Episode 05: Fast asleep?
In this episode: Cressida and Joshua meet Sarah Sharma, professor of media theory at the University of Toronto, and introduce her book, In the Meantime. We discuss the idea that society is getting faster, “temporal infrastructure,” and how some people’s sleep is “rescued” while others are the rescuers (7:33). We talk about Slow movements and other injunctions to withdraw from the cultures of speed and work (21:00). We get to “goblin mode” (23:38), Sarah introduces her distinction between self-care and selfie-care (33:14), and we discuss Audre Lorde and the tradition of Black feminist self-care and its connection to sleep politics (35:44). How does digital culture create the appearance of rest (37:40)? Joshua tells us the story of Bartleby (39:55), and Sarah has some self-help suggestions (49:15). Sleep secrets are revealed! (53:04).
Mentioned in this episode: Sarah Sharma is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (2014), and Insufferable Tools: Big Tech and the Broken Machine (coming soon); sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explains his concept of Liquid Modernity (from which Liquid Man is derived!); Carl Honoré’s OG TED talk on the Slow movement; goblin mode; #morningshed; who was Audre Lorde?; Tricia Hersey; Teen Vogue on “Black Power Naps;” a review of Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation; disability activist Johanna Hedva’s most famous essay; and Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” 1853 (full text). The trailer clip in our outro comes from the 2001 film Bartleby, dir. Jonathan Parker.
Transcript
Sarah: 00:00
Time wasting is central to our everyday diet and life. Like the doom scrolling example. Imagine if we weren't wasting all of this time. Like when you want to think about like a radical potential of our temporality or the things that we do to sort of step outside of these regimes of productivity are themselves exhausting.
Cressida: 00:39
Hi everybody, my name is Cressida Heyes, and I am a professor in the departments of political science and philosophy at the University of Alberta. I'm often to be found at about 2.30 in the morning doom scrolling. I had a baby who didn't sleep, and that's given me a deep personal and academic interest in all things sleep-related.
Joshua: 01:01
I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I'm a PhD student also at the University of Alberta, studying post-work and the politics of productivity. I am myself someone who never figured out how to sleep, and only until recently averaged a brisk four hours of sleep a night. So I have a personal stake in this series. I'm sure like many of our listeners, and I'm so excited to learn more about the topic. Today we're talking to the Canadian Media Studies scholar Sarah Sharma about her work on cultures of fast and slow, whose time gets rescued, selfie care, and goblin mode.
Sarah: 01:39
I'm Sarah Sharma. I'm the director of the Institute for Communication, Information, Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and also full professor of media theory.
Cressida: 01:50
So Sarah wrote a fantastic book called In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, which was published in 2014, which is relevant because some of the digital tech that she references is of its time. And we're going to talk about it as well as how we might update the work that she did in that book. Do you know what temporality is, Joshua?
Joshua: 02:13
I think so. Okay. Let me take a stab at it, and then you can add and annotate my attempt here. But my understanding of temporality is to be in time and to experience that time. It's a super fancy philosophical way of saying time and being and living and experiencing time and recognizing that that can be a very different experience depending on the culture, the even time period. And when Sarah is talking about structural temporality or temporal structures, I think what she is intending is the way we've organized society produces different experiences of time.
Cressida: 03:07
That's right. Very good.
Joshua: 03:08
Nice, thank you.
Cressida: 03:09
Yeah, time is sort of objective. I mean, if I say meet you at one o'clock, we have to agree when on what one o'clock is. I mean, we all know people who have their own individual one o'clock, or even cultural contexts where one o'clock might not mean one o'clock, you know, like don't actually turn up at the appointed time. But that's different from the experience of time, which varies in fascinating ways. Like the experience of time speeding up as you get older. Everybody who's old enough identifies with that one. And that's a temporality. Like, why does time move so much quicker as you age than it did when you were a kid? And so philosophers have long tried to answer those questions and so to distinguish between the experience of time and time as a sort of uh objective feature of the world. Some people don't think it can ever be objective, but you know, some people do. So this book is about um how people live time and they do it differently. And Sarah uses really interesting mixed methods. So there are interviews, there's ethnography, so kind of hanging out with people and participant observations, seeing what they're up to, theory, lots of theoretical discussions, and it looks at different groups of people whose relationship to fast and slow is different. So the things that we're going to focus on are frequent business travellers, Toronto taxi drivers, and then there are some mentions too of lunchtime yoga teachers, that's a personal favourite, and proponents of Slow living. So I guess in its most general form, the thesis of that book is that the widespread claim that society is speeding up, which is a sort of almost common sense claim that we still hear all the time, everything's getting faster, you know, people in lots of different historical periods, as you and I both know, have believed that to be true, actually belies lots of more local experiences of time that sort of fit together in a jigsaw-like way to form what you call temporal architecture or elsewhere temporal infrastructures. So, can can you explain what you mean?
