Uncanny underground: absences,ghosts and the rhythmed everyday of the Prague metro

Opening the underground

‘We are opening another three stations of the metro as we promised in our policy statement, and we are doing so two months in advance. Prague gets its 59th kilometre, and the 55th, 56th, and 57th stations of the underground railway are being opened’, proclaimed Pavel Bém, the mayor of Prague, while ceremonially cutting the ribbon and thus opening the latest metro extension on the 8th of May 2008. During the ceremony, representatives of the municipality and the Public Transport Company made several speeches in which they stressed the importance of the metro not only for Prague but also for the surrounding region and the whole country, as it also serves tourists and other visitors to Prague. They spoke of its advanced technology, and the role of the Prague municipality as its primary investor was emphasized: ‘there is no other city in the world that invests so much money into public transport as Prague’. ¹ The date of the opening was not chosen haphazardly; since the fall of state socialism, the 8th of May is now a public holiday commemorating the end of the Second World War in Europe and the liberation of Prague from the Nazi occupation. The ceremony praised the metro not only for its practical usefulness but also as a symbolic expression, as a means of measuring Prague/Czech achievements against Europe and the world.

Compared to the more famous undergrounds of London, Paris or Barcelona, the Prague metro – the underground railway system – is relatively tiny; it is also less splendid than the one in Moscow. Despite previous plans to build a metro in Prague, the system was largely built during the last two decades of socialism in Czechoslovakia (i.e. in the 1970s and 1980s). ²

The late 1950s and 1960s are often perceived as an era of thaw, of political, social and cultural liberalization within Central and Eastern Europe in conjunction with a specific cultural and artistic revival. ³ However, the two subsequent decades, which followed the social and political upheavals of the Prague Spring in 1968, are referred to as ‘normalization’ in the Czech context. They mark an era of socialist order and consolidation under the heightened surveillance of the Soviet Union as embodied by the physical presence of the armies of the Warsaw Treaty. ⁴ As Šimečka put it, the aim of ‘normalization’ was to ‘restore order’, to restore ‘quiet’ to socialist life; this ‘quiet’, however, would be based on ‘a nationwide amnesia about the recent [more optimistic] past as well as a wilted ambition for a socialist utopia’. ⁵

The ceremony of the 8th of May 2008 recalls another that took place just 34 years earlier. On the 9th of May 1974, Gustáv Husák, then president of socialist Czechoslovakia and a key figure of the ‘normalization’ period, opened the first nine stations of the metro with great fanfare, and with a similar movement of his hand in a similar cutting of a similar ribbon. As Rudé Právo, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, tells us in its 12th of May 1974 special issue, speeches were also made. These were about the necessity of the metro for Prague, its uniqueness and beauty, about the hardships that had been overcome in building it, as well as the never-ending friendship between the peoples of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, which had been strengthened by cooperation and which were now and forever to be embodied in the materiality of the metro – in its architecture, in the names of the stations, and in their décor. Indeed, the date of the opening was chosen purposefully: during socialism, the 9th of May was a public holiday commemorating the liberation of Prague by the Soviet army from Nazi occupation and thus the end of the Second World War in Europe.

The two celebratory openings attest to the observation made by Rosalind Williams that ‘the subterranean environment is a technological one – but it is also a mental landscape, a social terrain, and an ideological map’. ⁶ In their distinctiveness, both events present the metro not only in a simple utilitarian way as an efficient means of transport, but also as a symbol or expression of certain values and ideas. The reasoning behind the temporal setting of the events, the overall tone of the speeches and, most importantly, the general fetishization of the metro remained nearly untouched in the intervening years despite the profound changes to the context. Here, we see the metro dwelling ‘exactly on the twin-condition that connection to the network implies acquiring the use value of the utility and realizes the promise of participating in the phantasmagoric new world of technological advancement and “progress”‘. ⁷

The modernist fascination with and fetishization of technology ⁸ lurks in the socialist stations having been complemented by contemporary capitalist commodification and fetishization as embedded in the newly built stations. This results in an assemblage of material features referring to particular discourses. Having been built, used and experienced across time, the metro has been continuously re-signified on a discursive level, which brought change to the metro materiality. We could approach the metro as ‘a time materialized or better time materializing’. To paraphrase Barbara Bender, ⁹ in its visual and material dimension, the metro ‘never stands still’. Hence what I perceive is the palimpsest-like nature of the metro spatiality in which, as in a true paper palimpsest, subsequent time-layers materialize over one another, creating an assemblage that, despite all efforts to the contrary, is fluid and changing on the one hand and full of ambiguity on the other. ¹⁰ This article thus explores the particularities of this palimpsest-like landscape with an emphasis not only on what is present, but above all on what is absent, what has been removed or overlaid, and how this co-creates and (in)forms the presence of the metro.

