by BENJAMIN REISS
The Slumbering Masses : Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life and 24/7 : Late Capitalism;
Ends of Sleep and Dangerously Sleepy : Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness
Everything you thought couldn’t have a history now has one. Foucault had something to do with this, with his histories of madness and sexuality; and de Certeau — the other Michel — gave verve to the historical activities of wandering around, cooking, and various other non-epic feats. Since the age of the Michels, we’ve had histories of conversation, boredom, shit, death, breasts, penises, tasting, happiness, smiling, laughing, celibacy, masturbation, taking out the trash, obsession, collective joy, and sadness. (The editor of this publication has offered his own entries on crying and slacking.) Things that we do or experience in private, things we might expect to read about in novels or talk about in therapy, have now generated a hidden-histories boomlet. The best of these works not only make the familiar strange, but they make us think differently about history and its intimate relation to our own lives.
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Critical sleep studies has its charismatic precursors. In The Civilizing Process (1939), sociologist Norbert Elias viewed the privatization of sleeping quarters as a key component of the process by which subjects of European nation-states came to regard themselves as more “civilized” than members of other societies. Just as spitting, blowing your nose, and performance of other “natural functions” in public were transformed from unremarkable features of medieval life into aspects of rudeness that would mark one as either a countryman in need of discipline or an outsider, so sleeping out of view of others became a hallmark of bourgeois life in the West. Whereas in the medieval period, sleeping naked or in public was nothing to worry about, over the past five centuries or so “to share a bed with people outside the family circle, with strangers, is made more and more embarrassing. Unless necessity dictates otherwise, it becomes usual even within the family for each person to have his own bed and finally — in the middle and upper classes — his own bedroom.” In short, “bed and body” have formed “psychological danger zones […] in the most recent phase of civilization.” To sleep right is a part of national and class-based belonging.
Closer to the concerns of the authors under review here, the Marxian tradition has made modern sleep a matter of alienation rather than belonging. In chapter 10 of Das Kapital (1867) — “The Working Day” — Marx himself described the process by which capital squeezed ever more labor out of the proletariat: “It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential.” …
Los Angeles Review of Books for more