Reconnecting mobility history: Towards 'histories of ...

13th Annual Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T²M), Caserta, September 14-‐17, 2015.

Reconnecting mobility history: Towards ‘histories of waiting’.

Robin Kellermann Technical University Berlin

Note: Please do not cite or circulate without permission robin.kellermann@tu-‐berlin.de

Abstract The recent developments of the ‘mobility turn’ have triggered growing awareness for mobility’s inherent conditions of waiting and stillness. However, despite its continuous prominence the rich complexities of transport-‐induced waiting times as systemically and personally meaningful phenomena are lacking explicit historical investigation. Therefore, this paper proposes the need to put the spatial, technological and experiential constellations of the waiting passenger on the agenda of mobility and transport history and provides an exploratory research program towards ‘histories of waiting’ based on the author’s current PhD project. If historians take the mobility turn seriously they should finally pay attention to the various kinetic conditions of travelling, including the seemingly mundane and trivial practices of mobility that – so far – seem to have been concealed by a generic modernist passion for speed, tempo, and acceleration. In writing ‘histories of waiting’, mobility and transport history may gain fruitful research fields for contributing to the mobility turn’s relational questions of mobility and immobility, and, not least, implies to overcome some of the discipline’s severe deficits. Author: Robin Kellermann graduated from cultural studies and historical urban studies (M.A.). He has investigated urban infrastructures in their iconic role as agents of political legitimation, urban self-‐ representation and inter-‐city competition. Currently he is PhD student researching on the history of transport-‐ induced waiting. He is also a junior researcher at the Technical University Berlin, working in a governmentally-‐ funded research project VERS, devoted to the acceptance of new transport technologies.

I. Introduction When Bruno Latour in 1993 prominently insisted that “We have never been modern”1, he remarkably challenged a prevailing dualistic distinction between the spheres of nature and culture, a principle he considered entirely constitutive for the (scientific) notion of modernity. Opposing the artificial division between ‘objects’ (nature, science) and ‘subjects’ (culture, society) and such seemingly evident distinctions between what is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ humanity, his anthropology of science postulated a different approach, aiming to overcome a simplifying and deceptive dualism of describing the world along the exclusiveness of two allegedly self-‐contained and clear-‐cut categories. Instead, the detachment of nature from culture, he argued, has never been existent in pre-‐modern eras. Nevertheless, modernists – personalized for the author in central figures such as philosophers Thomas Hobbes or Robert Boyle – subsequently initialized a fictional and far too generic narrative of 1

Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).


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modernity, which neglected the world’s ‘real’ interwoven condition.2 Consequently, the persistent attempts to classify the world in either categories of nature or culture would have led to an unrealistic self-‐representation of modernity; moreover, to its complete self-‐deception. Struggling with the principles of modernity, Latour’s relational materialism argued not only for the need to reconnect social and natural worlds, but also to acknowledge the unnoticed proliferation of hybrids which, in his view, would have emerged at the intersection of both these worlds, stemming from persistent interaction between people, things and concepts. For Latour, as for other critics of the ‘modern’3, the social and the material world are teaming up as relational associates rather than as distinct players, they overlap and mutually influence each other in assemblages4, socio-‐material hybridity, or interrelated networks of human and non-‐human actors. Latour’s integrative convictions might lead us to challenge our own disciplinary principles. Inspired by his provocative notions, mobility and transport history can gain at least two profound conceptual inputs. First, more generally, it encourages theoretical sensitivity for relational thinking, thus sustaining the mobility turn’s recent achievements of contextualizing mobilities in dialectic perspective. Second, it encourages disciplinary reflection upon experiential and organizational themes within mobility history that formerly have been treated dualistically instead of dialectically, and might – in Latour’s sense – have created ‘hybrids’ that proliferated on the backside of transport and mobility history’s key topics. In other words, what are mobility-‐relevant phenomena (or let’s say hybrids) that finally might need thematic reconsideration and historiographical reconnection to the field’s core research traditions as well as to wider debates of the mobility turn? Encouraged by Latour’s lateral thinking, this article targets a historiographical reconnection of seemingly opposing kinetic conditions with the consequence of understanding categories of movement inseparable from those of temporary stillness, thus advocating for a stronger historical consideration of flows and stasis as strictly relational constituents of mobilities. Transferring the mindset of relational materialism, this article then particularly advocates for bringing spatial, organizational and experiential dimensions of the waiting passenger on mobility history’s agenda. Considered as one of the field’s sleeping hybrids that proliferated unattended, engaging in the various ‘histories of waiting’ might, as I will show, hold the potential of revitalizing the field not only by exploring an uncharted blind spot, but also by innovatively contributing to the mobility turn with regard to a deeper cultural-‐historical understanding of the relationality of mobilities and immobilities. We have never been fast Waiting belongs to the most significant and yet overlooked experiences of everyday life. Among the many fields enforcing interim pausing, mobility and transportation probably rank among the most 2

