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Wesleyan University The Honors College
Between the Lines: Transience, Transgression, and
Transfers in New York City’s Subway
by
Margalit Katz
Class of 2022
A thesis submitted to the
faculty of Wesleyan University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Departmental Honors in Anthropology
Middletown, Connecticut April, 2022
ii
Contents
Acknowledgements ____________________________________________ iv
Departures ____________________________________________________ 1
Chapter One: Public/Private ___________________________________ 23
Chapter Two: Contagion/Containment _________________________ 61
Chapter Three: Surveillance/Solidarity ________________________ 101
Epilogue: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors ____________________ 130
Works Cited _________________________________________________ 141
iii
iv
Acknowledgements
Like the subway, this thesis would not be possible without the influence of so
many people. I feel so lucky to have had the support of such exceptional
people who believed in my vision for this project and helped bring it to life.
To my parents: Mom, thank you for raising me to view life through a
psychoanalytic lens, for teaching me to watch for the symbols in everything,
and for encouraging lofty ideas. Dad, thank you for teaching me what good
storytelling, logic and argumentation look like. Thank you both for your
endless love and support and for always reminding me to watch for the Ghost
Station.
To my sister: Thank you for being my partner in play and discovery, for all the
laughs, conversations, and arguments, and all the train rides when those
moments took place.
To the residents of 128 Jefferson Avenue and adjacent community: Thank you
for your warmth, your openness, and your community. Thank you for
welcoming me home after long days of fieldwork and for all the late-night and
sunset chats on the roof spent exploring big ideas and digesting subway
stories.
To my professors: First and foremost, Daniella Gandolfo, my thesis advisor,
thank you for your unreserved guidance, kindness, patience, wisdom, and
enthusiasm through every stage of this project for the past two years. Thank
you for always pushing me to expand and complicate my thinking, and for
inciting my love of anthropology in ANTH 101. Joey Weiss, thank you for
teaching me to write ethnography and for challenging me to deepen my
understanding of theory, always with a sense of humor. Betsy Traube, thank
you for your devotion as my advisor throughout my time at Wesleyan and for
your diligent edits during the early stages of this project. Margot Weiss,
thank you for encouraging me to write, to be imaginative, and for showing me
how ethnography can be art. Thank you to the Anthropology Department
and Andrew J. Goffe for providing funding for this project, allowing me to
devote my focus to it last summer.
To my classmates in ANTH 400: Thank you for all your questions, for
pushing my thinking further, and for helping me see my blind spots. It was a
privilege to share my work with you and to get to be a small part of yours too.
To Evelyn: Thank you for sharing your stories and perspective as a non-native
New Yorker, for listening as I sifted through my half-formed thoughts, for
helping me piece them together. This friendship is so special and so
grounding, it gives me the courage to dream.
To Meg: Thank you for your support, for helping me sit through times of
stress until I eventually found solutions. Thank you for inspiring me with your
own ideas and work. Thank you for your unconditional love, your insights,
your earnest questions, your syntactic prowess, your critiques, your stories,
and of course your transcription work on the most frustrating and
incomprehensible audio recording of all time. You are all over this project.
v
To Alan Saly: Thank you for the work you do for TWU Local 100, and of
course for connecting me with so many of my interlocutors. This project is
indebted to you.
To my interlocutors: Thank you for being open-minded, for trusting me with
your stories, and for being willing to share your experiences with me. This
thesis could not have come to fruition without your interest and belief in this
project.
To all MTA Workers: Thank you for your steadfast social service, for going
above and beyond to make sure the city that never sleeps does not get a
second of shuteye.
To New York City: You “crazy,” beautiful, wild, ugly, magical beast, thank
you for raising me and for always keeping me on my toes.
Departures
2
“Trying to describe a day in the subway is a little like trying to take a
snapshot of the wind. It’s everywhere and nowhere in particular. You
can feel it and hear it yet chase in vain to capture the essence of the
life lived along some 700 miles of track, inside 468 stations, where
New Yorkers have done everything they’ve done on the streets above
and more. They've been born there and died there. They've lived there
and eaten there and slept there and dreamed the dreams they missed
during the too-short nights before. They've found their muses and
their soul mates. They've lost their wallets and their patience and,
sometimes, their minds.”
1
Fig. 1.1: Minh T. Nguyen, “A Step-By-Step Guide to Using the Subway System.”
I am running late. I sprint towards the sign, surrounded by
forest-green gating decorated with lampposts, and scamper down the
staircase into the station. A rectangular black box hangs from the
ceiling, green letters lighting up its screen:
1. (1) South Ferry……………..2 min.
I rush past the MTA employee in his glass booth, toward the
set of metal turnstiles by the emergency exit door. I snatch my
1
Kennedy, Randy. “A Day in the Subway, as It Rolls Up a Century.”
3
MetroCard out of my bag. Swiping it through the slot between silver
prisms, I hurl my torso into the horizontal beam, but it knocks the
wind out of me as it resists, and the machine emits a double-beep. The
screen on the right side of the turnstile reads: PLEASE SWIPE
AGAIN. Slightly irritated, I swipe my card a bit slower. More
beeping, and the screen repeats: PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN. I swipe
a little faster but slower than the first time, and even more beeps
follow: INSUFFICIENT FARE. I sprint toward the closest self-
service kiosk, tap Start on the upper right-hand side of the screen,
and keep tapping rapidly, anticipating every question and the exact
spot on the screen my answer belongs. Which language? Please
select MetroCard type: Please select transaction: Please
insert your card.
I place my MetroCard into the reader in the taxi-yellow panel
to the right, which sucks my card into the machine. What do you
want to add? Add value. How much do you want to add? $22.22.
How do you want to pay? Credit Card. Please dip your credit
card. At the bottom of the glossy blue panel below the screen I insert
my card into the reader briefly, unlike at any other ATM. Please
enter your ZIP code and press ENTER on the keypad below.
As I rush to do this last step, my train barrels into the station and my
heart begins to race. Come on, come on. You will be charged
$22.22. Ok. Processing payment. Take your MetroCard. The
reader on the yellow section spits out my MetroCard and I yank it out.
Do you want a receipt? No. Thank you. I run back to the turnstile
and swipe once again. It emits a triple beep, the screen reads: PAID
$2.75 BAL $23.77, and the turnstile bars click. I lean into the bar
4
and scurry through the turnstile as it swivels behind me. I sprint
toward the train and hop on just as the doors close behind me.
Fig. 1.2: “New York City Subway Map,” MTA, 2022.
The subway was established shortly after the political consolidation of
the five boroughs into one city, New York City. These two historical events
are closely intertwined. In fact, in a September 1894 issue, The New York
Times covered in consecutive news articles the upcoming votes on the
approval of the construction of rapid transit and the consolidation of the
boroughs into the Greater City of New York.
2
The construction of the
subway system and the integration of the city were mutually enabling—prior
2
“OF INTEREST TO POLITICIANS.”
5
to the subway, transportation and connection between the boroughs was
limited and thus consolidation of government was logistically difficult. The
creation of the subway fed the hunger for increased connection between the
boroughs, which increased population density. Population density allowed for
economic growth and innovation as well as increased exchange of ideas and
cultures. As the city developed, the areas with access to the subway became
the most desirable places to live and thus the most expensive. As in so many
other cities, the poorest were marginalized to the city limits while the wealthy
built their lives in neighborhoods well-connected to the city’s center.
3
Prior to the subway’s construction, the unmonitored congestion and
lack of circulation of crowds, particularly in Manhattan, was troubling to the
city’s elites, who thought they could lead violent mobs to coalesce. The
proponents of the subway appealed to these elites, arguing that the subway
could bring order and management of overcrowding by connecting disparate
parts of the city, encouraging people to relocate to more open spaces.
4
The city had previously experimented with electric elevated railways
dating back to 1868. But the first underground subway, run by the private
company Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), entailed a new level of
engineering and technological innovation. After the initial development of
the underground rail, three separate companies, one city-owned and two
privately owned, managed the separate subway lines.
5
In 1940, the city bought the two private companies and unified the
subway system, and by 1953 the New York City Transit Authority was
established, consolidating all of the separate subway maps into one.
6
In 1968
3
Mahler and Fass. “The Sunday Read: ‘The Case for the Subway.’”
4
Höhne, “The Birth of the Urban Passenger,” 316
5
Sims, “About New York; Alphabet Soup: Telling an IRT From a BMT.”
6
Stalter-Pace. Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway, 36-7.
6
the city Transit Authority transferred ownership of the subway and bus
systems over to the state-level Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA).
7
The
MTA’s original plan was to use toll money from bridges and tunnels to
subsidize the public subway system, but that proved to generate insufficient
funds, so ever since, the state government has picked up the rest of the
operating costs. However, since the 1990s, this reliance on the state
government has left the subway system struggling with lack of funds, despite
its crucial function in the city’s life and economy.
8
Today, the subway has 472
stations, and in 2016 saw an average daily ridership of 5.7 million people.
9
The first subway ride, on October 27th, 1904, ran along what is now the
6 line, from the now-defunct City Hall station to 145th Street and Broadway in
Harlem.
10
The original subway fare was five cents, half the price of the above-
ground rail and horse carriages, making it accessible to people of all incomes.
11
Around noon, elites of New York City gathered at City Hall to attend the
grand opening ceremony, although thousands of ordinary people had begun to
gather outside the building since the early morning.
12
The ceremony began
with a prayer and blessing on the subway by New York’s Coadjutor Bishop
David H. Greer.
13
The first trip carried 1,100 of New York’s elite. Mayor
George Brinton McClellan Jr. was granted the honor of driving the train for
the first few minutes, and in fact, “McClellan switched on the motor with an
engraved silver key, made especially for the event by jeweler Tiffany & Co.”
14
In the afternoon of the subway’s opening day, 15,000 upper-class guests with
special tickets were granted entrance to the subway, which did not open to
7
Sparberg. From a Nickel to a Token: The Journey from Board of Transportation to MTA.
8
Mahler and Fass.
9
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Subways.”
10
Latson, “Riding the NYC Subway Used to Be Fun—Then It Became a ‘Small Death.’”
11
Höhne, “The Birth of the Urban Passenger,” 315-6.
12
Höhne, 315.
13
Höhne, 315.
14
Höhne, 316.
7
the general public until 7:00 p.m. that evening. The subway management had
estimated an occupancy of 20,000 people per hour, but throughout the
evening the subway quickly became overwhelmed as ridership surpassed this
number and exceeded capacity.
15
The crowding of cars foreshadowed the
typical rush hour on the subway today, although it probably differed in mood:
according to witnesses that night, the event quickly took on the atmosphere
of a carnival.”
16
The subway administration had anxiously anticipated social disorder
on the subway on its opening day and had kept the entire police force and fire
department on high alert.
17
Police were called to impose order when panic
struck as masses of people for the first time spilled out onto the underground
platforms and nearby sidewalks. At 145th street, the end of the line, crowding
became dangerous, and police violently gained control of the mob using
batons.
18
However, these physical modes of imposing order on the subway were
not the only means of crowd management given forethought. The executives
of the subway had also anticipated the need for development of what
Madeleine Akrich calls “behavioral scripts” –a set of written and unwritten
expectations for behavior that is predictable and homogenous.
19
These scripts
were and are today constantly produced and reproduced. The first of these
emerged prior to the opening of the subway, to guide new passengers. On the
day prior to the opening, for example, The New York Times published an
article entitled “Some Subway Ifs and Don’ts,” which addressed and dispelled
fears about safety, detailed the rules of the subway, and provided logistical
15
Höhne, 318.
16
Höhne, 319.
17
Höhne, 318.
18
Höhne, 318.
19
Höhne, 318.
8
information.
