Nowadays, a reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers: between the familial and the nonfamilial, between the foreign and the non-foreign, the citizen and the non-citizen, but first of all between the private and the public, private and public law, etc. (2000: 47–49)
And he continues,
I want to be master at home . . ., to be able to receive whomever I like there. Anyone who encroaches on my ‘at home,’ on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage. (2000: 53–55)
Train seats do not make for spacious homes, but, nonetheless, notions of home (of having one’s own space and privacy) work as an important ‘cultural backdraft (O’Dell 2006) informing the rules governing life on the tracks. Commuting may be readily equated with the rat race, but once on the train, people tend to demonstrate high levels of tolerance for one another. This works as long as the laws of hospitality are respected. The risk of exceeding the implicit bounds of hospitality always exists, but as Derrida argued (2000, 2001), hostility and violence are inevitably built-in components of hospitality. Absolute hospitality seems to be an impossibility. Hosts always set limits. They do not just accept anyone, for any length of time, to doing whatever they like. And guests always have the potential of becoming threats. This is the dilemma of hospitality, and this is part of the tension built into the commute.
In this sense, aspects of the train commute are more similar to the workings of a motel or apartment building than the prison to which Certeau alluded. It is a place in which ‘room’ is rented by the minute rather the hour or day, and in which neighbours meet briefly before moving on. And perhaps it is this aspect of the commute that so readily lends itself to a whole genre of lore concerning chance meetings and found loves. It is a world in which many neighbours will never get to know one another, but in which the simple movement of a bag has the possibility of leading to bigger things. Seats here are more than pigeonholes, and their proximity to one another is more than incarcerating or claustrophobic. It also throws people into vaguely defined relationships with one another that can be the basis for loose-knit communities of repetition and recognition. ‘There’s the woman who gets off in Landskrona,’ ‘Oh no. That’s the guy who ALWAYS talks on the cell phone. I’m not sitting near him today!, and so on. This type of knowledge that commuters have of one another may seem superficial, but the results of accumulative and repetitive observations do play a role in the production of a sense of both space and belonging. Their presence is a confirmation of the fact that the rules of the game we engaged in yesterday will still apply today – and at some level I understand what this means in this specific context. It is a reassuring and anxiety-diminishing aspect of the structure of the commute.
My Soul for a Seat
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