Governing Sleepiness: Somnolent Bodies, Discourse, and Liquid Modernity

Abstract

This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person's responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate condition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”

Engaging with sleep: male definitions, understandings and attitudes

“…Recent sociological literature has highlighted how sleep involves both naturalistic and social‐constructionist concerns, and is an irreducible and multifaceted phenomenon (Williams 2002, 2005, Meadows 2005). For example, Kroll‐Smith and Gunter investigate the new ‘truths’ being told about sleepiness whilst acknowledging that sleep is a ‘brute fact’ and ‘essential for human survival’ (2005: 346). Similarly, Williams embraces the significance of biology whilst suggesting that issues of sociological import include the temporal dimensions, social patterning and ‘doing’ of sleep (2002: 173).…”

Sleep better than medicine? Ethical issues related to “wake enhancement”

“…Whereas fatigue was once generally described as “a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep”, a new discourse is gradually being formed that depicts the state as “hazardous to self and others” in terms of pathological inadequacies in alertness, reaction time, memory and decision making. Various institutional practices and techniques increasingly portray sleepiness as a troubling, risk-prone state and a personal, moral failing 21. Importantly, many of the sources which create this “new truth”, the authors observe, are corporations, the military and state/federal governments.…”

“…This concern has been expressed by sociologists Kroll-Smith & Gunter21. Following Foucault’s discourse analysis, they illustrate that a new truth about sleepiness is being created.…”

The Sociological Significance of Sleep: Progress, Problems and Prospects

“…In contemporary 24/7 society, where achievement is prized, alertness is expected and vigilance is valorised, sleepy bodies are rendered problematic. As Kroll‐Smith and Gunter (2005) note, for example, notions of sleepiness as a relatively benign corporeal state and promise of tranquil repose are now paralleled if not eclipsed by alternative discourses on sleepiness as an at‐risk corporeal state and a reprobate condition: a transition tied to the politics of consciousness and blame. Wreckless or wantonly sleepy drivers, for example, can now be prosecuted, thereby drawing a moral and legal parallel between drowsiness and drunkenness behind the wheel.…”