Profiling the passenger: mobilities,identities,embodiments

Introduction

Peter Adey and David Bissell

They wait, poised. The doors open and a stream of bodies enters the cocooned world of the train. Many find seats, settling into a comforting recline before opening a book, newspaper, or starting some work. Others look outside, while some tentatively wander their view within, averting their gaze from the glancing eyes of the other. People stand, shifting their weight against the drifting of the trains that now tilt, occasionally shaken by jolts and more sudden moves of direction. Learned arms, shoulders and hands move rhythmically to carefully balance a paper coffee cup, then later, a mobile phone.

These people are passengers because they have places to get to, things to get done. We might locate these particular passengers as a specifically modern invention. The train-travelling commuting passenger could be the summation of alterations in the spatial divisions of labour, suburban living and more flexible conditions of work. Within the broader trend of time-space convergence, passengering is a product of the compression of time and space by the technological acceleration of movement that traces an evolution from the stage coach to the jet engine. Transformations in the economies of leisure and tourism, post-Fordist flexible accumulation, all kind of structural forces have meant that not simply travel, but passenger travel, is essential to the rhythms of the contemporary economy, work and employment.

If this familiar and possibly even clichéd figure of the passenger seems too dry or superficial in the way that it is suggestive of definite intentions, meaningful journeys, precise trajectories, and anticipated arrivals, then Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film of the same title throws commonplace assumptions that tethers the figure of the passenger to the productivism inherent to the everyday life of capitalism into sharp relief. The film begins with a journalist, David Locke, who, while researching a guerrilla conflict in North Africa, finds a guest, Robertson, dead through a heart attack in his hotel room. Locke, who bears a passing resemblance to Robertson, fakes his own death and assumes Robertson’s identity. Using his appointment book, Locke meets Robertson’s business engagements, which take him across Europe where he gradually learns that he was a weapons dealer. The film sees ‘Robertson’ become acquainted with a young woman, and then gets pursued by Robertson’s superiors, and both Locke’s wife and colleague who believe that ‘Robertson’ can potentially unlock the riddle to ‘Locke’s’ mysterious death.

On the face of it, the film plot presents an almost incommensurably different scene to the commuter train of the opening vignette in both its narrative arc and its drama: the former perhaps epitomizing everyday routine, and the latter being a flight from this. However, there are many points of intersection that can be discerned. Most significantly, The Passenger is a film that pivots around the complex tension between ‘driving’ and ‘being driven’ that, for us, makes the figure of the passenger an incredibly rich locus for enquiry. So, rather than imagining the passenger as a body that is travelling within a motorized technology of transit, as our most immediately familiar understandings might posit, the film encourages us to imagine how the passenger might work as both a metaphor and a figurative trope to think about subject formation and identity. In the film, Robertson’s identity becomes both the driver and the vehicle within which the passenger, Locke, travels. Alluding to the spatiality of the passenger and the way that the passenger is cocooned within a vehicle of transit, the film deftly illuminates the constraints and consolations of this arrangement. By playing with a fantasy of escape, the film questions the extent to which we can survive in the absence of our own sometimes-caged subjectivities, imagined as they might be, as our vehicle of transit in the world. While, for the film’s protagonist, the determinacies, trajectories, commitments and allegiances that compose his subjectivity are a source of malaise that prompts him to assume a different persona in the first place, the film explores the disquieting effects of assuming new identities, subjectivities, and habits of thinking, feeling and doing. Indeed, what becomes evident is that assuming these new vehicles for living is by no means straightforward. The events, decisions and relationships that unfold are characterized by a radical ambivalence such that the trajectory of Locke’s journey is ambiguous and uncertain.

This does indeed feel like a radically different passenger to the commuter, where the more familiar paraphernalia associated with the commuter-passenger such as timetables, real-time travel information and habitual itineraries might affirm a degree of predictability and comprehension that is missing from Locke’s journey. ¹ Probed further, however, these passengers share certain characteristics and are subject to similar dilemmas. Indeed, while being in passage is part and parcel of our increasingly mobile lives, ² when apprehended against the background of this film, the figure of the passenger introduces us to some fascinating dilemmas: Who or what is the passenger? Where did it come from? What does it do? When, we must ask, is the passenger? The kinds of question that the film opens up are beginning to trouble more recent interrogations of life on the move, as the passage through the complex travel systems of automobility, train and airline networks, determine a manner of moving that is more or less driven in different and subtle ways.

In this collection of perspectives or ‘profiles’, we take seriously how the experiences and imaginations of the passenger cut across multiple of modes of mobility in different historical and geographical contexts. Far from the atomized individuals portrayed in computerized transport models, these interventions seek to breathe life into the passenger-subject by pivoting around some key questions: What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as a subject and object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, such as driver, pilot or parent? How is the passenger represented, practiced and performed? How might the passenger illuminate important theoretical problematics, from representation and mobility, to embodiment? In attending to these provocations, this paper presents four short perspectives that develop new ground for the study of the mobile body.

The passenger is no-doubt a technological development of Spinozan-cartographic proportions. ³ Bodies and objects multiply into compositional assemblages: machine and subject, Little Hans, cart and carthorse; passenger, car, driver; carer and cared. New relations emerge from these multiplications, while what these recombined bodies can do comes to produce what Nigel Thrift, borrowing the expression from Raymond Williams, has called ‘structures of feeling’. ⁴ All sorts of sensual experiences became possible from these new assemblages, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch and many others intent on showing us how the passenger experience has radically altered our perceptions of time and space have demonstrated, ⁵ through different iterations of what Peter Merriman describes in his essay as the ‘modern passenger’. Entrained, shaped, directed and framed: the development of modern locomotion has given rise to quite different sorts of perception of the landscape whizzing by, the feel of the road’s bumps and uneven surfaces, together with the juxtaposition of new combinations of social identities that are brought together in transit.

