How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness

Description

Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency. Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes. How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won't enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is co-author of Evil Media (2012), Editor of Software Studies: a Lexicon (2008) and co-editor of the journal Computational Culture.

Matthew Fuller has composed a revelatory and brilliantly original book. This richly insightful and multifaceted work will be indispensable reading for anyone concerned with the increasingly urgent problem of sleep. -- Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA Where do you fall when you fall asleep? Out of consciousness and into a state of quasi-death, or into an unconscious form of activity? Do you withdraw from the world or get projected upon it differently? Who is the subject of sleep? Like love, sleep makes us creative and vulnerable at the same time. It is a democratic state, yet inaccessible to phenomenological accounts: it does not even make sense to state: "I am asleep", and yet sleep deprivation is torture. Arguing passionately that sleep is both our posthuman, animal core and a form of power, this original volume performs a series of sleep acts, ranging from insomnia, apnea, narcolepsy, to sleep-walking, doziness, cataplexy and plain not wanting to wake up. In a brilliant combination of aphorisms, meditations, snippets of self-help and shreds of critical analysis, the book explores the bio-politics of sleep, as well as its social, psychological and aesthetic aspects. This is Matthew Fuller at his best: witty, theoretically sharp and thoroughly enjoying his inimitable flair for paradoxes. -- Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, The Netherlands