{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":89,"pdf_page":92,"physical_index":92,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"620f2bf61219b3e4950535a3930be7b2e381acd2590c7dbc20925006b63eddf6"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"I think it’s tragic that you have to pay 2000 Swedish Crowns every month to stand two hours a day, and you just don’t stand. Usually you have some unknown person’s breath working as a fan in your face, and in the morning it’s not all that fresh. I can promise you.\n\nJohanna<sup>7</sup>\n\nCommuting by train is not a phenomenon that many people regard very highly – if you ask them. Some may speak appreciatively of being able to bike or walk to the train, of getting fresh air, and perhaps even a little exercise. But press people on their experiences of commuter trains, and one enters a realm of frustrating delays, crowded cars, obnoxious passengers and uncomfortable proximities. From this perspective, the commute is a ‘necessary evil’ of sorts, whose negative reputation has long been reinforced and further denigrated by a prevalent flora of popular representations found in films and books in which commuting works as the ultimate symbol of drudgery: a space of flow inhabited by ashen grey and alienated faces, staring blankly into nothingness. This is a morally charged genre of popular folklore wherein train lines are all too easily likened to zones of transit in which machines transport the empty husks of humanity, so ravaged by the pressures of work and the intensities of the rat race that their bodies are hardly capable of registering the impulses to which they are exposed. The train is here not only a means of transportation, but also a jungle of micro-mobilities in which the social order and the sanctity of one’s own identity are ever threatened, and on the brink of oblivion, as bodies are jammed together, jarred around, intermixed and hurled forward along the trajectory of the tracks.\n\nBut implicit in images of the rat race are not only notions of the threat of flux and disorientation, but even the overwhelming and crushing weight of structure as people engage in the exact same routines day after day. This is also an aspect of life on the rails to which Michel de Certeau has drawn attention. His observations were based upon rail travel in general and not commuter travel specifically; nonetheless, his insights can work as a fruitful point of departure for a consideration of the role that structure plays in relation to routines. In Certeau’s view, trains were anything but chaotic; to the contrary, train travel was a phenomenon he referred to as ‘Travelling incarceration’:\n\nImmobile inside the train . . . The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia. Control and food move from pigeonhole to pigeonhole: ‘Tickets, please . . . ‘Sandwiches? Beer? Coffee? . . .’ Only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system. (1984: 111)\n\nIn Certeau’s eyes, the railroad car was little more than a rolling tyrannical prison. Once aboard, there was little chance for escape. Everyone had an assigned place, and the conductor carefully checked to make sure that everyone was in the right place and remained there.\n\nMy Soul for a Seat\n\n89","previous_page":88,"next_page":90}