Sarah: 05:25
Yeah, by temporal infrastructures and temporal architectures, I'm talking about how in our built environment and our everyday spaces, there's actually rescue of people's time or the privileged people's senses of time. And that when we go about our days, there's actually uh uneven politics of time where some are left to their own devices, not technological devices. I would consider half of our technological devices are actually temporal architectures, but for others, they can enter into an actual physical architecture or programs. They can download apps. And for others, you have to like strategize and be a bit more inventive when it comes to time management. There isn't like a rescue or an architecture of time maintenance. And what is it like to go about your day and actually see these temporal rescues for others and for yourself be left to manage on your own? And I don't know if people are cognizant of this or not in this way. And I think I read a temporal architecture in places we don't normally think of. So one of the spaces would be like the way a cab driver devises their own temporal infrastructure, temporal rescue, multiple coffee cups, thinking about how much water they're gonna drink, because then it's gonna mean they have to stop and and go to the washroom and then get a ticket and these kinds of things. So these everyday little strategies for the maintenance of time in one's life.
Cressida: 06:52
Yeah, that's a really interesting way of putting it, that some people get rescued often from themselves, I think is one thing I learned from the book, by the way that we organize time. But other people are doing the rescuing and at the cost of their own time management, their own control over their own lives. Yeah. Yeah, the interviews that you do are really compelling, and the vignettes that you present about the people that you talk to are, I think, an especially kind of gripping part of the book. So we we've talked on the podcast already about how sleep and time always seem to come together. So you can't really talk about sleep without talking about time. And your book is very centrally about time, but it's not not about sleep. Can you tell us about what you learned about sleep specifically?
Sarah: 07:42
Yeah, I was thinking about this in relationship to your question about how sleep is like another thing that's strategized. Either sleep is rescued through pharmaceuticals or through actual like things like napping pods, makeshift sleeping. Like I think about sleeping in public spaces, who's allowed to sleep in a public space and who isn't, and what cultures is sleeping in public permitted and not permitted. At the time when I was researching and writing this, one of the spaces I looked at was the way that airplanes, you know, first class, the lighting would shift to keep travelers within their time zones required when they land. I mean, just you just think of a plane in that way, and you see the various investments in people's time, right? Yeah, sleep and time management, right? We have all the like of a culture of apps related to time management, measuring how well you sleep, you know, tired culture. One of the popular ways of thinking about speed and not having enough time is that we lack sleep, right?
Joshua: 08:53
So one thing that really stood out to me while I was listening to Sarah talk was her use of the word "rescue" a lot. And the way she would say some people's time gets rescued, others' people or other people's time does not get rescued. And I think there was a bit of an intuitive grasp of what she meant, but it seems like an odd word to use. What does she mean by rescuing time?
Cressida: 09:26
I was thinking about that too. I think it's something to do with having others enable or block your use of time. So there are all sorts of technologies and practices and roles that people play that make it easy for some people to move quickly and seamlessly through the world while others are interrupted or forced to wait. And there are also people who are doing the enabling. So the actions of those people, the people who are making your experience of time as frictionless as it can be, are a kind of rescue. You open your book with a story about Liquid Man, a guy who you meet in an airport. I love to hate Liquid Man. But when I teach that chapter, some of my students feel sympathetic towards him, maybe even aspirational. Yeah, so Liquid Man is this guy who is just a young man who's traveling first class, who you encounter, who hears that you're a professor of technology studies, media, some version of that, that he picks up on and thinks that you must be you must be pro.
Sarah: 10:41
You know, I really have never thought my this project and my new project were related. And my new book that's coming out in a couple of months is called Insufferable Tools. And it's about our actual technologies, but also the tech patriarchy, big tech patriarchy. And I wonder even if like Liquid Man is what we would now call a tech pro. When I was writing this part, it was probably 2011, 2012, the book comes out in 2014, and he seems to be like that jet set traveler that I had my eye on at that moment, might be working in Silicon Valley or for a tech company. So that to me may be who Liquid Man is, and maybe it's appealing. My students want to work in tech and they want to be in charge of their flows and they want to be plugged in and on the go. Yeah. In my new project, I argue that our tech bros actually are media theorists, like they imagine themselves to understand media, and they're fascinated and like enamoured by technology in a particular way, and that they've turned to media theory, and the rest of us are not even paying attention to media theory. And I think our politics should reside in a deeper conception of media as an environment. And so I'm laughing here because I'm my first line about Liquid Man is that he's actually reading Plato's Republic. And now I realize too, like he's a theorist, like these people are theorists, they are philosophers and theorists. So just as concerned about the good life. Yeah.
Cressida: 12:10
So one of the big contrasts in the book is between elite business travellers, and Liquid Man's an anecdote, but you interview several people about fast-paced traveling all the time kind of lifestyle, and the taxi drivers, the Toronto taxi drivers that you mentioned earlier. And there's some really memorable stories about how those taxi drivers manage their sleep in particular.
Sarah: 12:32
Yeah, the one that always comes to mind for me is the one driver who talked about how he felt out of place during the day. He worked the night shift and he found the daylight unsettling. He used the word like he felt like a hyena. And also he shared he shared his apartment and car with another driver. So they would just switch back and forth. And I found this like to be an amazing relationship to time, temple strategy to like you think about how genius it is in some ways, they're sharing rent, living in the place half time each, but splitting the day in this way. I really think about that's like a collective sense of space and and and life.
Cressida: 13:18
Yeah. In Alberta we call that hot-bedding. Yeah. And it's and it's well known because lots of people in in the oil industry do it.
