrors, and the various active or passive means
for demands and obligations to be placed upon people by others. (The argument amongst parents contains the lines: You
feed or change the baby, this sleep is fast upon me and I am unable to wake as you can see by my immobility, which is not
after all stubborn but simply a necessity that you, by virtue of
being awake already can see, and, which, were you a sane person not given to the cruelty of waking another, would acknowledge.) Here, there is a rhetoric of sleep that operates at
multiple scales, in the shifting of labor from one person to an-
9
Tom Crook, “Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing sleep in Victorian Britain,”
Special Edition on Sleeping Bodies, Body and Society 14, 4 (December 2008),
15–36.
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other, the refusal to partake in it, but also sleep as disinterest,
the folding of the body to take up the smallest space possible,
or a voluptuous abandonment to the carousing of the organs,
glands, processes, and cycles that cohere as sleep.
Ingredients of sleep
As well as proliferating outside of the body, sleep in humans is
composed by the range and complexity of several kinds of activity within and between different parts of the brain and the
rest of the body it entails. Equally complex are the ways in
which the phases of sleep involve different kinds and rates of
synchronization between these elements at different times.
These can be described at different scales of generality, one of
which is in terms of systems that produce two key means of
producing sleep.
Firstly there is the sensitivity to circadian rhythm that entrains sleep to the changing conditions of daylight via the eyes
and is linked to a chain of other nervous and glandular systems.
Secondly a biological clock or homeostat that itself runs
slightly beyond 24 hours, primarily enacted through hormones.
The simple interplay between these two predilections sets up
moiré patterns of timing within and amongst bodies and what
composes them.
The mammalian body is an assemblage of intense variation and
peculiar intimacy. That of the set of humans within them is a
reasonable context within which to explore the meta-animality
that is implied by the freaks of luck that constitute their shared
and variable characteristics. Nevertheless, to map the ingredients of sleep is to figure it within a myriad of systems of interpretation and scales of existence, each with their own attendant
modes of enquiry and hierarchy within scientific history as
well as those constituted by the imaginary order of causality
and precedence. These include the cosmogonic stack of scales
interpreted by the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, psy-
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MATTHEW FULL ER
chology, sociology, and culture. Each of these can become an
entry point and exploratory base for any of the others whilst retaining the distinct characteristics and relative degree of autonomy of each scale, each of which is also potentially
momentary, multiple and fissiparous as they are interrogated
and constituted by others.
In 1982 Alexander Borbély proposed the model of the two oscillators,10 the homeostatic and the circadian systems. These
two interact as two uneven waves, modulating each other’s
thresholds. They are instrumentally identified in turn by waves
of electrical activity in the brain (building on work by Ernst
Berger in the 1930s). Each oscillator has a different characteristic cycle of change over the course of a roughly daily cycle.
The homeostatic process is governed11 by the hours of wakefulness, during which it increases, in terms discussed more fully
below, and by sleep during which the pressure to sleep decreases. The homeostat functions rather like an hourglass,
gradually building. The circadian rhythm has a different de10
Alexander A. Borbély, “A two process model of sleep regulation,” Human
Neurobiology 1, 3 (October 1982), 195–204. A prior, but unrelated, suggestion
of sleep being produced by two interacting systems is made by E. Brouwer,
“Harmonische Analyse van temperatuurcurven,” Nederlandsche Tijdschrift van
Geneeskunde 74, 27 (October 1928), 68–85. The first system consisted of a
combination of the effects of food-intake, muscular and intellectual work, and
waking and sleeping. The second factor, whose contours were mapped by
Brouwer, was tantalisingly unknown. Brouwer’s work remains a tantalising
aporia in the history of sleep science. Kleitman (1939) discounts Brouwer’s
model as being unnecessarily complex and it is not included in the extensively
revised second edition of 1963. See Nathaniel Kleitman, Sleep and Wakefulness (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
The cybernetic terms of the governor is not accidental to this discourse. Sleep
science, as with Cybernetics, emerges in part through an attempt to get ‘inside’ the
organisms to, in the terms of the Macy Conferences, the underlying physiological
mechanisms deemed sealed off by Behaviourism. See Andrew Pickering, The
Cybernetic Brain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
11
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gree of periodicity (roughly 24.5 hours) and rather than being
set by the pressure to sleep, modulates when the sleeper
awakes in interaction with that homeostatic process.
