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Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life <\/em>(Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by Steffan Blayney<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Need a quick recharge? Power up with a power nap. Geniuses like Dali and Einstein loved sneaking in some extra ZZZs.<\/p>\n Opening up my Mozilla Firefox web browser, a cartoon Albert Einstein greets me with this friendly message. Albert\u2019s suggestion \u2013 one of a rotation of quirky, entertaining factoids on the Firefox homepage \u2013 is indicative of a particularly modern attitude towards sleep. The examples of Dali and Einstein, it implies, show that sleep is not just a period of repose, but something that can \u2013 and should \u2013 be organised in constructive ways. More than simply providing a break from work or play, sleep can be used to \u2018power up\u2019 the sleeper, so that they might make the best and most productive use of their waking hours.<\/p>\n In The Slumbering Masses<\/em>, anthropologist Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer traces the origins and implications of this and other of our contemporary notions of sleep, charting in particular the rise of sleep medicine in the twentieth century. The book is resolutely interdisciplinary, combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork in sleep clinics and support groups, as well as numerous interviews with doctors, patients, and their family members. While Wolf-Meyer\u2019s focus is limited to the United States, much of his argument can be applied across the Western industrialised world. The way we sleep, he argues \u2013 and the way we think about sleep, both medically and culturally \u2013 is the product of a particular combination of historical and social forces, largely coming into play from the late nineteenth century.<\/p>\n While we tend to think of sleep as a natural fact \u2013 a human constant across cultures and time periods \u2013 recent scholarship has uncovered a rich, and often surprising, history and sociology of sleep. In his 2001 article \u2018Sleep We Have Lost\u2019 \u2013 expanded in his 2005 book At Day\u2019s Close <\/em>\u2013 historian A. Roger Ekirch revealed that, before the advent of industrialisation, most people in Europe did not sleep in one consolidated period overnight, but more usually in a segmented or \u2018biphasic\u2019 pattern of \u2018first\u2019 and \u2018second\u2019 sleeps, interrupted by a period of wakefulness.<\/p>\n Our conceptions of \u2018normal\u2019 sleep provide Wolf-Meyer\u2019s starting point for The Slumbering Masses<\/em>. How, he asks, have we come to view eight hours of sleep \u2013 consolidated, motionless, solitary or with an intimate partner, in a room set aside for the purpose \u2013 as, if not an inviolable norm, at the very least the standard to which we must all aspire? Like Ekirch, Wolf-Meyer apportions a large degree of responsibility to industrialisation, and \u2013 more broadly \u2013 to a particular set of discourses associated with the rise of capitalism. With a nod to Max Weber, Wolf-Meyer devotes a chapter to \u2018The Protestant Origins of American Sleep\u2019. Early protestants\u2019 commitment to worldly industriousness, the argument goes, generated a view of sleep as the enemy of productivity. A whistle-stop tour through more than three centuries of American protestant thought uncovers repeated characterisations of sleep as temptation, distraction, or waste of time. In 1690, the Massachusetts preacher Cotton Mather warns his readers that the devil lays \u2018his most fatal snares \u2026 on the bed, where it is lawful for us to sleep\u2019 (54). A century later, Benjamin Franklin admonishes his elite Parisian friends for their irregular hours, advising a strict routine of four-in-the-morning starts.<\/p>\n The advent of industrialisation and the factory system, with the concomitant requirement to regulate and coordinate large numbers of bodies, saw the question of sleep become a biopolitical problem. It was not the \u2018lone sleeper\u2019 but the \u2018slumbering masses\u2019 that became the subject of concern and regulation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Wolf-Meyer argues, \u2018normal\u2019 sleep became defined in relation to the spatial and temporal rhythms of industrial capitalism, centred on the working day and the working week. It was increasingly assumed that workers would build up fatigue during the day or over the week, enabling them to sleep for a solid period each night before returning to the factory ready for work. Against this background, alternative forms of sleep became pathologised as \u2018sleep disorders\u2019. In this context, the rise of sleep medicine in the twentieth century can be seen as a form of discipline, directed at aligning our bodies with the spatiotemporal demands of industrial society.<\/p>\n The four central sleep disorders discussed in The Slumbering Masses<\/em> are sleep apnea, insomnia, parasomnias (such as somnambulism, night-terrors, sleep sex, and sleep eating), and narcolepsy. Each of these, Wolf-Meyer argues, is, in their own way, a disorder of time and of space, and a disorder of social life. The body does not sleep when and where it should. Sleep medicine attempts to realign individual\u2019s bodies with the spatiotemporal rhythms of society through therapeutic interventions: behavioural, prosthetic, or pharmaceutical. Its model of treatment is not curative, but regulative, requiring the patient to submit to a regular and ongoing regime of closely monitored, chemically-controlled, or prosthetically-enhanced sleep and wakefulness. Those people who suffer from sleep apnea should visit the nearest sleep apnea center<\/a> for treatment.