Sarah: 13:27
There are people that live like this, it's not a fantasy.
Joshua: 13:40
So there do seem to be some cultural imperatives to speed up. And there are people who are trying to move consistently fast and get lots done, and folks who are rescuing their time to make that possible.
Cressida: 13:53
Yeah, that's right. What I remember about the taxi drivers, the chapter on the taxi drivers, is the hurry up and wait aspect of their lives. So the chapter is called "Temporal Labor and the Taxi Cab: Maintaining the Time of Others." And it's that temporal maintenance that Sarah describes so well. The business travellers who are the subject of chapter one are always in a hurry, often late, or trying to make time expand to accommodate their busyness. And there's a great quote from a taxi driver who Sarah interviews and spends time with called Billy. So can you read this quote, Joshua, in the which is in Billy's voice?
Joshua: 14:33
Oh, but I don't have Billy's voice.
Cressida: 14:35
You don't have to imitate Billy's voice. You just have to read the quote.
Joshua: 14:39
OK good. I would have needed way more prep for that. This is straight from Billy's mouth. "They think the taxi is going to make magic, like a magic carpet flying over the city. They have a job interview, a business meeting to close a million-dollar deal, a flight. Friday, I had a customer at six at Yonge and Bloor, and his flight was at seven." What is it?
Cressida: 15:03
No, no, no, no. I was just laughing at the idea of getting into a cab at six and saying my flight's at seven. Sorry, I wrecked it.
Joshua: 15:10
No, no, no. "Friday, I had a customer at six at Yonge and Bloor, and his flight was at seven. So the time he gets into my cab is the time he should have been going through security at the airport. He says he has a security pass, but that doesn't do anything for me. It is a 45-minute drive. He is transferring his stress to me immediately, the minute he gets in the cab. That is the service you are doing for this customer. You're a doctor, and he has a pain, and you want to help him because this is your job. You have to do something."
Cressida: 15:44
That kind of temporal pressure is really intense. And by contrast, for the taxi drivers, there's waiting. That's the other temporality that Sarah describes. There's a whole section in the chapter about waiting, about who waits for whom. It's always a sign of privilege. You know, if you're in a position to make someone else wait for you, especially if you do it deliberately, it's a sign that you have more power. Or if you're forced to wait for people, then it's an indication that their time is somehow more valuable than yours. So taxi drivers also wait doing no work and sometimes for long periods of time. I mean, we've all seen taxi drivers sitting in the rank waiting before they pick up a fare, and then that fare might want to go fast. I don't know, I don't want to go fast in taxis, but you know, waiting requires somewhere to stop. It requires somewhere you can park your car long enough to go to the bathroom or get something to eat or something to drink. But these aren't always easy to find, especially in a city. So there's an infrastructure of taxi ranks if you're lucky. So no one is really rescuing the time of the taxi drivers themselves.
Joshua: 16:56
No, and in fact, in that chapter as well, Sarah writes that or makes this comparison between what the taxi drivers are doing and the expression "doing time" in prison. Yeah. Right. And what does that mean? Doing time, holding time, and it's this very clear connection to a type of suffering, a type of endurance of pain is holding this time. And yeah, certainly the experiences that the taxi drivers have, just sort of waiting in limbo, can be very stressful and anxiety-inducing because you're looking for customers and trying to nab them before they before they get taken by someone else, but you're also just waiting. That really stood out to me too. And it also seems worth pointing out on this podcast that both the business travellers and the taxi drivers struggle with sleep. The business travellers get jet lag or just have to take flights at times that they'd rather be in bed. Maybe they have to work long hours at the end of the trip, but there's an infrastructure organized around helping them cope. There are these beautiful, luxurious waiting rooms that they get to hang out in. Of course, they can even nod off in the back of the taxi as their drivers drive them, saving them time, rescuing their time. But with the taxi drivers, they work incredibly long hours all the time and very anti-social shifts that mean they might rarely see their families, and it's very hard to find a time and place to nap. There are several alarming mentions of drifting off to sleep at the wheel in this chapter. So their sleep is a mess in the service of others, along with business class bed seats and jet leg lighting. They are one of the technologies that are supporting fast life.
Cressida: 18:54
Yeah, the taxi drivers themselves are a kind of a means to speed for other people. And I mean, I think a response to some of this, but obviously most obviously to the business travelers is to say maybe we all just need to slow down. Maybe everything's moving too fast and we need to slow down.
Joshua: 19:17
That might help. But the taxi drivers say that life is slowing down. So relative to the fast-paced life of liquid man, for the taxi drivers, more competition and lower wages mean that they get less work than they need, or more traffic and traffic jams. So who or what gets to be slow?
Cressida: 19:51
So your book starts from and well, continually engages this observation that society is speeding up. And you know, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. What I've learned from reading you is some bits of it are and other bits of it aren't. And one really common response to that that seems to have had a really to me, it seems like this has had a very long life, is to try and revalue all things Slow with a capital S, including rest and possibly including sleep. So we've got, you know, the Slow movement, Slow culture, Slow food, Slow all sorts of things. What do you think about that as a response to concerns about the culture of speed? And does it include sleep?