The passenger invites us to move away from imagining solitary individuals on the move towards considering the assemblages within which people on the move are sustained. Thus, the passenger might be constituted and supported by other ‘passengers’ that take the form of encumbering luggage, documents and ‘data doubles’ that shadow the fleshy body. And of course to talk of ‘fellow’ passengers might gesture to the fraternity and togetherness that emerges through moving with others, as John Law once showed in the very fluid articulation of people, things and rigging in the mutable mobile of the Portuguese merchant ship whose actants moved in and out of motive relations to the ship’s mobility. ⁶ Passengers might not always be easy travelling companions. ⁷ Diseases, anxieties, fears: these passengers might be rather more unruly. Indeed, this renders seductively simple understanding of motive force rather redundant. Being a passenger not only invites us to consider how we might be carried by technologies of transit themselves, but also, as David Bissell’s essay reminds us, how we are carried and driven by signs, trajectories, determinacies, desires and habits, and, paradoxically, those mediators that Marc Augé was concerned were suspending the passenger’s sociability so that to passage now means to be alone. As such, the figure of the passenger casts the sovereignty of subjectivity into doubt. ⁸

At particular times and places, the passenger might be apprehended as a weak or secondary form of mobile subjectivity, particularly when viewed relationally as hostage to the apparently more powerful and commanding figure of the ‘driver’. The passenger can appear a withdrawn body who has surrendered control. Passage threatens vulnerability to danger, discomfort and potentially effort. Bissell’s essay suggests, then, that the entubulation of passage serves to manifest ease and convenience by encouraging desirable practices, sensations and experiences of passage at odds with the pilot bodies shaped and sculpted in Peter Adey’s essay.

Ease and comfort, however, do not necessarily imply freedom. Being in passage implicates confinement, restraint, even incarceration; reminding us that the difference between being-carried and being-held is often difficult to make out. Almost all of the essays in this collection show this, particularly within Derek McCormack’s examination of the shifting narrative of subject-positions, moving between driver and driven. What’s more, McCormack shows how this holds true for actually distinguishing the driver from the passenger when he questions ‘who was guiding who’. Yet there might be considerable comfort in this devolution. It could provide a space that opens up mobile bodies to other intensities of a learned, familiar and consoling submission to other systems of travel. Indeed, as Bissell explores, there is a pleasurability of the passenger’s mobility as the repetition of those movements becomes ‘increasingly effortless over time’. Re-leaving agitation, however, does not make the passenger. While for McCormack the primary purpose of the perambulator is sleep, we see in Adey’s deconstruction of the pilot body how the agitated aviator becomes more passenger-like, especially as they violently acquiesce to the resistance of the aircraft

These provocations prompt us to evaluate what sorts of activity and inactivity are required to become a passenger. From the first moment of entering a relation to passenger travel, becoming a passenger might require all kinds of practical preparation. It might further demand the cultivation of specific kinds of affective, immaterial habits and practices, a ‘torsion of the active and inactive’ for Bissell, and specific kinds of stillness and vibration distinctive to other habits, activities and sensibilities of driving. Such demands also open up questions concerning the responsibilities, commitments and forms of attention that are required of a passenger. The emergence of irate, combustible and agitated passengers remind us that withdrawal is not always the case. Indeed, when the mutual dependencies of neurons with pistons, eye-lines with sat-nav are brought into focus, the passive passenger/active driver hierarchy becomes scrambled. Here, the driver as a modernist illusion becomes a passenger when apprehended within a more distributed agency of assemblages and the speed of events, contrasting paradoxically with the early pilots for Adey, air personnel who were required to direct and respond to these agencies. ⁹ As such, the passenger composes some fascinating mobility-stillness diagrams that play on tensions of restfulness and restlessness; gravity and levity; store and forward.

But as Merriman’s essay shows, this might be to time the passenger too soon, lest we forget that passage may simply require another human host, in symbiosis or not. And out of that relation, according to Paul Virilio, women are the ‘vehicle’, ‘he is the passenger’. ¹⁰ For Virilio, the woman is the ‘first in a series of relays that helps launch man progressively further into space’, and away from the domesticity of animal and social territories. Passage is the oldest biological fact of the human species as a mother carries her unborn child within her body. Once born to the world, the carriage of the womb may be externalized to cradled arms as McCormack shows, before they are moved to the more regular vehicle of the perambulator. Indeed, as Virilio takes the passenger through its evolutionary journey from military extension by the mounted horse, to the logistical sciences, we are reminded how political violence today is again cast by the passenger and figured in endless representational reproductions. As Jeremy Packer puts it, drivers, passengers and their vehicles are all ‘becoming bombs’. ¹¹

Passenger experiences are multiple, heterogenous and are mediated along many different lines. Within the tubes Bissell explores, the carriage of McCormack’s buggy and the tubular constraints of the aircraft cockpit examined in Adey’s account of flying personnel research, the passenger appears to be trapped or as Merriman elects: ‘imprisoned’, held within trajectories of elemental geographies, governed by lines and infrastructures that also offer ease. In spaces of transit, they follow different conduits and are treated in very different ways. Indeed, to talk about ‘the passenger’ in the singular risks collapsing the difference and singularity of lived experience of being in passage into a undifferentiated, generic and politically-problematic composite. Yet, at the same time, and perhaps in consolation, ‘the passenger’ also signals the anonymous, the unknown, the uncertain and the unidentifiable existences of being in passage; those unknowns that animate the concern for the mobile child to pre-thinking, qualities valued in the aerial body to think ahead intuitively. The film The Passenger poignantly invites us to consider what might disappear when we become a passenger. As such, rather than understood as necessarily purposive, or something moulded and determined by the outside of the passage, retrospectively by their point of departure, or anticipatorily by their destination, these four essays point towards some of the more ad-hoc, repetitious and seemingly-inconsequential aspects of passengering. In doing so, rather than emphasizing the comprehensibility of the passenger through the ways in which they are enrolled into regimes of identification and authentication – through profiles, screens, anticipations and rules – we can develop analyses that acknowledge the radical ambiguity of the passenger.