Ibid., 15ff. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2004, o. 1992); David Harvey, “Space as a Key Word“ in: Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006); Doreen Massey, "Place and Identity" and “Space, Place and Gender” in: Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 4 Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, o. 1987). 3

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prominent generators of waiting times. As hardly any other field of action in the modern world, these domains permanently produce spatial, temporal and organizational constraints that – materialized in timetables, stops and stations – result in travelers being temporarily stilled in waiting or delay situations. Within the linear and ‘productivist’ time perception of Western societies, waiting times are primarily perceived as causing economic as well as psychological costs. In this vein, to wait most often is considered an expensive waste of time, and, from a psychological perspective, is supposed to be a source for affective responses such as stress, anger or uncertainty5. However, despite its omnipresence and crucial relevance for everyday life, paradoxically the ‘temporal region’ of waiting is lacking explicit historical examination and thus remained an unchallenged and trivialized aspect within mobility and transport history. Concealed by an inflationary attention for movements and masked by a ‘modernist’ passion for concepts of high-‐speed and tempo, the experience of waiting at stations, stops or airport departure lounges – though accounting for a key mobility practice – has yet been disregarded. Said so, technological, organizational and spatial “negotiations” of hosting the temporary immobile subject as well as perceptual considerations or sense-‐making processes of waiting passengers – especially in the state of ‘pre-‐process’ waiting at platforms, bus stops or departure gates – are still missing historical and diachronic examination6. Instead, starting from early 1990s, psychology, marketing, management and health studies formed the spearhead of analyzing affective responses of customers and patients in the state of being temporarily paused. Nevertheless, temporary stillness, even though disliked, separated and concealed in mobility and transport history, has always been and will remain “mobility’s twin”7. In this sense, resonating Latour’s rhetoric, we can make a similar point by arguing provocatively that we have never been fast, thus addressing waiting as a fundamental element and inseparable constituent of mobilities; moreover, as a fundamental research field for the study of mobilities and transport history. In this sense, waiting might be for transport history what Latour considered typical for a socio-‐material hybrid; an omnipresent, implicitly operating, but at the same time (academically) unnoticed or overlooked formation, flourishing innocently outside dominating fields of vision. Addressing this deficit for the study of mobilities, David Bissell was as one of the first noticing the paradox of omnipresence and lacking academic devotion: “If the experience of waiting is therefore such a common everyday prosaic experience, particularly with regard to the travel experience, it is surprising that it has not received any form of specific sustained attention.“8 Also Phillip Vannini criticized the astonishing absence of waiting considerations within the study of mobilities. With respect to waiting formations he noted, “despite their prominence in everyday life, however, lineups remain of peripheral concern to mobility scholars.“9 While Bissell and Vannini’s 5

Edgar Elias Osuna, “The Psychological Cost of Waiting“, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 29, no. 1 (March 1985): 82-‐105; Shirley Taylor, “Waiting for Service: The Relationship Between Delays and Evaluations of Service”, Journal of Marketing, 58, no. 2 (April 1994): 56-‐69. 6 Andrey Vozyanov, “Approaches to Waiting in Mobility Studies: Utilization, Conceptualization, Historicizing“, 2 Mobility in History (T M Yearbook 2014), vol. 5, eds. Peter Norton, Gijs Mom, Tomás Errázuriz and Kyle Shelton (Oxford, Berghahn Journals, 2014), 64-‐73. 7 Susan Hanson, “Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability“, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 17, no. 1 (2010): 5-‐23, p. 6. 8 David Bissell, “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities”, Mobilities 2, no. 2 (2007): 277-‐298 (quotation: p. 283). 9 Phillip Vannini, “Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups“, Mobilities 6, no. 2 (2011), 273-‐299 (quotation: p. 274). Page | 3


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findings may be representative for the mobilities, also other disciplines come to a similar analysis. With respect to lacking explicit treatments of waiting in a world of acceleration, Harold Schweizer observed the general status of waiting as “a temporal region hardly mapped and badly documented.“10 In short, waiting has for the longest time been a ‘stepchild of mobility’, possibly in the light of its ordinariness and ubiquitous negative connotation. Why considering waiting? If we take the mobility turn seriously we do not only have to install a relational appreciation of mobilities’ various kinetic conditions but we also need to pay attention to the seemingly mundane and trivial practices of travelling that – so far – have been concealed by a generic modernist passion for speed, tempo, and acceleration. In short, mobility history may gain new fruitful fields of enquiry by finally recognizing mobility practices beyond the more obvious conditions of movement, such as waiting and stillness. More drastically, the proposed shift from transport to mobility history11 might not be fulfilled before acknowledging these previously overlooked mobility practices and recognizing the travellers’ various perceptual realms. If mobility history is not open to include such seemingly trivial topics (which they are not), there is good reason to fear that the field will fall back behind other disciplines that are contributing to the mobility turn with innovative subjects, methodologies and theoretical concepts. Aware of these dangers, Gijs Mom just recently insisted on transport and mobility history’s need for stronger considerations of subversive and hidden histories including ‘mobility modes’ absent from economic history. “After a decade of mobility history”, he observed, “the field clearly needs some new impulses. It is to be hoped that such impulses come from combining history and theory.”12 Therefore, the encouragement of this paper to engage in ‘histories of waiting’ exactly aims to provide such a new impulse. Scrutinizing the symbolic and material dimensions of an amazingly overlooked phenomenon, transport-‐induced waiting might serve as a paradigmatic field of investigation, which is able to verify Divall’s and Revill’s eligible demands for “emphasizing the importance of understanding mobility-‐subjects, mobility-‐objects and mobility-‐scapes“13. ‘Histories of waiting’ entail the potential to explore the historical evolution of individuals, physical infrastructures and perceptions as well as sense-‐making processes on the pretended ‘backside’ of transport. Additionally, engaging in the complexities and ambiguities of the waiting passenger might adequately match many of Gijs Mom’s requests for achieving a renewed mobility history, which is transmodal, transnational and culturally and interdisciplinary informed. Waiting ‘by nature’ is transmodal and transnational. Making sense of this ephemeral phenomenon particularly demands for transmodality, comparative approaches (modes, times, cultures) and interdisciplinary expertise 10