Sarah: 20:33
So I would think of slowness as just another speed. In the same way that a sped-up life is produced and maintained by a host of temporalities, so too would slowness. It's just another speed. And it's a dominant speed. It's like that's the other interest. Slowness is often articulated and understood to be like antithetical to speed, resistant to speed, a refusal of speed, but it's just another temporality and it's a dominant one. It's definitely produced. It's not, it's, you know, we can talk about natural time and all this sort of stuff. But even then in the world that we live in, like biological time, hardly natural anymore, it's also produced. It all it also requires temporal architectures and investment into particular bodies and disinvestment in others. So slowness has been a dominant response. And I think we have to be careful with it. And so, sure, rest, well, what kind of rest? And rest why? What is rest oriented towards? I think is another question.
Cressida: 21:44
I think Sarah's saying here that it might be really nice to go to a Slow restaurant and eat mindfully because a big, as I understand it, a big part of the philosophy of Slow is about experience. So it's about not just being focused on getting to a goal or or having got through something like a meal, but on enjoying it, eating mindfully, savouring it, taking pleasure in the company of others, and so on. So it's not terribly transgressive, but it sounds good, you know. Like I'd rather have a meal like that than fast food. I mean, it's even in the title. It seems troubling though, because we know the kitchen is of a Slow restaurant is likely quite frenetic. And so slow, at least at that level, if it's just individually curated experiences for people who get to do this particular thing slow, doesn't seem very radical, politically speaking. But of course, it could be collective. I mean, there are examples of Slow cities where the attempt is to make the entire community change its pace of life, in which case the people working in the kitchen might be under a different sort of pressure and might not be expected to get the orders out at the speed of light. So it's possible to think about Slow collectively and not just as a luxury for people who like to think of themselves as having wonderfully drawn-out experiences.
Joshua: 23:11
Yeah, I think what Sarah is expressing is a skepticism of certain capital-S-slow lifestyles, movements that create this appearance of simplicity and going slow, especially in a fast-paced society. But their slowness and their ability to go slow takes advantage of this massive temporal infrastructure that allows them to slow down like that. Maybe it's they can go slow because they don't have to worry about harvesting all of the vegetables in a season, right? Or there are these rhythms that they get to opt out of because other people are doing that work for them. So part of the problem is that slowing down our lives, including getting more sleep, is often framed as an individual project and not a collective one.
Cressida: 24:24
Is there anything for you? Is there anything good to orient rest towards?
Sarah: 24:29
Yes. But I was thinking a lot about this too. And I do now see like even what does slowness have to do with sleep, what does it have to do with thinking about rest? And I think a lot about, you know, this this culture of overwork and tiredness and quiet quitting and stepping out and these sort of minor refusals in quotidian life that people take and they understand our acts of refusal. But I also find it interesting the amount of attention put towards these practices and these activities. Like I've been thinking about goblin mode, which is this like TikTok trend that my 15-year-old taught me. And it's like it's when you lay in bed all day, you don't leave, your things are scattered everywhere at its highest form. I think there's like takeout boxes everywhere, you're on Netflix, and you just do nothing and you let yourself kind of be gross for a day. These images circulate or these like TikTok circulate of people in various goblin mode poses, right? So there's a form of rest. You're stepping out, but I find it amazing the need to document one, to document the activity, but also that it depends upon streaming, it depends upon your smartphone, it depends on being able to order in food or get somebody to bring it to you. And I just think in and of itself, that is interesting. But I think so, taking aside goblin mode, there's also all these other forms of stepping out. And one of the things that I find interesting about this is we have a way of talking about these things, like time, rest, sleep. I'm documenting the ways we talk about certain things, water, like you know, this constant need to, I understand we should be hydrated, but there seems to be like a lot of focus on being hydrated. And then with that, this thing about touching grass, which is like if you've been online too long, you should go outside. And what I find problematic about these things is they render the world scarce. Like we do actually have access to outside. This is a culture that has access to water. We can sleep, we can we have access to sex, sleep, all these things. I'm using that because it's the name of your podcast. What happens in this cultural imaginary where we make these things seem like they're difficult to get to? And my concern is when we render the world scarce in this way, we leave it rife for privatization. Right. So this is where I'm this is what I've been thinking about lately.
Cressida: 26:52
Yeah, so there's a step where you say, oh, got to touch grass, as if that's somehow a special task that you have to undertake and have to go and find it. And maybe you do, maybe if you live in a scuzzy apartment block on the 14th floor, maybe you do have to walk quite some distance before you get to a park that's nice enough that you actually want to touch the grass. Totally. But yeah, to turn it into a special act that requires intention is to make it seem as if it's a challenge rather than a part of ordinary life.
Sarah: 27:24
Yeah. Or and also just like we see like a consumer market for this world. And that's like the thing that makes it difficult. Like the discourse of these things being unavailable makes it seem like nobody else has access to them either. They become like luxuries or they become I think it's like a dangerous way of framing um the world.
Cressida: 27:57
Did you know that "goblin mode" was the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year in 2022? I was very struck by that. It's definitely a post-pandemic phenomenon, along with "bed rotting," another word of the moment.
Joshua: 28:13
Yeah, I did not know that. I hesitate to say it feels like the threshold for interesting words gets lowered and lowered in the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year. But I guess that's not the point of the word of the year.
