The Sleep of the World
The Sleep of the World
Why the dispute between the Old and New isn’t over...
After one of his first lectures on the unconscious, Freud made the beautiful observation he’d encountered such emphatic silence from the audience that it was as if he’d stirred the sleep of the world.1 This formulation describes a social condition where the World’s collective everyday concerns are a waking dream. While historians such as Christopher Clark may have concluded that European rulers stumbled headlong into the First World War catastrophe like sleepwalkers, we're dealing with a phenomenon that can only be understood, post ante, with the appropriate distance of time. As long as the music plays and the actors can indulge in their dreams, their contemporaries needn't be necessarily aware of their somnambulism. But convincing yourself that its bubble has burst isn't difficult once you awaken from this slumber. And, in fact, even beyond the previous decade’s many financial crises, our present time offers a wealth of illustrative material. If the Bildungsrepublik Deutschland2 [Education Republic of Germany], which the Merkel era prescribed as an excellence initiative, is now confronted with a veritable educational catastrophe, and if bridges collapse and the never again of the post-war period faces a slavering anti-Semitism (with the marking of Jewish apartments, now evoking the most terrible memories)—then we're not dealing with sudden shocks, but with the results of a long period of looking the other way. Because, of course, a functioning education system isn't dragged down overnight, just as the neglect of the social infrastructure cannot be considered a coup de main – not to mention the Sunday speeches in which everyone was a moral world champion balancing on top of stumbling blocks [Stolpersteine]3 while enjoying the best Germany ever. Instead, we're dealing with a chronic blindness to the present, a blindness that's become ingrained in everyday life, having often taken on the form of a business model—one that the church fathers named acedia, elevating this inertia of the heart to the rank of mortal sin. Still, mass psychology remains largely speechless when it comes to explaining this phenomenon. Although viral logic shows us how the risk of contagion can send the masses into a moral panic, we have no conception of this creeping delusion's insidious etiology.
As the sleep of the world is a chronic behavior that's slipped into the unconscious, it's not easily diagnosed, even when it starts festering. And while it's arguable that society’s fallen into a deep slumber, especially in the last decade, several arguments suggest we must go back much further. For contemporaries having woken up from their slumber to be now confronted with the destroyed infrastructure of deindustrialization and a social fabric stretched to breaking point, the question is whether the phantasm’s preservation is sufficient to initiate the appropriate counter-steps. If you’re not aware of your own delusion’s causes, there's a high probability you’re ultimately just laboring over symptoms – not to mention that chronic somnambulism leads to a form of perceptual disorder. Taking the neglect of digitalisation as an exemplar, it’s evident that missing its start can have catastrophic consequences. It becomes almost illegible when you miss the boat while the world has moved forward at lightning speed in the last three decades—leaving you standing like an ox in front of a mountain, unable to reduce this seemingly cryptic and hyper-complex structure to its basic building blocks. And when our classe politique displays a stupendous digital analphabetism, you get the impression that any insistence on data protection solely has the purpose of evading any responsibility for their long-overdue attention to measure ensuring our digital literacy. Bearing in mind that in ancient times, hysteria meant not only the consequence of a failed desire to have children—as an ambulatory womb wandering desperately around the body – but also referred to an actor's tardiness, comparable to the traits displayed by our histrionic political actors. And what do you do when you can no longer find your way in the present? When the actor loses what we’ve become accustomed to calling agency, there’s nothing left but actionism—an empty flailing to save yourself from losing your presence-of-mind [Geistesgegenwart].
If our time’s mass psychology only offers explanations of either moral panic, a logic of virality, or cognitive dissonance, then falling back on fiction and fairy tales may make more sense – and in this context, a new reading of the Sleeping Beauty story would seem to provide a more suitable option. Especially if we remember the material bequeathed to the German reading community by the Brothers Grimm isn’t this fairy tale’s oldest form as it's the transcription of an ancient story4, one re-written by a highly lucid intellectual and cultural politician. Charles Perrault (1628-1703), who left behind Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, wasn’t only a co-builder of the Louvre and responsible for supervising the construction of the Palace of Versailles, he was also a founding father and first secretary of the Académie française. In his time, he was famous for his uncompromising modernism, as, unlike his contemporaries, he didn't believe that the classical period represented civilization’s unrivaled pinnacle—but that the present was far superior to the past.