20
The circulation of explicit scripts continued as common
violations of bourgeois social norms developed in subway sociality. Just one
example is the advertisement from 1960 below, which discourages disorder in
the subway by calling attention to the transgression of taboo against pushing
through the animalization of its perpetrators, a common theme I return to.
Fig. 1.3: New York Transit Museum, “Poster Collection,” 1960.
Such explicit prescriptive advertisements in the subway continue to
exist today, like the 2016 “Courtesy Counts” campaign, which targeted
personal grooming, “manspreading,” and Showtime performance, among
other common modern transgressions.
21
In mid-March 2020, these were
exchanged for Covid-19 specific courtesy ads encouraging Covid-safe
behavior.
22
Ad campaigns reinforce tacit scripts that accumulate over time,
merging, overlaying, and interacting with each other to construct and
reconstruct the malleable subway sociality. Another way that the subway’s
architects attempted to influence social behavior was through decoration—
20
Höhne, 318.
21
Kirby, “Nail-Clippers and Performers Join Manspreaders as the Target of the MTA’s Latest
Ads.”
22
MTA, “Safe Travels and Operation Respect.”
9
many of the stations are covered in mosaics, which were meant to signal an
element of influence people to behave with decorum and quell doubts about
the safety of the subway.
23
Despite its service to the diverse population of New York City, the
subway has, since its first day, been organized to conform with bourgeois
social values, like many public institutions. I generally employ the term
bourgeois, as opposed to upper-middle class, because it refers to a specific
“social group that has a distinctive historical identity and culture.”
24
The
bourgeoisie developed out of cities and became hegemonic, managing both
industrial capital and social systems. “Bourgeois” evokes a system of values,
tenets, sensibilities, and aspirations that, in cities, emerged, at first as superior
to other social groups, and eventually became the norm.
25
Just some of these
values include an “aloofness and lack of collective spirit”
26
as well as “being
discreet, understated, serene, in control, responsible, ascetic, courteous, and
having a strong sense of family tradition, duties, and conventions.”
27
Kanishka
Goonewardena and Stefan Kipfer refer to the hold this ethos has on
metropolitan sociality as “bourgeois urbanism” which they define as “an
ensemble of strategies, knowledge forms and everyday sensibilities that has
absorbed subcultural practices and socio-political aspirations into dominant
processes of capitalist urbanization and popular milieus shaped by elite and
new middle-class fractions.”
28
This bourgeois constellation of social strategies,
behaviors, and sensibilities has prevailed in cities. Tim Cresswell alludes to
this framework as the context that facilitated neoliberal policies that reject
23
Höhne, 317.
24
Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners, 4/14/22 1:11:00 AM200.
25
Wood, “Snobbery and the Triumph of Bourgeois Values,” 10.
26
Lamont, 49.
27
Lamont, 244.
28
Goonewardena and Kipfer, “Spaces of Difference,” 671.
10
“out of place” identities and values deemed inferior to bourgeois, normative
ones.
29
Although the subway’s opening did not fulfill bourgeois values, as its
architects had hoped, the first passengers responded to the scripts they
imagined. For example, many people dressed in their best clothes and
celebrated the event by splurging on a dinner out at a restaurant.
30
This
performance of wealth by the lower social classes for the occasion of the
subway reflects the influence of the elite’s attempt to present the subway as a
civilized, sophisticated, and safe place. The elite’s desire to influence the
social scripts of the subway explains why the first ignition key was crafted by
Tiffany and Co., and why a Christian prayer was bestowed upon the subway.
However, many other social imaginaries came to influence the subway’s
sociality.
Life on the Train Itself
The bourgeois romantic imaginary of New York City at large has
deeply impacted the competing narratives about the subway. The
“Metropolitan Diary,” a segment of The New York Times that captures
whimsical, romantic, only-in-New-York stories, many involving the subway,
highlight feel-good, humorous stories, crafted precisely for the paper’s middle
and upper-class readership. In the column, strangers return lost items, borrow
tissues, comfort one another, and have quirky, funny, or awkward encounters.
The bourgeois imaginary constructs the subway as a place where the
fantastical is possible, a place also marked by the sought-after grit and
authenticity of the city. These Metropolitan Diary anecdotes are
29
Cresswell, In Place/out of Place, 5.
30
Höhne, 319.
11
overwhelmingly positive, glossing over conflicts or tensions and bolstering the
bourgeois illusion of a subway in which an ahistorical and egalitarian mix of
social groups coexist peacefully. This fantasy is the basis for many explicit or
tacit social norms and policies that seek to manage the behavior of individuals
who transgress beyond the charming level celebrated in the entries of
Metropolitan Diary. This kind of narrative is of particular interest to me in
relation to my observations of subway life as a lifelong rider and of the social
shifts within the subway due to Covid-19, when the city’s bourgeoisie fled the
system.
While serendipitous, uplifting encounters and smooth, uneventful
rides have always characterized the subway, a competing and ongoing
imaginary—that of New York as a city continuously on the brink of decline—
has equally shaped it. The sociality of the subway is informed by both
narratives, neither of which fully capture its reality.
What I call a “decay imaginary” relies on narratives of a dangerous city
that has failed to keep grit in check, and which has fallen into ruin. This
imaginary prevailed from the late 1960s through the 1990s as the so-called
crack epidemic frayed the city’s social fabric and violent crime increased
inside and outside of the subway, undermining social welfare projects, and
justifying neoliberal development and gentrification.
31
This narrative rose to
prominence again at the onset of Covid-19, particularly after the initial surge
of cases had passed, and subway ridership began to rise again. Mass hysteria
surrounding rising violent crime rates on the subway spread, with outsize
coverage of a handful of fatalities and with calls for increased policing that
pitted the governor and mayor against each other. While then-governor
31
Tochterman. "Welcome to Fear City: The Cultural Narrative of New York City, 1945–
1980," 18-9.
12
Cuomo called for greater city police presence, then-mayor de Blasio
reinforced the bourgeois imaginary of the subway as iconic of “authentic New
York,” stating: “If you said to one of my kids, ‘Oh, you shouldn't go on the
subway. It's not safe.’ They would laugh you out of the room, they would tell
you, you clearly couldn't be a real New Yorker.”
32
The first year or so of the pandemic, level of ridership varied by
borough. Stations in working-class neighborhoods of the city, which have
simpler designs and enjoy less frequent upkeep than those in downtown and
tourist-heavy areas, remained busiest and most active.
33
By the summer of
2021, when I did the bulk of my fieldwork, ridership had increased, though
still to less than half of pre-pandemic levels.
34
It is important to note that the
atmosphere of the subway varies significantly depending on the time of year
and of the day. In the summer, when schools are out, the subway takes on a
more informal air. Absent the packs of schoolchildren and residents who can
afford to decamp to summer homes, those who remain are the ones with no
options for moving around except the overheated, often malodorous subway.
People seem more easily agitated due to the heat; I know I am, which
explains in part the intense irritability I observed in many people, including
myself, and convey here in ethnographic vignettes based on my fieldnotes.
35
Conversely, in the dark and gloomy winter days, more people use the subways
for shelter, generating other conflicts. Likewise, the morning rush hour is
typically followed by a mid-morning lull, when behaviors appear that would be
impossible in very crowded cars. Weekend late-night and early-dawn
32
Nessen, “After Feuding With MTA Over Subway Safety, NYC Agrees to Add Volunteer
Police Officers Underground,” Gothamist.
33
Goldbaum, “Crowded Subways? Yes, in Neighborhoods Where People Have to Go to
Work.”
34
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “New York Subway Daily Ridership Reaches 2.5 Million,
Breaks Pandemic-Era Record.”
35
Field, “THE EFFECT OF TEMPERATURE ON CRIME.”
13
ridership also have different demographic compositions and moods, with
working-class city dwellers going to work replacing young revelers going home
after a night out. The timestamps of the ethnographic snapshots I offer here
are, therefore, important details.
Riding the Subway
Raised in New York City, I have been riding the subway my entire life.
From a young age I was fascinated by all those strangers, although my parents
instructed me not to talk to them and to avoid eye contact with “crazy”
people. My interest in the subway grew when I studied in Santiago, Chile in
the fall of 2019 and experienced the metro system there. Halfway through my
time in Santiago, public discontent with neoliberal policies reached a pinnacle
and protests erupted, beginning with student protests surrounding the metro
fare. Numerous metro stations were looted and damaged. The city became
inaccessible by train, which, for the first time in my life, made me consciously
consider the significance of subway systems. Similarly, the Chilean protests—
directed at the privatization of public spaces and services—crystallized for me
the ways that subways are inherently classed spaces, organized by upper-
middle class social norms and bourgeois fantasies.
With this newfound appreciation and understanding of the function of
subway systems, I returned to New York City. Shortly thereafter, Covid-19
hit the city with devastating virulence, driving those who could afford to work
from home out of the subway. In that moment, the city’s social stratification
was perfectly mapped onto the space of the subway. In the new context of the
pandemic, I began to wonder: How would the subway’s familiar social norms
change? What new social norms would be produced and reproduced, and
what purpose would these norms serve? Conversely, what would the
14
transgression of these norms mean now, and how would these transgressive
acts be navigated by authorities and passengers? In other words, what role
would the containment and release of affect play in the current social
organization of the subway, and how would social differences manifest and be
approached?
These are the questions that guided my fieldwork during the summer
of 2021 and that I consider in this thesis through a narrative that weaves
together first-person ethnographic vignettes, the words of my interlocutors,
social theory, and analysis. I employ this mix of diary-style vignettes and more
formal, analytical writing to convey the situated sensation of life in the
subway—an affective immediacy that can get lost in analysis alone—while also
deepening my understanding of it through theory. I thus establish the type of
space the subway is and how it serves specific social functions, and
simultaneously examine the nature of embodied social proximity across social
difference, from which affects arise. To understand these affective transfers
and flows, I invoke the concept of contagion as a concern that predates and
transforms with Covid-19. I investigate the various social norms and
imaginaries devised to organize the space, considering old and new currents of
social exchange as well as their adaptations, sources, and how they help us
manage social proximity and its consequences in the subway. Finally, I
explore methods of enforcement and their impact on individuals charged with
upholding social norms.
Being a Passenger, Being a Researcher
In addition to the subway’s transformation during Covid-19, I became
interested in the experiences of MTA workers who were forced to continue
15
to work throughout the pandemic. As a student with professional parents,
everyone in my family was able to work from home, avoiding the newly
discovered danger of contagion in the subway. As a result, I did not ride the
subway between March 2020 and February 2021, the longest hiatus of my life.
My privilege to avoid the subway complicated my research and interactions
with interlocutors as I was unable to actually enter my field site for part of my
research. Even when I returned, my positionality as ethnographer and as an
upper-middle class white person was evident, especially when I ventured to
the ends of train lines, where I had often never been before. I was aware that
I attracted attention in areas where I clearly was not from. One particular
example of this reckoning with my positionality is detailed below:
7/23/21 4:00 PM Forest Hills-71st Avenue-Bound R train
I am riding the R train toward Forest Hills, 71st Avenue. At 14th street,
a Black man
36
my age sits across from me. He motions to me, pointing
at my shorts. I am confused and lean closer to him to hear what he’s
saying. “You went there?” he asks, pointing to the district high school
logo on the basketball shorts I bought from a thrift store in the Bronx.
“Oh… no, why?” I say. He responds: “I went to high school there!” I
say, “That’s so funny!” and we smile at each other, but the racial and
36
In this vignette, unlike in most, you will notice that I identify the racial presentation of the
individuals involved. The instances when I choose to omit or acknowledge racial identifiers
are the result of a conscious consideration of the impact of my words, their ability to
perpetuate racial bias, and the value of such acknowledgements in the context of a particular
story and this thesis as a whole. In the subway, where the people I engage with are strangers,
I cannot know someone’s background or how they identify. Rather, I can only make
assumptions based on phenotype, behavior, general appearance, etc. Because race is a social
construction, I often encountered people throughout my fieldwork who I could not
categorize, which led me to question my inclination to label individuals I felt were easier to
categorize. At the same time, I recognize that racial and ethnic biases play a large role, both
implicitly and explicitly, in social interaction and in the affects that emerge from proximity.
