Dispatches from the present
I never thought much about sleep until it evaded me. Once sleep became uncertain, it became precious, demanding all kinds of rituals and magical thinking to invite it in and guard it. And when nothing works, the insomniac’s curse is to keep the virtual night watch over catastrophes she can do nothing to ameliorate: climate change, distant wars, certain election results. Sleep is the last refuge from the unrelenting exigencies of our screens, our work and the monetizable units of our time and data. It’s a right that must be rigorously defended. This summer, it came under a new line of assault.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled with a 6-3 majority in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson that local governments can criminalize sleeping in public, even in one’s own car, and even when the number of unhoused people exceeds the number of available shelter beds. “Either stay awake or be arrested,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamented in her dissent, summing up why such ordinances, in her view, amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The conservative majority, on the other hand, contended that such regulations are necessary to curtail the health and safety risks that homeless encampments pose to “the public.” In the months since, the decision has granted cities, particularly across the American West and in Florida, permission to violently clear encampments, confiscate crucial belongings such as tents and personal documents and fine and jail people with nowhere to go.
Many say that the laws in question merely use public encampment as a way to control the “real” problem: homelessness. The liberal justices’ argument, for instance, rests on the claim that criminalizing the “conduct” of sleep de facto criminalizes the “status” of being homeless, which would violate the Constitution. That may be. But it’s no mistake that this ruling and the controversial policies it has enabled erupted at the particular flash point of sleep. What does sleep do that the state fears?
Since the Enlightenment, Western elites have used sleeping conditions—where, when and with whom it is done—as an arbiter of full enfranchisement in the public sphere. In feudal societies, the sovereign was charged with protecting all sleepers, many of whom (particularly on long journeys) would have to rest outdoors. But as feudalism gave way to liberalism and economic status became more important than inherited class distinctions, a person’s political enfranchisement and protection became contingent on property ownership. Whereas houseguests, strangers and extended family members had commonly shared beds for centuries, one way the propertied class now expressed its privilege was by relocating sleep to the private bedroom. The secluded bedroom was not only more compatible with the individualized work schedules demanded by industrial capitalism, it also conditioned a novel sense of shame and dispossession in those without the means to sleep in private.
By the late nineteenth century, as the cultural historian Benjamin Reiss writes, “massive group sleep was really only for the neglected or unwanted members of society, such as disabled people, who often lived quarantined in institutions, or beggars in workhouses.” In 1870, one physician even argued for the “moral purity” of solitary sleeping by analogizing group sleepers to “the most spiteful, the vilest, and the filthiest of the animal kingdom.” When Justice Neil Gorsuch declared in the majority opinion that “those living without shelter often live together,” and then used this logic to raise a number of health and public safety concerns, he was participating in a long tradition of regulating sleep as a way to grant political recognition to some, while shuffling others “down the road” (to quote one Grants Pass councilmember cited in the ruling).
Sleep perennially points us back to the question of who counts as a subject in the public sphere. The public sleeper thwarts the fantasy of private sovereignty—over one’s personal space, one’s body and one’s ability to reason. Indeed, for centuries, philosophers have cited sleep as an exceptional state that baffles our capacity to distinguish perception from reality. Even today, modern science struggles to explain what sleep is and why we do it. So, when the sleeping body enters the public arena, it confounds our notion not only of what a body ought to do in public, but also our very understandings of liberal selfhood and the public/private divide at its heart.
It’s no wonder, then, that the figure of the sleeper has often paradoxically represented both the sedated, obedient masses and an intractable threat to state power. City Lights, Charlie Chaplin’s portrait of urban alienation and social inequality, opens with a particularly playful example of the latter. As the veil rises on a statue donated to the city by a wealthy couple, a blemish stains the gleaming monument: Chaplin’s tramp character snoozes in the statue’s lap. A small army of police promptly wakes him up and chases him away. The fascist undertones of this neoclassical statue, ironically titled “Peace and Prosperity,” in a film produced in 1931, are explicit: those in power would prefer to erect a mythic past than to confront the discord of modern democracy.
As a New Yorker, I encounter public sleepers daily: construction workers nodding off on the subway during the evening commute; taxi and Uber drivers dozing in their cars before night shifts; couples napping on picnic blankets in Central Park; and, of course, unhoused people sleeping on benches, sidewalks and in transit stations. Like Chaplin’s tramp, these public sleepers evoke a range of issues beyond homelessness. They speak to the punishing distance daily traveled between affordable housing and viable jobs. They bring to daylight the choice that unhoused people frequently face between submitting to certain restrictions in shelters or camping in the streets. They tally in public a collective sleep debt that, like all debt, disproportionately burdens the poor. They also, however, reveal the highly circumscribed ways in which we already do accept public sleeping. In theory, Gorsuch argues, the well-off couple sleeping in the park is liable to the same punishment as the homeless person. In practice, Sotomayor counters, this “describes a fantasy.” Even Grants Pass police officers testified that the ordinance was only ever used against people who do not “have another home to go to.”
The problems of who should be allowed to sleep where and how to provide housing to all those who want it have no simple solutions. But merely recognizing sleep as a “biological necessity,” as Sotomayor writes, comes up short. The way society responds to the public sleeper reflects our capacity for inclusion and empathy. Rather than exiling the sleeper like the cops in City Lights, we might instead let him rest on the monument to “Peace and Prosperity,” and, from there, begin to enact those ideals.