The Politics of Sleep by Simon J. Williams

Author:Simon J. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Transformations and Translations: The Laboratory, the Clinic and the Future of Sleep ...

Introduction

If sleep is now a ‘matter of concern’ in contemporary society, if sleepiness has now been transformed into a problematic or ‘at-risk’ corporeal state, and if we are all now advised, encouraged or cajoled to monitor, manage, modify or optimise our sleep in various ways in line with prevailing mandates or imperatives, then this of course begs important questions about the role of sleep science and sleep medicine within the foregoing storyline regarding the politics of sleep.

This final chapter therefore brings to the fore themes largely implicit in previous chapters concerning the critical roles and relations between biomedicine, bioscience and biotechnology in the contemporary politics or biopolitics of sleep today, from the laboratory to the clinic and into the wider realms or vistas of public and private life. The chapter may also be read as an attempt to revisit and revise or update my previous thinking on these matters, paying particular attention to questions located at the intersection of medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS), concerning the ‘biomedicalisation’ of sleep and the further light this casts on the biopolitics of sleep today and in the near future.

How then did sleep become an ‘object’ of scientific or technoscientific interest and inquiry, and to what extent did this pave the way for the subsequent development if not flourishing of more avowedly clinical concerns within sleep medicine in the latter part of the twentieth century? It is to these very questions that we first turn as a critical socio-historical backdrop to the biomedical themes and biopolitical issues that follow.

Brain waves: tracing sleep in the laboratory

A full account of the history of sleep research is of course beyond the scope of the present book, let alone this final chapter.1 Suffice it to say, for present purposes, that at least four key issues or meta-themes stand out here in the recent history of sleep research.

First, as the loss or negation of experience which for centuries was considered to be a largely passive rather than active state, sleep it is clear has proved at best problematic and at worst resistant to scientific or biomedical investigation; a mystery whose secrets it seems would not be surrendered easily or given up lightly. Second, while sleep has always of course been a key part of human existence if not experience, and while knowledge of the relationship between sleep and health has been evident for centuries (see Dannenfeldt 1986, for example), the origins of knowledge about sleep until well into the nineteenth century came largely, as Kroker (2007) argues, from evidence grounded in personal experience – either one’s own or those compiled by physicians and other dream interpreters. Knowing sleep, in other words, was thus for centuries primarily a matter of ‘ “I” and “thou” and was refracted through the prism of individual experience that depicted sleep as a negative state of consciousness’ (Ibid.: 5). Attention to sleep, in the main, occurred in the face of

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