346 STEVE KROLL-SMITH AND VALERIE GUNTER Governing Sleepiness: Somnolent Bodies, Discourse, and Liquid Modernity Steve Kroll-Smith, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Valerie Gunter, University of New Orleans This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person’s responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate con- dition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” Introduction A brute fact: the human animal requires sleep. Indeed, a third or more of our lives is spent sleeping and the other two-thirds is shaped in part by the relative presence or absence of good, restful sleep. Sleep itself is a nonsocial somatic state. While asleep we are unaware of a world outside the body. Indeed, a defining characteristic of sleep “is that we don’t know that we are sleeping while we are doing it” (Dement 1999:13). Sleep is truly a nonreflexive experi- ence essential for human survival. In spite of its asocial characteristics, however, sleep has not completely escaped the attention of sociologists. In a tribute to Parsons’ inclusiveness, he does mention this dormant state in his 1951 opus, The Social System. Not surprisingly, he identifies the function of sleep for the equilibration of social life. Sleep, he reasoned, is a fundamental “tension release phenomena . . . a permissive release” from the “frustrations and disciplines” of daily life (1951:396). Twenty years later, Barry Schwartz picked up this functional theme, added a dash of social psychology, and hailed sleep as the most “effective periodic remission” activity in social life, though not without some risk to the individual who “taking leave of the world, relinquishes his Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 75, No. 3, August 2005, 346–371 © 2005 Alpha Kappa Delta