Absence and landscape

In his article about landscape, absence and love, John Wylie argues that thinking and writing about landscape has so far been predominantly oriented towards presence. He calls for ‘an account of landscape, matter, and perception couched more explicitly in terms of absence, distance, displacement, and the non-coincidence of self and world’. ¹¹ In the following text, I would like to offer an analysis of the Prague metro and the ambiguity of its meaning (and experience) based on an exploration of the tension between absence and presence. On a more general level, I use the Prague metro as an example of the constitutive effect of absence on landscape.

In doing so, I share a common ground with scholarly works that deal with the issue of absence either implicitly or explicitly. This is a vast literature that theorizes upon ruins and ruinous landscapes. Here, the emphasis is on the interplay of presence and absence that shapes the materiality of ruins and its relationship to aesthetics, memory, and temporality. ¹² It is grounded in the observation (and sometimes fascination with the fact) that there is ‘an important temporal aspect of the ruin, whether natural or cultural, that it is not simply a sign of the past in the present, but rather marks the moment at which what is now becomes what has been’. ¹³ Although the metro is not a ruin but a highly efficient system dressed in a modernist design, I believe it shares with ruins this specific relationship to time, memory and aesthetics, stemming from the tension between presence and absence. A ruin can be understood as an epitome of ‘time materializing’, to recall once more Barbara Bender. In ruins, this juxtaposition of presence and absence grants evidence to the materializing of passing time; and here I deal with these juxtapositions within the Prague metro and their effect.

The work of Tim Edensor ¹⁴ exemplifies this; he explores the sensuous, phenomenological, and emotional aspects of the disordered materiality of industrial ruins. He employs ghostly metaphors in order to analyse the effects of disordered space on the spatialization of memory in the city and on the experience of remembering. Edensor shares not only interest in the workings of absences, but also the language of so-called ‘spectral geographies’. These represent a diverse set of writings that use ghostly metaphors in order to explore the relationship of space, time, and memory. ¹⁵ My understanding of the Prague metro has been influenced by these spectral explorations and I also employ ghostly metaphors in order to describe the metro materiality and the workings of the juxtapositions of absence and presence. At the same time, however, I do not want to let the ghosts lead me too far from the actual metro spaces. I want to explore not the spectrality of the metro but its materiality, and the ways in which the metro is constituted not only by what is present but also by what is absent.

Apart from the works already mentioned, some authors concerned with the issue of social memory paid explicit attention to absences. Dydia DeLyser analyses the role of absence in the social as well as personal constructions of the past in one US ghost town. ¹⁶ Karen Till explores the cityscape of newly reborn Berlin in order to understand the connection between absence and the politics of remembrance. ¹⁷ Unlike the spaces explored by DeLyser or Till, the metro is generally neither seen nor approached as a site of memory, and thus it is not explicitly featured in contemporary politics of remembrance nor is it used and experienced as a site for memory practices and practicing. However, due to the palimpsest-like nature rooted in the interplay of absence and presence, the metro does indeed host latent memories of the past as well as of past (and contemporary) ambitions for and fears of the future. I explore these in their material traces and show that the latent memories that they host have largely been suppressed in favour of the smooth efficiency of commuting, undisturbed by any undesired meaning and effect. I argue, however, that the workings of the interplay of absence and presence produces disruption to the smooth surface of the metro and this enables us to see the suppressed – be it the past or the technological background of the transportation system.

In order to explore the moment in which the familiar metro turns into an unfamiliar one, I draw on the work of Anthony Vidler and his notion of uncanny. ¹⁸ The uncanny, literally ‘the unhomely’, that Vidler borrowed and reworked from Freud, grasps the modern anxious experience (of space) rooted in ‘the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream’. ¹⁹ The sense and feeling of the uncanny originates at the threshold of the familiar and unfamiliar, of the known and unknown, the real and unreal, and at the ease with which one can turn into the other. To return to the aforementioned disruption facilitated by the interplay of presence and absence that is the centre of this essay, the uncanny effect produced in such situations is, to quote Maria Kaika, ‘due to the fact that these manifestations hint at processes that work and lie beyond what is the “ordinary appearance”. It is when the predictable nature of the familiar acts in unpredictable ways that the uncanny effect is produced’. ²⁰