For this reason, I flag racial indicators only in stories that detail tensions or connections
between individuals that may have been racially motivated or that require racial markers to
better illustrate an argument.
16
class differences are palpable and halt our exchange. He gets off at
Grand Avenue, toward the end of the line.
Transfers and Connections
In the summer of 2020, I connected with Alan Saly, a Wesleyan
alumnus and Director of Publications at the Transit Workers Union Local
100 (TWU) of New York City. Alan was able to put me in touch with MTA
employees interested in sharing their experiences with me, several of whom I
spoke with over the phone. In June 2021, I began conducting fieldwork in the
subway. During the summer, I rode every line of the subway from end to end.
When I did so, I was necessarily at once participant and observer—my roles
as researcher and passenger blended. I typically rode the subway in the
afternoons and evenings, avoiding the early morning and late-night hours for
safety and convenience. By avoiding rush hours, the times when the MTA
best achieves the promptness and regularity of trains, I missed some of the
most ordered times in the subway, when crowds uphold social norms and are
least likely to experience social disturbances in their commute.
To supplement the information I was gathering as a passenger, I
designed and printed 600 fliers advertising my search for fellow passengers
and workers interested in serving as research interlocutors. I put them up
throughout the subway system, sticking them in advertisement panels on
platforms and subway cars, MetroCard kiosks, and ticket booths. I scouted a
few additional interlocutors on Craigslist, but most of the seventeen featured
here found me through my fliers, and we spoke either by phone, on Zoom, or
in person at coffee shops, depending on their preference.
Other Passengers
17
Throughout this thesis, I also engage with several fields of theory and
research that offer lenses for interpretation. I begin by thinking about the
subway through anthropological and sociological theories of urban space,
including the relationship between “public space” and “public sphere.” Setha
Low and Neil Smith complicate publicity given the increasing privatization of
public space due to neoliberalism. Another framework I employ is Marc
Augé’s theory of the “non-place,” a space defined by its function, rather than
its identity, culture, interpersonal relationships, or history.
37
Constructed in
the same decade, the Paris Metro depicted in Augé’s ethnography In The
Metro, shares many features with the New York subway.
38
Here I put Augé in
conversation with Mike Owen Benediktsson, who theorizes New York’s
subway as a “fourth place,” contrasting it with Augé’s non-place and
Oldenburg’s “third place,” a social space outside of the home and workplace.
39
The fourth place is, for Benediktsson, a place that flattens social
stratifications, facilitating cooperation and flânerie. The concept of flânerie is
derived from urban poet Baudelaire’s figure of “the flâneur,” an affluent male
who wanders and observes urban life, which for some anticipates urban
ethnography.
40
For Benediktsson, the flâneur is lost in a dream-like state of
urban observation, an attitude akin to the various dispositions subway riders
assume during travel.
41
Sharon Zukin’s theory of “authentic” spaces to
understand the allure of “urban grit,” João Biehl’s theory of “zones of social
abandonment,” Jane Jacobs’s theory of street surveillance, and Michel
37
Augé, Non-Places, 77.
38
Grescoe, “Secrets of the Paris Metro.”
39
Benediktsson et al., “The Subway as Fourth Place: Anomie, Flânerie and the ‘Crush of
Persons,’” 116-17.
40
Shaya, “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–
1910,” 48.
41
Shaya, 48.
18
Foucault’s panopticon theory for insights into the internalization and
normalization of societal norms and surveillance also inform my analysis.
42
My second frame of analysis is interpersonal sociology. Within it, I
engage with the work of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, and others. I take
up Simmel’s concept of the “blasé attitude,” an adaptive response to
overstimulation in urban life characterized by a performance of indifference
and stoicism.
43
I put Simmel’s “blasé attitude” in conversation with Goffman’s
concept of “civil inattention,” to grasp riders’ performance of an unfocused
awareness of other individuals sharing a space.
44
I also consider Simmel’s
theory of “the stranger,” an objective figure who may develop solidarity with
others, and Goffman’s exploration of the public social norms organizing
sociality in the presence of strangers.
My third conceptual frame is affect theory. Drawing on the work of
Brian Massumi, Teresa Brennan, and others, I argue that affect is the impetus
and main force for the production and reproduction of social norms in the
subway. Always understood as something different from mere feeling or
sensation, Massumi defines affect as a fluid circuit of potential sensation
45
while for Brennan it is what constructs boundaries and what enables us to
cross them.
46
Kathleen Stewart defines affect as “transpersonal or
prepersonal—not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about
bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities.”
47
I argue
that affect, embedded in the experience of riding the subway, is the
fundamental force organizing our social interactions in that space, and that
42
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 183.
43
Boy, “‘The Metropolis and the Life of Spirit’ by Georg Simmel,” 195.
44
Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 44.
45
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25.
46
Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 12.
47
Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 128.
19
the social dynamics I explore in this thesis serve to mediate, control, and
avoid its eruption.
Finally, I engage with theories of taboo and transgression of the social
norms managing affect, drawing on the ideas of Georges Bataille. Taboo, a
term of Polynesian origin, denotes a tacit prohibition of a behavior due to the
belief that it is too dangerous or sacred.
48
Bataille shows that taboos often
become manifest only in their transgression.
49
He argues that taboo
“humanizes” while transgression marks a desire to return to our repressed
animality.
50
I put Bataille in conversation with Mary Douglas and her work on
“dirt,” which she defines as “matter out of place,” to complicate “dirt,” which
can retain an appeal or become desirable when prohibition becomes the
norm
5152
While I relied on the scholarship of the international group of
sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and social theorists named above,
I learned as much from my interlocutors, whose stories and opinions
determined the direction of this project. Although I spoke at length with all
seventeen individuals, the voices of a few figure more prominently in this
project. The gender of my interlocutors is overwhelmingly male. While I
cannot know the exact reason, perhaps more men felt comfortable
responding to my fliers. As I know from personal experience, women are
socialized and strongly compelled to be guarded in the subway. I doubt I
would have responded to my own fliers, information I took as important to
my analysis.
48
Encyclopedia Brittanica, “Taboo.”
49
Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, 144.
50
Bataille, Erotism, 83.
51
Douglas, Purity and Danger, 36.
52
Gandolfo, The City at Its Limits, 39.
20
I met Sam, who responded to one of my fliers via text message, at a
cafe near his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and we immediately recognized
each other from a train the week before, although he had not seen me put up
my fliers. I had noticed him because of his striking appearance—long,
straight, dirty blond hair swept into a ponytail, icy blue eyes peeking out from
round wire frames, work boots, and a tank top exposing muscular arms
adorned with a few tattoos. Sam hails from Kansas originally but had always
dreamed of living in New York when he moved there in 2019. Sam is frank,
but with a gentle voice and manner, and is immediately identifiable as a
millennial through his use of slang.
Another important interlocutor is Ernie, a Station Agent who has
worked with the MTA for twenty-five years. Ernie works as a writer and
filmmaker on the side and even referred to himself as “an anthropologist of
sorts.” Ernie wrote a play entitled “I Met My Wife at 30th and Penn Station”
and performed a reading of that work at Nuyorican Poet’s Café on the Lower
East Side. I only spoke with Ernie by phone but got the sense that he is a
lighthearted jokester, yet thoughtful and analytical.
Another key interlocutor is Alyssa, a TWU representative and the first
female Power Cable Maintainer in the MTA. I also spoke with Alyssa by
phone but learned that she has a no-nonsense personality and speaks out
when necessary.
I met Quincy, my first in-person interlocutor, in a cafe in Crown
Heights, Brooklyn. Quincy is a middle-aged white man with a thick brown
beard, mustache, and glasses. In our exchanges prior to meeting, he notified
me that, on principle, he is only willing to participate in studies if he receives
some form of compensation, be it a dollar or a cup of coffee. I reiterated my
policy that an in-person interview covered coffee, so he agreed to meet. I
21
could not have guessed Quincy’s reasoning—he revealed to me that he is a
serial participant in academic studies and that our conversation marked his
568th study, which he quickly scrawled into his notepad of tally-marks. For
Quincy, who holds a master’s degree in media studies and currently works in
market research, studies are an alternate source of income, alongside various
other side hustles, such as selling vintage liquors. Most of the studies he
participates in are medical since those tend to pay the best. Quincy came
prepared with a list of his countless grievances about the subway.
Another prominent voice throughout this thesis is John, a train
conductor who has worked with the MTA for twenty-five years. I met John at
a Starbucks in Bay Ridge along with his wife Janet, a former bus operator.
John has a thick Brooklyn accent and grey hair. Janet is blonde and wears
French nails. Before meeting, John sent me a glitzy photo of himself and his
wife at what appears to be some sort of dinner party, so I would know what to
expect.
Other important figures in this work are Lowell, a tall man in his mid-
thirties with a crew cut, a former Guardian Angel whom I met at a café in
Gramercy in Manhattan; Alessandro, an bald middle-aged Italian man with
gentle blue eyes whom I met on the G train when I was putting up fliers—
trained as a philologist, he was very interested in my project, so we set up a
time to meet at a café; and, finally, Mario, a feisty conductor with a thick
Brooklyn accent with whom I spoke by phone.
The names of all my generous and perceptive interlocutors have been
replaced with pseudonyms to protect their identities. Their insights and
knowledge were paramount to this work.
Chapter One: Public/Private
24
Liminal Territory: Theories of Space and Place in the Subway
New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority operates the largest
“public transportation” service in North America and one of the largest in the
world.
53
The phrase “public transportation” is often tossed around, but to
what extent does the term “public” accurately represent the form of transport
to which it refers and the space this occupies? The “public sphere” is a term,
coined by Jürgen Habermas in 1962, which refers to a realm to which all
people are guaranteed access and where “something approaching public
opinion can be formed.”
54
In the public sphere, citizens communicate freely
about topics of “general interest” rather than private affairs. However, public
sphere and public space are distinct concepts that inform urban life, which
Neil Smith and Setha Low discuss in their anthology The Politics of Public
Space. They write that public space is defined in contrast to private space,
whereas the concept of the public sphere, as Habermas defined it, is rarely
spatialized.
55
However, these two concepts intersect as a result of the
privatization of public space and the public sphere under neoliberal policies.
56
Although the state often champions programs for the “public sector,” it does
not exactly promote public space, as the state often is the agent responsible
for privatization.
57
For example, due to the imposition of a relatively steep
subway fare, the MTA excludes low-income individuals from public transport.
The necessity for the fare, and its regular increases, is due in part to a lack of
sufficient government funding to run the subway, resulting in the adoption of
a consumption-based model that is so often a strategy in the privatization of
53
New York City transit, https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit.
54
Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” 49.
55
Low and Smith, The Politics of Public Space, 4-5.
56
Low and Smith, 5.
57
Low and Smith, 12.
25
public space. However, the subway’s infrastructure does not effectively bar
those who cannot afford the fee from entering the subway, as people hop the
turnstiles with some frequency and ride the subway without paying.
Although Habermas focuses on explicit political discourse as a
function of the “public sphere,” this discourse can also regard socialization
and tacit social norms. In fact, Habermas argues that expression of public
opinion occurs informally, among a public that abides by the rules of rational
discourse and behavior, only occasionally impacting formal politics and
translating into law.
58
Regardless, the goals of Habermas’ public discourse is
overtly more political than that which would aptly describe the social sphere
of the subway.
By gathering in masses in a public space like the subway, citizens
communicate, verbally and non-verbally, explicitly and implicitly, about the
state of social affairs around and beyond them. This communication and
implementation of social rules can also lead to their transformation. Perhaps,
then, the subway fits most neatly into the “associational view” of public space.
