Abstract

Sleep has moved out of the shadows and into an unprecedented cultural visibility in recent years. On a weekly basis, the latest findings of sleep science are reported in news outlets, along with advice about how to get a better night’s rest. Sleep figures prominently in practices of self-care, propelling a consumer goods market that promises to enhance our slumber by means of the latest products, drugs, and technological aids. It beckons as a promising new field of inquiry, as demonstrated by the rise of critical sleep studies across a number of disciplines. In the spheres of contemporary art and performance, numerous works endeavor to literally put their audience to sleep. And starting with the worldwide Occupy movements, sleep has become a site of politicization and an expression of protest.

This talk maps the curious status of sleep as it breaks from its longstanding definition as interruption and absence. In the present moment, sleep emerges as a dynamic object of knowledge, shuttling between the position of problem and solution, crisis and cure, alarm and answer. It is marked by an ever-thickening tangle of discourses, interventions, and regulatory strategies. On the one hand, changing conceptions of the relationship between sleep and waking life instantiate a new stage in (bio)technological capacities and techniques of control. On the other hand, as the boundaries between sleep and wake are displaced and reinscribed, we are also presented with an opportunity to question the dominant systems of value that dictate waking existence. What can be preserved by carving out a space for sleep?

Biography

Jean Ma has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. At Stanford University, she is Professor of Art and Art History, Area Director of Film and Media Studies, and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. Her latest book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Book Grant.