One aspect of the interaction of the two oscillators described by Borbély therefore is their non-linear character. Accordingly, if the time of sleep’s onset is delayed from the
habitual time by a shorter amount of time (four to twelve hours)
the total length of time asleep shortens. If it is delayed by sixteen to twenty-four hours, the total time asleep is extended.12
The simple interaction of these two slightly out-of-synch characteristics creates some of the complex qualities of sleep.13
Here too, in describing sleep in such terms we are also
recognizing its variable, contested and difficult interweaving
with systems of measure, instrumentation, counting, and
recording. We may make recourse to charts, graphs, groups of
equipment that make such traces and that call upon the reliability of certain entities within bodies in order to posit, witness
and to map such patterns. There is a ripple of standing in for, or
of transduction.14 This encompasses the electrical activity of
sleep, the sensitivity of electroencephalographic equipment to
such activity, the skill and work of experimental subjects and
operators in placing and working the equipmental apparatus. In
addition there is the acuity of numbers and models to articulate
and arrange the quanta as organized data (for instance in charts
directly drawn onto or by numerical recording on computers),
the capacities of interpretation, dissemination, and evaluation
of wider networks of knowledge systems. In turn, there are the
12
Paul Achermann and Alexander Borbély, “Simulation of daytime vigilance
by the additive interaction of a homeostatic and a circadian process,” Biological Cybernetics 71, 2 (June 1994), 115–121.
13
See for an exploration, Steven H. Strogatz, The Mathematical Structure of
the Human Sleep-Wake Cycle. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics 69 (Berlin:
Springer, 1986).
Adrian Mackenzie, Transduction, bodies and machines at speed (London:
Continuum 2002).
14
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MATTHEW FULL ER
wider systems of machining by evaluative metrics, funding and
the direct or indirect investment into certain problems rather
than others. Such ripples are accompanied by the variable
kinds of noise, politicking, and interpretation that feed out in
turn from such brain waves and their wider interpellation
within such systems and the activities of thought and understanding that they in turn stand in for. Finding means to articulate the interaction of such parts and processes becomes key to
understanding the wider ecology of sleep.
And here I want to turn to two formulations of an aesthetics of
sleep. Chronobiology is one of the interdisciplinary scientific
fields that feed into the wider and unevenly composed context
of sleep research. Concerned with the nature, effects and gestation of time and timings in organisms and ecologies it moves
across the scales of matter, species, and habitats to develop a
richly composed aspect of what might be thought to be a
‘meta-biology.’ Time and cycles of time allow for a means of
cutting across different biological and social operations by
means of this scale of interpretation. Thus an issue of The Journal of Biological Rhythms—a core journal for the field—might
include discussions of the effects of light on certain proteins,
the role of the hormone adenosine in circannual hibernation cycles in ground squirrels and the effects of shift-work on the cardiac-nervous system in humans.15
In another issue of the journal, Derk-Jan Dijk and Malcolm von Schantz describe how sleep is produced by a “symphony of oscillators.”16 Within chronobiology, this sense of
multitudes of interactors inhabiting, producing and modulating
15
Journal of Biological Rhythms 28, 3 (June 2013).
Derk-Jan Dijk and Malcolm von Schantz, “Timing and Consolidation of
Human Sleep, Wakefulness, and Performance by a Symphony of Oscillators,”
Journal of Biological Rhythms 20 (August 2005), 279–290.
16
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multiple scales and thicknesses of time makes a fascinating
complement to the ‘rhythmanalysis’ proposed by Henri Lefebvre and others that attend to such characteristics at the scales of
the urban.17 Chronobiology posits time and timings as a significant factor in evolution and in turn, the development of such
time as being that of a process of evolutionary kairos. How do
bodies choose and make timings?
Timings hinge on, are blocked, stepped, modulated, and
subjected to various forms of structuring relation, or are amplified by their location within organisms, within and amongst a
species, a similar kind or an organization of organic matter, and
within ecologies and across a planet. The speed at which a
muscle may respond to a nerve impulse; the rate at which an
eye can sample movement or at which a plant can bend towards a source of light; the mode of inhabitation, asleep or
awake, of a particular evolutionary niche; the rate of undulation
of a cilia or the capacity for reproduction within a species or individual. All of these have both evolutionary bearing and the
capacity to be analyzed as chronotopic factors.
