Canary Wharf, Friday 10th April, 3:00am:

Whilst our expectation was to find a site actually more alive at night than during the day; filled with cleaners and other night-shift workers who prepare the business district for the fast-paced nature of the day to come,  what we were actually confronted with was a place in a much eerier state of purgatory.

A sort of 'sleep with one eye open' or 'half-rest' as the area slowly readied itself for the next day, without of course, ever fully being 'turned off'. I documented:

i. Cars waiting for passengers



ii. Receptionists waiting for calls



iii. Fountains waiting to be watched

All of which made me begin to think of London, and cities in general, much more in terms of living entities in themselves, than I had before.  I was reminded of a passage in Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he equates free-market capitalism with a Hobbesian corps politique. Whilst his focus is on an economic system, are his points not equally valid as analysis of the city-form?

We are told that individual's 'collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them’ and that to some extent, this alien power conditions behaviour, creating and encouraging attitudes through its very existence:

'the competitive system, the market [or the city?] does the taming and controlling all by itself, no longer needing the absolute state.'



Jameson argues that the market is 'thus Leviathan in sheep's clothing... [which] assures us... that we are fortunate in possessing an interpersonal mechanism... [which] we only need to keep clean and well oiled.'

It was Hobbes who argued that sleep was a good example of how no one individual can be invincible - we all need to obey natural functions at one point or another, and thus appear vulnerable. It is also Hobbes then, who sees the solution to this problem as creating a power that can stand above us all, which does not sleep, and therefore is not vulnerable. The city, and Canary Wharf in particular, is a striking signifier of this line of thought:

iv. Lit-up offices waiting for workers

v. Escalators waiting to be ridden

To conclude, I thought it might be insightful to quote at length from Baudrillard's America, much of which is relevant to our thesis:

'… in America, the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man’s artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles (the seasons, day and night, heat and cold) has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd (deep down, there is the same refusal of the intermittent nature of true and false: everything is true; and of good and evil: everything is good). You may seek to explain this in terms of fear, perhaps obsessional fear, or say that this unproductive expenditure is an act of mourning. But what is absurd is also admirable. The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in the primitive night.'