Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity PDF
Preview Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity
Becoming Insomniac This page intentionally left blank Becoming Insomniac How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity Lee Scrivner © Lee Scrivner 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-26873-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6– 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-44359-8 ISBN 978-1-137-26874-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137268747 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scrivner, Lee, 1971- author. Becoming insomniac: how sleeplessness alarmed modernity / Lee Scrivner. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Sleep Initiation and Maintenance Disorders—history. 2. Sleep Initiation and Maintenance Disorders—psychology. 3. History, 19th Century. 4. Information Seeking Behavior. 5. Medicine in Literature. 6. Philosophy, Medical. WM 188] RC548 616.8'4982—dc23 2014021109 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For Kim γνω̑θι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments x Prologomenon 1 How it feels to be something on 1 The plan 5 1 A Modern Insomnia 14 Insomnaissance 14 Nervous extensions 22 Insomniac paradox 29 2 The Freeing of the Will 34 Centuries of sensory excess 34 Je pense, donc … 37 The unsettled mind 43 Scientific rumination 52 3 The Narrowing of the Attention 58 Argus eyes and invisible gorillas 58 Phenomenologies of attention, historically considered 64 Into the narrows … 70 4 In Vicious Circles: The Physiologies of Exhaustion 81 Brain/work 81 Thermodynamics and prosthetics of the will 84 (Lacking) the will to sleep 89 Neurasthenia and the soporific supplement 92 5 Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep 99 Bodies 99 “The mental activity of women” 100 The bloody idea 106 Vicious cycles and paradoxes of cerebral hyperemia 109 6 Psychologorrhea 116 Mind/control 116 The associationist school and confirmation bias 120 Mass quackery? 125 Therapy as logorrhea as critique 131 vii viii Contents 7 Slumber and Self Subdivided 136 Cogito ergo ego? 136 Multiple sleeps and insomnias 140 Hypnotic suggestion as vibration 147 Auto- suggestion as cause and cure 150 8 Prostheses and Antitheses 157 Night trains (of thought) 157 Mimeses and malingering 163 Telegraphic simultaneity, t wo- sided newspapers, and “thickened” time 168 Lucem inventioni: light bulbs in the void 176 9 Insomniac Modernism 181 “An ideal insomnia” 181 Proto- Modernist insomnia and the monstrous shadows of “progress” 184 “A feverish insomnia:” the “fruit of pure will” and technological embodiment 192 Eliotian “pervigilium” 196 The insomniac sensory subject: light, sound, time, space 202 Tradition and individual techne 206 10 Volitional Regress and Egress 210 “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night” 210 Willing backwards 212 Notes 214 Bibliography 239 Index 253 List of Figures 1.1 “Electrical percuteur.” Joseph Mortimer Granville, Nerve-vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1883), 66. Not under copyright. Image taken from the author’s private collection. 29 7.1 “Outline of a Plan for the Study of Mental and Sensory Causes, or Forms, of Sleeplessness.” Joseph Mortimer Granville, Gout in its Clinical Aspects (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1885), 114-15. Not under copyright. Image taken from the author’s private collection. 144 8.1 “Edison’s Telephonoscope.” Punch's Almanack for 1879 (Dec. 9, 1878; RB 180263, vol. 75). Image used by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 171 8.2 “The rise of insomnia.” Google “n-gram” showing the rise in the prevalence of the word “insomnia” from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Image produced by Google Books Ngram Viewer. http://books.google.com/ ngrams 172 9.1 “Melencolia I.” Albrecht Dürer (1514) Not under copyright. In the public domain. Image from Wikimedia Commons. 189 ix
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