This saga of breakdowns was more than a string of personal bad luck. What makes these cases interesting, and why we know about them, is that these private frustrations had a public outlet. The GDR had an elaborate petitioning system (even encouraged it), where citizens could voice their complaints or suggestions to the heads of the regime. Historians have mainly viewed this system as an instrument to contain political opposition, if with diminishing success over time. But it also worked as a channel for the frustrations of daily life. The endless wait for the telephone, the queuing for children’s clothes, or, in the case of the Sparwassers, sitting once again on the side of the road in a broken-down car – the petitioning process amplified a sense that life was not ticking according to its proper rhythm, that the regime was failing on its promise to bring material comfort to all. Through the petitioning system, breakdowns exposed the dysfunctionality of the regime. The thick documentation of letters and complaints to the VEB works that the Sparwassers prepared was a kind of quotidian politics of disruption, about the rights of the little man to things running smoothly, and to redress where they don’t – in short, of not having to put up with repeated breakdown. As Mrs Sparwasser put it bluntly: this ‘cannot be normal’.
The second episode is from contemporary Canada and concerns the normalization of disruption. For families who had lived in Manitoba for generations, the frequent flooding of the Red River was part of their culture. When newcomers began to prepare for the risk by moving possessions to higher floors or storage, they were disparaged by locals for being ‘excessive’. Floods happened. There was nothing that human intervention, adaptation or planning could do to change that. In this case, the habit of naturalizing flood made for such a high degree of elasticity in people’s behaviour that, when a major flood struck in 1997, many were unwilling to evacuate or move their animals to higher ground, with devastating consequences (Scanlon 2001: 1–2).
The breakdown of the Hongkong Mass Transit Railway (HMTR) on 6 May 1996 shows the opposite force at work: the denormalization of disruption. Instead of being normal, the public came to view disruption as exceptional and avoidable, the result of human error and mismanagement. On the morning of 6 May 1996, a trackcircuit defect near one station escalated into a delay that held up sixty-six trains for almost an hour. When trains resumed at 11 a.m., 156,000 commuters were late for work. Forty-four people had to be hospitalized, including three pregnant women. The incident is interesting because it occurred in one of the world’s most intensely used and most reliable transport systems. The HMTR carries 800 million passengers a year. In 1995, a mere 0.1 per cent of its 717,000 journeys had an incident, that is, less than one potentially accident-causing incident for every million passengers.
Disruption is Normal
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