Cressida: 28:31
I think it's supposed to capture the zeitgeist in some way.
Joshua: 28:34
Well, then that goblin mode, I think, is less surprising, knowing that that's the standard that we're looking for. But I had no idea, nor with bed rotting. And both are part of what Sarah calls selfie-care. That is the idea that the world is too demanding, and so we need to retreat into taking care of ourselves, but in ways that are both totally self-centered and publicized. Goblin mode assumes you can afford all that takeout, can risk taking time off work, having a living space you can crash in for the Netflix marathon, and so on.
Cressida: 29:11
Yeah, it it seems to go lots of ways. So there's selfie care that involves giving up on work and sleeping a lot, maybe bedrotting. And then there's selfie care that involves being very attentive to yourself in ways that require a lot of effort. So it's hard sometimes to parse the role of trying. And in fact, I think some of them are about documenting yourself looking like you're not trying. But that can that can require a lot of work. That's the paradox of it that you are trying to represent yourself as relaxing or not taking things too seriously, not expending too much effort. But the documentation itself is carefully structured and curated and presented. And so in the interview, I referenced #morningshed, which is this TikTok trend of videos where usually young women take off all the things they've put on before they go to sleep on their faces, typically. So, you know, it's not just that you have this nighttime skincare routine, which can, if you're serious about it, have many, many steps. It can be a huge thing. But you also put on like eye patches or um, you know, like under your eyes, not like pirate eye patches.
Joshua: 30:35
Why not a face mask? Yeah, just in different things.
Cressida: 30:40
Or like a mask, like a cream mask or a covering on your face. And then these face wraps that the Kardashians are now producing, where it's like a the visual effect of a post-facelift, where you have a bandage wrapped around your face. So you you put one of those on to try to sort of lift your face as you sleep. And there's I mean, I've watched #morningshed videos and I don't know what half the things are that the person is taking off because you didn't see them being put on. So #morningshed is like you make a video of yourself fake waking up in the morning and then taking off all this stuff. So unwrapping yourself, basically. They're unboxing videos, yeah, but for young women's faces. Yeah.
Joshua: 31:23
Wow. I can also see where this would be related to sleep, right? If you're having a neoliberal perspective to sleep, it would be like seeing your sleep as an investment that you're making into the next day of productivity almost, or as an investment you're making into yourself so that you can be productive and effective the next day.
Cressida: 31:45
Yeah. And it's the way you phrased it there is "sleep positive," in the sense that sleep needs to be done well and properly in order for you to be the best kind of entrepreneurial subject. And I think that sometimes is associated with femininity as well, the more sleep-positive approach. Sometimes it's just associated with a very blunt kind of sleep negativity, like "sleep is for the weak." "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Yeah. And the idea that you just that sleep is a waste of time and that you could be, you could be working and you could be developing your brand instead of drifting off. And so it can appear in that form as well. But I'm interested, and we've talked about this before in the way that the sleep-negative hustle and grind side of this is represented often as masculine. And the more look after yourself, make sure that you have enough and good enough sleep so that you can be productive the next day is represented as the domain of women and more feminized. And so they're but they're both really making the same sort of argument. They're both adopting the same position.
Joshua: 32:52
Oh, yeah. And that maps onto that self-care, selfie care as well. If both, if the more feminine interpretation of sleep is this positive work of care on yourself, but with the neoliberal bend, becomes so that you can work the next day. Self-care or selfie care is so that you can be a good influencer subject, so that you can participate in the in the marketplace of self-care, right? In the buying, purchasing, contributing to the proliferation of self-care ideology.
Cressida: 33:35
Yeah, I think there's no doubt that being positive about sleep and rest and representing yourself as somebody who cares about being properly rested is marketed and sold back to us. Ouch.
Joshua: 33:48
Ouch.
Cressida: 34:00
There's something about the idea that you need to represent everything that you do. Document it. Yeah. Document it perhaps through social media. That's you know the obvious place. And so you sent me some of your recent work, which was really interesting to read. And you draw this distinction between self-care and selfie-care. Here's a quote: "The self-care, selfie care political spectrum is easy to plot. #Selfie-care is a photo of a pair of feet floating in a pool of sudsy water being worked on by the repetitive motions of the manicurist at the nail factory. On the other end of the spectrum, you might find people engaged in communal forms of reproductive labor so others can eat, sleep, and rest." So can you tell us more about self-care versus selfie care?
Sarah: 34:48
Yeah. You know, a lot of people have written about this, but the way that Audre Lorde's self-care was co-opted by like the sort of radical Black feminist work was co-opted by like neoliberal feminism. So I think we know that critique, right? But to me, what's central to the rise of the sort of neoliberal self-care is that it's focused so much on the individuals. This is why I call it selfie care. And it's also selfie because it's a need to document it, the need to document and publicize it, like showing yourself taking care of yourself. And in fact, within Black feminist thinking, like showing yourself taking care of yourself is actually a necessary part of survival and showing that you're thriving, that means one thing. But to be engaged in these forms of wellness that revolve simply around an individual just doing things and calling it self-care is again, we make these things scarce. We can't like take care of ourselves. But also self-care, as it was meant to be in Audre Lorde's formulation, is oriented towards the reproduction of life, making sure the self is okay so the self can be engaged in political struggle, also communal forms of taking care of each other. And those aren't things that you can capture in a photo, and those aren't things you can document, and also maybe you shouldn't document them. Maybe these are strategic forms of politics that shouldn't be documented. Maybe these are strategic forms of refusal or flying under the radar. And so I just think the move to document and the move to publicize is dangerous again to the tradition that this word is as co-opted from, but is borrowing from.
