Book review: Jeff Ferrell,Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

In Population 436, the 2006 mystery-horror film starring Fred Durst (best known as the vocalist for Limp Bizkit), residents of the remote and seemingly idyllic village of Rockwell Falls, North Dakota, attach mystical importance to the number 436, willing to take extreme measures to keep the population at exactly that figure, including executing “surplus” residents. Those who express a desire to leave or who attempt to do so are treated for the “fever” by the town doctor, who administers electroshock therapy or performs a frontal lobotomy.

In many respects, the film (or at least its theme about the desirability of fixity) represents the antithesis of Ferrell’s book. Whereas most residents of Rockwell Falls see no reason to leave their town (and cannot do so if they try), many of the characters and individuals described by Ferrell embrace or actually seek out dislocation and disorientation.

Ferrell begins, in Chapter 1, “Drift Dialectics”, by outlining his goals for his book: to “sketch at least something of drift’s long history, while also situating contemporary drift within the particular economic, social, and cultural dynamics of the present day”; to demonstrate that “drift is today a global phenomenon—perhaps even the defining trajectory of a globalized world”; and to probe “the contested politics of drift—both the ways in which legal and political authorities work to control drift and drifters and the ways in which drifters and those who embrace drift create their own slippery strategies of resistance” (p. 3). Ferrell acknowledges, however, the challenges of maintaining a broad, global perspective on drift, and clarifies that his interest lies with the North American hobo (“the quintessential American drifter” (p. 74)) and “the hobo’s bastard descendent, the train-hopping gutter punk” (p. 3). It is an important elucidation, for it absolves him somewhat of a discussion of “digital drift”, as explored by Goldsmith and Brewer (2015), or what we might call “elite drift”, suggested by Ong’s (1999) discussion of “flexible citizenship”.

From here, Ferrell offers “four dialectics of drift” (p. 10)—dialectical pairings that serve as themes throughout the book: (1) drift then and again (drift is both an historical thread and a contemporary phenomenon); (2) drift as dependency and autonomy (drifters lack agency/drifters possess radical self-determination); (3) drift together, drift apart (some drifters are “willing escapees from the confines of conventional community”, while others “come together but mostly in occasional communities—or perhaps more to the point, communities of occasion” (pp. 17, 18)); and (4) drift as hope and despair (the dislocations of drift are brought about by economic ruin and political conflict at the same time that the eschewal of material comfort ignites possibility and promotes radical self-reliance). The presentation of these dynamic dialectics is as close as Ferrell comes to offering a roadmap (or “vague compass direction” (p. 140)) for how the book will unfold. If this is unsettling, well, it is supposed to be, for how better to encapsulate the excitement, happenstance and uncertainties of drift than to ask (or require) the reader to trust the author and/as guide.

Ferrell’s book is divided into three parts—Illicit Mobility, American Drift, and Uncertain Knowledge—each containing three chapters. In many respects, though, the pagination is suggestive, rather than prescriptive: one could treat Drift as Barthes in S/Z (1974) moves through Balzac’s novella Sarrasine: in other words, it can be read out of order. (Readers can literally drift between chapters and parts.) That said, Ferrell offers both a “sociology of drift” (p. 27), which situates drift in the theoretical tradition of Émile Durkheim, Robert Merton, and, most importantly, Gresham Sykes and David Matza, and “a political and spatial economy of drift” (p. 33), which resonates with Ferrell’s earlier writing on the policing and control of urban space.

Towards the end of the first part of the book, Ferrell explores the notion of “open public space as essential to a democratic society” (p. 52). Ferrell is curiously abstemious with respect to references to his prior work, despite the discussions of Critical Mass, Food Not Bombs, Reclaim the Streets, and other collectivities or forms of do-it-yourself (DIY) activism. In many respects, it seems as if Ferrell, having found the central motif of his life’s work—drift—wishes to relinquish it or at least delay gratification so as to more graciously invite or better involve the reader. And given that the book serves as more of a mournful meditation on the contradictions, ironies, tragedies, and vicissitudes of contemporary urban life than an indictment of the marriage of economic inequality and ecological decay that accompanies and defines it, this is no small task. Indeed, it is as if Ferrell has repurposed the microphone or bullhorn or soapbox to which he is entitled to build a more modest, but capacious, stage for more actors; Ferrell’s nuanced book is a far cry from Roger Matthews’ brilliant, but egotistical manifesto, Realist Criminology (2014).

