Nonetheless, the rush for seats still exists. Commuters can hardly do more than shuffle aboard, but these are the few seconds in which the commute really is a race. And it is the anticipated opening of the doors that releases this unique cultural energy, emanating from the upholstered seats within. Somewhat ironically, these are seats that were placed on the trains to make passengers’ trips more comfortable and relaxing, but which paradoxically have a haunting effect upon everyone boarding the train.
As Kevin Hetherington (2004) has pointed out, consumption is not just about processes of acquisition, use and having. It also concerns issues of absence and disposal (see Munro 2001). And the seats within the commuter train constitute a sort of disposable good that consumers strive to acquire every morning, but which they gladly forfeit every day (twice a day) upon arriving at their destination. But unlike paper plates and Styrofoam cups, which we generally think of as ‘disappearing’ after we have used them, train seats are relinquished in a way that we hope will only be temporary. The seats are, in other words, perpetually entering and exiting states of ‘secondhandedness’ (Hetherington 2004: 170–172), of allure and ‘used-upness’. They haunt the bodies of passengers through the corporeal memory of how it feels to stand the distance of the commute as opposed to sinking down into a soft seat. And even as commuters get off the train, and leave their seats behind, they presume at some level that the seat (or its equivalent) remains stored on their monthly passes – ready to be reclaimed and pulled out of storage upon the pass’s re-invocation at the end of the day. In a sense, the pattern of consumption here is a perpetually cyclical one of acquisition, divestment, longing and attempted reacquisition, in which the dynamics of return are as important an aspect of the consumption process as the actual acquisition and use of the object in question (the seat).
Rituals of Transformation: Between Home and Work
Once on the train the rhythm and intensity of the commuter’s routines shifts yet again. As Christena Nippert-Eng (1996) has argued, this phase of the commute provides people in the morning with the opportunity to re-orientate themselves away from the home and the routines of the private sphere towards work – and the process reverses itself in the evening in a manner that is highly visible.
Take the commute home from work, for example. Compared to the morning commute, this is an emotionally ‘lighter’ trip. While the morning commute may be characterized by people getting ready for work, reading papers, working on laptops, consuming coffee to get them focused and ready for the hours ahead, the evening commute features buttoned-down collars and loosened ties (which are immediately jettisoned and replaced by leisure clothing upon arrival home). This is a commute in which alcoholic beverages tend to replace caffeinated ones (more so in the US than Sweden), as people talk, joke and prepare themselves mentally for the arrival home (Nippert-Eng 1996: 125–135).
My Soul for a Seat
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