Cressida: 36:27
Yeah, and I think it's doing okay, that tradition. Yes. I've sort of encountered a lot of really interesting black feminist work about sleep, like Tricia Hersey's Nap Ministry. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Like "Black Power Naps" as an art installation. So I like all of these sort of creative or artistic or even spiritual attempts to reconnect with a tradition of self-care that starts but doesn't finish in Black feminism and is interested in how people who've been marginalized and denied their rest can reclaim it.
Sarah: 37:06
Yes.
Cressida: 37:07
So it seems like that's an interesting counterpoint to some of this, dare I say, narcissistic kind of
Sarah: 37:13
yeah, but I also think there are on top of that, there are just forms of this type of care and reproductive labor that cannot be documented, that they don't make sense in the form. And so it's always to hold the significance of that to me.
Cressida: 37:28
I wonder about those things where you're sort of visibly discarding the trappings of being self-organized and having an executive function and being the kind of person who makes #morningshed TikToks, right? Which I have to say I find unfathomable because the first sort of several minutes of my mornings are so radically different than removing my collagen face wrap. I wonder what you think about that sort of refusal of self-care, or maybe it's a refusal of selfie care.
Sarah: 38:04
But I don't know. I don't think we should be worried about these forms. I know that like these sometimes create public health scares where people are worried if people are being unhealthy or moving into these depressed modes. But no, I think I just read them more as like what they indicate culturally, like about where we are and how we're thinking in terms of what's available to us. And I don't think these modes of being are available without forms of digital culture. This is very much a digital practice, it's not like an unproductive self laying around all day. So I think that's interesting too because it's not like unplugging, it's a type of rest related to digital culture, and it can only exist because of digital culture.
Cressida: 38:45
Yes, we used to unplug, or at least I did, and lie around all day without anybody knowing. And in fact, we might invest a certain amount of effort in in other people not finding out. Yeah. But so there are experiments in checking out in various ways, as well as revaluing the bed, revaluing rest or sleep, both in real life and in fiction. And so I've worked with a lot of these in things in talks that I've given. And there's Ottessa Moshfegh's book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Sarah: 39:13
I love that book.
Cressida: 39:14
Yeah. There's Johanna Hedva, who does a lot of interesting disability theory. I already mentioned Tricia Hersey, her Nap Ministry, and now her book, Rest is Resistance. And so when I bring up these examples, what people often say to me is, well, that's all very well, but that's quietism. It's literally quietism. Like you can't just say everybody should go to bed and have a rest. Because we, you know, we've got Donald Trump in the White House and starvation in Gaza, and the world is coming to an end through climate change. And so if we just all got more sleep, it would devolve into a kind of well, an exercise of privilege for those who can and just more politics for those who can't. So coming back in a way to your book, but I wonder, I wonder how you sort of engage that, because it does seem to me that there is value in doing less and value in rest, but that it needs to be handled quite carefully.
Sarah: 40:12
I think again, it's like what your practices are oriented towards. So, yeah, if you're involved in political organizing or versus if you're just like going to I don't know, I don't want to say it, but finally, like if you're just gonna go work at a hedge fund. I don't do whose tiredness do I care about?
Joshua: 40:30
So like so we have selfie care versus self-care, the one oriented toward curating a digital self, the other oriented toward flourishing in a community. So I asked Sarah about Bartleby, one of my favorite fictional characters from Herman Melville's famous short story. Herman Melville, probably more famous for writing Moby Dick. Although Bartleby enjoyed quite a renaissance amongst continental philosophers. Everyone from Agamben to Zizek, Derrida, Deleuze, Badieu, like they've all written
Cressida: 41:25
the names!
Joshua: 41:26
Yeah, Judith Butler, they've all written...
Cressida: 41:28
Yeah, everybody's got an essay on Bartleby. When I was doing some Bartleby research, I discovered that. I was like, oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to read all of these.
Joshua: 41:35
Yeah, everyone who enjoys the celebrity of philosopher had to say something about Bartleby.
Cressida: 41:45
What year was Bartleby written?
Joshua: 41:47
That's a great question.
Cressida: 41:48
I think it's I'm gonna say 1858.
Joshua: 41:52
Okay, that's a great guess.
Cressida: 41:54
Let's see if I remembered that right. Uh 1853.
Joshua: 42:01
Wow.
Cressida: 42:02
You know, it depends what date you think the final version is. But the 1850s.
Joshua: 42:07
Yep, 1850s. So this will be our contribution to that rich archive of Bartleby talkers. I like reread the short story. And, you know, it's it has some some funny moments, but the story goes it's this lawyer who has set up an office. He, I think it's either moved to a new office or gets new work, so he needs to hire somebody new in his office, a copyist, so somebody who's just going to write.