Hannah Arendt proposes two views of public space, the “agnostic,” which
describes the politicized public Habermas describes, and the “associational,”
which “emerges whenever and wherever,” in Arendt’s words, “men act
together in concert [and] where freedom can appear.’”
59
In the subway, people
“act together” through their collective movement through space. In order to
be able to navigate the subway, people must cooperate and communicate with
others, often silently, about their movements and routes. People make space
for others, allowing them to enter and exit platforms and train cars, although
they not always do so seamlessly: In engaging with the expected norms, riders
58
Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox, 49.
59
Arendt Between Past and Future, 4 quoted in Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah
Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 78.
26
possess a certain degree of “freedom” to act how they wish, which can prevent
efficient and peaceful commutes.
Arendt’s discussion of privacy and publicity is also relevant to grasp
the subtle ways social life in the subway unfolds, blending the two. According
to Arendt, modernity led to the “rise of the social,” through which the
distinction between the political or “public” realm and the “private” realm of
the family became starker. Arendt identifies “society” as the realm of
socialization that mediates between the public and the private.
60
Likewise,
the subway, as a mode of mass transportation that for millions, facilitates the
passage between the home and workplace. It is neither public nor private but
a realm of “society” itself.
This is observable every day in the way passengers enact and inhabit
this dichotomy of the public and the private. In any given subway car, it is
common to observe private behavior, such as reading and making phone calls.
It is also common to see people sleeping, a behavior usually relegated to the
“private sphere” of the home. However, to complicate matters, Mario, one of
my interlocutors who has worked as a conductor for the MTA for the past
eight years, remarked, “The homeless population—now what do you do with
them? I mean, you literally have people that live there. That’s their home.”
Although Mario spoke of the extraordinary situation of the “shelter in place”
order at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, his statement demonstrates
the disorder created by those who transgress social norms in the “public”
space of the subway. Those who find home, a part of the “private sphere,” in
the subway, participate in “out of place” behavior that challenge the social and
official scripts that aim to organize that space.
61
60
Benhabib, 74.
61
Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, 3.
27
7/13/21 2:55 PM Coney Island Stillwell Avenue-bound F train
When I step onto the F, a man in his late twenties or early thirties is
sleeping on the bench across from me. He is lying down and takes up
more than half of the seats on his side. He wears a white wifebeater,
black pants, and a clean, white cloth mask. He wears the straps of his
navy blue du rag draped over his eyes as a makeshift sleep mask. He
looks somewhat disheveled. Two boys get on and one of them projects
his voice down the car: “Hi, my name is Omar, I’m selling—” The du
rag guy interrupts him and calls out, “Yo, can you go to the middle of
the car?” Omar appears not to hear him and continues without
hesitation. A few moments pass, and the man picks his head up this
time and raises his voice: “I’m trying to sleep; can you move to the
middle of the car so I can’t hear you?” Omar ambles over to the middle
of the car without responding to the man and displays his big box of
snacks and candy made up of smaller boxes held together by packing
tape. He gets off at the next stop. A few stops later, an older boy, also
selling snacks, gets on and makes the same speech. His name is ALSO
“Omar.” The du rag guy gets up and prepares to dismount the train at
the next stop, 57th street. A man in a suit glances at him. The du rag
guy shouts, “WHAT?!” He motions back to his bench, says something
I can’t hear, and gets off the train.
The prevalence of private behavior on the subway can be explained by
Irwin Altman’s claim that “privacy” is a quality associated with specific
activities, not just the sphere of life that we denote as “private.” “Privacy,” in
28
his view, is a technique utilized to regulate social interaction.
62
Privacy is a
process that shifts constantly to approach an equilibrium, a balance of
interaction and non-interaction.
63
However, the aspects of subway behavior
that can be recognized as “private” or that allow for “privacy” can better be
described as affording “anonymity.” According to Altman, “anonymity” is a
form of privacy that emerges in public spaces where an individual does not
expect to be recognized and does not engage with others beyond minimal,
casual interaction.
64
Due to its potential for both public and private behavior, the subway
evades a purist definition. It is, thus, “liminal” in the strictest sense Arnold
Van Gennep formulated as a space that allows for territorial passage. As such
a space, the liminal is that which is “neither this nor that, and yet is both.”
65
It
is an arena of possibility that allows for movement and transformation and in
which new ideas and relationships form.
66
As Marc Augé puts it in relation to
the Paris Metro, the metro is a liminal space par excellence: it is “collectivity
without festival and solitude without isolation.”
67
It is transient and mobile,
without one primary locus. It is neither completely private nor public.
7/12/21 3:00 PM Court Square-bound G train
The doors glide open at Greenpoint Avenue and several passengers get
off the train, including Alessandro, who I just met after he saw me put
up my fliers. “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” we hear the
conductor exclaim. One side of the doors slides closed, but the other
62
Irwin Altman, The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory,
Crowding, 10.
63
Altman, 11.
64
Altman, 18.
65
Turner, 99.
66
Turner, 97.
67
Marc Augé and Tom Conley, In the Metro, 30.
29
gets jammed. All the other doors in the car automatically bounce back
open, clicking and shuttering to neutralize the glitch. They attempt to
close again, but the jammed door remains stuck. The doors open and
close a few more times before a female voice says, “We’re being held
momentarily by the train’s dispatcher.” The train operator unlocks the
door separating his cabin from the car. He pokes his head out then
walks toward the doorframe for a closer look. He wears a black mask
with white print that reads, “6 feet away please!” He unlatches his
keyring from his belt-loop and selects a key. He inserts the key into
the slot in the rectangular panel that displays a subway map above
three seats, and the people sitting there stand up. He opens the panel
and fiddles with something. He walks over to the door and tries to
open it mechanically. A voice calls out of the Walkie Talkie in his duty
belt: “What kind of door problem are you having?” Static screeches.
The train operator presses a button and opens up the entire seat
underneath the map. The conductor announces over the train
intercom, “We’re having a door issue. We should be moving
momentarily. Thank you for your patience.” The train operator
continues to inspect the buttons and dials in the panel. An unmasked
man sucks his teeth. The operator pulls on a latex glove, then pinches
the edge of the jammed door with his fingers. He tries to pull the door
out of its socket, to no avail. A teenage boy draws closer and watches
the operator. The operator asks him to step back. Another passenger
dressed in work boots watching the operator asks to the rest of us in
the car if anyone has a screwdriver. No one responds. The operator
steps back and sends a message on his phone. In the meantime, one
man approaches the door and tries to pull it open. Another man jumps
30
in to help, and they discuss tactics. The operator looks up from his
phone and calls out, irritated, “Guys hold on!” The man who asked for
a screwdriver asks the operator earnestly if he needs a screwdriver. I
don’t catch a response. Suddenly, the intercom splutters on and the
conductor announces that this train is no longer in service and that we
need to wait for the next train. Everyone floods out of the train onto
the platform. I haven’t seen a station this packed since before Covid.
One woman exclaims, “I KNEW this was gonna happen!” to no one in
particular. The passenger with work boots gets back on the train to try
to help the operator. He takes out a flashlight and shines it into the
crevice that holds the door. It does not seem particularly helpful.
People crowd to watch as the operator fiddles with the door. I feel bad
for him. One man sucks his teeth and grumbles, “GET IT OUT, man!
Fuck. Get this train outta here, man!” He adds, “It’s the same fucking
shit every week. Get this shit the fuck outta here, man!” He starts
speaking in Spanish to himself about how he’s just trying to get home.
The doors that are still functional close, and the train rolls out of the
station. Another train comes within two minutes.
In some sense, this was a shared, public experience—the hundreds of
people on the train experienced together a delay in their commutes due to a
mechanical malfunction. This experience demanded cooperation and the
adjustment of private schedules to a public service. The passenger who spoke
to himself articulated this—for him, the subway can just be a means to get
from work to home and vice versa. He doesn’t particularly want to have a
social connection with other passengers. He just wants to get home as quickly
as possible, perhaps with minimal social contact. His complaint suggests that
31
he would like to maintain his privacy, or his anonymity, while efficiently
moving from point A to point B. But such detachment is only possible in a
functioning public space, where crowding enables undisturbed internal
contemplation. However, this moment also showcases the forms of solidarity
that arise in public spaces. For example, some of the passengers attempt to
remedy the problem themselves, despite the presence of a professional. They
do not behave as though the worker alone is responsible for the commute but,
rather, as though each person impacts it. They attempt to involve others in
the process and invite them to help attain a common goal. They display a
sense of ownership over the subway as a space that belongs to them, to all of
us, together, in a common goal of fixing the door that connects us. In the end,
everyone continues their solitary commutes, together. This negotiation of the
public and the private can be understood as “solitary contractuality,” a tacit
contract that Marc Augé argues we enter in with each other when we step
into a place neither public nor private.
68
Augé defines liminal spaces like the subway as “non-places.” He
proposes the “non-place” in contrast to “place,” which grounds a space in a
specific culture, time, history, and identity. Methods of transportation, for
Augé, are non-places.
69
Antithetical to places, non-places lack enduring
personal relationships, histories, or identities and do not integrate other
places within them.
70
“Non-places” are defined by their function and the ideas
their users have of them. Patrons’ individual and task-oriented relationships
to these spaces, as well as the expectation that they be efficient also figure in
68
Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 94.
69
Augé, Non-Places, 34.
70
Augé, Non-Places, 77.
32
the space’s composition. The non-place, like the place, is constantly
reproduced and redefined by individual behavior.
71
Augé classifies spaces associated with transportation and movement,
such as train systems and airports, as non-places. While places are often
defined by social groups and identities, non-places depend upon the
formation of anonymity precisely through “solitary contractuality.”
72
This
disconnection from other places of meaning and from people fosters a sense
of solitude. In this disconnection, the non-place suspends the passenger in
the present such that she “cannot avoid contemplating… and derives from…
awareness of this attitude a rare and sometimes melancholy pleasure.”
73
Subway passengers may read, listen to music, or daydream as they consider
the ephemeral images and scenes that surround them, submitting to their
temporary detachment from the outside world and responsibilities.
The subway may also be identified as what Mike Benediktsson calls
the “fourth place.” The “fourth place” builds upon Augé’s concept of non-
place and on First name Oldenburg’s “third-place,” which is a social space
outside of the home and workplace.
74
Benediktsson defines “the fourth place”
as “a utilitarian environment in which prescriptive behavioral norms act to
flatten social distinctions, allowing an elective form of transient social
engagement that is enabled and constrained by the presence of strangers.”
75
Benediktsson proposes that, unlike Augé’s suggestion that non-places
produce a sense of solitude, fourth-places cultivate cooperation and flânerie.
Although Augé does not refer explicitly to flânerie or related spectatorship,
71
Augé, Non-Places, 78.
72
Augé, Non-Places, 101.
73
Augé, Non-Places, 87.
74
Benediktsson et al., “The Subway as Fourth Place: Anomie, Flânerie and the ‘Crush of
Persons,’” 116-7.
75
Benediktsson et al., 105.
33
Benediktsson’s definition of flânerie is not so different from the anonymous,
contemplative gratification that Augé describes as integral to the non-place.
In fact, Benediktsson also mentions the potential for introspection in the
subway.
However, Benediktsson, more than Augé, expressly focuses on the
social rules within the subway that allow it to function as a “fourth-place.”
Augé recognizes the social contract within the subway that enables its
inclusivity and anonymity, but his concept of “solitary contractuality” does
not include the ways in which it can be violated and revoked. Benediktsson
discusses this contract of the public sphere as something inscribed in the
physical space itself, as a “moral geography” that sets boundaries on behavior
of all passengers, regardless of social group. Judgments are disentangled from
identities and reattributed to behaviors.