The second part of Drift commences with Chapter 4, “Hobo History”—a chapter true to its name and as “episodic and uneven” as advertised (p. 73). Ferrell is an exponentially better ethnographer and storyteller than historian, and the book really accelerates in Chapter 5, “Catching Out”, where we are introduced to Zeke, a gutter punk, with whom Ferrell hops a train in Chapter 6, “Freedom In The Form Of A Boxcar”. To be sure, there are moments when Ferrell tries a little too hard to prove his (subcultural) credentials. But for the most part, Ferrell combines exquisite, sensory detail with empathic understanding.

Ferrell presents an evocative (and provocative) discussion about methods in the last third of the book when he writes, “to be honest, I have little interest in a conventional discussion of method—mine or others’—if by this we mean parsing the predetermined technical procedures deployed in the generation of ‘data’” (p. 153). On the surface, this may seem like a trigger warning for those more positivistic and numbers-driven in their orientation. And to be sure, Ferrell does present compelling arguments for why certain approaches distort the realities of street gangs and for why accurate sampling of drifters is impossible. But it would be overly reductive to refer to Ferrell as anti-method. Rather, Ferrell regards method as more (important) than merely “selecting the proper coding procedure”, suggesting that it—method—“shapes how we see the world around us, how we connect with it, what we make of it” (p. 159).

Ferrell laments the extent to which social scientists have come to fetishize and reify method “as something exterior to, even more important than, the fluid social worlds they seek to understand” (p. 180) and offers, as an alternative, in the second half of Chapter 7, the photo-documentary work produced in the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) of Americans, whose lives were cut—or cast—adrift by the Great Depression’s economic collapse. By including familiar images by Dorothea Lange, Ferrell evokes the dialectic of drift then and again. While I might quibble with his overreliance on two-dimensional imagery—why not, for example, discuss the “anarchitecture” of Gordon Matta-Clark, the performance art of Vito Acconci (such as Following Piece (1969)), or the paseos of contemporary artist Francis Alÿs?—Ferrell does stay true to his goal of sketching cultural representations of drift.

In Chapter 8, “Drift Method”, Ferrell proposes that drift often intertwines with departure and social death, and that accordingly, drift can be understood in terms of absence and aftermaths, ghosts and interstitiality. The connection between drift and ghosts is not readily apparent, and I would have much preferred it if Ferrell had devoted his penultimate chapter to fleshing out the relationship of pace to drift, given his earlier work on speed (Ferrell, 2003). Perhaps part of the problem with Chapter 8 is that Ferrell somewhat abandons his four dialectics of drift in discussing ghosts. And while he does refer to the “spectral dialectic of absence and presence, visibility and invisibility” (p. 213) and suggests a fifth dialectic—“the dynamic by which drift’s gorgeous mistakes are inseparably interwoven with its dangerous, disorienting vulnerability” (p. 228)—these are presented in the final chapter, almost as an afterthought, leaving Chapter 8, if not rudderless, then at least somewhat unmoored from the rest of the book.

It should come as little surprise that Ferrell’s final chapter, “Ghost Images And Gorgeous Mistakes”, offers neither a summary nor a conclusion to the book for, as Ferrell states, “[t]hat straight-line finality would undermine the shifting dynamics of drift”, which is, as he reminds us, “not simply a synonym for random variation either; [drift is] more of a matter of calibration and recalibration, of courses tentatively set and soon enough changed” (p. 211). In keeping with this spirit, I will avoid a more traditional conclusion to this review, except to say that while the last chapter may feel unfulfilling and the last line a bit pedestrian, it is hard to fault an author who has taken his readers over and through so much exciting terrain and who must now say farewell.