Cressida: 42:41
It's relevant that it's the 1850s because there's no Xerox.
Joshua: 42:45
Right, yeah. So yeah, he's Bartleby the scrivener. So this is what he's gonna do. Bartleby shows up and he is, it's important, like he is very industrious at the start. Yeah, he starts so very good. He starts off so strong, so you can't doubt he knows what he's doing. And then gradually this lawyer starts asking him to do not extra things, just parts of his job, what would be accepted as being part of his job. And Bartleby's notorious response is "I would prefer not to." He never says no. He just always expresses a preference not to do the thing that he's being asked to do. And this gradually extends to his entire job. It's very funny, almost the passive aggressiveness. The employer can't figure out how to get him to do his job. He kind of tortures himself about how he should treat Bartleby. He can't figure out how to deal with him. He eventually ends up telling Bartleby that, you know, if he's not going to do the job, he can't stay there. He has to go. And Bartleby says that he would prefer not to go. And instead of calling the authorities, the employer decides that he will just move to a different office then.
Cressida: 44:08
It's like it's told from the point of view of that narrator, the narrator is the lawyer employer, right? And it's just like, dude!
Joshua: 44:16
Yeah. The torture in his head, just like, you can't do it.
Cressida: 44:20
You're a bit pathetic, honestly. Because when he gets to the stage where he's like, I just couldn't get rid of Bartleby, so I decided to relocate the entire office and just leave him behind in the old one. You think, okay, ineffective leadership.
Joshua: 44:33
Yeah, and then the new tenant comes to him at his new office and says, I don't know if you know this, but you left you left a man in the office, and I don't know what to do with him. He just stands at the window, and this is not documented, but I assume everything he would have asked him, Bartleby would have responded with, I would prefer not to. And so eventually the original employer does go back, tries to again talk Bartleby out of loitering, essentially. It's important also to note that at this point, Bartleby has been like pushed or something. He's they got him out of the office. He's just he's in the hall and he's just kind of around. And to a point that we've come to in this series, that drives people insane. The sort of disproportionate response to Bartleby just existing and just being around eventually like explodes into the authorities being called to have Bartleby removed. He is carried off to prison where he prefers not to eat, he prefers not to do anything and eventually wastes away and dies.
Cressida: 45:55
It's very sad at the end. There is tremendous pathos because he does just starve to death and fade away. And he's a sort of sympathetic character until that point, or at least for me. And then by the end, I was like, oh, you're not gonna be transgressive in the way I hoped. Like, I don't know what I hoped for him, but yeah, it wasn't that this practice of saying I would prefer not to, this kind of passive resistance would lead him to death.
Joshua: 46:23
So I think if you are looking for a sort of revolutionary action that Bartleby takes or initiates, it's not like he rouses this workforce that is like you know, Bartleby.
Cressida: 46:39
He's not a union man.
Joshua: 46:40
No, Bartleby has refused, so we will all refuse. This doesn't lead to some great general strike or anything like that. It's really it ends in like a self-inflicted death. He literally just sort of wastes away. But I think what's provocative about the story and what has like relevance to Sarah's work is the way that he becomes a speed bump for the entire society that is kind of moving around him, and by not even refusing, but by doing nothing, he becomes this unavoidable just pain for everybody. And yeah, I mean, a lot of philosophers have made a very big deal about the fact he does not refuse outright, but just expresses a preference. Because I think the problem is if it's a just straightforward and direct refusal, there's a way to meet that, right? With discipline or with some sort of response. But the fact that he just expresses this fairly banal preference, it really puts the narrator, as you say, the this employer in this really, really uncomfortable position where he doesn't quite know how to proceed because he is not being told no. He's being told I could do that, but I would prefer not to.
Joshua: 48:16
Okay, then my personal question was: I do a little bit of work right now on interrupting that process of capture or deactivating that mechanism. Often that the way that you interrupt that mechanism of capture is through exposing its sort of emptiness or pointlessness. It renders it more obvious, right? And so in that framework, I was wondering if that helps think of other examples too. Like it's are there any other examples you can think of that don't just like risk that mechanism of capture, but actually show that mechanism of capture at work? Part of how I'd summarize this question, maybe, is you know, is Bartleby a goblin? Is Bartleby in goblin mode?
Sarah: 49:07
Yeah. I the only thing I keep thinking about is like, what if we have time? Like what if what if yeah, what if we have time and where the things that we do, now I feel like a self-help guru, and that's not why you invited me here.
Cressida: 49:22
We love self-help
Sarah: 49:23
Yeah, no, but I mean, sometimes I wonder, I would say like the privileged people that feel exhausted certainly have time. I'll just leave it at that for now. But I will say though that our time wasting is central to our like everyday diet and life and the way we spend our minutes, right? Like the doom scrolling example, the way that we're like hailed into this sort of regimes of time wasting. And like imagine if we weren't wasting all of this time. Like when you want to think about like a radical potential of our temporality or organizing or social justice or like all the things that we do to sort of step outside of these regimes of productivity are are themselves exhausting. Yeah, I think that's what that's what I would say to that. That's where this, yeah, it's self-help, but it's related to social justice. So yeah.