Harold Schweizer, On Waiting (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p.1. Gijs Mom, “What Kind of Transport History Did We Get? Half a Century of JTH and the Future of the Field“, Journal of Transport History 24, no. 2 (September 2003): 121-‐138. 12 2 Gijs Mom, “The Crisis of Transport History: A Critique, and a Vista”, Mobility in History (T M Yearbook 2015), vol. 6, eds. Kyle Shelton, Gijs Mom, Dhan Zunino Singh and Christiane Katz (Oxford, Berghahn Journals, 2015), 7-‐19 (quotation: p. 19). 13 Colin Divall and George Revill, “Cultures of transport: representation, practice and technology“, https://www.york.ac.uk/media/workingwiththeuniversity/documents/cpd/sectorscourses/Cultures.pdf (retrieved 25 July 2015), quotation: p. 14. Revised version of the essay originally published in Journal of Transport History 26, no. 1 (March 2005): 99-‐ 111. 11

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(e.g. architecture, transport planning, psychology). It is compulsory transmodal because comparative approaches between transport modes might be the only thinkable ways of illustrating the phenomenon’s capillary differences. It is compulsory transnational because the management of the waiting passenger – beginning with mass transportation in the mid-‐19th century – has never seen comparable historical pre-‐experiences and was thus organized differently according to national rules and cultural values of time. Lastly, a history of waiting must be compulsory interdisciplinary because the ‘temporal niche’ of waiting can only be understood properly by taking into account economic, organizational as well as psychological perspectives. In this sense, the research object’s specific requirements may account for solving many of the field’s self-‐inflicted constraints. Finally, historiographical considerations of waiting might also match John Armstrong’s suggestion for a more integrated conception of transport history considering “transport as a whole”14. In this vein, focusing on markedly transmodal and ubiquitous transport phenomena might diminish the temptation of favoring certain transport modes for the price of failing to provide the holistic picture. Against this background, the paper proposes the need to put the relational, material as well the experiential and symbolic constellations of the waiting passenger on the agenda of mobility history and provides an exploratory research program for problematizing waiting in mobility history based on the author’s current PhD project. However, before presenting such a research program, it serves helpful to review the latest research efforts regarding stillness and pausing within the broader interdisciplinary activities fueled through the mobility turn. As to be shown, the recent promising efforts to understand mobilities as i) strictly relational, and ii) waiting as a complex bodily experience highlight in how far the mobility turn has provided an ideal breeding ground for the investigation of formerly underrepresented constellations of the mobility experience, paving the way for historicizing them. II. Waiting in mobilities: A state-‐of-‐the-‐art The past decade saw an increasingly fruitful academic atmosphere facilitating the consideration of formerly forgotten aspects of mobility, comprising both its relationalities and its experiential components. Today, the new ways of theorizing mobilities under the ‘new mobilities paradigm’15 involve research “on the combined movements of people, objects and information in all their complex relational dynamics”, and include increasing attention to “the representations, ideologies, and meanings attached to both movement and stillness”16. The following selective review of works by mobilities scholars will provide an outline for contextualizing the historical condition of waiting in the framework of mobilities’ relational and experiential affairs. Engaging in ‘histories of waiting’ implies for mobility historians to both make use of theoretical concepts as well as to be conducive to the same. Relationalities 14

John Armstrong, “Transport history, 1945-‐95: The rise of a topic to maturity“, Journal of Transport History 19, no. 2 (September 1998): 103-‐121. 15 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning A 38, no. 2 (2006): 1-‐ 22. 16 Mimi Sheller, “The new mobilities paradigm for a live sociology”, Current Sociology Review 62, no. 6 (May 2014): 789-‐811 (quotation: p. 789). Page | 5


