Alert!
Hannah Ahlheim. “Governing the world of wakefulness: The exploration of alertness, performance, and brain activity with the help of Stay-Awake-Men (1884-1964).”
Nicole Eugene. “Working while narcoleptic.”
John Marlovits. “Give me slack: Depression, alertness, and laziness in Seattle.”
Stacey McKenna. “We’re supposed to be asleep? Vigilance, paranoia, and the alert methamphetamine user.”
Matthew Wolf-Meyer. “Where have all our naps gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the consolidation of sleep, and the historiography of emergence.”
Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 24, Issue 2. 2013.
Stacey McKenna talks about the paranoid hyperawareness that degrades chronic amphetamine and methamphetamine users’ quality of life. Amphetamines “lead to increased heart rate, sleeplessness, constricted blood vessels, decreased appetite, and increased alertness,” making them a popular prescription solution for everything from attention deficit disorder to obesity (McKenna). Many chronic users benefited at first from the alertness these drugs promoted, the payoff in increased productivity at tedious low-paying shift-work eventually collapsing in on itself as the visual and auditory hallucinations that attend persistent wakefulness overwhelmed them.
Amphetamines and methamphetamines, and Adderall, and Provigil, and caffeine, all facilitate the enactment of Protestant “busyness,” as John Marlovits puts it, “producing a totally different relationship to temporal rhythms and alertness,” than that of the Gen X slacker culture. That awareness one amphetamine user craves “as a short-term remedy for the extreme fatigue that accompanies his periods of depression” so he can function at work is the very same awareness slackers in Seattle, Austin, Portland, and elsewhere artfully avoid, “[losing] themselves in daily minutiae, willfully inattentive.” (McKenna; Marlovits) “We might say that the slacker is at the vanguard of the visionary lazy—a kind of industrial slowdown and disengagement for the digital age.”
Marlovits learned to see his caffeinated blinders and the privilege that comes with successfully managing days structured by large consolidated periods of waking and sleeping. Deviants, like narcoleptic contributor Nicole Eugene, must sink or swim in a naturally neoliberal adulthood that links productivity with sustained self-direction. “Throughout most of my struggle with narcolepsy, I managed my EDS (excessive daytime sleepiness) through a delicate balance of medication, good sleep hygiene, and vigilant self-awareness.” Eugene recorded in her journal on October 29, 2010, that she forgot to take her medication on a particularly important day and went to a McDonald’s and a donut shop for iced coffee and a quick, cheap sugar high. Two years later, she is alarmed by how many naps she succumbs to during a road trip. After the second, she wondered “if something interfered with me sleeping soundly through the previous night.” She couldn’t even remember the third one.
During the Second World War, “physiologist David B. Tyler conducted more than 20 experiments involving almost 600 voluntary subjects from the Marine Corps or Civilian Public Service Camps. The men, between 17 and 35 years old, stayed awake from 24 to 112 hours, often taking various substances such as the stimulant Benzedrine or barbiturates. (Ahlheim)” After concluding that the harshest effects were psychological, Tyler used an EEG to “write” the brain’s activity. Almost two decades later, EEG readings revealed that a radio DJ staying awake for more than 100 hours in a glass booth in Times Square was sleeping when outwardly he appeared to have lapsed into “near-psychotic states.” (Ahlheim)
Matthew Wolf-Meyer, the guest editor of this special issue, believes we can thank Nathan Kleitman, professor of physiology at the University of Chicago from the 1930s, for postwar Americans’ willful inattention to the therapeutic benefit of naps. Kleitman was active when a great many Americans kept irregular hours, but his commitment to an 8-hour workday in particular and to a general vision of daily human activity characterized by 16-hour chunks of attention and 8-hour chunks of rest meant naps were never more than a frivolous curiosity for him. The development of techniques for the scientific management of sleep coincided with the consolidation of manufacturing jobs into grand coordinated industrial regimes, and for decades researchers concerned themselves with ensuring a good night’s rest.