76
In this way, the subway is inclusive
of all people. At the same time, Benediktsson acknowledges the limits of this
since inclusivity is not always achieved as structural racism and classism often
lead to discrimination on the subway through distancing.
77
Discrimination can
surpass subtle nonverbal distancing, even becoming physical. Among regular
victims are those perceived as homeless or mentally ill. Nonetheless, such
explicit discrimination violates the social contract constructed to prevent
conflict and eruptions of affect, and thus is generally scorned by other
passengers.
The Construction of Norms in a Fourth Place
Social norms on the subway, whether it is those explicitly adopted by
the MTA or more informally assumed by passengers, are there to organize
76
Benediktsson et al., 117.
77
Benediktsson et al., 108.
34
sociality. However, these norms are not natural or apolitical—they are class-
based, historically informed rules of behavior that were strategically
developed to support a particular imaginary of New York City: a
romanticized white, upper-middle class fantasy of civility, responsibility, and
self-control. I believe that these social norms, which we accept, habitually
reproduce, and sometimes transgress, perpetuate social inequality in New
York. The norms and the prejudices behind them are the basis for a reified
picture of social relations in the city, and yet they can be transformed by their
transgression. I explore the ways in which these norms support certain
identities and not others in the chapters that follow.
A core social norm in the subway is what Goffman refers to as “civil
inattention.” Civil inattention consists of an intentionally unfocused gaze that
occasionally passes over and displays recognition of other individuals.
78
Goffman highlights the difference between civil inattention and what he calls
“blatant disregard,” a behavior which he attributes to the “occult
involvement” of those who fail to react to something recognized by others.
Those who disregard others completely are thus viewed as suspect.
79
Civil
inattention, by contrast, requires the individual’s occasional recognition of
others and “implies that he has no reason to suspect the intentions of the
others present and no reason to fear the others, be hostile to them, or wish to
avoid them.” Goffman goes on to say that, “this demonstrates that he has
nothing to fear or avoid in being seen and being seen seeing…”
80
In
performing the courtesy of civil inattention, therefore, individuals open
themselves up to reciprocal behavior from others.
78
Goffman, 44.
79
Goffman,77.
80
Goffman, 84.
35
Essential to the performance of civil inattention is the tactful
manipulation of eye contact. Goffman draws similarities between the
sociological gaze, or sociology’s arguable dependence upon vision as the
principal sense through which fieldwork is conducted, and the everyday
power of the gaze that all humans bear. The use of gaze that Goffman names
“civil inattention” resembles Michael Taussig’s concept of the “tactile eye.”
81
“Tactile optics” draw upon, as Benjamin calls it, an “optical unconscious,” a
gaze shaped not by contemplation but by tactility.
82
The “tactile eye” is one
that attempts to be attuned to the minutiae of a social scene, one that seeks
an embodied awareness of the periphery. Taussig discusses the “tactile eye”
also in relation to the anthropologist’s methods because he views it as the
dominant mode of seeing in the world today, one that Goffman argues is key
to social functioning in public spaces. Perhaps the “contemplation” and
flânerie that Augé and Benediktsson describe within the subway are also
explained by this kind of tactile optics.
A tactile optics is surely employed in flânerie, an almost voyeuristic
observation of the masses in which the observer is positioned as both in and
outside of the crowd. Benediktsson argues that the subway provides a domain
for flânerie due to the anonymous confluence of millions of people in that
transient space. At times, passengers slip into the role of the “spectator” as
they observe or even surveil social performances of others.
83
This widespread
adoption of the role of the flâneur, despite the impropriety of staring, can be
modulated by civil inattention or understood in tandem with Goffman’s
assertion that civil inattention is regularly transgressed.
84
81
Taussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” 152.
82
Taussig, 149.
83
Benediktsson, et al., 4-5.
84
Goffman, 85.
36
In avoiding someone’s gaze, we can convey a desire to avoid
cooperation or interaction. Our use of civil inattention allows us to interpret
when someone would like to connect with us. It is only through contrast with
civil inattention that the stare acquires such intense meaning.
85
Rules of the
gaze are inscribed on the body and internalized, and, thus, we engage in them
without conscious awareness. The embodied nature of these rules allows us to
identify, without any verbal communication, potential “others” who disobey
or threaten to disobey the rules.
86
Another core concept about behavior in an urban “fourth-place” is
Georg Simmel’s notion of the blasé attitude. In “The Metropolis and Mental
Life,” Simmel discusses the blasé attitude as an adaptive response to cities’
overstimulation, a condition born only out of the development of the modern
metropolis. In a metropolis, “the concentration of people and things
stimulating the nerves is at its peak … causing this singularly adaptive
phenomenon of the blasé attitude. The sole remaining possibility for the
nerves to handle the contents and forms of the metropolis is to eschew any
kind of reaction.”
87
Although this theory is distinct from the one centered on
civil inattention in that it is an impulse response to cognitive overload, it
manifests a sort of dissociative, disinterested affect not entirely distinct from
the intentional disregard of civil inattention. However, the blasé attitude is
the result of an aversion to the affective intensity and overwhelm of city life.
7/13/21 6:55 PM Jamaica 179th Street-bound F train
85
Goffman, 94-5.
86
Goffman, 93-4.
87
Boy, John D. “‘The Metropolis and the Life of Spirit’ by Georg Simmel: A New
Translation,” 195.
37
After riding the F to Coney Island, I switch to a Queens-bound F train
across the platform. A family with several small children clutching
stuffed animal prizes and cotton candy gets on. The doors close, and
the train lurches around the bend, giving us a full view of Coney
Island. I almost fall out of my seat. I can see the Wonder Wheel and a
few rollercoasters. The baby starts crying and screaming, and the
mother struggles to prepare his bottle. When the doors open at the
next stop, she unscrews the cap of the bottle and dumps the leftover
milk out onto the tracks. She frantically pours more as the baby
shrieks. She yells, “I’m coming, I’m coming. I’m trying to go fast! Hold
on!” Finally, she screws the cap on and pops the bottle into the baby’s
mouth. The baby continues to cry and the other children yell. I have a
headache, so at the next stop I switch to another car. I sit down across
from a mother and her three children. The mom wears a hijab. The
toddler is sleeping in the stroller, and a boy who seems to be about
seven sits with his eyes closed next to his mom. The oldest, a girl about
eleven, lies with her head on her mother’s lap. I soon realize that the
mom is giving her daughter a lice check. She picks and pulls something
out of a strand of her daughter’s hair, then pinches her fingernails
together. She flicks her fingers, and I see something drop onto the
linoleum floor. At the other end of the car two young girls play a hand
game. The girl who’s getting a lice check looks self-conscious and
occasionally glances over at the other girls. She seems especially
uncomfortable when I look over at her. We make eye contact, and she
whines something to her mom. I think she tells her mom to stop, but
I’m not sure because they’re not speaking English.
38
The mom dismisses her daughter’s concern sternly and
continues her pursuit. As someone who has undergone several lice
treatments, I can tell that she does not go about it in a methodical way
at all and must miss a bunch. She bites her lip as she pinches her nails
together, then clears them out onto the floor using her thumbnail. She
seems distressed. My mind goes back to the times I had lice, and my
mom was desperate. We hired a professional to treat our hair because
my mom could not do it alone. I think it was expensive, and I know a
lot of families can’t afford that. The train is fairly empty. The little
brother and sister are so small they don’t seem embarrassed by this
behavior. The oldest girl continues to squirm and whine to her mother
although it’s unclear if it’s because it hurts or because she’s
embarrassed. A woman with blonde hair gets on the train and looks
over at the mother picking the lice. The mother takes a break from
combing through her daughter’s hair and begins to pick at her own
eyebrows. I wonder if she has lice, too. The girl starts to pick at her
own head ruthlessly. The blond lady pulls a nail clipper out of her
purse and clips her nails. She tears off her broken acrylics and throws
them into the tracks when the door opens. The mom resumes picking
at her daughter’s head. Every now and then she pauses to show her the
results in her fingernails. Everyone except for the blond lady seems
completely oblivious. I wonder if she started clipping her nails because
she saw what this family was doing and felt that in this context, nail
clipping would be more socially acceptable than it usually is on the
train. At 7th Avenue a bunch of little boys scream and run ahead of
their moms onto the train. The mom pulls her daughter to a seated
39
position and slips the child’s hijab back on. At Bergen Street I switch
to the G.
Expressions of privacy on the subway can tell us a lot about individuals’
conceptions of public and private behavior and how they are enmeshed and
negotiated on the subway as a liminal space. For passengers sharing the same
car, these private, even intimate, behaviors are also prime moments for
engaging with the tacit rules of the gaze. The mother performs two private
acts—the removal of her daughter’s hijab, something only permitted in the
home, according to religious Muslim law, and the performance of a lice check,
a stigmatized act of grooming typically relegated to the domestic sphere. The
negotiation between the daughter and mother speaks to how children tacitly
develop and internalize a sense of social norms on the subway, in ways that, in
general, are not necessarily informed by their parents. In this case, the child
seemed more sensitive to the limit than her mother. The mother’s lack of
anxiety surrounding her own private behavior suggests that she did not
recognize her it as transgression. And on the spectrum of taboo subway
behavior, this example seems rather minor. The liminality and anonymity of
the subway create and encourage a flexibility that loosens social norms. In
fact, it’s quite common to see private acts of this kind on the subway—just
prior to this experience, I observed a woman bottle feeding her baby.
Private behavior on the subway is so common that in 2014 the MTA
launched their “Courtesy Counts” ad campaign, which intended to discourage
the violation of tacit norms by explicitly acknowledging them. However, the
behavior exhibited in the ads was perfectly acceptable in private spaces. One
of the ads pertained to personal grooming, such as nail-clipping, applying
makeup, and flossing. This ad conveyed the message that grooming, as a
40
private activity, is not suited for the subway.
88
In asserting the impropriety of
these private activities, the MTA implied that they wish to promote a
perception of the subway as a public place, not a private or even liminal one.
In this situation, my gaze amplified the sensation of privacy and
impropriety. As I witnessed a private moment, I felt uncomfortable, as
though I was invading their personal space by watching them without their
permission. At the same time, I was captivated by their lack of decorum and
could not look away. It was perhaps my gaze that made the little girl
uncomfortable, and as we made eye contact, she asked her mother to stop.
Her reaction made me realize that I myself had transgressed the norm of civil
inattention. My prolonged gaze had not successfully conveyed my
trustworthiness. Rather, it had taken on another meaning: that of judgment
or prying. Similar fixation of my gaze in other circumstances could also
convey flirtation or aggression. A private act in public is only improper when
it is observed by other members of the public. My gaze marked this behavior
as transgression while I myself simultaneously transgressed by failing to feign
ignorance or indifference to this private act.
Methods of Adherence to Norms in the Subway
Whereas Simmel provides a psychological explanation for the blasé
attitude, Goffman analyzes his concept of “civil inattention” through the lens
of social rules. He understands civil inattention and its corresponding norms
as a means for organizing social interaction by conveying trustworthiness to
others in public spaces. One method of performing civil inattention that
88
Emma Fitzsimmons, “Door Hogs, Music Blasters, Litterbugs: Readers Sound Off About
Subway Rudeness.”
41
Goffman outlines is the use of “involvement shields.” “Involvement shields”
are barriers that restrict the visibility of embodied signs and objects in places
of “involvement” such as bathrooms and bedrooms or portable barriers like
newspapers and fans.
89
Goffman argues that portable involvement shields
provide “screens” we can raise to avoid social contact and improper gazes, and
thus offer a “face-saving,” or dignity-saving, solution to the “where-to-look”
problem.
90
They also conceal inappropriate behavior and project an image of
proper engagement.
91
While many passengers on the subway employ
involvement shields to save face, others do not.