Passenger becomings

Derek P. McCormack

There are many points of departure, but for you, it began in the seat. ¹² You could not come home without it: straps checked, tightened, secured. Safety first. It was always about more than your safety, however. Positioning opened up worlds differentially. For almost a year you faced backwards, far below the horizon of what might ordinarily have been considered interesting. You saw seat back, head restraint, rear window. Sky, trees, upper stories – elevated blur passing by in a rush. And then you reached that weight threshold beyond which arrived a new preposition: forward. With forward came new visibilities, new objects of attention, new modes of interaction. You could sense the oncoming. You could now be seen, and see, in a second rear view mirror incorporated into the car. Before long, then, there were two of you. To sit between you was – is – to occupy a space of mobile vision and visibility that requires looking in more than one way at once. To move with, and be moved by you, provides an occasion to dwell: to dwell upon and draw out some of the many ways in which passenger becomings take place through parenting milieus.

***

To parent is to carry. You bought a sling, used it only once or twice. Too much squirming and stretching. Claustrophobic rather than cocooned. You probably waited too long to try out the carrier. Five quid at a second hand sale, a little worn, but you hoped it would do the job as advertised: ‘[Our] Mobility range gives you and your baby the freedom to move around everyday life with ease and style. Our popular Baby Carriers provide closeness and security for your baby and flexibility for you as a parent when taking the first steps to explore the world together.’ ¹³ You never used it for sleep. You always faced forward, looking out at the world. In time you borrowed its replacement: more rigid, better neck support. One of you found it barely tolerable; the other loved the sway-bounce gaze. To hold your hands was to feel as if you were ever so deliberately steering along random perceptual vectors. Who was guiding whom? You also borrowed a back-pack: underused, again, as most of your artefactual hinterland inevitably was. Nevertheless, you came to realize that back-packs generate moments of benign sociality: smiles, hellos, winks. Everyone apparently loves or at least is drawn into the gaze of a back-pack baby. ¹⁴

***

Seats and carriers were relatively straightforward: one model seemed as good as the next. Prams, buggies, strollers – it took an age to decide. Endless options: ‘travel systems’ for transporting infants; technologies that via a kind of baroque materialism of the folds, often promised the world: new ways of being mobile with infants; effortless, friction free negotiation of urban space; access to muddy fields, towpaths, festivals and farms. You hadn’t been to a music festival for years: why did you ever imagine a buggy would do anything to change this? But you were drawn to the possibility of becoming a facilitator of enriching experience. You really went for it, weighing up options, soliciting advice from others, road testing. Manoeuvrability, foldability, weight, boot fit. You looked at, among others, a pushchair claiming to ‘allow children to enjoy exploring the city in comfort by raising them up from the ground away from city dust, car exhaust fumes, and the heat of the pavement’. You were taken by the fact that the ‘seat unit’ could be ‘set to face parents allowing eye contact to be maintained. In this orientation, there are three positions; sleep, rest and active sitting. For older children the seat unit . . . can be turned to face the world giving your child an overview of their surroundings’. ¹⁵

It was all about offering as many modes of worldly engagement as possible. ¹⁶ You wanted to be able to talk and to share the view. Eventually, you went for the manufacturer of the modern perambulator that claimed to be ‘all about mobility’, that revealed its ‘mission to excite every person on the move. For parents, that means having the ability to get out and explore the world with their child. Whether you’re travelling through the city or the woods, on sand or through snow, [we want] to help you reach your destination the easy way’. ¹⁷ You convinced yourself you were investing in experience, in the affordances of mobile things.

***

To parent is to perambulate. In the early days of course it was less about mobility, and all about sleep. Or it was about how different ways of becoming mobile might facilitate becoming sleepy. Driving often worked, but then left you tensed between two options: to sit out the sleep in the car or to risk waking during transfer to the house. Nor did the carrier seem to have the desired effect. Too interesting, and you were always restless.

So you pushed and pushed. To begin you thought it was all – only – about the motion: that being in movement might work to still you. No such luck. Your agitation would not seem to quiet, or at least not easily. And so you learned about vibration: about the optimal frequency and amplitude. ¹⁸ Not enough and you ignored it. Too much and it kept you awake. Gently bumpy. About being affected without being agitated. You began to attend to, search out, and become familiar with neighbourhood surfaces and textures. You learned to avoid surprising bumps and jolts, scanning ahead in advance. Grass cut to the right length worked. Weathered concrete pavement worked. Roads of a certain vintage worked. But not smooth tarmac.

OPEN IN VIEWER

The playing field outside your house worked – sometimes at least. And you had an excuse to wander aimlessly. Across it you traced endless lines, loops, and zig zags. ¹⁹ And in the process you learned to anticipate and avoid sources of noise. You adopted an unfriendly attitude, discouraging the approach of those who find it necessary to exclaim aloud the sheer fact of sleep.

***

To parent is to become vehicular. ²⁰ More specifically, it is to think seriously of the vehicle as a potentially safe environment. It is to remember the value of technologies of attachment, to remember to ‘Clunk click every trip’. ²¹ It is also to flash forward, however, to think the unthinkable. It is to listen more attentively to the snippet of an accident report casually overheard. It is to imagine yourself in their position. It is to be reassured by crumple zones, by Euro NCAP reports. It is to put your faith in the promise of pre-emptive inflation, to speculate upon the future affordability of Pre-Collision, Pre-Safe, and Pre-Sense plus systems. ²²

***

A playing field, a street, a pavement, a bedroom, a car: each is a milieu composed of ‘qualities, substances, powers, and events’. At the same time, milieus are composed of trajectories that ‘merge’ with the subjectivities of those who pass through them. To parent is to remake such milieus and their subjectivities by ‘exploring them, by means of dynamic trajectories’. ²³

***

Milieus are not fixed abodes. Some are more obviously mobile than others. The car journey, for instance, is one such milieu – it consists of the fractional, experiential gathering of being vehicular.