‘As a concept . . . the uncanny has, not unnaturally, found its metaphorical home in architecture’, ²¹ and its manifestation and embodiment in the figure of the ghost, who haunts the seeming security of home as well as of the rational and rationalized, illuminated, and guarded but crowded spaces of the city. Indeed, the ghost is an elusive figure. Ghosts are not coherent, as Steve Pile ²² points out; they do not express ideas but haunt them. They represent not the signs of the past in the present, but ‘traces of the unknown or unknowable’, as Holloway and Kneale ²³ put it. They feed on the threshold of life and death and thus also of past and present, and presence and absence. From this point of view, they seem a very apt tool for exploring the uncanny of the Prague metro.

The body of this article is divided into three parts that approach the metro and the workings of its absences from different angles. The first focuses on the ghosts of the past. I pay special attention to what has been expelled from the metro – what is absent from the spaces of the metro as well as what is present though overlooked or made invisible. The second focuses on less explicit workings of absence; here, I concentrate on the presence of absence rather than the opposite. I describe the fears that have shaped and continue to shape the metro on material as well as experiential levels. I present contemporary fears as rooted in the feeling of absence or potential presence of certain material elements, behaviours and experiences.

But I believe that there is more to the tension between absence and presence than the absence of presence and the presence of absence. In the third section, I turn my attention to the potentiality of absence (and also of presence). Here, I draw on Henry Lefebvre’s work on rhythm in order to show the metro as consisting of various intertwined rhythms. ²⁴ Lefebvre asserts that ‘everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’, ²⁵ which certainly applies to the metro. By focusing on rhythms, one can pay ready attention to the ‘dramatic becoming’ of the metro as well as potential disturbance to it in its never-ending unfurling. ²⁶ My aim is to suggest that the workings of absence and the rhythmicality of the metro are deeply intertwined; together they represent a constitutive foundation of the landscape of the Prague metro.

Since the Prague metro is a means of transport, the article crosses the field of ‘geographies of mobilities’ that have recently been (re)forming. ²⁷ However, I do not delve into these waters because I am less interested in the practices and experiences of mobility than I am in issues of absence and the constitutive role of the tension between absence and presence within the landscape (of the Prague metro) as well as how this has played out within the rhythmed landscape. ²⁸

I do this because I believe that the source of the metro uncanny can be comprehended as the potentiality of absence together with the rhythmicality of the metro. The uncanny can in turn be seen as the effect of a sudden non-coincidence of the self and the world, to paraphrase Wylie again. I thus address the polyrhythmia of the metro, and link it to the metro uncanny in order to show how the present and absent come together in the vivid presence of the metro landscape. I conclude by arguing that absences are a key source of the difference (disturbance) introduced to the polyrhythmia of the metro, and hence of the metro uncanny as manifested in ghostly figures.

The article draws on multi-method field research that took place during two summer months of 2008. The aim of the research was to explore the cultural history of the metro and the ways in which this history was present and manifested in the actual metro spaces. I conducted archival research (in the Prague Public Transport Company archive, the Prague Municipal Archive and the Czech National Archive) focusing on the decision-making process before and during construction of the metro in state socialism and after. Discourse analysis of the visual as well as textual (archival) material ²⁹ was coupled with observation in the metro and ethnographic incidental interviews with metro staff, including station managers, ticket inspectors, technicians and others. Because at the time of the research my father worked as a ticket inspector, I also gained access to the backstage of the metro and the people working there. I also interviewed two metro station architects. As I am a long-term resident of Prague, the research was necessarily influenced by, but also subsequently influenced, my own experience of the metro. All this drew my attention to the issue of how the present and absent intermingle in this vivid underground landscape. I also lead walks to the metro as part of varying cultural events in Prague. This allows me to talk to people about their (sudden or incidental) interest in the metro and observe how their understanding changes when confronted by narratives about the metro’s cultural history. Thus, when I refer to the experience of the metro, I build on my personal long-term experience as well as observations of others’ experience, both of which have complemented the original research.