The condition of sleep needs to be understood as part of,
but not reducible to these manifold and dynamic range of factors. Dijk and von Schantz’s figure of the symphony of oscillators then, certainly spreads out beyond sleep, but it also vividly
sets out the complexity of interactions making up such a symphony. It implies an organology: one of music, but also of organs.
Body Parts
The writings of the early Greek philosopher Empedocles come
to us in a mess of parts, fragments of manuscripts and reports
on his philosophy from others, the proper combination of
17
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart
Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum 2004); Steve Goodman, Sonic
Warfare: Sound Affect and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
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MATTHEW FULL ER
which provides the cause for much labor and the exercise of
learning. In his writings on nature— from what can be worked
through—Empedocles theorized that the parts and organs of
the body were once independent free-roaming entities. He
writes that: “Here many heads sprang up without necks, bare
arms were wandering about without shoulders, and eyes needing foreheads strayed singly.”18 Plunging towards each other
out of hungry attraction to make up a composite being in all its
majesty and succulence or shriveling away from others into the
wilderness or other hiding places, these parts, in turn, were
transient alliances of matter since the cosmos was a turmoil of
the four elements or eternal roots: fire, air, water, and earth. In
their familiar forms such as sun, rain, mountains, breath, such
matter is easily discernable, but their complex interplay generates all that is shaped and is given liveliness by two principles.
As with all of the cosmos, such parts were gradually brought
together by Love, or affinity, and their integration was tugged
at and maybe ruined by Strife.
These principles and material forces were operative in
the development of the current form of the human body over
time, but in a previous era had also manifested in beasts with a
“face and breasts on both sides,” “bull-headed men,” or “manfaced bulls and others with male and female nature combined.”19
What manifests as an individual, the physiologically
discreet organism, by this measure becomes an alliance of
other entities, an ensemble of either very transient or greater
duration. Such a thing could be configured as a world of components, a very modern cosmology of plug-in architectures,
modularized and delimited, replicable components assembling
a self out of more or less well-crafted parts. However, Empedocles’ schema of the interaction of forces and matter is a formu18
Empedocles, Fragment 50(57), in ed. M.R. Wright, Empedocles, The Extant
Fragments, trans. M. R. Wright (London: Bristol Classics Press, 2001), 211.
19
Empedocles, Fragment 52(61), ibid., 212-13.
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lation of the world that is at once both more cosmic, that is to
say abstract, and more visceral.
In her story Life, End Of, a lively, wistful, grumpy, and catalytic reflection of late old age, Christine Brooke-Rose restages
something of this moment as a triad of illnesses via different
parts or systems of the body, to lay siege to the life of the character she writes through.20 Polyneuritis sometimes becomes
‘Polly’ amongst other names, withering the nerve fibers and
turning the legs into pillars of fire. Vascular and cardiac problems appear as Vasco de Gama amongst various other alliterative monikers. Additionally, there are the seemingly
independent contents of the cranium such as the thalamus and
hypothalamus. And these are completed in turn by the appearance of glaucoma, dousing the fire of the eyes. The body’s systems churn up a civil war fought out on its own terrain, along
with medicines prescribed at odds with each other by doctors
with different expertise who take the side of one or the other of
such systems. Sleep too becomes part of, is precluded by and
found in between such a cacophony of interacting, surging and
failing systems amongst trays, trolleys, beds, wheelchairs,
books, pens, tables, and other stubborn objects.
Developing Lefebvre’s proposal for a rhythmanalysis,21
that would attune critical thought to the cycles of process and
behavior at multiple scales, Charlotte Bates remarks how
“Each organ, function, or segment of the body has its own
rhythm. Some, like the beating heart, remain mostly hidden,
while others like respiration, are heard.”22 Amongst such
20
Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End Of, (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006).
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, Space Time and Everyday Life, trans.
Gerald Moore and Stuart Elden (London: Anthone, 2004).