At the beginning, every journey seemed epic, logistical. The first part of your first real epic was five hours long. Home to port. How to occupy, fill, generate that time? How to manage the atmosphere: to maintain interest, enjoyment, to keep everyone on board? You considered briefly the DVD screen – in-drive entertainment as a technology of quiescence. Tempting. But why use TV in the car when not at home? So the road became your screen, one that you all came to watch, primed for the approach of something out of the ordinary: that big lorry, that tanker truck, that wide load. The macabre bonus of an ambulance at siren speed. See it, See it, See it. Where? It’s gone. Where? It’s gone. Where? The after affects of having missed something flagged up with such enthusiasm. The problem of having been primed too much: anticipation becoming bodily tension, anxiety. Quell this anxiety, quickly: play the CD, that track, that same track, again and again, and again. We like that track, don’t we?

You have prepared in advance, hidden a stash: Matchbox™ toys concealed in an under seat compartment. Hotwheels™. An ice cream van, a tractor, a DHL lorry. Emergency distractions, produced when things get out of hand. They set up moments of possible resonance, realized when you pass real world versions of these same things. Just like that one. Just like that one. Just like that one. At some point you find yourself being asked to chase a DHL lorry. Find it, find it, find it.

***

Ferrying: another mobile milieu. The second leg of your epic: you board Ulysses. Named after the novel, its reception area adorned with the author carved in relief. You had booked a window cabin, anticipating four hours corralled in reasonable comfort. Timed with afternoon nap, the hope was that after some initial enthusiasm, you would settle down. Some hope. See the sea. See the sea. See the sea. The forces become centrifugal, propelling you beyond the confines of your bunker. Calm by wandering; down those endless cabin-doored corridors, up and down those brassy, mirrored stairs. Wander, through different zones, again, and again: through reception, through the Travel Galleria shop, though Café Lafayette, through Boylan’s Brasserie, through the James Joyce Balcony Lounge, through Leopold Bloom’s bar, across the Sandycove Promenade Deck. Avoid, determinedly, the Cyclops Family Entertainment centre. Perish the thought. Fail to access the Martello Observation Lounge in club class. Nevermind. You seem unable to lose interest in this exploring, in composing a map of ‘wandering lines, loops, corrections, and turnings back’. ²⁴

Long after the event you discover Ulysses has its own signposted walking tour: it would have allowed you to ‘find out all you need to know about Ulysses, James Joyce’, would have allowed you to have ‘fun exploring the largest car ferry on the Irish Sea’. ²⁵ You are thankful you had not seen the signs.

***

For all of the talk of fatigue, exhaustion, challenge, to parent is to open oneself to the possibility that passenger becomings can move along other affective vectors. September 4th, 2010: you trace tight arcs around a car-park in the rear seat compartment of a fire engine. To parent is to open oneself to the possibility that well rehearsed routes might be reanimated in minor ways. September 5th, 2010: you follow a route around Oxford on an open top double decked bus. You sit right at the front, and for a while you are the only people on board. Ignoring pre-recorded commentary, you provide your own.

***

To parent is to precipitate the memory of other passengers, other journeys. It is to realize that styles of becoming passenger have already always been shaped for us in advance. ‘Parents’, writes Deleuze, ‘are themselves a milieu that children travel through: they pass through its qualities and powers and make a map of them’. ²⁶ This map is not representational; it is affective, dispositional, habitual. It lingers with and within you, in potentia. It revisits you on longer journeys, during those occasions when you have the time to really settle into your seat. And, as so often before, you find yourself remembering that he always sat there. He only took the wheel once or twice. And the difference was palpable. Tensed, imperceptibly. Hunched forward. The passenger seat was – is – always his territory. The driver’s seat hers. As it was and always will be.

***

To parent is to reposition. With new arrivals things change. One of you can no longer remain so unlicensed. Responsibility has to be shared. You swap and shift. And you remember so vividly those first, tentative journeys under the new arrangement of bodies and things. The point and shoot ease of the automatic transmission becoming habitual. Adjusting the mirrors. The pull of the wheel. Trying to be ‘loose but in control’. ²⁷ Remarking upon the strangeness of it all, when you say: I love being a passenger.

***

For parents and children, the passenger is not so much a singular figure, nor a role played or imitated, but a series of milieus composed of different and sometimes divergent becomings. Thus, to parent is to facilitate passenger becomings in children, and to have one’s own becomings modified, inflected, reflected. At the same time, infancy and childhood are defined in no small part by the experience of learning to become a good, or at least a manageable passenger. These becomings are facilitated by relations between bodies and with technological artifacts. They are never reducible to technical questions, however. They take place, and can be apprehended, through shifting modes of vision and attentiveness, through the ‘ordinary affects’ of travelling, ²⁸ and through sideways glimpses of the milieus through which we are always passing, and which, in turn, we are always passing on.

Being in passage

Peter Merriman

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. ²⁹

Writing in Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault describes the medieval madman on the ship of fools in terms of his confined and controlled passage between places; imprisoned on a ship by its seemingly infinite, watery surrounds. Foucault’s prisoner is being transported rather than travelling at will, and he is imprisoned by ‘the passage’ – the action and movement, and the space and watery medium – as well as in ‘the vehicle’ – the ship – itself. This ‘passenger par excellence’, this ‘prisoner of the passage’, highlights important themes we might explore in relation to the ontologies and etymologies of passengering. What does it mean to be a passenger, in passage? What are the ontological dimensions of passengering, and how have the experiences of passengers varied across time and space? What are the geographies and histories of ‘the passage’, and how should we trace the geographies of these more-than-linear, ‘elementary’, physical and topological spaces? In this short paper I outline the etymology and cultural geographies of passengering and being in passage, tracing the emergence of the modern passenger; a being whose embodied movements, experiences and subjectivity are politicized, socialized, technologized and en-cultured in a variety of different ways.