The past to be expelled

Being underground, the metro is a totally man-made environment. Groys argues that

the topos of the metro is definitely a u-topos, even if a demonic, subterranean one . . . In this space there can be nothing inherited, traditional, taken for granted, or unplanned. One is completely dependent on the will of those who create it. This gives the metro planner the opportunity to utterly redesign people’s lives, provided they set foot in the metro. ³⁰

The urban spaces transformed or built during socialism were usually invested with complex ideological meaning; generally they were either ‘designed as a measure of triumph over fascism or as an expression of ideology of social justice’. ³¹ Either way, they served as an expression of the triumph of socialism. As Crowley and Reid observed, this is because ‘totalitarianism is distinguished by a kind of epistemological imperialism, the battle for the “symbolic occupation” of space and time’. ³²

The Prague metro was no exception. During socialism, it was planned as a kind of holistic environment embodying an old modernist dream of social utopia and harmony expressed and simultaneously created by a thoroughly designed environment. ³³ Hence, station names and aesthetics of their artistic décors were put under intense scrutiny. ³⁴ They all had to conform to the rules of, and pass through a formal approval procedure by, the Prague city council and then the political committee of the City Section of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which was formed specifically around the issue of the metro and understood to epitomize the interests of the people.

These political bureaucracies considered the name, décor and aesthetics to be the main agents bringing harmony into the environment and thus into the lives of people. In each station, there was (to be found) a place that should be used for artistic decoration. The name of the station reflected and symbolized the idea that each station would convey, and the aesthetics of the décor was subordinate to that idea. For example, with regards to the terminal station on line C, the Cosmonauts station, we read:

the ideological content of the station stems from the name of the station and is based on [expressing] the diversity of the work related to astronautics – from manual and scientific to work in outer space. The range of different kinds of work, a most elaborate form of distribution of labour, aimed only at the goal of entering outer space, is in fact a celebration of work as such, as well as a celebration not only of accomplishing the old dreams of humankind . . . but also of the significant contribution of Soviet astronautics to the endeavour. ³⁵

However, each station as such belonged to a larger aesthetic and ideological whole. Within the lines, all the ‘building, architectonical, operational, transportational, technological and visual demands were [are] identical’. Ideologically, every line (and its subsequent sections) is based on a ‘general idea’, which represents a unifying force and determines the content and décor of the stations. Thus, the names and décor of line C reflected the struggle for and the building of socialism.

On an ideological level, the whole metro was meant as a kind of historical monument, simultaneously mirroring, representing, and re-creating the optimistic world of socialism. The meanings hidden in the body of the metro were intricately hierarchical, expressed by single artworks and names that were supposed to merge into a larger image, an ideological statement embodied in the physical space and aesthetics of the metro. The ‘symbolic occupation of space and time’ ³⁶ was to merge with the real, physical, lived occupation in a large, optimistic, socialist whole.

However, the Velvet Revolution of 1989 changed what until that time had seemed unchangeable and Czechoslovak state socialism collapsed. Gustáv Husák, the president who opened the metro a quarter of a century before, resigned. And on the 28th of March 1990, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic ceased to exist. The new republic inherited a metro that was in fact an unfinished monument to a bright socialist present and future that had suddenly become the past.

Duncan Light argues that one of the rituals of the revolutions in the Eastern bloc, one of ‘the earliest responses to the collapse of socialist regimes’, was the renaming of public places: ‘Such renamings were a small but highly symbolic statement with a high propagandist impact that history had changed course.’ ³⁷ This is definitely true for the Prague metro, where stations were renamed by the city council even before the old socialist republic had been fully turned into a new, democratic one. Thirteen of 41 stations in use at that time were renamed; this included the old Cosmonauts station, which took an old local name and became Háje, and Moscow station, which became Angel. The announced reason for renaming the stations was that ‘many station names are entirely erroneous’ (i.e. ‘shallow’ or ‘tendentious’). ³⁸ However, I believe that efforts to deal with a recent and uncomfortable past and its distinctively present ideological heritage laid tacitly behind the justification of renaming, scarcely obscured by the idea of ‘erroneous’ names. Renaming is, as Light put it, a process of de-commemoration and new commemoration, ³⁹ a way of exorcizing the underground spaces haunted by the past.

I realized how the past haunts the metro, one day, when I was sitting in the Public Transport Company archive browsing through old photographs of the metro. The director of the archive came to greet me and to amuse me with a metro related story. It happened about a month before when somebody called the town hall in order to complain about an inscription and moulding on the wall in the vestibule of Hradčanská station. He requested it be removed and the request was, after some time, forwarded to the archive.