The most common “involvement shields” today, Benedikktson adds,
are cell phones.
92
Mobile phones have changed the tactics for mediation
between the public and private in the subway. Berry and Hamilton posit that,
today, people experience their phones as an extension of the self.
93
The
prevalence of cell phones in the subway manages the public/private boundary
in multiple ways. The most apparent way is that they serve as apt involvement
shields, replacing older forms such as the newspaper or hand fan.
94
However,
when involvement shields are personal items of expression, such as a diary,
they also work as portals to individual private lives. The subway is already a
liminal space between the private and public spheres, but cell phones further
blur this boundary by allowing people to bring aspects of their personal lives
and identities, such as their communication with their friends, family, and
coworkers into spaces like the subway.
89
Goffman, 40-1.
90
Goffman, 137-9.
91
Goffman, 41.
92
Boy, 4.
93
Berry and Hamilton, “Changing Urban Spaces: Mobile Phones on Trains,” 112.
94
Goffman, 40.
42
7/13/21 5:30 PM Coney Island Stillwell Avenue-bound F train
A man and his two kids get on the train at 75th Ave. The kids sit on
either side of him, and both immediately take out their phones. The
girl, who looks about twelve, is watching videos and the boy, who looks
about fourteen, is playing some game. The father looks at them, then
reluctantly takes out his phone, too. After a few minutes, he puts it
away and looks from one if his children to the other. They don’t
notice. There’s something really sweet, but a little sad about it. He
looks up at the ads over the seat across from him. The son jiggles his
leg.
The father exhibited the sort of tactile, solitary contemplation
possible in the subway because of the imperative of civil inattention and
because of the transient nature of the space. The children, on the other hand,
demonstrated how cell phones function on the subway, not just to protect
against improper gazing and social involvement but also to enable people to
extend their own private leisure life into the space of the subway. The fact
that the children did not notice their father looking directly at them also
showed the strength of cell phones as involvement shields.
One of my interlocutors, Alessandro, commented on the impact of cell
phones on the subway. He sees a turn toward the cell phone not just as a turn
away from other passengers but also a turn away from the self. Alessandro
seemed to believe that the phone as a shield from improper social interaction
also functions as a means toward social disaffection and distraction:
I've really witnessed people just like . . . pulling out their phone to not
engage . . . and that's actually kind of sad . . . I'm not saying that . . .
they should engage on the train. But if you look at, if you imagine what
they did, say, when they open[ed the] subway, [in] 1902 [sic] they
probably all dressed up, you know. And they were like, eager to engage
with someone who was in such [a] close space, right? So, you fast
43
forward, like a century after and now we're all like, glued to our screen.
And that's like, a whole other conversation. But . . . people, I think
they just don't care about engaging. They just want to go home and
maybe move on to a bigger screen or . . . yeah.
Berry and Hamilton, on the other hand, understand neither cell
phones nor other objects like newspapers as “involvement shields,” or tools
for mediating interaction between strangers, or even as depressing symbols of
an antisocial apocalyptic society in pursuit of a metaverse. Rather, they
understand the loss of solidarity brought about by cell phones as an effect of
the role of cell phones as “transitional objects” that people employ as “place
making devices.”
95
Phones are “place-making devices” in that they allow
people to control their experience on the subway by bringing their personal
life and preferences into the space. Phones contain contacts but also books,
podcasts, and music, all of which can be customized to curate a personalized
experience in the subway. People can also call others not physically present
into the space by phone call or text message.
96
However, the increased public
display and individual sensation of private life in the subway function as
figurative territorial claims on the subway. When we experience the subway
as a private space, we assume our experience of this place, which perhaps
cannot be defined physically, belongs to us. When we have this mentality, we
can violate social norms, which may cause conflict.
Private/Public Territory and Personal Space
Many of my interlocutors described the struggle for personal space in
the subway, but none conveyed such desperation as Quincy. Quincy lives
along the N-Line near Coney Island. Quincy arrived at the coffee shop we
met at prepared with a long list of grievances about the subway. When he
95
Berry and Hamilton, 114.
96
Berry and Hamilton, 114.
44
began, I felt he was overreacting. On the topic of personal space, he locked
eyes with me, leaned in and waved his hands about as he insisted: “Just to
preserve your own sense of personal space and well-being…you…have to be
like competitively fighting for your own personal space. And [it’s] something
you have to do on the subway, just for your own personal survival, or just
comfort. You absolutely have to.” This seemed a bit over-the-top to me.
Obviously, everyone would prefer to have adequate personal space, but it is
not always possible. However, perhaps Quincy was tapping into the social
purpose of personal space.
Psychiatrists DeFazio and Fried argue in their study on the subway
that territoriality is useful because the subway runs most effectively when
passengers behave in highly predictable and regularized patterns.
Territoriality, they argue, “…would seem to require the inhibition of
dispersing tendencies, such as aggression, and of binding tendencies, such as
sexuality.”
97
Fried and DeFazio explain that territoriality manages affect and
behaviors, often deviant or taboo, that spur inappropriate connection or
conflict and impede smooth commutes. Thus, places with highly regulated
and clear territorial boundaries are associated with high social class.
98
However, the boundaries in the subway are unstable and regularly violated,
which explains why the bourgeois imaginary of the subway remains
unfulfilled.
In fact, some of the territorial defenses Quincy outlined demonstrate
how unclear these boundaries are and how much tension and unspoken
conflict is needed to defend them. Quincy explained:
97
Fried and DeFazio, “Territoriality and Boundary Conflicts in the Subway,” 57.
98
Fried and DeFazio, 57.
45
Personal space is something you're very defensive of. But you can
infrequently have, like, you'll… have somebody physically touching you
on the side, touching you on this side, and you can't avoid it. But you
would have to even still sort of tense yourself to advertise some sort of
social propriety, right? And it's so interesting, then the wall between
social propriety and impropriety is something as simple as the laxity of
your muscles. And that's something that happens on the subway
because personal space is at such an absolute premium…And then I'll
strategically box people out to get to the door, you know, I'll
strategically position myself before the subway gets there, knowing
that if I do so I can get a seat.
Precisely this silent, passive-aggressive bodily and affective tension seems to
be unreliable in its results. Territory in the subway is difficult to assert and
maintain and depends on the affect within the space at any given moment as
well as the motivation of each individual.
The struggle for personal space has shifted dramatically throughout
the various stages of Covid-19. As the subway emptied, personal space became
easier to come by but the norms that regulated it remained uncodified and
unstable, and as a result, the decay imaginary of the subway as associated with
low social class prevailed. Alessandro recounted how, during the early months
of Covid-19, he had to take the train a few times a week to pick up his seven-
year-old son. He remembered how dirty and empty it was, but also how
territory was negotiated differently than it had been in the past. He
remarked,
it didn't feel safe . . . because it was empty. And because also you have
the homeless people there . . . They've always been there. They
claimed the subway, you know, it was their territory. And it makes
sense because they're like homeless people. So, to them, they feel that
entitlement comes from the fact that they, that's where they . . . sleep
and now it's empty . . . I remember . . . cars would be . . . taken over.
There were like tents, you know. So, each one or two [homeless]
people would just claim a car.
Alessandro’s experience represents a specific moment during late
March and early April of 2020 on the subway. As increasingly more of the
46
bourgeoisie fled the subway, some people felt empowered to begin to occupy
entire subway cars. This occupation, which was not socially acceptable or
tolerated legally prior to the pandemic, was able to occur because fewer
people were present to enforce place-based social norms. The territorial
boundaries were unregulated and, because of this, presumably homeless
people were able to take control of subway cars. The dispersion of people
enabled previously marginalized groups to appropriate territory in the subway
and shift the power dynamics. Socially constructed territorial boundaries were
too unstable to survive such a large loss of ridership. This allowed groups of
low socioeconomic class to temporarily redefine the boundaries, which
reinforced the already lower-class status of the subway as a place with weak
territorial boundaries. However, when the MTA announced the closure of the
subway for cleanings from 1 to 5am beginning on May 6th, 2020, people were
no longer able to occupy the subway in this way.
99
In addition to this order to disperse from the subway, Quincy and I
also discussed at length how the increased anxiety around Covid-19
intensified the driving forces of social distancing in the subway. Although
social distancing has always been preferable on the subway, it was not always
possible or socially acceptable to maintain. However, Covid-19 increased the
stakes of maintaining personal space. The fear of contamination through
pathogens, which had not previously held much weight in the subway, now
played a large role in the motivation of social comportment. The public
shifted the paradigm for what was a tolerable level of social distance in the
subway during Covid-19, however, by utilizing the preexisting methods built
into its social fabric. Quincy provided an example:
99
Goldbaum, “Subway Shutdown: New York Closes System for First Time in 115 Years.”
47
I mean, one of the externalities of this [Covid-19], you know, is like in
a bygone era…even if you sat in one of those two-seaters, there would
always be some freak, who would just like come and sit next to you
[even if the car was somewhat empty]. It was like no respect for
personal space at all. And now…you don't have to worry about that at
all. You can just keep your bag there. And nobody looks at you or
judges you or anything. It's so much easier to carve out and establish
personal space on the subway. People are much more amenable to the
idea of standing [and] nobody's going to sit down next to you because
it's no longer socially acceptable. Hopefully, that lasts for a couple of
years. Maybe it's a residual effect.
The technique of placing a bag on an adjacent seat to maximize
personal space rose during the early months of the pandemic due to elevated
need for order, boundaries, and social distance from “dispersive tendencies,”
in this case in the form of a virus. However, this technique of maintaining
territoriality and social order is not new. In fact, Fried and DeFazio comment
on the exact dynamic Quincy mentions—the two-seater. They argue that the
two seats at the ends of each car and separate from the rest of the benches are
commonly viewed as occupied when only one person sits there. The rationale
behind this mindset is that, due to their isolation from the rest of the seats,
these sections heighten intimacy between the individuals who may occupy
them, which can feel like an invasion of personal space if they are strangers.
100
In the first months of Covid-19, these unspoken rules became widely
respected. Unfortunately, this behavior was unstable, and by the spring of
2021, one could no longer expect people to refrain from sitting directly next
to others, and it became unacceptable to place a bag on an adjacent seat
unless the train was empty, as gaze conveys. This shift marks the instability of
territorial boundaries and the reliance on shifting social norms to regulate
space.
100
Fried and DeFazio, 53.
48
Taboo and the Anxiety Surrounding Animality
One of my interlocutors, Lowell, delights in telling me his most
outrageous stories. Lowell has lived in New York City since 2003, when he
moved here from the Finger Lakes region. He lives far south along the F train,
near Brighton Beach. During our conversation, he discussed what he believed
to be the nature of the improper behavior he observes on the subway:
You know, I hate to compare my fellow human beings to wild animals,
but what I'm talking about is the mentality. Right? Not the man or the
woman or whoever . . . you know, like, what's going on in their mind . .
. you have people here that have kind of got a wild animal mentality,
you know, focusing on like my survival, regardless of what it costs
anybody else. It's a wild animal mentality, I'm not judging it, just, you
know, that's what I see. They're pushed out of the civilized spaces, like
coffee shops. So, there's only so many places they can go, Central Park,
(Lord knows I've had encounters in Central Park) or any of the other
large parks, OR the subways. These are the most wild areas that you're
going to encounter in New York . . . And so [in the subway] we're
gonna have that collision of the two worlds, I think. Lord knows, I've
seen it enough times. I think that's really what it comes down to: they
go where they have space to go. Because they're pushed out of other
places. And, and I think a lot of times, you know, this is a failure
somewhere, to address the fact that these people are unbalanced. I
don't know, you know, it's not for me to say, but, you know, clearly,
they have a different way of assessing risks and appropriate behavior,
wherever that comes from, and it's never dealt with.