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With the help of the ‘mobility/mooring’ dialectic, John Urry, as one of the mobility turn’s main patrons, was among the first to powerfully demonstrate the relationality between mobilities. Borrowing the nautical term of the mooring, he made metaphorically illustrative that contemporary societies’ ubiquitous fluidity is only enabled by extensive systems of immobilities (moorings). Against circulating notions of a totally unsettled “liquid modernity”17, Urry argued that any kind of motion depends upon fixities and the organizational need of pre-‐ordering passengers, resulting in both spatial and, as I would add, temporal moorings. In short, Urry understands contemporary mobility dynamics being determined by a landscape of “material worlds that involve new and distinct moorings that enable, produce and presuppose extensive new mobilities.“18 Such moorings are materialized in airports, bus shelters, borders, territories, or personalized in security staff and a multitude of facilitating technologies. Moreover, they are also ‘temporalized’ in the passengers’ need to be momentarily stilled for organizational purposes. In this context, he notes that mobilities may always involve

“temporary moments of rest of a machine and/or its users and/or its messages, such as at a bus-‐stop, voice mailbox, passport control, railways station or web site. The machine or its object or user waits in preparation for its next mobile phase.”19

Urry liquidated the dichotomy of movement and stasis towards their interrelatedness and inherent dependence; moreover, moorings always have to be considered as powerful and important as mobilities. With the help of the convincing mooring metaphor, Urry theorized temporary moments of stillness as (valuable) functions of speed and movement. In this respect, movement and spatial fixities are always co-‐evolving. Expressed by the relational axiom, Urry illuminated the inseparable condition of the passenger in the state of waiting and implicitly paved the way to make the temporal phenomenon of waiting a possible key interest of mobilities research. Building upon Urry’s dialectic, the geographer Peter Adey has to be mentioned as another important contributor for theorizing the mobility/immobility relation. Confirming Urry’s findings, he declared, “things must stop in order to prepare for later movement“20, thus echoing the condition of temporary stillness as an inevitable component of mobilities. However, Adey warned that mobility can only be analytically useful when focusing “on the contingent relations between movements”21 and on the power structures that are enacted in different ways. In this vein, Adey declared that there is nothing like absolute immobility but only relative immobilities resulting from relational differences in speed, scale or direction:

17

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p.138. 19 Ibid., 125. 20 Peter Adey, “If Mobility is Everything Then it is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities“, Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 75-‐94 (quotation: p. 89). 21 Ibid., 75. 18

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“We need to consider mobilities in differential and relational ways. By this I mean that there is never any immobility, but only mobilities which we mistake for immobility, what could be called relative immobilities.”22

As a consequence of such strictly relational considerations, he assumed that academics would not any longer elaborate on “fixed forms” but instead would begin “to look at the relations between materiality and force”23. Moreover, he urged not to trivialize the analytical power of such relational thinking: “If we are to take the ‘mobility turn’ seriously, academic scholarship should not fail to realise the relations and differences between movements.“24 Though Adey was not explicitly focusing on the deeper complexities of the waiting passenger, his work increased the awareness for the relational character of movement by explaining moments where mobility appears temporarily abated in relative terms. By admitting to kinetically different scales and conditions of mobility, Adey can be claimed to have contributed to opening the contextual prospect to overcome prevailing kinetic hierarchies, thus shedding light on constellations other than the subject ‘on the move’. Proving the inspirational impact of his thoughts, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller extended Adey’s relational terms by suggesting that there actually is nothing like ‘total’ stillness. “Within this relative immobility”, they state in their edited collection Stillness in a Mobile World, “things are not still at all. Apparently-‐still phenomena are always already in a state of ontogenic transformation.”25 To mention a third influential thinker on the relational character of mobilities, the well-‐known geographer Tim Cresswell provided another insightful frame for contextualizing historical considerations of the waiting passenger. By focusing on the production of mobilities within specific social, cultural and geographical contexts, Cresswell’s approach aimed at gaining a “more nuanced understanding of mobility as a contested concept and practice rather than as a metaphor for new ways of thinking and being.”26 With the help of this concept, mobility “is thus seen in relation to both forms of relative immobility (…) and other connected but different forms of mobility.”27 The ‘mobility production approach’ allows a more sensitive consideration of different mobilities of different social groups, including “the role of power in the production of mobilities and the role of mobilities in constitution of power”28. In short, concentrating on the production of mobilities “focuses attention on the ways in which mobility is produced and the contexts within which diverse forms of mobility come to be.”29 In that sense, mobilities of some can induce immobility of others; moreover, waiting can be conceptualized also as a means of power with the consequence of temporal inequalities. 22

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 78. 24 Ibid., 91. 25 David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, “Stillness unbound“, in Stillness in a Mobile World, eds. David Bissell and Gillian Fuller (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011): 1-‐17 (quotation: p. 4.). 26 Tim Cresswell, “’You cannot shake that shimmie here': producing mobility on the dancefloor“, Cultural Geographies 13, no. 1 (January 2006): 55-‐77 (quotation: p. 56). 27 Ibid. 28 Tim Cresswell, “Mobilities II: Still”, Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 5 (October 2012): 645–653 (quotation: p. 650). 29 Tim Cresswell, “’You cannot shake that shimmie here'”, 57. 23