‘Why did they even phone us?’ the director expressed his amusement. ‘That’s something we don’t have anything to do with.’ Nevertheless, after the phone call he set off to Hradčanská to see the problem with his own eyes. He realized, to his surprise, that the moulding and the inscription are ‘so indistinguishable you have trouble finding it’. The vestibule of Hradčanská is veneered with yellow stone. On one wall, a state symbol of a lion is decoratively moulded, accompanied with an inscription that proclaims: ‘All the power in Czechoslovakia belongs to the working people.’ Hradčanská station is close to the Prague Castle, after which it was named. The reason for the use of state symbolism in the station décor is understandable and seemingly harmless – except that the lion is a socialist one, with flames of the Revolution burning in his chest, and the inscription is informed by socialist ideology and rhetoric. This décor was embedded deep in the normalization period, just before the station was put into service on the 12th of August 1978. ⁴⁰

In contrast to the surety with which socialist names were expunged, socialist decorations were often left to their fate. As time went by, some of them were removed while others remain visible in vestibules or outside metro entrances. And thus at the former Cosmonauts station, astronauts still look down at the passengers from a mosaic sprayed over with contemporary graffiti with the same unearthly smile as those in a bronze panel at the former Moscow station (Figure 1). At Staroměstská station, to give another example, the revolutionary mosaic has disappeared and its spot is now taken by a tobacconist’s stall. However, the mosaic is still in its place, embedded in the wall behind the stall, just as other mouldings at Hradčanská station are now covered by a flower shop.

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Figure 1.

Bronze panel and mosaic of astronauts at former Moscow (left) and Cosmonauts station (right). Source: author.

Some of the remnants of the past remain in the metro though they are overlooked and linger close to absence. Others have disappeared but their absence is still felt – the holes in the marble after inscriptions are removed, old names still used in speech, flashback memories from childhood and the overall aesthetics of the stations, these all have become repositories of the past, tacit but maintaining the capacity to disturb passers-by from time to time.

It seems that this could answer the director’s question as to why the complaint about the lion was forwarded to the archive. After all, it is a matter of the past. As such, it belongs to the competence of the archive, does it not? But for the person who complained about the décor, it was obviously not a matter of the past, or at least not of the past that was already dead, but of the past that was only too dangerously alive. Holloway and Kneale suggest that it is more productive to think about ghosts as ‘something alive that appears to be dead’ rather than the opposite. ⁴¹ It may be that the angels of socialism hovering above the heads of the crowd, the ghosts of the socialist past hiding in the shadows of brightly lit stations appear lifeless; but in fact they are undead, they are present in their absence tacitly waiting for the moment in which they are able to disturb the seemingly smooth and unproblematic technological underground.

The present to be tamed

The socialist metro was not designed and built only as a transport system that aesthetically conveyed the socialist utopia. It was also built as part of the so-called Metro Protective System (MPS), to be converted upon need into a nuclear fallout shelter. Tunnels and underground parts of the stations can be sealed off with hydraulic doors and each line has its own ‘technological centre’, from which the shift into the MPS regime is to be managed and controlled. Air filters, warehouses, and even hospitals and morgues are scattered around the metro providing all that is necessary for survival in case of nuclear war.

During socialism the MPS was classified; however, its existence was and to some extent has always been an open secret, partly because some of the features of the secret are, paradoxically, highly visible. Hydraulic doors at the end of tunnel sections or airlocks in stations are conspicuous features, which the metro passengers see and pass every day (Figure 2). These are some of the visible traces of the hidden metro, symbolically drawing attention to the fact that there is much more to the metro than what can be seen in its public spaces.

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Figure 2.

The hydraulic doors at Ládví station opened in 2004 and the airlock marked by thick walls and steel covering on the floor at Charles Square station. Source: author.

Having been the result of a specific socialist world view preoccupied with the possibility of imperialist aggression, the MPS represents a kind of hidden dimension of the metro, which nevertheless substantially informed the employment of technology in the metro as well as shaped the space of the metro on the most elementary level. The case of the MPS shows the metro planning and building was influenced by a specific fear – the fear of a dystopian post-nuclear-war future. And although the fear has subsided, traces of it can still be seen in the metro, as it lies at the threshold of the present and the absent.

The contemporary metro space is, nevertheless, informed and shaped by another yet structurally similar anxiety concerning both present and future. This anxiety, I believe, is rooted in the fact that the metro can be understood as a complicated system of flow. This flow is facilitated by technology and controlled by those who run it and who, at the same time, merge with it – this includes train controllers from the Traffic Supervisory Centre who supervise the movement of the trains along the tracks, station managers, escalator technicians, electricians, train drivers, etc. This flowing of air, electricity, information, matter and people, of which the metro consists, are indeed intricately intertwined and carefully operated while at the same time analysed and controlled. The Prague metro is, as a result, a very stable and efficient transport system performing with few delays or interruptions. Here anxiety begins; within the idea of smooth flow and technological perfection disruption starts to be feared.