His position led to a long, vehement debate that was started by a lecture given by Perrault at the French Academy in 1687, which has gone down in history as the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In it, he, as a convinced modernist, expressed the opinion that the Sun King's century was superior to all others. Reading Sleeping Beauty (La belle au bois dormant) from this perspective, it becomes clear that it’s a fairy tale about the question of having presence-of-mind that’s readily grasped in Perrault's version. This is particularly evident in his modifications to the story, first presented by the great European storyteller Giambattista Basile. In Basile's story, the king's daughter Talia, prophesied to be in great danger from a flat fiber, simply fell dead after pricking herself on one, a misfortune prompting her desperate father to resort to a strange memory-sealing measure.
When the unhappy father heard of the disaster that had befallen Talia, after paying for this cask of Asprino with a barrel of tears, he placed her in that palace in the country, upon a velvet seat under a canopy of brocade; and fastening the doors, he quitted for ever that place which had been the cause of such misfortune to him, in order to drive all remembrance of it from his mind.
In short: the castle is transformed into a necropolis where only Sleeping Beauty, believed dead, is enthroned. Perrault's version deviates from the original Renaissance version in several respects. All of them are characterized as not dealing with an individual psychological, but rather a social process. Because Perrault is concerned with the collective destiny, he puts the entire royal household to sleep along with Sleeping Beauty. This collectivization logic fits in well with the author's wealth of experience, having witnessed the emergence of the social etiquette social game, which the sociologist Norbert Elias describes as the signature of modern society. Because trivialities have replaced realities here – as in our current attention economy5 – Perrault begins his fairy tale with a violation of etiquette, for an old fairy had been overlooked, not out of malice, but because nothing had been known of her for more than a hundred years and she’d been thought dead or missing.
The King, though she chose to accuse his manners, was in fact the politest of men. He hurried to express his regrets, led her to table with his own hand, and ordered a dish to be set for her; but with the best will in the world he could not give her a dish-cover such as the others had, because seven only had been made for the seven invited Fairies. The old crone received his excuses very ungraciously, while accepting a seat. It was plain that she had taken deep offence. One of the younger Fairies, Hippolyta by name, who sat by, overheard her mumbling threats between her teeth; and fearing she might bestow some unlucky gift upon the little Princess, went as soon as she rose from table and hid herself close by the cradle, behind the tapestry, that she might have the last word and undo, so far as she could, what evil the Fairy Uglyane might have in her mind
The old fairy takes revenge for the breach of etiquette by prophesying to the king's daughter that she’ll prick herself on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. In the original version, the old fairy re-casts the death sentence into a 100-year sleep through the spell of another fairy. Perrault, however, has the king place his trust in the power of the State Machine and its Law – thus intensifying the original version where the king had only issued a strict command.
But His Majesty, after bowing from the balcony amid the banging of rockets and hissing of Catherine wheels, retired to a private room with his Chamberlain, and there, still amid the noise of explosions and cheering, drew up the first harsh proclamation of his reign. It forbade every one, on pain of death, to use a spindle in spinning or even to have a spindle in his house. Heralds took copies of this proclamation and marched through the land reading it, to the sound of trumpets, from every market-place: and it gravely puzzled and distressed all who listened, for their women folk prided themselves on their linen.
Despite the State Machinery’s ticking clockwork, the prophecy comes true. During her parents’ absence, the daughter explores the castle, where she encounters a living anachronism in the form of an old woman spinning yarn on her spindle. Because of her overpowering curiosity, she asks the old woman what she’s doing. Naturally, the old woman offers to teach her, and in the process, she pricks herself and falls asleep on the floor—thus fulfilling the fairy prophecy—and with this act comes a state of frozen time, affecting not only the king's daughter but the entire court:
As soon as she had touched them, they all fell asleep, not to wake again until the time arrived for their mistress to do so, in order that they might be all ready to attend upon her when she should want them. Even the spits that had been put down to the lire, laden with partridges and pheasants, went to sleep, and the lire itself also. All this was done in a moment; the fairies never lost much time over their work. After which, the King and Queen, having kissed their dear daughter without waking her, quitted the Castle, and issued a proclamation forbidding any person, whosoever, to approach it. These orders were unnecessary, for in a quarter of an hour there grew up around the Park so great a quantity of trees, large and small, of brambles and thorns, interlacing each other, that neither man nor beast could get through them, so that nothing more was to be seen than the tops of the Castle turrets, and they only at a considerable distance.