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Accordingly, the mobilities of refugees are highly contrasted by those of tourists or business people, including fundamental differences in avoiding to, or, being enforced to wait. Formations and bodily experiences of the wait In addition to the more abstract concepts on the relational character of mobility and immobility, human geographer David Bissell transferred the relational notion of mobilities to a more concrete, subjective and bodily sphere by prominently arguing for a relationality of activity and inactivity while waiting. Instead of perceiving waiting as an inactive and meaningless entity, he insisted on an understanding of waiting as a relational function in itself and as a rich duration, which, because of its seemingly ordinariness, would have become invisible for contemporary societies. Against the background of a prevailing “productivist rendering of (im)mobilities” and a “primacy of the mobile as the more desirable relation to the world”30 there would be almost no alternative examinations of waiting with the consequence of neglecting the various and indeed meaningful modalities of what it means to wait. Opposing a trivializing simplification of the waiting experience, he urged to consider the various forms of impatient and patient, active or acquiescent waiting, which might be “mediated by the degree of certainty or uncertainty about the length of the wait.”31 In this sense, waiting would stand for far more than just a passive form of being-‐in-‐the-‐world. Instead, new conceptualizations of waiting should identify it as a corporeal phenomenon and a transient experience. Therefore, theorizing the relationalities of mobility and immobility may not be limited to the point of speed differentials but should also involve the more subjective levels of action and inactivity: “Rather than using velocity as a differentiator for such mobile/immobile relations (…) the differential embodiment of action/inactivity as a problematic may serve as a more useful way to think through the corporeal experience of what it is to experience these ‘mobile’ spaces.”32 Besides Bissell, the ethnographer Phillip Vannini has to be mentioned as another mobility scholar bringing the issue of waiting and queuing at a more explicit and inspirational level. His mobile ethnography of Canadian small island ferry lineups in British Columbia shed light on the transitory places of everyday life, demonstrating lineups as “complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility.”33 Like Bissell, Vannini aimed to uncover the underlying complexities of the waiting passenger in its special condition of being neither sedentarist nor nomadic. Against denunciating notions of waiting as a mundane and trivial being-‐in-‐the-‐world, and, alike Bissell, opposing against privileging the mobile rather than the relatively immobile subject, he declared “lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities.”34 Instead, waiting, either at lineups or in other spatial formations, is ephemeral; moreover, is “neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private”35. With extensive fieldwork, Vannini showed how the necessity to wait at ferry terminals forms networks and communities of waiting together in line. He not only contributed to de-‐trivializing the condition of

30

Bissell, “Animating Suspension”, 278. Ibid. 290. 32 Ibid. 294. 33 Vannini, “Mind the Gap”, 273. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 275. 31

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waiting as the “Achilles heel of modernity”36, but beyond that illuminated important methodological aspects (and constraints) of how to utilize the waiting constellations in mobilities research. With a strong focus on formations and structures of waiting constellations in mobility contexts, social semiotician Gillian Fuller investigated queues as social systems and as extensive forms of control. Queues, she argued, are crystallizations of the power of transport authorities, governments or planners, or in more abstract terms, “in a world of speed, they configure time as space”37. From a socio-‐psychological perspective, Fuller believed queues to form “public infrastructures that are experienced privately”38. However, despite this seemingly impersonal peculiarity, queues would respond to unseen commands “initiated by the viscerally felt interactions of the bodies themselves.”39 Expressed by her “Queue Project”, she demonstrated that queues act as key formations in understanding the relationality between mobilities but also in decoding the interplay of time and space in the mobility context. Although in everyday life we might seek to avoid queues at any given time, Fuller assumed the information age and its increasing mobility levels to trigger even more ubiquitous queuing in both virtual and physical formations: „Since the increase of both packeting technologies [e.g. the Internet] and global mobility at all scales, the queue increasingly permeates every modality.“40

Beyond those mentioned, there are other scholars working in the domain of mobilities studies providing inspirational approaches for historical examinations of transport-‐induced waiting. However, as shown by this compressed selection, we are witnessing a growing amount of promising inputs that all contribute i) to dismantling mobilities in their relational components, and contribute ii) to revealing the actual relevance of everyday life’s waiting formations regarding their underlying social, political and organizational complexities. Ironically, it seems the recent celebration of the mobile has led us to a long forgotten element of mobility. In this vein, Cresswell noted affirmatively, “if nothing else, the 'mobilities' approach brings together a diverse array of forms of movement across scales ranging from the body (or, indeed parts of the body) to the globe. These substantive areas of research would have been formerly held apart by disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries that mitigated against a more holistic understanding of mobilities.“41 Passengers in the state of waiting might definitively form such a substantive area of research, not least because there is growing consensus among mobilities scholars that “there will always be points of friction and obduracy in the networked worlds of mobilities where, for a while at least, stillness dominates“42. Accordingly, Cresswell claims that “those of us interested in mobility include an awareness of stillness as part of our inquiry.“43 However, as mentioned above, thematic awareness of stillness and waiting is not (yet) pronounced in mobility history. While geography, sociology and ethnography provide the most encouraging 36

