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Alexei Penzin

Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity

The phenomenon of sleep is a rather unusual subject for philosophy, critical theory and the
humanities. It remains in the realm of natural, a-historical rhythmicity: days and nights, dusk and dawn, falling
asleep and awakening. Today, biology and medical sciences are highly advanced in studying the physiology
and neurology of sleep, and the emerging medicalization of sleep disorders is one of the new places of
biocapital accumulation. At the same time, our 24 hours society with its incessant production,
communication and consumption activities makes sleep a problematic, uncertain element of everyday life, just
wasted time or inertia in a mobile and pragmatic neoliberal society obsessed with the idea of the full
employment of finite human existence. However, it seems almost impossible to identify a consistent critical
discourse on sleep in its social, political and philosophical registers.

In my lecture, I will discuss the following main points:

Sleep and modernity The question here is about the limits of capitalist modernity as a progression in
the complex rationalization of life forms aimed at accumulation of capital and extraction of more profit. The
critical testing of the limits of this rationalization has now become the key political and theoretical question,
in order to confront the widely accepted position that there is no alternative to capitalist organization of
economy, society and politics. That is why I take regulations and controls over such a natural phenomenon
as sleep as paradigmatic case of the rationalization of everyday life in the time of capitalist hypermodernity.
In the Working Day chapter of Capital, Marx argues: Capitalist production therefore drives, by its inherent nature,
towards the appropriation of labour throughout the whole of the 24 hours in the day. That statement triggers hypothesis
that in the space of capital there is no structural place for sleep at all, except for the practical problem of
recreation and reproduction of labor force. This condition of sleep is not just a passive outcome of
modernity. Sleep and wakefulness form a paradigm for understanding the power operations, which enable
this order. The modern regime of power, famously outlined by Foucault and updated by the Deleuzian
notion of society of control, is indeed sleepless. Checkpoints, monitoring cameras, police patrols, security
guards function incessantly. At the same time, in the post-Fordist society of immaterial labor, where
working time is merging with the time of life itself, sleep has acquired a new value as the sole non-working
time. This complex position of sleep in modernity requires an archeology of its specific rationality.

Sleep and knowledge As a rule, in the humanities and social sciences sleep is treated from the point
of view of dream, which only has decipherable meanings. Sleep, as a whole, is just one of natural life functions,
explored in biology, neurology, medicine, etc. This division of discourse and knowledge we could describe as
a form of oneirocentrism, just to coin a new term here. Since ancient Greek philosophy dream, oneiros is a
traditional part of skeptic argumentation. Then, paradoxically, dream becomes a royal road to subjective
truth, since the emergence of psychoanalysis. This coincides with the symptomatic exclusion of sleep from
the field of psychoanalysis by its founder: I have had little occasion to deal with the problem of sleep, for that is
essentially a problem of physiology (Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, Ch. 1). The next step of our
research will be questioning this exclusion of sleep, and tracing several arguments for its oblivion in theory
and philosophy, starting from obvious empirical reasons (the specific weakness and neutrality of sleep
experience) to metaphysical ones, privileging wakefulness over sleep, which might be linked to
logocentrism in the Derridean sense. Then we want to trace several philosophical models of understanding
sleep. To give an example, it is the negative model at work in Platos Laws. In an ideal State, says Plato, citizens
should not sleep at all, because while sleeping human beings are outside of any ties with Logos, Reason; they
are useless for the State and ungovernable at the same time. A positive model can be found in Aristotle sleep
here is put rather in relation to life, bios. It is a part of the economy of life forces, a potentiality (dynamis)
preserving their instant expenditure. We can find elements of these models in modern philosophy, configured
in an especially interesting way by Kant and Hegel. For Hegel sleep is ambivalent, because it is a singularity
outside of the order of universal Reason, rationality, and, at the same time, it is an intimate core of subjectivity
as its full interiority and absoluteness.

Sleep and subjectivity Following this Hegelian perspective, sleep and awakening could be
considered as the starting points of subjectivity formation (see Marcel Prousts description of awakening on
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the first pages of la recherche du temps perdu as a literary example of the formation of subjectivity). In his early
book Existence and Existents Emmanuel Lvinas gives a beautiful account of sleep as a kind of support
for subjectivity. It is a shelter, an escape from terrifying forces of anonymous existence in modern rationality.
For Walter Benjamin, a dialectics of sleep and awakening were essential in understanding the emergence of
collective subjectivity. Sleep, as state of uselessness, unproductiveness and potentiality, is connected with
artistic subjectivity and aesthetics as well. Sleep works as a condition of suspension and inactivity, needed in
producing an image, or as a precondition of the revolutionary awakening of individuals and collectives (cf.
Benjamins essay on Surrealism).