The metro is a space interwoven by diverse means of control. These are not limited to the technology but also include the way in which technology is used to control both space and the people moving within it. All the airlocks, cables, CCTV cameras and other gadgets impersonate somebody hidden somewhere, operating or controlling them; the gadgets are visible but we see them without really seeing them, without noticing who or what they reference. By their presence they point to something absent from the metro space but that actually controls and influences both what happens and how it happens in the underground.

The metro is full of (hidden) spaces taken over by technology or inhabited by unseen inhabitants – escalator technicians, electricians, cleaners, station managers, platform guards, all of them being flesh and blood but scarcely noticed by ordinary passengers. Passengers usually do not think about the necessary existence of vast technological spaces in the backstage of the metro, or they ignore them. Or they generally do not seem to show any interest in them when travelling on the trains and hurrying along the corridors.

The glimpse of backstage metro spaces or of dimly lit tunnels leading seemingly into infinity can arouse uncanny feelings. The metro is not a haunted house, but it is uncanny as testified by all those horror movies set in an underground metro that acquire their emotional weight from it, be it Death Line, Kontroll or Creep. ⁴² These movies use the metro because ‘the underground . . . is familiar enough to be recognised and unfamiliar enough to be frightening, or at least enticing’, as David Pike observed. ⁴³ The Prague metro is no exception, lying exactly at that threshold, being a mundane space of the everyday commute guarded and operated by technology with vast spaces hidden in the backstage that could potentially host anyone and anything.

Stemming from its underground spatiality as well as technological, spatial, and social opaqueness, the uncanny of the Prague metro found its folklore embodiment in the figure of a phantom that haunts the underground spaces. The legend goes like this: the phantom is in fact a maniac, who

pushes innocent victims under the metro train. He attacks only when there are a lot of people on the platform. He always chooses somebody who stands near the safety line and waits until the train approaches the platform. In an instant, he suddenly rushes out and pushes the victim under the metro … and briskly disappears in the crowd. Always, people are so shocked that he manages to escape. This is why the police are unable to catch him. ⁴⁴

Here the uncanny aroused by the metro spatiality coalesces with the uncanny of the crowd that is again familiar and mundane but may well harbour a threat.

The metro, having been thoroughly planned and well equipped with technology to ensure both its functioning and passengers’ ‘safety and security’, could at first sight seem to be a utilitarian, uninteresting and over-smoothed space, merely a fully controlled background for travelling. But as I have shown, considering its past, its technological grounding as well as its aesthetic or spatial uncanny character, it is far from that. Even seemingly indifferent attempts to maintain cleanliness in its spaces seem always to come to grief.

The apparently unambiguous background for travelling is being re-signified on an everyday basis by tags, stickers, graffiti and other forms of street art as well as by unusual uses of space and the behaviour in it (begging or forbidden musical performance being just two examples), all of this appearing and disappearing in various places with varying intensity and re-appropriating the metro as a symbolic or aesthetic space. Indeed, such a kind of (aesthetic) re-appropriation has been publicly condemned as something ugly or even horrible. Tags and graffiti, in particular, are battled by every available means; from a campaign emphasizing how much it costs to clean the painted-over surfaces to the walls being sprayed with special anti-graffiti coating.

Nevertheless, and in particular, underground street artists are rarely seen and even more rarely caught, leaving behind only traces of their presence – tags or graffiti, or blurry stains on the walls where the former had been removed. The agents of disturbance may have gotten into the metro at night despite all the security precautions, CCTV cameras, and locked gates and grills. Or they may have infiltrated the metro staff. Or they simply did their task during the day, caught by ever-present CCTV cameras to hover unnoticed across a flickering screen somewhere, before disappearing again. The guards are absent from the metro yet their absence is manifested in the form of the technology they operate. The re-appropriating and disturbing agents are also absent, though in their absence they still can be felt as present. Like apparitions, they challenge the space of the metro unheeded bequeathing only the traces of their activity (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

On the right, the technological space in the mouth of the tunnel decorated with graffiti. On the left, the mirror glassy station manager’s control room overlooks the platform. Both at Mu°stek station. Source: author.