Cressida: 50:51
Yeah, that's such an interesting comment! The idea that time-wasting is now baked in to temporal infrastructures. And through activities that are themselves exhausting, even though they often represent themselves as kind of relaxing. So doomscrolling is I think a great example. It makes you feel tired or stressed but it's not really necessary. Does it do any good? No, not really. Maybe you learn something, but so what? And so it's an activity that many, many people participate in, and it arguably wastes a lot of time at the same time as it's just kind of assumed to be a part of everyday life.
Joshua: 51:08
Yeah, it seems even checking out can be or can become quite draining.
Cressida: 51:14
Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the things that are represented to us as forms of checking out don't make you feel refreshed or invigorated. They just make you feel more tired or tired in a different way.
Joshua: 51:28
Or alienated. More alienated from your time, from yourself.
Cressida: 51:34
But then even the sort of alleged alternatives to that are sold back to us. That's what Sarah is so good at describing. I might have spent an hour on the couch doom scrolling away, and then someone might come in and say, Oh, touch grass, you know, go touch grass.
Joshua: 51:52
Here's some grass.
Cressida: 51:55
Yeah, here's a tray of grass
Joshua: 51:56
Here's a tray of grass that you could touch for $10.
Cressida: 51:58
And so the idea that you then have to go and engage in a counteractivity that will be therapeutic to that alienation, to it's sort of endlessly meta, endless levels of this wasting of time and then attempting to recuperate the negative affect that you generated through that time-wasting activity. And it's true that at work, we're offered numerous things that we often have to do that are a waste of time... So sorry, I just horrified myself for a moment.
We've been asking some of our interviewees what their sleep story is. Joshua reveals a deep dark sleep secret.
Joshua: 52:60
For most of my life I had an inability to fall asleep, so like just straight and simple insomnia, like I could never fall asleep, but at some point it shifted into a like phobia of sleeping too, because this would have been like pretty young, like I think about eight or nine, but for me it was weird that you can never remember it. You can never remember that moment that you fall asleep. Yeah, and so my like eight or nine-year-old mind associated that with like being knocked unconscious by like blunt force trauma. And so I became terrified that it must be excruciating to fall asleep because that's why you like never remember it. It's like something so painful. Well, I had a lot of time to think about it, right? Like I had they'd put me to bed, my parents put me to bed at like eight, and I'd normally like lie awake until one in the morning. And yeah, I think that was also like what geared me into philosophy as an undergraduate was I had all this like time to just,
Sarah: 54:11
What am I doing in life? What is life?
Joshua: 54:15
What are we doing here?
Sarah: 54:17
Yeah, my 12-year-old had trouble sleeping, and but partially it was like the representation of sleep on television and movies where people would close their eyes and be asleep. Yeah, I finally realized what her problem was because she she couldn't understand that it's a process. Like she just was she closed her eyes, and because it didn't happen, it led to a lot of anxiety, and we had to keep explaining to her, like and it reminds me of you saying your nine-year-old brain was like because she was about nine when this started, and I just would can you just imagine where you get that idea from? You close your eyes, you fall asleep.
Joshua: 54:55
So yeah, no, it it is like such an obvious connection once you see it, but when you're an adult and you, you know, and you have a long career of sleeping without too much difficulty, understanding like how somebody can be so anxious about something that should be so easy, right? And I think it does connect to like that anxiety over not being able to do it. Yeah. And I'm thinking of the making scarce of things like time and sleep as a mechanism, like a social mechanism. And that might be a mechanism of enclosure, like you're describing, right? Where this mechanism of making something scarce. I guess part of that mechanism then would be its representation in media, right? That people on CV close their eyes and they're instantly asleep. Maybe the screen light blurs in some whimsical way. But so like the representations of time management of sleep and how we should be sleeping, give us that sense of scarcity. To turn that into a question, is that a fair summary of how you see that scarcity working?
Sarah: 56:17
Yeah, I think that would include it. Like to me, the representations of it are part of the overall cultural discourse of it, popular discourse of time management, sleep, rest. Yeah, I think the other thing is I when I'm looking at something, I wouldn't privilege one discourse over the other. Like I think popular cultural texts are just as important as our academic writing on this or and any other, like even scientific understanding and how they all work together for all of us subjects to feel unrested subjects to feel like we can't access these things.
Outro: 56:59
Every day since the beginning of time, people have gone to work. Then one day, Bartleby was hired to do a simple job.
Outro: 57:05
Bartleby, your finger. Put your finger there.
Outro: 57:10
I'd prefer not to. I would prefer not to. I'd prefer not to. I would prefer not to say. I would prefer not to.
Outro: 57:24
Will work ever be the same?
Outro: 57:27
I would prefer not to!
Outro: 57:29
Bartleby.
Outro: 57:37
I'd prefer not to.
Outro: 57:40
Bartleby !
Cressida: 57:46
That's all for today. Next time on Sleep is the New Sex, we'll be talking about sleep in performance art with our guest Danielle Drees. This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Niisitapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudonosonee, and Anishinaabe lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognise the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations. You can find us on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find show notes, including references to everything mentioned here, on our website, sleepisthenewsex.ca.
Joshua: 58:43
See you next time.