Bissell, “Animating Suspension”, 277 Gillian Fuller, “The queue project”, The Semiotic Review of Books 16, no. 3 (2007): 1-‐5 (quotation: p. 3). 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Ibid., 1. 40 Ibid. 5. 41 Tim Cresswell, “Towards a politics of mobility“, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17-‐31 (quotation: p. 18). 42 Tim Cresswell, “Mobilities II: Still”, 651. 43 Ibid., 648. 37

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works for including mobility also as slowed or stilled, mobility history has missed to immerse itself in the different constellations of waiting as a mobility-‐relevant phenomenon, neither exploiting the potential of intermodal comparisons nor historical evolutions or perceptual transformations. In order to change this situation and to stimulate a historical debate on the subject, the following section will sketch a first research program – based on the authors on-‐going PhD project – designated to compose various ‘histories of waiting’ which are informed of the mobility turn and the cultural turn alike. Sharing the recent critiques about the unsatisfactory developments in the field, this mission may include the opportunity of overcoming mobility history’s prevailing bias of monomodal focus, national orientation, lack of interdisciplinary cooperation, and a lack of theorization.

Figure 1 -‐ Waiting in Berlin 1928 (Source: German Federal archive)

Figure 2 -‐ Waiting in Berlin 2015 (Source: own image)

III. Histories of waiting: proposal for an exploratory research program Though running the risk of redundancy, we need to consider waiting as congenital to movement. Despite its continuous prominence from the very beginning of mass transportation, the rich complexities of transport-‐induced waiting times as systemically and personally meaningful (and problematic) phenomena are lacking explicit historical investigation. Deriving from this paradox, an exploratory research program should follow the principal question if and in how far waiting situations in transport were underlying historical transformations, regarding both its physical environments as well as its cultural perceptions and social practices. More precisely, such a research program could examine three interrelated inquiries, either with a theoretical, organizational, or experiential/perceptual focus. Theorizing waiting First, it is essential to understand how to contextualize transport-‐induced waiting in the wider framework of modernization/acceleration processes44 and in due consideration of theoretical offers provided in the interdisciplinary repertoire of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’. Just recently, Tim 44

E.g. Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005); Richard Sennett, Flesh and stone: The body and the city in Western civilization (New York: Norton & Company, 1996); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time & Space (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press 2003, o. 1983). Page | 10


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Cresswell urged mobility scholars to not forget to think “about forms of stillness as part of the theorization of movement.“45 Therefore, the ‘theorizing waiting’ research path seeks to identify transport-‐induced waiting (in all its various appearances as regular ‘pre-‐process’ waiting, ‘in-‐process’ waiting, delay or ‘post-‐process’ waiting) within mobilities’ relational interplay and aims to define waiting as a ‘time niche’ historically inseparable from movement. Moreover, what are the systemic origins and factors creating transport-‐induced waiting times? Therefore, introducing the term systemic waiting may be supportive i) of conceptualizing waiting times as an inevitable organizational, yet psychologically detested, precondition for the provision of modern mass transportation, and ii) of re-‐qualifying transport-‐induced waiting experiences beginning in the mid-‐ 19th century in distinction from most of pre-‐modern waiting experiences. Systemic waiting will also serve as a helpful expression to uncover the role of transportation systems in creating new (and unintended) ‘temporal niches’ induced by centrality of clock time and timetables. Moreover, such a term may support theoretical reflection about the emergence of mid-‐19th century time-‐use patterns; furthermore, it may facilitate cultural-‐historical contemplations on the subjective tangibility of modern clock time regimes. Organizing waiting With reference to early railway stations, architectural historian Carroll Meeks noted, “neither of the two preceding modes of transportation – the canal and the century-‐ old turnpike system – had developed special buildings for the use of passengers.“46 Though drawing upon functional and constructional experiences from the stagecoach system, railway stations and the management of an ever-‐increasing amount of passengers afforded new organizational solutions. Against this background, a second principal research interest may center on the question how architects, engineers and transport operators have handled the waiting passenger as an organizational ‘problem’. How waiting was organized in different transport systems and which kind of spatial, technical, material, and economic arrangements mediated the wait? Therefore, structural developments of waiting rooms, shelters or airport departure lounges – including its designs and interiors – are believed to expose profound sources for retracing the shifting conceptions of waiting from planners’ and transport authorities’ perspectives. Here, intermodal comparisons include the potential of revealing similarities and differences, e.g. illuminating similar problems and trajectories of handling passengers at 19th century railway stations compared to today’s airports. This branch of research will touch upon approaches and methodologies of architectural history, history of transport organization and history of technology. In short, the ‘organizing waiting’ research path seeks to uncover spaces, technologies, principles and economies of waiting. Practicing waiting A third key research question needs to center on describing passengers’ social practices and cultural perceptions, or, in other words, describing how waiting has been “performed” individually and collectively in waiting environments? With regard to the early class structure of waiting rooms, it is needful to analyze class-‐specific waiting routines between self-‐representation and boredom, as well 45

Tim Cresswell, “Mobilities II Still“, 645. Carol L.V. Meeks, The Railroad Station: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), quotation: p. 27.

