"One of these days I'm going to get Organiz-ized": Insomnia as the Arrhythmic Experience of Modernity

The proliferation of insomnia and related discourses since the 1970s has produced an expanding moral economy of sleep. The discursive field of sleep has been defined by the production of biological assumptions of the nature of sleep in the sleep sciences, their distribution through clinical modes of hygienic and pharmacological intervention into disturbed sleep, and their popularization in media discourses of risk, suffering and management. My research begins by identifying the situation of sleep as a discursive object in the sleep sciences, which I contrast with experiential representations of insomnia in the film Withnail and I (1987). The purpose is to dislodge insomnia pathology and instead to understand it as an arrhythmic modality. What emerges in this discourse, however, is a romanticized notion of the discordant body unable to integrate to the rhythms of capital. I then examine the role of sleeplessness in the production of white masculine suffering in neoliberal capitalism through Taxi Driver (1976) and Fight Club (1999). In contrast to this privileged form of androcentric insomnia, I then turn to biographical accounts of insomnia by Gayle Greene and Patricia Morrisoe, who narrate the effects of sleeplessness and their gendered movements through consumer culture and clinical spaces in their attempts to restore what they understand to be natural sleep. The limitations of this embrace of natural sleep as an object of desire is then opened in examining the epistemological foundations of the sleep sciences. The objectification of sleep in the sleep sciences proffered a means of accessing a biological substratum that would define the proper expression of sleep. Rejecting this notion of a discrete substratum, and the attendant notion of sleep debt, I close with a chapter on the way in which the spatio-temporal disciplinary apparatuses of the milieu and the functionalized day served to consolidate sleep rhythms and thus the claims of the sleep sciences. The purpose of the dissertation is to call into question the role of the social sciences in furthering discourses of insomnia as friction between bodies and the bureaucratic-functional ordering of the day. Instead I develop sleep as a biopolitical object of intervention and management, one based on the occlusion of the structuring agencies of sleep.