In contrast to the ghosts of the past, these apparitions are mostly absent from the metro but their absence still shapes the metro spaces. They remain present in their absence. Similarly, the metro guards are present in their invisibility. And invisibility here can be thought of as a form of absence (from the immediate spatiality and experience of the metro).

The fear and anxiety and the uncanny of the metro can also be understood as stemming from the very presence of certain elements that linger close to absence – be it the MPS, hidden spaces, spooky guards, or apparitions of disturbance. If the presence of their absence is noticed, the processes lying behind the smoothness of the metro suddenly become visible; potentially, the metro may then become ‘defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream’. ⁴⁵

Polyrhythmia, difference and the metro

The metro is indeed a planned (and thus architectonical and as I have shown, ideological) space governed technologically. But it is more than that. It is also a space that is not simply present under the ground but that is coming into being on an everyday basis as a kind of dynamism, in which ‘a place, a time and an expenditure of energy’ ⁴⁶ intertwine, or in other words, as a rhythm encompassing architectural and technological space(s), technology, matter, energy and people. Referring to Till, I argue that the place of the metro rhythm, however, is not an inert space, but a place ‘haunted by past structures of meaning and material presences from other times and lives’, ⁴⁷ which were produced in the process of place making, and of de-commemoration and new commemoration since the 1990s.

The actual existence of the metro is rhythmic. Rhythm is inherent to the metro. It is inherent to the process of the gradual building of the metro and of opening the stations; it is inherent to maintaining technological as well as public spaces, to the weekly as well as daily pace of trains coming and going. People continuously fill the platforms during the metro’s working hours, people who are abruptly superseded by the people who get off the train and are about to leave the station, the emptiness of which starts to fill again with people coming to wait. The weekday rhythm differs from the weekend one, and so does day rhythm from the night one, which is the most loose, consisting of either regular or emergency night maintenance of the stations, tunnels and technology.

Technologically speaking, the synergy of the various rhythms of the metro aspires to a total perfection from which a polyrhythmic landscape of transportation arises. What I have so far presented, however, has been intended to show that this rhythmed landscape of transportation is also a palimpsest-like landscape hosting the traces of ‘the unknown or unknowable’, to borrow again from Holloway and Kneale. ⁴⁸ My argument is that these traces are rooted in the interplay of absent and present, and that this interplay has the potential to create an uncanny effect of sudden defamiliarization, of turning the known into the unknown and unknowable.

The producers and managers of the flows of matter, people, energy and information aspire to perfect, uninterrupted, smooth unfurling of flow, embedded in and symbolized by clean, untouched, smooth underground space. But, as Lefebvre observed, ‘there is no absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference. When it concerns the everyday, rites, ceremonies, fêtes, rules and laws, there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference’. ⁴⁹ This would mean that the routines – of flow, of experience – ever-present in the metro are susceptible to disruption, challenging both the intended meanings embodied in architectonical-technological spaces and the routine experience of these spaces. I believe that the workings of absence that I have outlined have the capacity to challenge the established and to turn the attention to what is behind ordinary appearance. The newly sprayed graffiti catches one’s attention on the way home. Sprayed over an old and long overlooked socialist mosaic of astronauts (see Figure 1) it enters the realm of presence for the moment; and with it rises the uncanny feeling of the non-coincidence of self and the world, of difference. After some time, however, the uncanny feeling will fade into background noise; this happens slower for those more interested in or angered by graffiti than it does for others.

Moreover, ‘not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them’. ⁵⁰ As for the metro, the rhythm – or better, the polyrhythmia of the everyday – gives birth to a preoccupation with the futile effort to perfect the rhythm, to prevent disruptions. It gives birth to the fear of disturbance symbolically embodied in the struggle to purify the metro space. The seeming, inhumane perfection of the rhythm also nurtures the uncanny of the metro. When the precision is disrupted, the train stops inside the tunnel, the then familiar turns unfamiliar and the absent, the unnoticed, the unconscious – being that technology behind the movement of the metro or the cultural imagery of underground – comes to light.

