I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: Agency and Work in Political Imagination

In this talk, I am interested in projects that imagine a future without sleep, or with a significantly diminshed need for sleep, and what these say about our understandings of temporality, agency, and embodiment. For example, militaries conduct research into minimizing the human need for sleep, while transhumanists try to biohack it; science fiction presents the Sleepless as a superior elite. In a sleepless utopia, human beings, we infer, could fight longer and work harder. This vision, I argue, is closely linked to neoliberal work patterns: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” busy and important people like to say. This talk shows how sleep figures in a cultural imaginary most pronounced in the United States but alive and well, according to my archive, in Canada, the UK, and Australia, where neoliberal norms of work inflect understandings of time and agency. These norms are profoundly individualizing and depoliticizing, and representations of sleep are increasingly deployed within existing scripts of class, race, and gender stratification. In particular, I argue that attenuated concepts of agency as merely doing—understood at the limit as simply being awake—are used to represent any paid labour as virtuous, and any form of dreaming (literal or political) as outside the realm of worthy action.

Co-sponsored by the Carleton University Department of Sociology & Anthropology; The Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies and the Joint Chair in Women's Studies, Carleton University and University of Ottawa.