Sophie Calle-esque Intervention.

'He who rises at six in the morning because he is rhythmed in this way by his work is perhaps still sleepy and in need of sleep. Doesn’t this interaction of the repetitive and the rhythmic sooner or later give rise to the dispossession of the body?' 

Henri Lefebrve and Catherine Regulier, 'The Rhythmanalytical Project' in Henri Lefebrve, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 71-84 (p. 75).

Hi guys, this is what we all agreed on in the meeting yesterday. I'm pretty excited to see what everyone thinks now it's written down, so please comment with any suggestions. But as it stands this is what will constitute our intervention(s):

We will split in to pairs and travel to various sites across London (perhaps on 2 separate nights?) at around 2/3am to document what we see:

'Raj, a minicab driver taking a break in Liverpool Street, explains: "London by day is a theatre, the stage preparation for which takes place at night."'

These nights of documentation will take place at various sites that have come to represent the ceaselessness of postmodern metropolises: an airport, St Pancras station, a 24 hour cafe or McDonalds, a 24 hour supermarket and Canary Wharf (apparently more fares are issued from here between 9pm and 2am than during the day...)

We will take photos, note down any sounds, snippets of conversation, interesting people/activities in general that capture our interest.It is very much a process of (following on from what Anna has posted below) of being aware, of resisting the individualisation of the subject that capitalism requires in order for its inequality to perpetuate. We will essentially be trying to rupture what is generally invisible; the extent to which we rely on others. This brings me to an evocative quote from Hegel:

We draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life - the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled."

We will then return to the library, and collate our various observations in to poster form.  Once this is complete we will place what we have created near the sites where the various observations were made, and hope to inspire a thought in the various commuters that travel around these hotspots of London. I'm hoping what we design will be in the same vein as the Sophie Calle works that were the original inspiration for this idea:

Overtones of the sort of cold, forensic report but at the same time, warm, fleeting, and celebrating ephemerality.  I was thinking after our meeting about a book that we discussed in our Politics of Vision course - Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys, in which she argues that Western beauty practices fit the quota from the United Nation's 'harmful cultural practices'.  I wonder if the same thing couldn't be argued for our current culture of endless wakefulness- wherein our bodies and natural functions are forced to adapt to the needs of the market on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Sleep deprivation is used by many countries as a highly effective form of torture, after all.

So, the theoretical bent of our intervention, our justification, is an attempt to draw attention to the extent to which modern capitalism relies upon the control of various people's bodies:

'people in institutions - prisoners, soldiers, other people like that - they go to sleep at a time which is laid down. So being able to sleep when you want to is almost like a measure of autonomy.'

and more generally an attempt to challenge the  rise in popularity of sleep clinics/sleeping pills.

'It is strange, once you think about it, that the phrase “He’s a machine” is now supposed to be a compliment in the sporting arena and the workplace.'

The interventions (hopefully) won't be preach-y, like a traditional marketing initiative, or overly intellectual... but are perhaps best viewed as a challenge to the culture of immediacy, through use of subtlety, inquisitiveness and detail, not commands like 'EXCEL IN BED'/'THIS PRODUCT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE' etc etc. Whereas adverts are generally seen as attempting to block spontaneity/creativity,  it is precisely this creative thinking we might hope to encourage. Thus, the posters are not an attempt to resolve a problem, but just trying to make people think differently.. A sort of 'i would prefer not to' moment; we would prefer not to ignore what is going on, but don't have the solutions. As Rancière  has argued, interventions can lead to ' modifications in the fabric of the sensible', even if just one person was to stop and study one of the posters, and think about what was going on whilst they were sleeping, what enables their day-to-day activities to function so normally, I think we will have succeeded. When thinking about this idea  I also had in mind the photos of Tim Hetherington:

Something that on first sight looks like all the other photos we see but has a 'deeper' meaning attached to it. In this case, we see U.S soldiers (generally portrayed as invincible, covered in armour etc) seen instead in their most vulnerable, human moments. In our case, what we would create is both a supposedly banal recitation of various 'early morning goings ons' and something that actually hints at capitalism's claim on us to be productive, useful, at all hours of the day. As Marx puts it in Das Kapital: capitalism 'reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential.' What do you guys think?