I assume that this session will draw on Neil Smith's (1996) work on
"Rethinking Sleep" (Environment and Planning D 14: 505-506) (reprinted in
full below): perhaps he could be asked to contribute?


RETHINKING SLEEP by Neil Smith (1996)
[Published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 14,
pages 505-506. Copyright 1996 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain]

Sleep has thus far been radically excluded from explorations of a
counterhegemonic politics of the everyday. This results presumably from a
privileging of consciousness and of conscious human action over other states
of being, recalling perhaps the parallel privileging of visuality over other
senses. But the centrality of sleep in daily life is not simply a question
of quantitative dominance the fact that sleep consumes perhaps a third of
any lifetime. Sleep is more than a biological necessity, and it is much more
than a convenient trope on which a fashionable narrative of oppositional
practice can be exercised. If Foucault is correct that political opposition
oozes from the interstices of unexceptional daily activity, then surely
sleep is a vitally unexplored site of oppositional possibility.

Excessively narrowed by the totalizing megadiscourses of economism and
historicism, social and political theory has remained innocent of the
practical political instantiations embedded in sleep; indeed sleep has been
widely ignored in the mistaken assumption that it is a lesser site of human
experience. If Marxists especially have undervalued 'sleep', Lenin may be a
partial exception to this dismal record. If his notion of 'false
consciousness' at least began to challenge the fetishism of a self-evident
consciousness, unproblemati-cally and fully present to itself, nonetheless
by equating false consciousness with a kind of uncritical social
somnambulance Lenin closed off the possibility for an exploration of
counterhegemonic sleep practices, falling back into the familiar
'degradation of sleep' narrative. More important, obviously, was Freud for
whom the interpretation of dreams bespoke a vital inner life beyond the
conscious. More than anyone else Freud understood sleep as a site of
difference, a place where not only sleep itself was differentiated from
consciousness but where the myriad of social differences were reinvented in
sleep. As such he was sensitive and sympathetic to the symbolic social power
inherent in sleep. But for all this even Freud tended to see sleep in
essentialist and rather passive terms. Sleep for Freud was the place where
the 'discontents of civilization' may have received a working out, but only
very dimly does he perceive the active social agency of sleep. This
contradiction is most sharply expressed in Lacan for whom sleep might have
become the preeminent site of the political other, the location where the
language of political possibility emerges most fully, were it not for his
more negative focus on sexual loss.

The extremeness of Lacan's position poses its inherent possibilities in
stark fashion. What if this treatment of sleep is stood on its head? What if
sleep is retheorized as a site of quintessential social inventiveness, of
gain rather than loss, of political creativity rather than simply
responsiveness, of active political transgression rather than simply a mire
of psychosocial discontent? The boundary between consciousness and sleep, in
fact, marks the transterritorial shift from the liminal disempowerment of
the body, subject to multiple vectors of social power in space and time, to
its transubstantial empowerment. Sleep alone, in fact, facilitates the
unfettered exploration of alternative subject positions. The ultimate
deterritorialization, it is in some senses the perfect expression of power.
Sleep, then, can reasonably be scripted as the major locale of
transgressive, counterhegemonic imagining and therefore of political
strategy.

The dismal failure of the various political programs of the New Lefta
revivified Marxism, feminism, antiracism, and the new social movementshave
many diverse and complicated roots. But the exclusion of sleep as a viable
political practice surely plays a profound and as yet poorly understood
part. With political struggles at such a low ebb, there is surely no better
time for a reconsideration of this vital but unexplored category of
quotidian existence as a means of remapping a more critical cultural
politics.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kraftl Peter" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:12 AM
Subject: CFP: RGS-IBG 2007; Geographies of sleep/iness


Call for Papers: RGS-IBG conference, London, 28th-31st August 2007

Title of session:

"Geographies of sleep/iness: sleepy geographies of culture, economy and
politics"

Sponsored by the Social & Cultural Geography Research Group (RGS-IBG)

Convenors:
Dr Peter Kraftl, The University of Northampton, UK
Dr John Horton, The University of Northampton, UK

Format:
Twenty-minute research papers plus discussant/short discussion

Call for papers:

Approximately one-third of human lives are spent thinking about sleep,
preparing for sleep, being asleep, and waking up from sleep. Hence,
one-third of human geographies are similarly committed to sleep,
sleeping and sleepiness. Yet social scientists - and especially Human
Geographers - have hitherto virtually ignored sleep. Whether in or as
practice, policy, discourse, ethics, somatic-embodied state or event,
the geographies surrounding sleep have rarely been subject to the kinds
of rigorous, critical investigation as what might be termed 'wakeful'
geographies (i.e. most 'human' geographies). It is the aim of this
session to problematise this imbalance, and to provide a space in which
very initial, exploratory discussion about the geographies of sleep may
be fostered. In short, this session will explore geographies of sleep,
and - in so doing - articulate ways in which sleep might be significant
for contemporary Human Geographical debates (about, for example,
domesticity, public space, travel, consumption, well-being, embodiment
and ethics).



In particular, this session aims to consider a number of questions that
may both complement and extend current geographical research. First,
(how) is sleep constitutive of, opposed to, and imbricated in, the
'waking' geographies that preoccupy the majority of geographical study?
Second, what is the role of sleep in producing and policing diverse (and
frequently inequitable) socio-spatial organisations, formations, and
rhythms of everyday life? Third, what are the implications of sleeping
and sleepiness (and the manifold attendant neuroscientific and
physiological endeavours, knowledges and languages) for geographical
research pertaining to human embodiment, consciousness and cognition?
Fourth, what are the spaces in which sleep occurs, and how might
critical interrogations of these spaces (e.g. bedrooms, hotels, schools,
institutions or transport termini) inform contemporary Human
Geographical research, theory and practice, both pertaining to these
particular spaces, and in general?



We encourage papers that present both finished and ongoing research
projects, as well as preliminary musings, that somehow interrogate the
multiple potential linkages between sleep and research/theorisation in
contemporary Human Geography and cognate disciplines. Owing to the very
nascent and exploratory nature of this area of research, we do not wish
to foreclose any potential paper themes and styles. However, as a guide,
topics might include but are not limited to the following.



* Inequalities, differences, relationships and affinities produced
via sleep.
* Cross-cultural comparisons of sleeping practices.
* The geographies of intimacy, withdrawal and vulnerability.
* Sleep/ing as a (socio-political) challenge to vitalism,
intention and cognition.
* Sleep as (im)material practice, and, the materials of sleep.
* Sleep, health, quality of life and (post-)medical geographies.
* The ethics, responsibilities and rights of/for sleep.
* Policy-making, politics and sleep.
* Economic geographies of sleep (hotels, commercial cultures,
sleep products, self-help guides).
* The organisation and disciplining of sleep (in homes, prisons,
schools, and the workplace), and the production of 'sleeping' subjects.
* Learning to sleep: babies', infants' and children's geographies
of sleep.
* Historical geographies of sleep, sleeping and sleepiness.
* Spaces and practices of rest and relaxation, or weariness and
sleeplessness.
* Dreaming, dozing, daydreaming.
* Rhythms of waking and sleeping, day and night.
* Sleeping and embodiment.
* Philosophical and literary encounters with sleep.
* Neuroscience and (non-)consciousness, and their geographical
ramifications.
* Methodological challenges faced in 'doing' geographies of sleep.
* The potential for multi-/cross-disciplinary sleep research.


Please submit titles and abstracts (no more than 250 words) to
[log in to unmask] by January 15th 2007.