Lowell described the unfortunate reality of the privatization of public
space, which Cresswell delineates, as well as the animalization of certain
marginalized groups that often justifies such privatization. The animalizing
rhetoric used to cast out undesirable “others” maintains the bourgeois
imaginary of the city. The resulting “zones of social abandonment”—places
where such “others” excluded from normative social life are left to fend for
themselves, as anthropologist João Biehl theorizes—further support the decay
imaginary.
101
101
Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, 4.
49
Lowell is clearly aware of the social implications of referring to people
as animals and does not intend to dehumanize certain groups of people he
labels as “unbalanced” and too wild to be included in civilized, explicitly social
“third places” like coffee shops. At the same time, he feels compelled to
couch his description in terms of animality. I believe that this choice is not
necessarily a matter of poor taste, but rather demonstrates his implicit
awareness of underlying narratives surrounding animality in the decay
imaginary of the subway, as well as the role of animality in taboo.
Similar to Goffman’s understanding of social norms, Bataille
understands that limits, or taboos as he calls them, are transgressed daily.
Bataille specifically describes the principal prohibitions I notice in the
subway—violence, “sexual exuberance,” and the uninhibited performance of
“acts which hitherto…had only performed in private.”
102
He argues that the
limit “is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are not the real and
final reaction; on the contrary, they are a temptation to overstep the
bounds.”
103
Bataille argues that while taboo represents the fear, transgression
represents the fascination.
104
The limit is reified when it is transgressed, and
the individual who transgresses faces consequences for his actions. This
negotiation of prohibitions as a result of their transgression transpires
through a process Bataille refers to as “drama,” a process central to the
experience of the subway.
105
For Bataille, this drama, or constant contention
with and revision of these limits, forms the basis of our humanity.
Lowell marvels in telling me stories of transgression because he, like
everyone, is fascinated by taboo. However, Gandolfo cites Bataille in arguing
102
Bataille, Erotism, 67.
103
Bataille, Erotism, 144.
104
Bataille, Erotism, 68.
105
Gandolfo, The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, 40.
50
that these opposing urges are not just experienced simultaneously, but rather,
that animality “‘is remembered as desirable’” only when the prohibition, or
“nature’s antithesis” is established “as the given and is negated in its turn.”
106
The potential and drive for transgression and its outcomes are only born
through the separation of humans from animals by taboo.
107
Thus,
paradoxically, the animality that Lowell describes is uniquely human because
it is achieved only through transgression. For Bataille, the transgressor
experiences a uniquely human form of “animality,” because humans can never
return to true animality, or “what [they have] rejected in the first place.”
108
.
For this reason, Lowell avoids explicitly calling people animals. Rather, he
describes a “wild animal attitude,” a distinct animalistic temperament only
possible in humans. Thereby, he reiterates that this form of animality is
socially produced rather than natural.
Bataille reasons that humans depend on limits, or taboos, in order to
distance themselves from their “animal” nature.
109
Yet, in distinguishing
themselves from animals, they also distinguish themselves from each other.
Bataille claims that those who adhere to prohibition most strictly are those at
the greatest distance from animals and, consequently, those who enjoy the
greatest prestige.
110
However, to observe prohibition requires financial means
not all have access to. Those with the financial resources necessary to attain
“refinement”—manifested not just in displays of wealth but in the ability to
respect taboos related to social contact, cleanliness, and management of the
body—therefore often enjoy a higher social status or rank than those without
106
Gandolfo, 39.
107
Bataille, Erotism, 83-4.
108
Bataille, Erotism, 85.
109
Bataille, Erotism, 83.
110
Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, 67.
51
such financial means.
111
Absence of “refinement” can be assumed from
transgression but also from a lack of visible anxiety about approaching
animality, as, according to Bataille, it is the anxiety that humanizes, not the
mere abstinence from the taboo act alone.
112
On the subway, the performance
around an act of transgression plays a large role in how people perceive each
other. Through tactile observation of behavior that adheres to or breaches
taboo, people assess the class status of others without verbal communication.
What makes the people Lowell describes “wild animals” is not that
they transgress the prohibitions of violence, excreta, and nudity, but that they
do so publicly. Many of these transgressive acts of are perfectly acceptable in
private. However, when they are conducted in public, they result in an
animalization of the perpetrator. They also result in the attribution of low-
class status to the individual and justify their treatment as “non-persons.”
113
The people who transgress, at least in Lowell’s eyes, are “unbalanced,” which I
infer to mean irrational or severely mentally ill. He might assume that these
persons are mentally ill not only because they violate prohibitions, but also
because they may not perform anxiety surrounding their transgression. This
compounded transgression further reduces them to the state of “non-
persons,” a category of being to which many mentally ill people are relegated.
Lowell refers to “wild” places, to which we exile those who transgress
taboos. Given that transgression is a return to animality, it is no surprise,
then, that, according to Lowell, the only “wild” places tolerant of this
transgression are the parks—curated replicas of nature—and the subway, a
liminal space. The decay imaginary of the subway as a deviant, animalistic
underworld isolated from the specter of law enforcement is widespread.
111
Bataille, The Accursed Share, 68.
112
Bataille, The Accursed Share, 68.
113
Goffman, 84.
52
Like Lowell, many people fantasize about the animality of the subway
itself. In fact, a popular Instagram account that documents sociality in the
subway has the handle “@subwaycreatures,” which suggests an imagination of
the subway as a non-human realm.
114
Although a few of the photos on this
account depict dogs, pigeons, or rats, the majority depict humans. I believe
that the use of the word “creatures” is not just meant to be inclusive of all
species but also to express a perception of animality in the behavior of
humans in the subway. The photos, while sometimes rendering funny t-shirts
or celebrity look-alikes, most often portray humans who violate prohibitions
and accordingly embody the marginal identity of a “non-person.”
Furthermore, the account description reads: “‘People watch’ from the safety
of your phone.’” This account adopts an informal language and tone and
portrays transgressive acts regularly, so I doubt that the account owner, Rick
McGuire, employed scare quotes for any formal syntactic reason. Rather, he
acknowledges that the people he captures are not entirely people, but “non-
persons,” and that therefore the account followers do not exactly engage in
people-watching, but in fascinated spectatorship and contemptuous
surveillance of taboo.
Another example of the decay imaginary in the subway as it relates to
animality is the myth of “mole people” who allegedly live in the tunnels below
the subway.
115
The term “mole people” demonstrates their animalization by
likening their transgressive behavior to that of burrowing rodents. These
people are considered dirty and “out of place,” according to Douglas.
116
These
people, if or when they exist, are homeless and, as a result, transgress
114
McGuire, (@subwaycreatures).
115
Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City.
116
Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 36.
53
prohibitions against public displays of private acts in addition to violating the
law, hence their animalization.
Transgression and the “Delicate” Nature of Norms in the Subway
Goffman concedes that civil inattention is such a “delicate” norm that
we can expect rampant impropriety.
117
And, indeed, civil inattention is
routinely observed and transgressed on the subway. One person’s
transgression of civil inattention does not condone reciprocal transgression by
the other but does weaken the other’s obligation to continue to comply.
Thus, the violation of civil inattention (via staring, for example) can be met
with a variety of responses, which include the maintenance of civil inattention
toward the offender out of tactfulness or fear, the performed ignorance of the
offender (the treatment afforded someone considered a “non-person”
118
), or
reciprocal transgression, as staring back “…often constitutes the first warning
an individual receives that he is ‘out of line’ and the last warning that it is
necessary to give him…staring itself may become a sanction against staring.”
This framework applies to subway sociality, as does Goffman’s remark that
civil inattention intensifies with increased physical proximity and weakens
with distance.
119
Throughout my fieldwork on the subway, I struggled to control my
gaze. Like many riders, I have always occasionally violated the social norm of
civil inattention on the subway. During my fieldwork I maintained a tactile
optics but found myself unable to hold back from and a flitting, but focused
gaze. My choice to disobey social norms as an anthropologist conducting
participant observation with the hopes of maximizing the outcome of my
117
Goffman, 85.
118
Goffman, 84-88.
119
Goffman, 85.
54
work did not come without consequences. I willingly subjected myself to
these consequences perhaps because of the largely anonymous quality of my
fieldwork. I often experienced others’ awareness of and anxiety surrounding
my gaze (usually through the methods Goffman outlines, most commonly
staring). However, in some instances I experienced different forms of
communication about my transgression that aimed to reenforce social norms.
8/5/21 2:30 PM South Ferry-bound 1 train
“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” The automated male voice recites
his catch phrase in unison with my activated memory. Our intonations
rise and fall at the same moments to form one distinct cadence. I rock
back onto my heels and lean my upper back against the closed doors in
the dead center of the car with ease. I settle into my slouching stance,
legs spread wide. I occupy the space in the way unique to someone
visiting their old stomping grounds. I’m riding my line, the 1. I look
down to type some notes on my phone. As the train barrels toward
103rd street, out of the corner of my eye I notice a stocky male figure
pass to the other side of the car. I glance up as he strides past me
without taking his eyes off his destination. I glance back down at my
notes, unruffled by my quick analysis: another middle-aged white man
without a mask on.
After 72nd street I almost instinctively switch sides. It’s a
strategic move: the 1 is the local and the doors won’t open again until
the next express stop, my stop, 42nd street. I can continue to lean
against the door without dealing with the constant disruption of it
opening and closing. From my new vantage point, I become aware of a
silhouette riding on the rickety gangway in between cars. Through the
55
tiny, smudged window I make out a man. He loiters in the doorframe;
I notice his torso lean slightly over the rusted chains. Now I’m looking
straight at him, and I can’t look away until I witness his safe landing. I
hate when people do this. My heart pounds hot in my chest. The
longer he stays out there on the ledge, the more concerned I grow.
The beam of my gaze must pierce his skin—he looks up and right into
my eyes. It’s him.
He’s wearing a red T-shirt and pants, neither particularly
disheveled nor dirty. Yet, I know something is off. The second our
eyes meet, his turn overcast with fury. Before I can process the last ten
seconds, he thrusts his tight fist into the air and his cocked middle
finger trembles. In shock, I swivel my head away and compose myself,
catching my breath and smoothing any expression out of my face. I
look up, embarrassed, to see if anyone has noticed my intense
emotional response. Satisfied by the general oblivion surrounding me,
some force pulls my eyes back to the window. Once again, rage
overcomes him, and I feel myself press my lower back harder into the
door. He waves his arms about frantically, mouthing what I assume are
profanities, again raising his middle finger at me. Emboldened by our
distance and the physical barrier between us, I shoot him a confused
look, eyes half squinted, shoulders shrugged, as if to say, “What’s your
problem?” He finally cranks the lever and slams the door to the next
car open.
I look away and feel my body relax and return to its prior poise.
But soon enough I sense eyes burning a hole through me. Once more I
turn, only to catch him staring at me from a corner seat in the adjacent
car. He waves his hands, again flipping me off. It’s an intimate
56
message, directed only at me, and no one else notices. I look away for
the rest of the ride but continue to feel his gaze on me. Finally, he
seems to grow bored and looks elsewhere. I occasionally see his head
turn toward me through my peripheral vision. We near 42nd Street and
his continued presence is beginning to make me nervous. I am alone in
my fear. I hope he doesn’t try to follow me off the train…he wouldn’t
do that, right? I’m probably being paranoid. As the door opens, I
decide to posture as if to stay on the train. The crowd in my car bulges
as people get on and off the train. I hide behind this coverage and
jump off the train at the last minute. I rush down the stairs to the 7
train, periodically looking back at the crowd behind me to see if my
fake-out was successful. Just as I arrive at the 7 platform, the doors on
the 7 close. Slightly irritated, I look at the monitor and see that the
next train arrives in five minutes. I look around the platform,
confident that I am safe now.
After a few moments, a figure stalks down the platform. In a
split second as he passes me, our eyes meet, and I know I’m in trouble.