46

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as to highlight the 19th century societal requirements to prevent ‘classless’ waiting. This research path may focus on an investigation of the symbolic, socio-‐cultural, experiential and the communicative dimensions of waiting in due consideration of the phenomenon’s (implicit) means for structuring power relations, social order, class and gender. In other words, how waiting has become a means of understanding inequalities arising in mobilities? Moreover, ‘performing’ waiting may reveal the economic exploitation (or value) in service systems such as restaurants, shops and libraries that were evolving around the experiential novelty to be systemically stilled in dedicated environments. The three proposed research questions cover only a thin outline of many possible research paths growing from the phenomenon’s ubiquity in the transport realm. Generally, Divall and Revill remind us that as historians rather than discarding the waiting experience as a trivial and mundane mobility practice, mobility historians “can help by looking closely at how the means by which mobilities were produced and consumed in the past — the organizations, modes of governance, infrastructures, vehicles and other artefacts which all together constitute transport systems — have shaped present-‐day expectations and practices. In so doing, we should be forced to re-‐examine the ways in which transport systems and their mobilities were both shaped by the exercise of social power (class, gender, etc) and have in turn acted back upon it.“47

Thus, transport and mobility historians should historians should be encouraged to explore new grounds by the fact that within the mobility turn there is great demand for historical contributions. According to Tim Cresswell “we cannot understand new mobilities, then, without understanding old mobilities. Thinking of mobilities in terms of constellations of movements, representations, and practices helps us avoid historical amnesia when thinking about and with mobility.“48 Against this background, they should become receptive for taking into account temporal experiences beyond those linked to traverse space through exploring the various histories of and histories in waiting. Summing up, I assume mobility history to be a predestinated field to uncover, describe, and systemize the material and cultural reflections of transport-‐induced waiting. These reflections can be considered evidences of a complex being-‐in-‐the-‐world; moreover, can be considered fragments of a complex socio-‐technical co-‐evolution between organizational and travellers’ needs, mediated by technologies and shifting perceptions of time use. Therefore, methodologically, histories of waiting should describe and interpret the spatial, social and cultural transformations of waiting regarding both its respective environments and its associated practices. At its best, this shall happen by intermodal (train stations, tram and bus stops, airports), transnational and diachronic analysis. Either based on a paradigmatic in-‐depth analysis of a single case or based on comparative approaches, since relevant evidence about waiting hides in the plurality of transport-‐related contexts, ‘histories of waiting’ will however require analysis and interpretation of a wide range of sources reaching from train station floor plans to photographs, from political directives to restaurant menus, from (grey) literature sources to delay statistics or books of complaints. Mobility historians will face the phenomenon’s challenging ephemeral characteristic, maybe even its elusiveness. In order to narrow these constraints, the investigational focus should be defined 47

Colin Divall and George Revill, “Cultures of transport”, 100. Tim Cresswell, “Towards a politics of mobility“, 29.

