Sleeping with Strangers - Techno-Intimacies and Side-Affects in a German Sleep Lab

In: Historical social research: HSR-Retrospective (HSR-Retro) = Historische Sozialforschung, Band 48, Heft 2, S. 23-40

Abstract

This article explores the challenges of knowledge production in a sleep lab. Based on ethnographic research, and drawing on affect theory, I investigate the peculiar mix of cables and care, sensors and senses, "natural" sleep and technological tinkering, intimacy and strangeness that characterize nightly life at the lab. I discuss how the production of relevant knowledge and good therapeutic outcomes depends on the careful co-management of technologies, environments, bodies, personalities, and their various entanglements, which I capture by developing three analytical concepts: intimate space (to think about the sleep lab environment), technointimacy (to think about the haptic encounters between technology, bodies, and emotion), and side-affects (to think about the undesired effects of bodyminds on technology). Together, the three concepts bring out how patients' entanglements with sleep-related technologies and environments evoke intense affects and emotions which incessantly interfere with knowledge production and therapy. In order to bring about "good enough sleep" for "good enough knowledge," trade-offs between natural sleep and techno-medical interruptions abound. As every insomniac knows, sleep resists control. The sleep lab manifests this tension writ large.