21
Charlotte Bates, Vital Bodies: A Visual Sociology of Health and Illness in
Everyday Life, PhD diss. (London: University of London, 2011), 109. Avail22
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MATTHEW FULL ER
rhythms everyday activities such as eating, exercise, and sleeping are affected in different kinds of illness. Sleep is stirred into
illnesses in uneven ways; ne may be unable to sleep due to discomfort and pain. Or, as an unruly diabetic awake at night feeling a hypoglycemic fit coming on and reaching for a nearby
bottle of sports energy drink to calm its demands. Sleep is a
moment, in the admixture of love and strife, when the influence
of fire becomes less manifest in the blood, in which we can
sense something akin to such a process still operative and find
ourselves composed in it.23
How to thrive biologically
Various economic forms of sleep can be linked as part of the
composition of the refrains of life and lives that are integrated
into what Elizabeth Freeman calls chrononormativity.24 This is
the sheer repetitiveness of intimate and large-scale social forms
built around cycles of various periodicity, integrating systems
of memory-formation with all of its medial subsystems. A cycle
of billing, breeding and domesticity that trap, stabilize, entrain
and disturb other cycles, passages and latencies.
In relation then to the question of “psychopathologies of
cognitive capitalism,” we might also attend to the way in which
parts of the body are hypostasized, reworked and organized
alongside the nervous system. That is to say, the condition of
plasticity effects more than one kind of tissue, something Beatriz Preciado discuses very well in relation to hormones such as
testosterone for instance in the recent Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs
able online at: http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/6373/
23
Aetius, cited in Empedocles, ed. M. R. Wright, op. cit., 13.
24
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer temporalities, Queer histories
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 3. See also, Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York, NY: New York University Press, 2007).
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and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era.25
As the medicine of sleep is intersected and entrained by
mechanisms for farming money, strange bulges and attenuations can be found in investment according to territory, regulation, and the potential to extend the capacities of certain
chemicals or analytical devices. Under the microscope the illnesses of sleep become different things. They billow and blossom into a myriad of forms to be further chased and worked
with. Fat seams of illness and difficulty to be mined for results
and recompense, all the cash in all those blocked throats! All
the potential for returns in arranging chemical bonds that sedate!
Apnea is a physiological condition where the structure
of the throat sags during sleep. Often though not absolutely associated with obesity, it is correlated to the dumping of quasifoods into the diet of the west. As adipose tissues balloon out in
fantastic fleshy ebullience, with no seeming upper limit, the inability of other body structures to maintain integrity starts to
become manifest in different ways. There is no singular point
where such a state will be reached across all individuals, in
their elaboration of the expressive range of parts disarticulated
and incapacitated in subtle relations of cohesion and dehiscence. Apnea can be intervened by mechanical and surgical
means such as CPAP where humidified air is blown into the
mouth and nose of the sleeper. The throat strikes up an alliance
with masks, tubes, fans and mists to maintain the lungs in a cyborg state of quiescence. Here, sleep exists in a state of complex and uneasy formulation between habits of body and social
customs of sleep. The love of the mouth and intestines is in relation to the demands of work, boredom and other forms of
duress and in combination with the comfort given by what is
25
Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the
Pharmacopornographic era (New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City
University of New York, 2013).
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MATTHEW FULL ER
eaten. Yet it is beyond the capacity of the concerted assemblage
of flesh to actually metabolize and thus food remains in a reservoir of stored energy that tendentially subsumes the capacity of
an individual life to sustain it. Such conditions are amplified
by the strife induced by the collapse of moral codes based on
individual choice. This is framed within strictly constrained
limits and a structurally depleted set of acceptable forms of life
within a liberalism-encoded but increasingly authoritarian
polity that is actually unable to name what it is doing to itself.
Amidst all of this tangle are the experiences and undergoings
of a body, or many specific bodies, each with their own genealogy and afflictions, struggling to breathe and to have some
peace amidst suffocating moments doled out in seconds.
At a different scale of abstraction to apnea the other
major zone of medical intervention into sleep is framed in
terms of insomnia. There is no ready engineering fix, so the
scale of intervention is chemical. Here again, figurations of
convenience, the formulaic character of normal bodies vies
with attempts to resolve the difficulty of accommodating a life.