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by either concentrating on ‘pre-‐process’, ‘in-‐process’ or ‘post-‐process’ waiting situations49. Focusing on ‘pre-‐process’ waiting might, for instance, entail an in-‐depth investigation of waiting constellations occurring before boarding a transport facility, thus localizing the phenomenon’s physical and cultural reflections at stations, platforms or airport departure lounges. On the other hand, ‘in-‐process’ waiting would entail the psychologically distinct investigation of waiting on a train, an airplane or in a car. ‘Post-‐process’ waiting would entail analyzing waiting situations after having received the service, e.g. waiting situations occurring at claiming baggage after the flight. Changing perspectives A historiography of waiting can only succeed by internalizing the cultural turn both in terms of broader selection of sources and approaches, and, more generally, by striving for an attentive perspective of how people ‘made sense’ of an unavoidable temporal phenomenon. More precisely, such a perspective entails two changes. First, it requires changing perspective from the supply side of transport to the user side and the cultural contextualization of everyday life mobility practices. Second, it requires enlarging perspectives from transport modes towards bodily modes of being-‐in-‐ the-‐world. Taking these perspectives will be necessary not only due to a lack of all-‐embracing sources, but, as Hans-‐Liudger Dienel emphasized, also due to the research object’s inherent complexities. Omnipresent phenomena of the transport world and its individual or societal perception (such as waiting) request cultural-‐historic explanations; moreover, such phenomena utterly demand for cultural sciences orientation. 50 Hence, historicizing waiting requires borrowing theoretical and empirical approaches from a wide range of disciplines but also renders the possibility to contribute to contemporary questions brought up by the mobility turn. In the wake of this turn, Tim Cresswell notes, “stillness in work informed by the mobilities turn, however, is not suggesting a return to a discipline based on boundedness and rootedness but rather to an alertness to how stillness is thoroughly incorporated into the practices of moving.“51 Where to go? Histories of waiting should pursue the general goal to uncover historical transformations of one of modernity’s most complex and controversial temporal phenomena. These could comprise a description of spatial and experiential typologies, perceptional oscillations and comparative statements regarding cultural and social differences of waiting. More precisely, how waiting has been organized in different transport contexts? Are there physical and perceptual differences and similarities in, for instance, waiting for a bus or an airplane? Did passengers wait differently in the 1920s compared to 2010 and how -‐ with respect to airports -‐ waiting has been economically exploited (or even produced)? Assuming an “evolution of impatience” rather than waiting’s constant appraisal, passages of waiting from the mid-‐19th century should highlight differing perceptional cycles 49 Laurette Dubé, Bernd H. Schmitt and France Leclerc, “Consumers' Affective Response to Delays at Different Phases of a Service Delivery”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 21, no. 10, (1991): 810-‐820; Margareta Friman, “Affective dimensions of the waiting experience“, Transportation Research F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour 13, no. 3 (May 2010): 197-‐205. 50 Hans-‐Liudger Dienel, ”Verkehrsgeschichte auf neuen Wegen”, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 48, no. 1 (June 2007): 19-‐37. 51 Tim Cresswell, ”Mobilities II Still“, 648.

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and bodily strategies performed while being enforced to wait. In this vein, analyses of waiting can serve as an indicator or ‘seismograph’ of shifting time perceptions and social orders. Writing ‘histories of waiting’ might probably seek to compose a cultural history of temporal immobility and facilitates a re-‐interpretation of modernity through the lens of an era’s unintended and yet massively induced temporal congestion, identified by Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren as the ‘backyards of modernity’52.

Figure 2 -‐ Draft research program for a 'historiography of waiting'

IV. Conclusion Opposing the modern primacy to privilege speed over stasis, this paper advocated for the necessity of reviewing prevailing research foci within mobility history. Reflecting on the evident absence of studying mobility practices of temporal immobility, this paper advocated for stronger historical considerations of supposedly mundane and trivial mobility constituents such as waiting and stillness. Criticizing the field’s prevailing tunnel vision of global acceleration, transport technologies and the mobile subject, examinations of the relatively immobile waiting passenger as a historically rich research subject might be overdue for two reasons. First, in the light of the mobility turn’s strictly relational character which acknowledges speed inseparable from waiting. Second, it is overdue because exploring the complexities and ambiguities of waiting bears the strategic potential of finally rejuvenating mobility history through overcoming its prevailing thematic and sensorial constraints. Owing to the waiting phenomenon’s specific ephemeral and ubiquitous nature, historical analyses of systemic and perceptual waiting trajectories will simply require transmodal, interdisciplinary and transnational approaches, thus the phenomenon’s idiosyncrasy may facilitate (or enforce) the recently requested inspirational “look over the fence into adjacent subfields”53. In order to reconnect mobility history to the cultural and the mobility turn, this paper therefore proposed a rough exploratory research program on ‘histories of waiting’. Building upon encouraging 52

Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren, The Secret World of Doing Nothing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 53 Mom, “The Crisis of Transport History“, 8. Page | 14


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insights of the latter, this research program seeks to stimulate a stronger debate within the field of mobility and transport history for supposedly mundane mobility practices. More generally, it seeks to uncover historical transformations of one of modernity’s most complex and controversial (and yet hidden) temporal phenomena, aiming to draw spatial and experiential typologies, perceptional oscillations and comparative statements regarding cultural and social similarities and inequalities of waiting. In order to prevent or relativize notions of exaggerated novelty subsumed in the cherished dogma of the “new mobility paradigm”, the mobility turn calls for a strong need to trace back transforming histories and geographies of transport-‐related environments and practices. Mobility historians engaging in ‘histories of waiting’ are assumed valuable contributors to this task. Their job is to shed light on continuities and breaks, the roots or the persistence of relational mobilities; moreover, to “looking closely at how the means by which mobilities were produced and consumed in the past – the organisations, modes of governance, infrastructures, vehicles and other artefacts which constitute transport systems – have shaped present-‐day expectations and practices.”54 In this respect, waiting is definitively one of the missing jigsaw pieces in the puzzle for achieving a more holistically understanding of mobilities. Thus, addressing the significance of accommodating waiting – the ‘stepchild of mobility’ – in the wider debates of mobilities and mobility history, mobility historians, aware of the cultural and mobility turn, should be tempted to modify Bruno Latour’s provocative slogan We have never been modern into a waiting-‐sensitive exclamation of We have never been fast.

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Collin Divall and George Revill, “Cultures of transport“, 100. Page | 15