When the castle and the court society within it fall into the sleep of the world, it isn’t just a frozen state of time but also a form of wildness for both man and mouse – for just as nature is hypertrophying, demons and man-eaters are making their presence felt in and around the castle.
Some said that it was an old castle, haunted by ghosts. Others, that all the witches of those parts held their Sabbat in it. The more general opinion was, that it was the abode of an ogre; and that he carried thither all the children lie could catch, in order to eat them at his leisure, and without being pursued, having alone the power of making his way through the wood.
Following Perrault's logic, we could say sleep isn’t only a form of standstill but also a relapsing that accompanies it into a pre-modern, mythical world—a world where man-eaters roam, and nature, populated by magical beings, is transformed into a threat. Both Giambattista Basile's and Perrault's versions emphasize the importance of this regression for the narrative as their fairy tales don’t end with the prince's kiss but are subsequently followed by a highly complex story. In Basile's version, the prince is a married king. After having sexual intercourse with the seemingly dead princess, he fathers two children, named the Sun and Moon, who are fed by invisible fairies in a sealed castle. He then returns to his wife, who notices a change in him—after solving the mystery of the second wife and her children, she invites them to her palace. If Sleeping Beauty, called Talia in this story, feels flattered by her attention, the hospitality is merely a ruse, as the queen instructs her cook to serve her husband Thalia's children as food.
We find a comparable epilogue at play in Perrault's story: here, the prince becomes king after his father’s death and then legitimizes Sleeping Beauty and their children –but his mother wants to eliminate her son of this attachment. So when the king goes off to war, the dowager takes advantage of his absence and instructs the cook to use the children to prepare a meal for her in a special sauce. That she’s fallen into a man-eating mood testifies to the extent that the forest’s wildness has also taken hold of her psyche – indicating the depths of courtly decadence. First and foremost, when the prince is first confronted by the awakening Sleeping Beauty, he begins sensing a past that, while familiar, was an echo not belonging in the present—echoing an uncanny out-of-time existence.
The king's son helped Sleeping Beauty, whose limbs were still somewhat asleep, out of bed. She was fully dressed, and he noticed that her toilet bore the greatest resemblance to that of his blessed grandmother. But he was careful not to say a word about it. He even went so far as to praise her antiquated costume of yesteryear in a fine way, which certainly did him no harm in her eyes, although she acted as if she didn't care a jot about such trifles as clothes and finery.
The anachronism is repeated on several levels, as the entire royal household seems to have fallen out of time, not only in their clothing but also in their behavior and practices – the tunes that the court orchestra plays for the couple sound to the king's son like music from another world.
Let's leave the world of fairy tales to examine how Sleeping Beauty’s sleep fits into our time’s mass psychology. It’s noticeable that this sleep isn't just a form of non-awareness as a kind of sin of omission, but—as in the fairy tale—is accompanied by signs of neglect seemingly relapsing into pre-modern times. For this reason alone, terms such as escapism or escape from reality seem like euphemisms – appeasement formulas that don't do justice to the situation’s seriousness. After all, upon waking, you may feel catapulted into a nightmare—no, more like waking into a horrific daydream where the instant of falling asleep remains a void. And because there’s no memorable cause of falling asleep, analysis of undesirable social developments is also largely absent. Taking our most significant financial crisis as an exemplar, the erroneous conclusions leading up to this catastrophe have remained unexplained. Generalizing neoliberalism as the culprit while simultaneously avoiding the question of what this has to do with the free-floating currency system and our transitioning to a post-material society is merely the paraphrasing of an intellectual void.6 In this sense, social slumber is much more insidious than moral panic, which betrays itself in its outwardness as a form of mass psychosis – and is easily decipherable. In comparison, Sleeping Beauty's slumber acts like a collective sedative to which we become insidiously habituated as it shapes our personal behavior. Only when the bubble bursts do we realize the extent to which we've indulged in psychic inflation by taking wishes for realities.