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018An overlooked aspect of biopower\u2019, Wolf-Meyer writes, \u2018is the construction of the inevitable over and above its usual insistence on the production of the normal\u2019 (155). The production of knowledge about bodies is concerned not only with what the body should do, but with what the body, by definition, must <\/em>do: the limits and flexibilities of its behaviours, rhythms and potentials. Disordered sleepers, Wolf-Meyer argues, threaten our expectations about the body\u2019s inevitabilities. Their stubborn refusal to align their bodies with the social demands placed upon them, disturb the very spatiotemporal order of capitalist modernity.<\/p>\n While some cultural critics (prominently Jonathan Crary in his 2013 book 24\/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep<\/em>) have argued that the constant demands of technology and the market are destroying our sleep, Wolf-Meyer makes the more subtle argument that capitalism functions to make us sleep more efficiently. Rather than demanding the \u2018end of sleep\u2019, the social relations of capitalism require that we sleep in certain ways, and at specified times, so as to make us the most productive subjects in our waking hours. The model of the late capitalist subject, Wolf-Myer argues, is not the insomniac \u2013 \u2018constantly awake, alert, and productive\u2019 \u2013 but the narcoleptic, medicated \u2018both to remain alert throughout the day and to sleep soundly at night\u2019 (17).<\/p>\n If Wolf-Meyer\u2019s nuance provides a useful corrective to polemics such as Crary\u2019s, however, he does at times run the risk of ignoring important recent transformations in the structuring of time and space under neoliberal capitalism. In an economic environment no longer governed by the regularities of the factory, the traditional boundaries between work and leisure, production and consumption, day and night, are increasingly flexible. While Wolf-Meyer is critical of theorists who have predicted the \u2018end of sleep\u2019, he is perhaps premature in dismissing the \u2018twenty-four hour society\u2019 as a failed project. For example, while emphasising a reversal in the late-twentieth century drive towards open-all-hours businesses in the United States, Wolf-Meyer neglects the impact of the internet and mobile technology in ensuring that we are able to remain consumers even when the shops are closed. In the UK, to provide just one example, a recent Guardian article reported a rise of 30% in online shopping between the hours of midnight and 6am.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Moreover, as one of the most interesting passages in The Slumbering Masses <\/em>explores, one effect of globalisation has been to align the hours of workers in developing countries with the socioeconomic rhythms of Western capitalism, requiring, for example, operatives in Indian call centres to work according to American or European time zones, office hours, and holidays. The implication of this form of \u2018spatiotemporal imperialism\u2019 (188) is that our regular eight hours in the West may come at the expense of the disrupted sleep of millions of others around the world.<\/p>\n The Slumbering Masses <\/em>is wide-ranging in its explorations of sleep and sleep disorders past and present. Interspersed with chapters on the history of sleep medicine and the pharmaceutical industry are often fascinating digressions on, amongst other things, sleep in children\u2019s literature, the career of the \u2018sleepwalking defence\u2019 in American criminal law, and the manipulation (or minimisation) of sleep in extreme sports and the military. The downside of this impressive scope, however, is that the book can often feel unfocused. While numerous lines of argument are introduced, not all are followed through, while their relationship to an overall master-thesis is sometimes unclear. Wolf-Meyer\u2019s prose is often dense, and at times frustratingly imprecise. Items of theoretical jargon are introduced with little explanation, only to be jettisoned a few pages later, often with the effect of obscuring, rather than clarifying, his arguments.<\/p>\n Wolf-Meyer\u2019s strengths lie in his ability to combine patient historical research with a concern for the contemporary, and in his anthropologist\u2019s attentiveness to the structures of everyday life. Perhaps due to his extensive fieldwork on the both sides of the doctor-patient divide, he is able to provide an account of sleep medicine that, while critically-informed, is at the same time refreshingly sympathetic, far-removed both from a top-down approach to the history of medicine that disregards the experiences of patients, and from the often caricaturish approach of much medical history, which presents practitioners as no more than the stooges of a nefarious \u2018medical imperialism\u2019. Having discussed the numerous past and present forms of sleep that humans have indulged in, The Slumbering Masses<\/em> ends with a call for a new bioethical stance based towards variation and difference. \u2018Multibiologism\u2019, as Wolf-Meyer terms his (perhaps utopian) proposal, would entail \u2018a cultural and medical acceptance of nonpathological variation within species, which recognises both society and biology as mutable limits\u2019 (244). With a medical model less tied to an opposition between the normal and the pathological, he suggests, variations across bodies and behaviours might provide the basis for an expanded conception of human potential, and for a multiplication of new possibilities for life and society.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Steffan Blayney is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Twitter @SteffanBlayney.<\/em><\/p>\n