Passenger (noun and verb). Passage (verb and noun). Pass (verb and noun). Passenger, like the related words pass and passage, is of middle English origin, derived from the Old French word passager, and the verb pass can ultimately be traced through Old French to the Latin word passus. ³⁰ In the 15th and 16th centuries a passenger could be a person or thing that enabled passage – for example, a ford-keeper, a ferry-man, or a ferry itself – as well as a traveller ‘who passes by or through a place’. ³¹ In its predominant, contemporary usage passenger refers to ‘a person in or on a conveyance other than its driver, pilot or crew’, and as the New English Dictionary stated in 1904, before the widespread use of the private motor car, passengering was generally associated with ‘public conveyance[s] entered by fare or contract’. ³² As new transport technologies have emerged and been improved over successive centuries, so the experiences of the passenger have frequently become associated with increasing levels of comfort and speed, as well as changing relations and engagements between the passenger and the passage or paysage (landscape). The railway brought a speed, smoothness and regular rhythm (a pre-continuous-rail clickety-clack) to Britain, which, despite improvements in turnpikes and coaching technologies, was unknown to earlier travellers, and German critic Wolfgang Schivelbusch described how this led to the emergence of a new, relatively detached, fleeting mode of perception or way of seeing that was ‘panoramic’, as the landscape appeared to lose its depth and become fractured into ‘evanescent’ glimpsed scenes. ³³ John Ruskin famously complained that ‘all travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity’, as the railway passenger’s sensibility is shattered, they detach themselves from the landscape, and are transformed from a ‘traveller into a living parcel’. ³⁴ Ruskin’s parcellized, transported passenger becomes a ‘prisoner of the passage’, unable to appreciate the evanescent landscape, and forced to turn his or her attention to a book, newspaper or the companionship of fellow passengers. Artists, satirists and social commentators made much of these new socialities of passengering and the geographies of the railway compartment, ³⁵ but it was not long before commentators began to actively engage with the new visualities and sensibilities afforded by train travel, and subsequently the very different visualities and embodied engagements associated with car travel, photography, the cinema, air travel, and the virtual mobilities afforded by digital media and internet use. ³⁶

The alienated, isolated, disempowered and detached passenger has been caricatured as the archetypal modern monadic ‘subject’ in the contemporary and future western world. In the writings of Paul Virilio, the modern passenger-traveller is ever-increasingly experiencing the passage through the medium of the ‘screen’, sealed off from physical landscapes and enfolded into their vehicle. ³⁷ Likewise, for Marc Augé, the increasing mobility of supermodernity and the resulting proliferation of ubiquitous non-places such as motorways and airports has led to the triumph of ‘the eternal passenger, always viewing locales as one passing through them’, exposed to ‘the alienating, individualizing, contractual’ nature of these spaces. ³⁸ In one sense, ‘we’ may understand what thinkers such as Augé, Virilio and Baudrillard are getting at, but such caricatures easily overlook the situated embodied practices of passengering and driving in particular vehicles through particular landscapes. ³⁹ Take, for example, people’s experiences of driving and passengering in motor cars. For more than 100 years, commentators have remarked on the similarities between the visualities of motor travel and the visualities afforded by the cinema screen, ⁴⁰ with an array of scholars and writers, for example, describing how ‘the sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells of the city and countryside are reduced to the two-dimensional view through the car windscreen’. ⁴¹ And yet, many specific accounts of driving, whether in the 1890s or 1990s, stress the multi-sensory and kinaesthetic, as well as visual, dimensions of driving and passengering. For many motorists – from pioneering automobilists in open-topped vehicles with non-standardized controls in the late 1890s, to contemporary off-road drivers and motorists in countries with relatively few paved roads – motoring was and is a bumpy, draughty and noisy experience. What’s more, the visual practices associated with motoring are highly specific, requiring extensive periods of engagement and observation, yet also effecting a ‘distracted attention’, or a semi-automatized ‘ontology of everyday distraction’, characterized by ‘a partial loss of touch with the here-and-now’. ⁴² As the design and architecture critic Reyner Banham remarked of car travel in 1972:

The observer plunges continuously ahead into a perspective that is potentially dangerous and demands his active attention (nor is the passenger passive: watch his feet and hands, listen to his comments and warnings). ⁴³

Banham’s observations on the ‘active attention’ of the passenger are echoed in Eric Laurier’s more recent video-based ethnographies of car driving and passengering, where he notes that front-seat passengers frequently become engaged in the practices of driving, watching and judging the movements of other vehicles, gesturing and directing suggestions to their driver. ⁴⁴ While one common colloquial definition of ‘passenger’ refers to ‘a member of a crew or team [originally in rowing] who does not contribute properly to the collective effort’, ⁴⁵ the social scientific studies of Laurier and others reveal that passengers are far from being inactive or passively transported by others. ⁴⁶ Passengers are very often actively engaged in the embodied practices of wayfinding and, at times, driving. But if passengers are not passive, we might also surmise that drivers are not autonomous or fully in control. Geographers and sociologists writing about driving have examined how ‘car-drivers’ are not simply autonomous human actors but are hybrid, collective and cyborg figures whose subjectivity and objectivity – and their ontologies and materialities – are bound up with their embodied inhabitation of a vehicle and the spaces and situations of the road. ⁴⁷

If the ‘passenger par excellence’ is a ‘prisoner of the passage’, then the geographies of the passage are a key component of the geographies of passengering. This is not uncharted territory. Writing on ‘Geography and the realm of passages’ in 1982 the Lund geographer Erik Wallin explained how geography as a whole was essentially concerned with ‘passages’ which ‘work as mediators and coordinators between the world, considered as a host, and phenomena, considered as guests’:

The passages of everyday life constitute a mixture of different communicative intermedia. These channel, modulate, and regulate the behavior of the ‘passengers’ – those who are communicating in the actual medium. ⁴⁸

Passages are, here, defined in their broadest sense as intermediaries that ‘divide and unite the world’, ⁴⁹ but passages also have a specificity and typology as they are clearly striated or carved out in different ‘elementary’ media in different ways. ⁵⁰ Passages have different physical, ‘elementary’, political and cultural geographies, whether we are talking about the ocean, airspace or the land, and whether we are talking about the movements of ancient ships, modern aircraft, motor vehicles or trains. ⁵¹ These ‘elementary geographies’ – of earth, water and air – affect the nature of the course and purchase of vehicles, with different effects of friction, aerodynamism, stability and gravity. The currents, geological obstructions and political geographies of seas and oceans shape the passages of ships in very different ways from the steel rails guiding trains, or the atmospheric conditions and air traffic control regulations affecting aircraft. Very little attention has been paid to the elementary and physical geographies of the passage, although a few examples do spring to mind. ⁵² Perhaps the materialities of earth, water, air, steel and tarmac, and questions of texture, gravity, buoyancy, aerodynamics, suspension, stability, purchase and friction are too banal or ‘physical’ for mobility scholars working in the social sciences and humanities, or even for ‘more-than-human’ cultural geographers. Of course, as Henri Bergson infers, we must never simply conflate the qualitative movements of the passage (defined as ‘the action of passing’) with the fixed instants or geographical positions within a passage (defined as ‘a place where there is a way through’). ⁵³ But neither is this a reason to ignore passages, routes, ways and transport corridors at the expense of studies of experiences of driving, passengering and travel.

In summary, we might ask what directions contemporary work on the geographies of passengering should take? Clearly it is important that geographers and others continue to explore the socialities and spatialities of the passenger experience, qualitative differences between passengering and driving, and the economic, political and cultural dimensions of passengering, but I would also encourage geographers to think seriously about the broader, sensuous, affective and ontological dimensions of practices we associate with passengering and passages, in order to push the boundaries of what a passenger is and can be, and in what domains of life we may be entrained and carried along as more-or-less active passengers without realizing it. Perhaps we are all simultaneously drivers and passengers every day, caught in the ebb and flow of practices and affects shaping the events that unfold around us.

The auto-pilot, or becoming passenger

Peter Adey

Under the auspices of the Flying and Personnel Research Committee (FPRC) of the Royal Air Force, by 1939 numerous studies were being carried out on RAF pilots. These tests sought to examine performance under the extreme conditions of flight. ⁵⁴ The duress of long flying hours, anxiety, difficult weather conditions as well as the strains of carrying out tense military operations, all gathered to inhibit the pilots’ flying. This could cause significant dips in performance as well as regular mistakes and accidents. The aviator threatened to fall into something quite other to its accepted self. ⁵⁵ Believed to be reduced to a state that was less-than-active, in-charge, or even aware of the movements of the aircraft they were flying, the emergence of a more passive and irritable kind of subject necessitated its understanding and translation through an ontology of circuits, gates, relays and energetic exchanges. This was a science of the pilot that would be used to reassemble the aerial body into a purposive, responsive and vigilant being. This making of the less-than-pilot back into a pilot, I want to suggest, outlines the kinds of dualisms and qualities that mark contemporary examinations of the mobile body and, specifically, the becoming of a passenger. In this account I seek to move the passenger off centre and complicate some of these assumptions.

Before Norbert Wiener’s ground-breaking studies of person-machine ‘feedback’, which led to the official birth of cybernetics and what Peter Galison describes as a new ontology of the enemy, ⁵⁶ at the FPRC in Cambridge the human pilot-operator could be easily modelled, each movement of the pilot and their capacity to respond to changes in the aircraft could be compared to a synthetic operation. ⁵⁷ The scientists’ tests would also function to diagnose problems in the aviator, showing a degradation in the pilot’s actions by the lessening of their ability to direct action and respond to the environment around them. These ‘lapses’ in behaviour were not put down to inappropriate training or something lacking in skill, ⁵⁸ but as a function of the conditions in which they were placed – conditions that effectively reduced the pilot to a passive and potentially vulnerable state in which they could only submit to the unfolding of events.

In the Cambridge scientists’ analysis of the pilot, we find an undoing of the assumed boundaries between the pilot (or driver) and their apparent opposite: the passenger – a figure that this essay aims to decentre. ⁵⁹ By complicating claims surrounding the passenger and its relation to other forms of mobile subject such as the driver, I focus attention upon the pilot body itself by exploring the diagnosis and repair of their attentiveness and their regulation of energy, morale and wakefulness. The essay uncovers the management of a troubling oscillation between pilot and other mobile subjectivities that were stabilized and effectively governed.

In the midst of the Second World War, aviation accidents were normal. A combination of mechanical and human functions, different phases of flight produced higher risks than others. Human functions presented a long and complex list of behaviours that could potentially go wrong. F.C. Bartlett would list these as: ‘Muscular imbalance in vision, slowness of accommodation, inaccurate judgement of distance and other binocular defects, jerky-coordination, a high proprioceptive threshold’ among others. ⁶⁰ Somehow these defects had to be prevented and the human improved.

In the context of recent research surrounding the passenger, Geographer David Bissell has explored how particular sorts of passivity, sensibility and kinaesthetic sensations are commonly associated with passenger travel. Eric Laurier has also sought to demystify the positions of both driver and passenger as supposedly inactive. Discourses of ‘quiescing’ propagate railway advertisements and even airline passenger travel. While these journey’s might free up ‘travel-time’ to be made productive, they are also conducive to emphasizing and producing more ‘sedate regularities and habitualities’. ⁶¹ In rethinking the rather active excitations often assumed of mobile experience, Bissell is not attempting to characterize the passenger, than to rather open up the possibility of understanding mobile experience as withdrawn, closed down, and vulnerable. For the passenger their mobility can be unwinding, gentle and easy, while it might just as often be tiring and fatiguing. Might these experiences be so distant from the driver or pilot, or part of what defines them? Let us understand how quiescence was deemed the most constant threat to the pilot, relentlessly threatening to give way to the sensibilities and states more often associated with passengering.

