In post-Fordist capitalism, the demands of wage labor have expanded to the point that they increasingly affect all areas of life. Analysis has shown that the logic of markets and productivity extends into the psyche and into interpersonal relations,121 and that efficiency concepts and time management already entered households with industrialization.122 With the neoliberal globalized economy and new technologies, high-speed networks and information systems, production and markets are increasingly organized to run 24/7. Accordingly, the prevailing internalized regime of availability and innovative creativity demands ‘permanent productivity’.123 In today’s world, where work continues globally around the clock, the forms of collective experience are what has changed. If the industrial age was shaped by a regular, shared work rhythm, today’s digital consumer and business culture is determined by ideas and values of ‘self-modeling’ and permanent availability.
Under these conditions, Jonathan Crary sees sleep as the final bastion against the “relentless financialization of previously autonomous spheres of social activity.”124 His view of sleep as a communal experience appears paradoxical, given that it is generally regarded as one of the most private matters of all. In a society in which personal responsibility, productivity and control are so closely tied to the mobilization of individuals, Crary points out that sleep is a potential area of resistance – he sees it not only as an individual biological necessity, but additionally as a regular experience of trust in the community. Only those who “knowingly or not […], abandon [themselves] to the care of others” are able to fall asleep; sleep, for Crary, is a “periodic release from individuation”.125 Although I find his argument problematic, I was interested by the hypothesis implicitly contained in it: the experience of sleeplessness and restlessness could be seen a symptom of an absent sense of trust in a community. In the case study on dementia care, I learned that patients in an advanced stage of the illness are able to sleep better when they are not alone in their rooms. This coincides with more recent scientific insights: the calming effects of the presence of other people in the same room has been traced back to the physical memory of communal sleep.126
Meanwhile, individual experiences of sleep, especially in the form of dreams, belong to the private sphere and are generally not regarded today as experiences that are valuable for the community. Crary refers back to premodern societies in order to remind readers that dreaming was “integral to the lives of individuals and communities.”127 Dreams were not interpreted as personal desires or fears, but took on a role in collective life as meaningful visions and voices.
With the experimental staging of Jeux impairs, I also wanted to open up a dream-like space-time in which it would be possible to explore the opaque entanglements between individual case studies. As in a dream, the scenes are designed to allow elements from the situations being observed to appear, e.g. through the film stills printed on memory cards, which are thrown together like fragments from daily experiences and turn up out of context. The instruments by which social norms are controlled (school rules for behavior and evaluation methods; the cycle tracker for plannable fertility; the memory game as cognitive proof that short term memory is working well) appear, but do not have any causal relationship with each other and are employed in a way that deviates from their original function. Thus, the memory game does not follow the usual rules, since the pairs of cards never show completely identical images, and thus open up scope for interpretation and negotiation about what belongs together, and how. The cycle tracker, too, remains a kind of unidentified object – it is worn by the actor when she sleeps, according to its function, but it remains unclear why she is wearing the bracelet, and the extracts from the tracker app which appear on the memory cards are removed from the game without comment and placed in the drawer. The objects, the space and the characters remain ambiguous and cannot be allocated to a clear context. Are we in a school room, in a theatre, or in an empty trade fair hall at night? Is the woman a teacher, a psychologist or a children’s entertainer? Is the whole thing supposed to be a dream of the boy who has fallen asleep listening to his parents’ voices singing and finds himself on this surreal film set, where he is invited to play games with images of his life? Or is it the woman who is dreaming, after falling asleep in exhaustion at her desk?
Like a reversible figure, an image which seems to flip between two forms, the filmic form aims for a spontaneous shift in perception between the documentary aspect and the artificiality of the situation: contradictory aesthetic devices are employed, including the ‘slowed down real-time’ of the action [L is for Lightsaber] and stylistic effects such as jump cuts, timelapse, freeze frames and sound design, which create a dreamlike space between realistic banality and a more dramatic atmosphere.
A film shoot, especially when it is based on a screenplay and involves a film crew, always gives rise to an unusual temporality. Because of the intensity, the sense of purpose and the concentration on the fiction being staged, everyone is collectively sucked in. A tension which for some people comes from the hurry to set up the equipment and build the set, while for others it involves long waits and constantly being ready. Once the cameras are rolling and everyone is in position, everyone’s attention is on the moment of filming. For the duration of the scene, it is as if the heterogeneous times which come together in everyday contexts were all paused, and a prism seems to concentrate all temporalities that are present, focusing them in and on the moment developing in the scene.
In the concrete case of the shoot setting for Jeux impairs, this ‘focal point of time’ served as an experimental variable: the scene at the table did not have a set duration, but was dependent on the concentration of the two actors and the development of their interaction. The script lay on the table along with the memory cards, but how the two actors would play, and for how long, did not depend only on the duration of the card game, but also on their collective performance [E is for Evaluation].
At some point in the back and forth of revealing cards and watching the actor take her turn, the boy invents a ‘trick’. It is his turn. Rather than scanning the cards and remembering the ones which have already been revealed, he lowers his head to the edge of the tabletop. With his eyes just above the horizon of the table, his gaze wanders along the edges of the cards. As if he could see under the cards by looking at them so closely from this angle, his eyes creep along the small gap between paper and wood. He celebrates his magical power and tries to seem mysterious. He seems to know that we know that he’s playing. Unlike his impulsive interruptions and shifts in concentration when he takes up his lightsaber, here he adopts a different strategy: he does not resist the rules, but applies them in an unexpected way, by inventing a game within the game – he plays a boy who believes he can see under the cards.
Shortly after that, he uses his powers of manipulation as a direct provocation, when he turns over two cards that don’t match, and does not put them back in their places, but demonstratively shuffles them so that it’s no longer clear where each one is. These strategies raised questions for me about the concrete meanings of irrational actions for a community: with this deliberate confusion, are the boundaries of acceptability being sounded out in a playful way? Or is it actually about taking reason out of the game, because it’s no longer possible to ‘know’ where the right cards are, and instead they have to be sensed intuitively? Is the factor of ‘luck’ in the game a kind of balance against the performance-oriented mechanisms of winning?
The experimental shoot brought new insights for me, not least because of the role played by fiction. Until that point, I had not realized all the dimensions of asynchronicity. Firstly, it became clear that Jacob was making use of rapidity and stalling as strategies to resist the discipline of authorities. Asynchronicity in this case was his (conscious or unconscious) aim, so that he could set himself apart and create his own spatial and temporal islands. Furthermore, he also created dynamics in which chronological time became irrelevant: when he found himself in the playful temporal dimension of the fantastic, it was only the others who were asynchronous, those who did not play along. This temporality of the game and the imagination, however, does not work in an exclusive way, but invites others to participate, and as soon as one joins in, one becomes involved and integrated.