If we superimpose Perrault's image of frozen time as a form of wildness with its desire of returning to the past, we can conclude that somnambulism doesn't manifest as sleepwalking. Instead, it's the insistence on doing business as usual despite changing circumstances - or, as the saying goes: ›We still know how to do certain things in our sleep.‹ In this sense, reality transforms into a waking dream in which everything can get out of hand with infinite ease – since it’s freed from the weight of the world. The financial crisis makes an interesting example of mass psychology that allows us to understand this transition into a mental twilight. Having just emerged from the failure of the dot-com bubble, people supposedly returned to the iron values of Capitalism: land and property. Here is a desire for Capitalist fundamentalism when monetary foundations are shaken, losing their load-bearing capacity – when the objects in question were nothing more than a memento. The decisive factor here was by no means the respective property's value – but in the massive size of bundling many together of a triple AAA rating, behind which was the secure promise that statistical measures would limit – if not eliminate – the risk of a bad investment. Having this etched in our memory as the real estate crisis, the term real estate suggests statistical trust is disconnected from reality. When Alan Greenspan, who recommended quantitative easing as a solution to economic problems at the time, believed that real estate risk assessment models were so complex that only quantum mechanics could decipher them, it’s easy to see how people settled into a mental stupor as they abandoned themselves to the world of wishing machines, which, as we know, always make dreams come true.
As we know, financial bubbles are hardly understood in statu nascendi, not least because they're understood as an economic rationale and a social obligation. And so the collective hovers in a waking daydream as a mental bubble characterized by the sleep-walking ease of its compensation for lacking intellectual presence-of-mind—resulting in the phenomenon C.G. Jung aptly called psychic inflation. But the moment comes when we’re confronted with reality, and because the world has moved on in the meantime, it becomes virtually unreadable – making adulthood all the more painful. If today's protagonists primarily accuse themselves of being oblivious to reality – if the awakened portray their opponents as benighted and ideologically blinded—this doesn't mean they've necessarily understood what's led society into its collective stupor. According to Theodor Däubler’s »The enemy is my question in another form,« characterizing a political opponent as deluded and oblivious to reality is a beautiful stratagem for distracting attention from yourself and allowing the malaise’s actual causes to be hidden. In fact, in many contemporary debates – even when presenting themselves as woke or awakened – the actors can be portrayed as artificial, violent extensions of drowsiness. In this sense, Perrault’s dispute between the ancients and the moderns hasn’t ceased, as many contemporary practices are nothing more than denials of reality that can’t be understood as such because they still pay off. Perhaps the greatest trick Perrault's fairy tale tells of is that by regressively falling back into the past, we’re relieved of dealing with the embarrassment of the present. Or, put more boldly: if you bring up the ghosts of the past—racism, colonialism, the metaphysical Nazi, and the like—you can, in demonstrative vigilance, attach the presence-of-mind label to yourself.7 The only difference is that previously, in the mode of business as usual, it was possible to indulge in idle activity—now, the battles of the past are part of the game plan, announcing something like a symbolic civil war.
Translation by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
This goes back to a line by Hebbel, who wrote in his play Gyges and his Ring: »Only never touch the sleep of the world!«
The Bildungsrepublik Deutschland is an educational reform initiated by Angela Merkel in 2008 in response to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research's annual Education in Germany 2008 report to ensure Germans received the necessary education to become an Educated Republic.
The Stolpersteine [Stumbling Block] Project, initiated in 1992, is a decentralized memorial commemorating all the Nazi’s fallen victims consisting of raised plaques placed in the pavement where each of these atrocities occurred as artificial stumbling blocks to remind the world of what happened.
The modern form of Sleeping Beauty draws on many sources of inspiration over the centuries, including Greek mythology, early Germanic heroic legends, and Christian saintly martyrs. The story as we know it can be traced through the Rennaisance tales that Perrault used as the basis of our Modern fairy tale.
It’s interesting to note that Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital owes much to Norbert Elias' observations on the emergence of etiquette.
To prove this assertion, you only have to look at Friedrich von Hayek's reaction to the end of the Bretton Woods System, which he outlined in his book titled The Denationalization of Money, where he argues for the abolition of the State Central Bank’s privilege – and that customer and market-oriented private banks could better manage the creation of fiat money. Here, the question is how to convince the public that the foundation of a private bank – which, of course, could also be a Burckhardt ex nihilo, inc. – can provide good faith in the currency. Hayek's solution actually marks a regression of the first order, as he believes that such a private-sector currency must be backed by gold.
Another compelling trick in this game is that, in the sense of a paradoxical nominalism, when the very terms used have a binding nature of inner logic that we are, by no means, prepared to follow. Because, as the Robert Koch Institute demonstrated during the coronavirus crisis, people claim authority as the owners of the data and supposed certainties; then, when society demands accountability, they invoke data protection to explain their ineptitude. It’s the same way people are instigating disinformation disputes – and kicking up a storm of hatred and agitation.
