Afterword: In Search of Sleep…Or…The Politics of Sleep Revisited

Abstract

To speak of sleep, let alone write about the politics of sleep, is a far from simple or straightforward matter, as the foregoing chapters attest. An amorphous, mutating phenomenon within a dynamic field of investments, sleep, as we have seen, is located at the intersection of material-corporeal questions concerning the regulation and governance of bodies and cultural questions concerning meaning and discourse. The site and source of multiple anxieties and aspirations, desires and dilemmas, hopes and fears, facts and fictions, fantasies and projections, which converge, conflict or coalesce in a multitude of forms or fashions. Sleep, as I have argued, doubles as both a problem or matter of concern in its own right and a prism or point of articulation if not amplification for a range of other concerns and anxieties, not least our increasingly vexed or troubled relationship to time (i.e. time compression, time paucity, time poverty or time scarcity) and the proliferation of doubts, risks and uncertainties associated with life and living in the late modern age.