That is, an assemblage of parts held together in the face of
strife, to the stress, demands, and sometimes fatal requirements
of other scales of being that may be coded as economic, familial, aesthetic, or military.26 Much sleep research is financed
and carried out to the requirements of the military. This results
in a full-spectrum Keynesianism underlying the creation of materials for secondary civilian markets with anti-sleep drugs
such as Provigil/Modafinil. Since these drugs are developed to
meet military needs first and foremost, to what extent this implies a militarization of the population at a molecular level is
open to question. A state of alertness and readiness of will
over-coming somnolence at a somatic as well as mental level
may be key. The incompossibility of sleep with such conditions
See: Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and
Modern American Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
26
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provides a steady and reliable line of income for pharmaceutical companies. The latter offer a buffer of chemical insensibility to compensate for the lags and grinds of those parts of the
world that are in the peculiar state of seeing themselves as fully
developed. Since, however insomnia is always also psychic and
cultural as well as biological—in many cases perhaps primarily
so as beings become out of phase with the demands made on
them or the drives they co-constitute with—it is impossible to
‘cure’ as such. Insomnia may manifest as an immanent, and
often highly repetitious condition of sleep itself and a cessation
of sleeplessness may require an ethically grounded change in
what is reckoned as health.
A single night has so many bodies in it, so many sleepers with
their intestines, eyeballs, teeth, limbs in various states of tonus
or slackened musculature, tongues lying in mouths making
their bed amongst teeth, so many parts moving in and out of
sleep, so many sleepers that continue into the day and pass
through the day. The continent of sleep that passes round the
globe in darkness has routes cut through it by light, electricity
and the demands of work.
As recounted in the section in Marx’s Capital on the
working day, nineteenth century bakers turned up to work at
night and mixed the dough in tubs for the following day’s
bread.27 No loafers, they slept on boards over the dough as it
proved, perhaps providing a little ambient warmth for the
yeast, and woke two hours later to start working it, kneading
and then shaping different kinds of bread. Here the length and
place of sleep is determined by the actions and needs of a
micro-organism within the dough, the hours of sleep, uncounted for by the wage but required by the work. There is a
coupling between sleep that goes unfulfilled, and the liveliness
27
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 359–360.
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of a minute entity, like raising babies rather than dough. Yet
this is not a simple dual relationship, it is one scaffolded by
conditions of work. Sleep occupies a seam of time that is to be
mined by the employer, its satisfactory exploitation leaving the
baker, at that time, with an average life expectancy of fortytwo. When an economic force is thinking through your flesh,
calculating its capacity of becoming, sleep becomes an obstacle
to the self-realization of capitalism. However, perhaps an economy may make strategic or tactical alliances, even accidental
ones, with particular organs. This will be in order to break open
the resistances of others: the belly, an insolent worm threaded
from mouth to anus; the brain, seat of anxieties and capacities
for delusion; the eyes, omnivorous and cunning; the skin in its
liking for silks and warmth, the touch of others. The idea being
speculated upon here is that an economic force may couple
with the re-imagination of parts. The ideation of an economic
becoming may also produce new alliances with organs, weird
arrangements between brain, ears, eyes, hands and belly, that
may in turn generate fields in which new organs may flourish.
What modes of disturbed sleep might be expressed here?
There is no specific part of the body required for sleep. One
can sleep with or without legs, sight, hearing, and stomach: any
of those parts can be done without. Others can be replaced or
bypassed by an intensive-care unit and are monitored when the
computer running them has not yet crashed, causing the nurses
to run over and reboot it. Sleep is not solely located in the
brain although it may be used as a proxy to verify it, but it is
the juicy bait that draws wanderers into its folds to monitor,
sink fingers into it and caress it for data.
Perhaps the properly sleeping subject is never fully arrived at, just like the woken one. Is it something that must be
conjured up, or proven by the attachment of a device? Judith
Butler writes of the imaginary schemas that address and conjure
bodies, descriptions that are “psychically and phantasmically in-
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vested.”28 These imaginary schemas produce erotogenetic, normative, and imaginal forces when coiled or overlaid into persons, bodies, formalizations, and conjugating twisted loops of
being, selfhood and alterity in their mutual and asymmetric fibrillation, containment and provocation of each to the other.
