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Awake, Asleep, Adult, Child: An A-humanist Account of Persons

s Sleeping persons do not seem to be agents, to express identity or to give voice. On one view this means that social research on sleep would do best to focus on the social context of sleep rather than sleep `itself'. If the only analytic vocabulary at our disposal consists of abstractions that assume the existence of self-conscious, self-present individuals, this conclusion is probably correct. This article, however, builds on the work of some contemporary childhood researchers to offer an account of the `person' as an emergent property of distributed interactions between heterogeneous elements. The account is built through a discussion of `transitional objects' and `affects'. It is argued that this version of the `person' could help social research to make sense of both sides of the awake/asleep threshold. The potential contribution of this approach to the emerging bio-politics of childhood and states of un/consciousness is discussed.

Key Words: Actor Network Theory • affect • assemblages • baby • biopolitics • childhood and theory • Deleuze

Body & Society, Vol. 14, No. 4, 57-74 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X08096895


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