Easy rider: being-driven and the powers of the passage

David Bissell

In this short essay, the figure of the passenger is mobilized as a relation that invites us to consider the way in which this figure moves relative to other mobile figures, and how this figure moves and is moved by infrastructures of mobility. ⁸⁵ There are of course dangers in collapsing difference of experience. Different passenger bodies are positioned within constellations of mobility in diverse ways. ⁸⁶ And within these formalisms, singular lived time-space trajectories are enmeshed within specific contextual and intellectual histories. But against these specific axes of differentiation, ⁸⁷ what ‘the passenger’ seems to name is precisely an abstract, anonymous figure that is an effect of mobility, rather than a self-subjecting identity-figure ⁸⁸ that is assumed every time a person boards a technology of transit. Therefore, rather than unpicking histories or diagramming the passenger in terms of a specific set of experiences, I want to tentatively draw out the passenger as a seductively-subtle figure of thought through which to refract the metaphysical relation between ‘being driven’ and ‘driving’. Exploring this relation provides a portal through which to consider how the movement of the passenger is contingent on ease.

Given that the etymological root of travel is ‘work’, ⁸⁹ it is perhaps not surprising that easy passage is one of the promises granted to passengers through a suite of infrastructures that give rise to an entubulated ⁹⁰ experience of mobility. Seamless point-to-point passage where different modes of being-driven snap-to-grid are afforded by traffic reports, itineraries, timetables, real-time journey information and travel agents, which enrol the passenger into an economy of ease, speed and comfort that aspires to make travel quicker, more comfortable, and above all, effortless. ⁹¹ Within this economy, resistances and encumbrances that impede smooth passage are unwelcome. ⁹² Infrastructures that alleviate the encumbrances of travel through speed demonstrates how the passenger is enrolled within a particular capitalist ethic that privileges particular ways of moving over others. The powerful lure to the passenger that ‘we will get you there quicker’ feels disconcertingly close to Colebrook’s critique of determinist forms of thinking, referring to an organism that ‘wishes . . . to move quickly through its world without stalling to consider all the complexities and differences – that it will develop concepts and means for speeding up motion, even if these same concepts will ultimately render it close to immobile’. ⁹³ While this pairing of ease-as-sensibility with efficiency-as-method compresses the passenger into a productivist figure, we can usefully lean on these sentiments to consider how ease and efficiency are manifested. ⁹⁴ Infrastructures of mobility that entubulate passengers are charged with reducing intense sensations of passage that are registered as undesirable within this economy of ease. ⁹⁵ Think of how delays and road-rage are often framed as agitative intensities of passage that must be quiesced. ⁹⁶ While agitation is part of the everyday fabric of contemporary life, ⁹⁷ these intensities are often deemed to be undesirable ⁹⁸ within an understanding that preferences effortless passage. For some, such preference might be symptomatic of ‘our indolence, which prefers to do what is easiest’. ⁹⁹ For others, it is the same acquiescence that has both given rise to and is perpetuated by protocological techniques of mobility control that guarantee easy passage for some. ¹⁰⁰

While these spatially-extensive, entubulated infrastructures of mobility that guarantee ease are contingent on smoothing a passage, this in turn pivots around a tension between ‘driving’ and ‘being-driven’ that splinters the figure of the driver from the figure of the passenger. The driver is often assumed to be the locus of agency and becomes the reference point for comprehending the more meagre powers of the passenger who, in turn, must submit to the power of the driver. From this, the passenger is the figure that is being-driven and it is this relation of submission to the powers of the driver that helps to enrol the passenger into an economy of ease. ¹⁰¹ This passivity comes from a delegation where the responsibility to both move and coordinate is devolved elsewhere. Devolution names descent, and therefore it is this submission of being-driven that creates a vulnerable figure that can be worked on, who is at the mercy of the driver. But the driver in question is not necessarily a singular figure. ‘The driver’ might be better apprehended as precisely those entubulated infrastructures of mobility that bring about easy passage, demonstrated through the forms of suggestibility that are engineered into spaces of mobility, where the passenger is driven by the affective signals of surfaces, ¹⁰² arrows ¹⁰³ and passages ¹⁰⁴ that require submissiveness to guarantee easy passage. ¹⁰⁵ This withdrawal of agency from the passenger reaches its apotheosis in contemporary aeromobility where the passenger has no choice but to yield to protocological control techniques that work to pacify the body such that it is light enough to be carried. This might be problematic on account that it marks the attrition of personal freedoms, and that these modes of being-carried atrophy the body’s capacity for self-maintenance where the responsibility to care for the self is displaced; ¹⁰⁶ tensions that are revealed in other mobility infrastructures that enact a soft-paternalism ¹⁰⁷ in the submissive bodies that they generate.

If such ‘engineering’ marks the intensification of the powers of the passage, this prompts us to reconsider how the familiar bodily figure of ‘the driver’ might too be more faithfully conceptualized as a passenger, albeit one who is being driven by the passage in a different way. Specific styles of attention, perception and reaction demanded by driving means that the driver must submit to a zone of speeds and intensities that quiesce the capacities for other modes of thinking and feeling while on the move. ¹⁰⁸ The labour of driving enacts a narrowing that requires a particular ‘digital aesthetic’, a task-directed eye-brain that ‘sees the world in terms of manipulable “digits” . . . the world as always the world for this viewing and mobilized organism, an organism of coordinated organs’, ¹⁰⁹ which generates a specific biological form of attention that is orientated towards the task of driving. But submission for the driver also implicates a certain passivity, since the driver is no longer the sovereign driver, but increasingly part of a machenic assemblage that connects eye and ear to sat-nav, to road-signs, to hands and feet to clutch to pistons. The ease of contemporary driving is therefore similarly contingent on devolved agencies that enact a different diagram of devolution. Driving is thus part of a larger machenic infrastructure characterized by ‘machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections’; ¹¹⁰ a set of powers that are distributed across multiple bodies, and infrastructures. ¹¹¹ Within this diffused understanding of agencies and powers, of different diagrams of devolution and conscription, the distinction between ‘driving’ and ‘being driven’ becomes difficult to discern.