Here we encounter organs and body systems that work through
matter and ideas about matter, divulging and convoluting experience. There is a potential bestiary to be assembled of bodilyimaginal entities. The pineal gland’s overloading with functions
and role as cosmic object makes an obvious candidate. The
soul, with its complicated anatomical sense of being located in
and transcendent of the flesh, predates and to some extent prepares the ground for these entities. Part objects and quasi-objects follow in proliferating the libidinal and psychic
diagrammatics of parts and bodies composed of them. But such
things are also a way of recognizing what has historically been
described as media. Marshall McLuhan’s formulation of the
“extensions of man” is in many senses a disavowal of the thick,
often dirty and complex ways in which media can come into
composition with persons and the personifications that go before them. It is run through them and left as traces by them instead, reducing each to a neurological telos, set in place by but
yet betraying what is already manifested in the human.29 Media
forms certainly compose phalluses, amongst other things, and
indeed the successful recapitulation and instantiation of such entities in the capacity and range of each media system may form
part of their genealogy. This reveals how each media system
manages to produce, optimize and elicit its own range of organismic or partial organs and projections, each with their own
hypochondrias, inertias and lusts. The variations of the debate
about remediation or skeumorphism (representational mimesis)
28
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1994), 66.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994).
29
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in media may provide a means of mapping each media form as
an imaginal organ, variously articulated in ideals, conventions,
abstractions, and related systems of co-ordinates onto other
forms. Where the idea of such fantasmic entities and their relation to sleep gains traction in the context of media is in relation
to the proliferation of medial forms around sleep.
One of the innovations of sleep medicine has been the
arraying of devices, apparatus and institutions around the
sleeping body and its panoply of mediation. Unlike many
other forms of medicine that address the person at the level of a
constituent entity in a population where the particular target is
a pathogen or gene, or something below the level of the entity,
sleep medicine has a particular point of reference in the individual sleeper. A specific articulation of this tendency has been
in the growth of forms of devices for measuring sleep available
in the form of apps. Some of this work relates to the distributed social movement or fashion known as the ‘quantified self’
in which many types of data about life processes are captured,
made subject to analyses and in some cases made public. Numerical bodies and processes, manifest in concatenations of
software and hardware and are made legible through Application Program Interfaces (APIs)—by which discrete programs
may communicate with each other—and graphic interfaces.
These are put into place around systems of organs, filtered
through skins, read off into spreadsheets and data visualizations
and this leads in turn to new regimes of diet, exercise and
sleep-regulation. This is an investment in imaginal entities that
are brought into realization or persistent near-manifestation by
such systems. After all, they are merely tools, so the story goes,
for self-understanding. But perhaps we can also imagine this as
part of an exemplary model in a wider population of fantasmic
entities captured and wrapped up in psycho-material loops and
patterning. Or, popularly commoditized variants on technologies that have been, and are, initially developed in medical contexts wherein such things have complex histories. The imaginal
forces that they are imbued with are as much computational
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and numeric as they are social, bodily or pathological.
Metrics are introduced into bodily processes and in turn
interpolated by data structures that adduce and commute relations amongst things. Via the means of recordings and analyses, the collections of “indicators of life” users are to achieve a
form of structural coupling with self. A window, replete with
scroll bars, graphs, models and projections of more than one
kind, is put into place. This is related, perhaps, to a fistula
placed into the flank of an experimental subject in order to
monitor the cycles of digestion attributable to the species.
However, at the same time that sleep coalesces into the figurations of an app run on a smart phone, it is saved as a dataset to
a server. This sets up a means by which sleep both becomes a
coagulant of referents, a reservoir of data, and a means by
which the body effervesces, shedding data like skin cells. We
are not talking about simply closed forms of reflexivity here,
but a proliferating set of medial and bodily relations. Sensors,
databases, and targets also interpolate these, themselves composed by the imaginaries of logic, ordering, proliferation, entrepreneurial ‘disruption,’ user-centeredness, and ideas of
health and improvement. Sleep and imaginal sleeps are composed and recorded under such conditions by medial organs
whose capacity for cathexis remains yet to be fully explored.
Sleep’s oscillations, the systems of sleep, its populations of
parts that proliferate outside of the body via means such as
media, as well as by organismic forces such as the circadian
system, hooking it into the movements of the cosmos. Moving
bodies are always composed of other bodies in motion.