Sometimes ghosts challenge the conformity and the rhythm (of the metro landscape) by materializing right on the platforms. In October 2006, a group of lords and ladies playing poker and drinking whiskey nestled in one of the carriages to the surprise of ordinary passengers (Figure 4). They travelled all the line long and then disappeared. In their nonchalance, they disrupted the general conception of the metro on many levels. They were not dressed as others, and they were not simply going somewhere. On the contrary, they enjoyed themselves; they had fun, chatted, played cards, and flirted. They violated regulations by drinking alcohol in the carriage, but they did so with an air of ingenuousness and naivety as if they came from another world. They even communicated with other passengers, inviting them to share their (metro) reality. They used the space of the metro for their own purposes that, however, remained unclear; thus, they presented the ride not as a means of getting somewhere. From the discussions I had afterwards with two personal friends who took place in the event, I gained a mixed feeling that, for the lords and ladies the ride was meaningful in itself, while at the same time the actual meaning remained unclear. The lords and ladies did not express ideas, again to paraphrase Pile, but their haunting emphasized the metro as a lived space, a landscape that could be invested with a particular mood by disrupting its ordinary appearance.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Ghostly ladies and gentlemen in the metro accompanied by their servants. The inscription they glued on the window says: Non-smoking coupé. Source: <http://www.jansilar.cz/janek/lordi/index.html>; 1 September 2008.

The disruptions are uncanny for they seem to be the result of the workings of ghostly figures that surface despite ongoing exorcism. I understand the uncanny to be rooted in the polyrhythmia of the metro that in turn is grounded in the potentiality of absence – in the potentiality of what is absent to become present and what is present to become absent. It is thus the tension of presence and absence that shapes the materiality and experience of the metro. Polyrhythmia and the tensions of absence and presence are intertwined in the metro landscape. It is the unfurling of the tensions within the polyrhythmia that constitutes the ‘dramatic becoming’ of the Prague metro. This is also the reason why no exorcism will ever be fully successful. Ghosts are inherent to the metro because they are born from the palimpsest-like nature of the metro, grounded in the juxtaposition of presence and absence that is played out within the metro rhythmicity both everyday and long term.

Conclusion: the uncanny underground

The metro exists as polyrhythmia, as a coalescence of various rhythms. In this article, I argued that apart from this, the metro has always been meant to be present under the ground in a particular way – the crudest being simply an efficient means of transport. This, however, points to the efficiency of technology and by so doing, also to the efficiency of the municipal government and its fulfilment of a promise of a better future. However, I showed that the metro is never as unambiguous as this. Its spaces are inhabited by different kinds of ghostly figures who feed on the tensions of absence and presence and who make the metro uncanny.

In his work on industrial ruins, Edensor ⁵¹ presents the disordered space of ruins as having particular effects on people, their movement and emotion; and he argues that these effects can prove subversive with respect to the cleansed spaces of a contemporary city. A disordered space is a space of affordances different from those in a city, due to the particular juxtapositions of presence and absence within the materiality of ruin. What I have tried to show here is that, though not in a ruinous state but due to its palimpsest-like nature, the metro can also be conceived of in terms of absence and the juxtaposition of absence with presence. However, for me, the absences in the metro and their effects are not simply a part of a disordered landscape; they represent agents of disordering. In Lefebvre’s words, I understand the workings of absence as introducing difference into the rhythmed-and-palimsest-like landscape of the metro.

Thus, the absences in the metro are not simple voids to be filled with imagination, nor are they mere potentialities for narratives and narrativizations. Different from DeLyser, ⁵² who observed people using the absences in a US ghost town to strengthen their pre-existing readings of the landscape, the absences in the Prague metro subvert the existing potential readings of the metro; they subvert both the discourses that have been introduced to the metro as well as the ordinary experiences of commuting.

I presented the diverse ghostly figures coming out of the spaces where presences and absences meet to show the diverse effects of the working of absence in the landscape of the metro. Ghosts are disruptive; they do not express ideas but haunt something, to recall once more Pile’s words. ⁵³ To paraphrase, I see absences not as compelling, but disturbing; they do not foster ideas, but allow for difference to take place – the difference that makes the invisible, the unfamiliar, and the hidden come suddenly into sight in uncanny moments of seeing behind the ordinary appearance and conception of the metro.

Or to phrase it differently, the metro’s polyrhythmia gives birth to differences within its own unfurling. Ghostly figures spring from the tensions of absence and presence to manifest particular forms of difference. They arise from the potentiality of absence to produce a sudden feeling and experience of distance, the non-coincidence of self and the familiar world to which Wylie refers. This sudden feeling lies at the heart of the uncanny. By means of describing particular outcomes of the tensions between absence and presence within the Prague metro, I attempted to come closer to the source of this experience. I have done so because a focus on absence can link the notion of the uncanny to that of rhythm in order to produce an understanding of the ambiguities inherent to the Prague metro; this, I believe, applies on a more general level to any relationship between landscape and absence.