If the fallacy of the sovereign driver forces us to surmise that all mobile bodies are more faithfully understood by the relations that compose the passenger – as being-driven by the entubulated infrastructures of the passage – does this overemphasize the passivity of the passenger, as acquiescent to the powers of the passage? Furthermore, does the consolation of ease always necessitate submission? What if we consider that ‘to drive’ does not name the assumption of control, rather it names a susceptibility to be driven? The strength of this inversion becomes clearer if we consider how the passenger is animated by all kinds of drives, many of which might just need to be dampened in the productivist business of getting from A to B. Such a rendering of drive-as-desire helps us to temper sovereign understandings of intentionality, where the task of choosing whether to move or not to move becomes less a question that is resolved by a sovereign ‘driver’, but is rather an emergent effect of different competing drives that animate and cross-cut a body. ¹¹² The drive to relinquishment might not be indicative of indolence. Rather, subordination demonstrates how drives are not ‘ours’ in the sense that they are emergent from an ‘internal’ source. ¹¹³ That we are moved in ways that are not always ‘in our best interests’ ¹¹⁴ is evidence precisely of how bodily drives are invested, shaped and contorted by social formations, assemblages, and infrastructures ¹¹⁵ in ways that drives themselves become understood as much more mutable and distributed. ¹¹⁶ Where understandings of the distributed nature of the passenger have tended to emphasize its extensive distribution within informational architectures of track-and-trace, ¹¹⁷ apprehending the dispersed and virtual ontology of drives is to recognize the intensively-distributed nature of the passenger. Rather than submission to the powers of the passage, the intentionality implied in ‘driving’ is not understood in an object-directed sense of ‘aiming towards’, but names a more passive intentionality: an openness to the world that ‘functions anonymously, involuntarily, spontaneously, and receptively’. ¹¹⁸ Instead of apprehending how extensive passages modulate the movements of submissive bodies, if we apprehend drives as not only much more distributed but also much more intensive, this allows us to think about how passengers are drivers ¹¹⁹ in the way that they are an effect of a specific arrangement of drives.

In place of a passive passenger that is being-driven either by the passage or an ‘internal’ motive force, this distributed understanding reconceptualizes being-driven as a synthetic folding of the inside and outside. Crucially, this is a folding that takes place in the duration of movement, which in turn prompts us to consider how entubulated infrastructures of mobility are brought into being through the event of being mobile, rather than infrastructures that pre-exist passage. Therefore, instead of ease being a consolation of devolution to powerful driving capacities of the passage, ease emerges from this synthesis of passenger and passage through the duration of movement itself. ¹²⁰ Ease here becomes a devolution constituted by the passive synthesis of thought and matter that develops over time: the passive synthesis of habit. Appealing to a dynamic ¹²¹ understanding of habit, repetition or continuity of an action makes movement easier, reducing sensation (and particularly uncomfortable sensations). ¹²² Both Felix Ravaisson and, later, Paul Ricoeur’s writings on habit point to a pleasurability in motion that is gained through repetition as movement becomes increasingly effortless over time. This coincidence of ease with pleasure emerges from the bodily transformations that take place through repetition and work to carve out passages of movement: shapes of action that can be inhabited with ease and that we yield to. ¹²³ The powers of habit, therefore, become as significant a part of the entubulated infrastructures of mobility as the spatial architectures that compose these spaces. Habit need not point to an indolent or submissive passenger. Rather, we can start to imagine bodies that develop particular aptitudes for movement, which, in doing so, carve-out intensive passages as they synthesize thought and matter; past and present. Within this temporalized understanding, passages change from being a primarily spatial architecture that passengers move through, to an effect carved out of duration. And where passages emerge through passive synthesis, habit becomes the driver.

To acknowledge the intensive movements that constitute the passenger over time, particularly the reduction of receptivity and increase in spontaneity that is afforded by habit, we can start to imagine how this ease opens up other capacities for the passenger that emerge in this folding of activity and passivity. Such a claim introduces some explicitly political questions; for example, how habit might drive a body ‘against its wishes’. ¹²⁴ But to be a passenger does not just have to name the constraints that narrow a moving body, as is perhaps implied by an asymmetrical driver-passenger relationship, where the demand for particular modes of disclosure and submission to particular expectations, commitments and responsibilities render it a weak form of mobile inhabitation. The figure of the passenger is an emergent torsion of the active and the passive; the deliberative and the acquiescent. ¹²⁵ But more than this, habit also precipitates a stillness and a weightlessness that renders the passenger vulnerable to other intensities, ¹²⁶ other forms of awareness: enlargements that can only take place within such speeds. Indeed, habit understood as a driver might also help to understand how the desirability of ease and efficiency came to be such a pervasive mobile sensibility in the first place. Given ‘that our habits make life easier and more comfortable (more lived in) suggests an impulse to ease and comfort drawn from a sense of irritation and agitation. This kind of suffering is, in turn, habitual, since it consists of patterns of response to certain sensations on the body’.¹²⁷ Consequently, for transport planners, designers and architects intent on improving the passenger experience by making it ‘easier’, the thorny task becomes one of recognizing the obduracy (or fragility) of these virtual passages carved out by habit, and their susceptibility to change.