And above us all fluorescent tubes shall hang ...
I.
'Manhole 69' is not, as far as I know, the name of gay sex club (though maybe it should be).
It is, rather, the title of a short story by J. G. Ballard [a], concerning a medical experiment in which three volunteers have their brains tampered with so that they can exist without sleep and thus be able to live life 24/7, rather than spend a third of it as an invalid snoring their way through "'an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica'" [68], as the doctor in charge of the research puts it.
This same doctor - Dr. Neill - is convinced that his work marks a crucial evolutionary advance for man as a species [b]. As he tells his young colleague, John Morley:
"'None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we've freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel, we've added twenty years to those men's lives.'" [67-68]
Unfortunately, total wakefulness soon proves to be a nightmare. Because sleep, of course, and the chance to dream, is more than "'an inconvenient symptom of cerebral anoxaemia" [69]. Nor is it merely a form of idleness - i.e., a vice or moral failing - as some neoliberals seem to believe; the sort of fanatics who pride themselves on being able to get by on as little as three or four hours sleep a night.
Sleep is vital to our health and wellbeing. For if nothing else, as Morley points out, sleep gives us the chance to switch off and escape: "'Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself'" [69] and to prevent you becoming like a waxwork dummy with open, unblinking eyes set in faces with "the empty, reflexless look of psychic zero" [87], which is what happens to Bobby Lang and his two fellow test subjects.
As Morley concludes:
"'Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word 'sleep' fifty times. After a point the brain's self-awareness dulls. It's no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift. [...]
The central nervous system can't stand narcotomy.'" [87]
II.
Interestingly, the negative consequences of sleep deprivation in the name of a life lived to the max have recently been explored by several cultural commentators and political theorists, including Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society (2015), a work I discussed on Torpedo the Ark a couple of months ago: click here.
Readers might also be interested in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2014), a work in which Jonathan Crary also develops the argument that by expanding market values into every aspect of life and allowing consumer capitalism to operate around the clock, we have fatally submitted to a form of torture and compromised our own physical and mental wellbeing.
As the author notes:
"Behind the vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected schema of a week, extracted from any unfolding of variegated or cumulative experience. [...] A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machine performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. [...] An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history [...]" [c]
Crary suggests that sleep - as a restorative withdrawl that is intrinsically incompatible with the 24/7 world of neoliberalism - might provide a possible form of resistance and a refusal of the fascist imperative to always be wide awake [d].
He writes:
"In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. [...] Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present [...] it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it." [e].
Concluding:
"Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistable forces of modernization." [f]
In other words - and as Heidegger might say - Nur ein langes Nickerchen kann uns retten ...
Notes
[a] 'Manhole 69' was originally published in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1957. It was then included in the collection Chronopolis and Other Stories, (Putnam Publishing, 1971). Page numbers given in this post refer to the tale as it appears in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 56-89.
The title, by the way, refers to a small narrow room or cubicle, without windows, and with just a solitary bright light shining from behind a steel grille in the ceiling; a place where it's always 3 a.m. After a while, it's easy to imagine the walls closing in ever closer.
Readers might also note that prisoners subjected to sleep deprivation - a form of torture endured by many victims of
extrajudicial rendition - are often confined in rooms lit by high-intensity lamps and so cramped in size that they make it impossible even to lie down.
[b] One of the three test subjects, Robert Lang, buys into this line of thinking, even though, as Morley points out, leaving the seas behind in order to become air-breathing creatures, isn't analogous with eliminating the need for sleep. Interestingly, Lang also subscribes to the view that sleep is a form of pseudo-death that keeps the human psyche orientated towards its own mortality. Eliminate sleep, therefore, "'and you also eliminate all the fear and defence mechanisms erected around it'" [78].
Cf. D. H. Lawrence writing in Fantasia of the Unconscious on the relationship between ourselves and the death-realm which is "active every moment of our lives", but particularly whilst we sleep and the individual consciousness is suspended and we lie "completely within the circuit of the earth's magnetism". It is this circuit, according to Lawrence, which removes the deadness (i.e. tiredness) of the body: "For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed, or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death circuit, while we sleep."
See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 177.
[c] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (Verso, 2014), pp. 8-9.
[d] Readers will doubtless recall that Deutschland Erwache! was one of the Nazi Party's most successful and oft-repeated slogans (taken from a poem by Dietrich Eckart entitled Sturmlied). Contrary to what many people believe, fascism compels to speech and constant activity; it never lets its citizens enjoy a silent night in which they might sleep in heavenly peace and dream their own sweet dreams.
[e] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, p. 10-11.
[f] Ibid., p. 13.