In that moment, I could hear a pin drop. It all happens so fast; I can
barely react. He inches toward me to the point of encroachment, and
roars, “I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOU PEOPLE IN THIS CITY!”
He points his meaty finger an inch away from my face, and I flinch. I
recoil instinctively and shrink backward until my spine presses up
against one of the platform’s steel columns. I glance over my shoulder
and try to escape, but he’s got me cornered. He bellows, “ALL YOU
NEW YORK TRANSPLANTS GOT MOMMY AND DADDY
PAYING FOR YOU TO BE HERE! YOU PEOPLE DON’T
KNOW HOW TO MIND YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS! YOU
57
BETTER NOT FUCKING LOOK AT ME!” I cower, spluttering,
face transfixed in panic. I compress my body harder and deeper into
the crevice in the column. Maybe if I get all the way inside, I could
disappear. He turns, and I watch in terror, terrified of what comes
next.
But he pivots and walks away, down the platform and out of
sight. Like it was nothing. I slowly retreat from the column, my eyes
wide. My surroundings come back into focus. Everyone within a
fifteen-foot radius stares at me in confusion, concern, judgment, and
disgust. I blush. After three minutes, I look up, and three older women
are still staring at me. My irritation gets the best of me, and I let out a
cheeky comment: “I’m okay, in case you were wondering.” The women
avert their eyes, but only briefly. The 7 train propels down the track.
I’m grateful for something to take the attention off me. I’m also
grateful for an escape. I step onto the car along with the three women,
but as the doors close, they continue to stare at me. As the train
continues its course, the car fills until it’s bustling with construction
workers and crying babies. I take notes, but nothing takes those eyes
off me, not until the three women independently disembark. Just like
that, I was branded.
In this extreme example, I was punished for my violation of civil
inattention. Despite receiving what Goffman says is the last necessary
warning, a long stare, I continued to push my luck. Precisely in line with
Goffman’s argument, I felt comfortable violating civil inattention when the
man was stationed in the gangway because of our physical distance. However,
when he confronted me, my personal safety was immediately in question, and
58
this motivated me to submit to the rules—avert my gaze, be quiet. Similarly,
when the man, through more intimate methods of communication such as
hand signals and verbal remarks, conveyed increasing proximity (if not yet
physical) to me, I felt more bound to civil inattention. I was uncomfortable
by the quickly narrowing distance. By making angry facial expressions and
hand motions towards me, the otherwise ordinary man escalated his warning
because reciprocity, via staring, failed to deter me. This warning, a violation
of personal space, I was less familiar with, and it led me to submit to the rules,
to look away. But it was too late.
My blatant violation of civil inattention, including my rejection of a
warning, conveyed to this man that I was spectating and judging him as an
animal or “non-person.” My behavior suggested that I felt above the rules. It
was so irreconcilable to this man that he felt he was responsible for pursuing
me physically to set me straight. He did so publicly through implicit threats
of violence and, more importantly, a public shaming, a warning tactic he
hoped would be more effective than staring. Because I disregarded the social
norm of civil inattention, based on my appearance and the way I conducted
myself, he assumed I was not fully out of touch with social norms in general
and would still be impacted by public shaming. My nondescript appearance
mixed with my resistance to civil inattention led him to the conclusion that I
was a New York transplant, new to the city and, thus, to the social norms
therein.
However, I was an insider to these norms since childhood. After
following my excitement in violating them, I was left with the profound sense
of shame Bataille outlines. I knowingly provoked this man to shame and
threaten me with his physical dominance, made scarier by his violation of
Covid-related distancing. I then attempted to save face by claiming the role
59
of the victim. Many people surrounding me maintained the blasé attitude as
well as civil inattention. Whether the women staring at me were concerned
for my wellbeing but not wanting to meddle or judging me for my
involvement, I had now become the spectacle. Simply by my association with
such a transgressive outburst, I drew attention. And then, when I spoke
aloud, I failed to perform a blasé reaction to the outburst, inadvertently
othering myself.
As was the case in my experience, transgression of social norms and
taboos contaminates. The man’s transgressive yelling and his relation to me
contaminated the way I was perceived and was one of the reasons I myself
became suspect. Our actions built on each other and proliferated. My own
violation of civil inattention led the man to yell at me, which led others to
violate their own civil inattention and blasé attitude by staring at me. Such
affective contagion in the subway, as well as its antithesis, containment, can
determine the outcome of a simple transgression.
Chapter Two: Contagion/Containment
62
Corporeal Boundaries: Anxiety, Transmission, and Covid-19
The social need for boundaries—the boundary between the private
and the public being just one of them—presents itself in few places as
evidently as in the New York City subway system. These boundaries,
transgressed and upheld by behaviors, are also constructed to contain and
control affect, an inevitable product of sociality. Affect itself also constructs
boundaries through its ability to infiltrate, boundaries that are often inscribed
not just in space but on the body. At the same time, the unavoidable physical
proximity in the subway calls for social norms, like civil inattention and the
blasé attitude, as supplemental methods of boundary formation to manage the
transmissibility of affect.
120
But what is affect? In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi describes
affect as intensity, or “a nonconscious … autonomic remainder.”
121
In other
words, affect is an unconscious free-floating “potential” that escapes
confinement in an individual in the form of emotion.
122
Emotion, according
to Massumi, is affect contextualized, “owned and recognized.”
123
When
someone transgresses a social norm or boundary, the remainder affect spills
over. It moves between individual bodies and evolves, prior to being owned or
“captured.”
124
These remnants of intensity develop as “unactualized,
inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored
perspective” until they are captured.
125
However, this uncaptured intensity,
120
Goffman, 152.
121
Massumi, 25.
122
Massumi, 35.
123
Massumi, 28.
124
Massumi, 35.
125
Massumi, 35.
63
despite constant movement and development, is often undetectable until its
moment of capture.
126
The free-floating, unbounded remainder that Massumi describes is not
captured willingly or consciously—it is transmitted. Teresa Brennan, in The
Transmission of Affect, writes in this regard that affect is social and can arise
from within and outside of individuals, as “the emotions or affects of one
person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can
enter into another.”
127
Because the transmission of affect connects humans to
each other, it also highlights the boundaries, or lack thereof, through which
affect permeates. Affect’s ability to connect in its violation of boundaries
requires the construction of external limits, or social norms, to further
manage its potential to disrupt order. Brennan argues that Western society
does not legitimize the transmission of affect as real—we do not believe our
emotions and bodies to be permeable by such invisible forces. As a result, we
urgently construct the concept of bounded body as well as norm-based
boundaries—such as social distancing, civil inattention, and the blasé
attitude—in an attempt to prevent and dismiss the possibility of
transmission.
128
As such, beneath the surface of commonplace acts of transgression on
the subway, affect simmers, begging to be released as people feel the urge to
transgress or stop transgressions. Like Bataille’s argument that transgression
itself reifies limits, affect, as the ammunition for transgression, creates
boundaries through their very violation.
126
Massumi, 36.
127
Brennan, 3.
128
Brennan, 15.
64
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the illumination of our
physical permeability spread through the growing knowledge of how the
airborne virus circulates in crowds, the subway lost millions of customers due
to anxiety of contagion. For those who continued to ride the subway, this
anxiety solidified pre-existing boundaries and enforced new ones, such as
wearing facial masks and social distancing. In this way, the material
transmission of Covid-19 mirrors the transmission of affect. We construct
social boundaries to contain both. Methods of virus avoidance, such as social
distancing, are informed by the pre-existing normative techniques of affect
management in the subway. Consequently, conflicts that arise surrounding
the enforcement of boundaries invented to mitigate the spread of Covid-19
are also affectively charged. Thus, the tension surrounding Covid-19 has
become a means of communicating anxieties about intrusion at large.
July 6th, 2021, 2:00 pm
On my way into Manhattan on the C train, a young man gets on
at Utica Avenue. He wears clean, new yellow Jordan’s, jeans, a belt, a
heather grey t-shirt, sunglasses, and a fresh single-use blue surgical
mask. As he gets on the train, I hear him repeatedly mutter, “Ohhh
man, oh shit, bro! Don’t do it!” He snickers to himself in a low,
gravelly tone. He sits down on the bench diagonal from me. As the
train barrels through the darkness, he continues to speak, and directs
his gaze toward the window across from him, almost as if to talk to
someone on the other side of the glass. Suddenly, he takes his t-shirt
off. He flexes his bicep muscles and lets out a deep growl. He pulls his
shirt back over his head, but only partly, leaving one sleeve flapping on
top of his bare right shoulder. His back and chiseled abdomen remain
65
exposed. The young white woman closest to him looks up at him out
of the corner of her eye.
I look down for a moment to take notes when suddenly I hear a
loud smacking sound, as if someone just slapped another person. I look
up, and once again, smacking sounds, only this time I see the source—
the half-shirtless man jolts and pounds his fist into his own abdomen.
The sound of skin slapping against skin ricochets down the car. A
white man in a suit looks up from his phone and over at the half-
shirtless man. At the next stop a white man in dirty, tattered clothing
gets on and launches into his panhandling spiel. Everyone inspects
their shoes. He passes the half-shirtless man, and I hold my breath.
However, to my surprise, the half-shirtless man does not engage. The
presumably homeless panhandler moves on to the next car. The half-
shirtless guy continues to mutter and sporadically punch himself in
various parts of his body. A middle-aged white man who sits close to
the end of the car lets out a cough that seems to dispel the tension.
The half-shirtless man hangs his head and remains silent for several
stops. Then, for no apparent reason, he jerks his head up and bangs his
palm on the metal pole, hard. The pole vibrates and rings for what
feels like minutes. No one else so much as stirs. At Fulton Street in
Manhattan, he stands up and bolts off the train, his sleeve still hanging
off his naked back.
The coughing man continues to cough. He’s wearing a striped
t-shirt and no mask. He looks like a disheveled version of Jerry
Seinfeld. A young guy on the other end of the car wearing an army
green t-shirt and a camouflage-print backpack stands up with purpose
and tears down the car. He takes a seat directly across from me, which
66
puts me on edge. He appears erratic and flicks his MetroCard over and
over in his hand rapidly before he sprints to the other end of the train,
his shoes thundering down the linoleum aisle. As the doors open, he
cuts in front of the white man in the suit, who grimaces. They both get
off.
The coughing man wheezes again. It’s getting ridiculous, and I
want to ask if anyone has an extra mask for him, but I don’t. A rail-
thin Black woman wearing a wifebeater, sweatpants, and flip flops
barges through the gangway door, then turns back and yells something
I can’t make out to someone in the other car. She rushes to the end of
the car and sits in the corner. She closes her eyes. Suddenly she opens
her eyes and yells something I can’t catch, then jumps off at the next
stop. When the doors open at West 4th Street, the coughing man
coughs up gelatinous globs of green phlegm and spits them onto the
platform three times. He notices me looking at him and says
something I can’t hear. He hangs his head and appears distressed. The
erratic guy from long before jumps back on and sits down right next to
the coughing dude. I guess he never actually got off the train, he just
switched cars. After about one minute he springs up again and jets off.
I feel antsy, like there’s tension building, like a bubble that
eventually needs to pop. Another splitting cough cuts through the
silent car. Finally, someone cracks. A person I read as Latinx and
gender non-conforming sitting across from the coughing man erupts,
“YOU WANNA FUCKING COUGH UP A STORM BUT NOT
WEAR A MASK?!? IT’S FUCKING DISGUSTING!” They get up
and dart toward the opposite end of the car. Their booming voice
startles me, and I’m impressed by their ability to project. As they pass
67
me, I nod my head at them, but they ignore me and sit almost as far
from the coughing man as possible. He replies with a weak, “oh fUck
yOU.” No one else even looks up. The person continues their tirade:
“COPS GIVING OUT TICKETS BUT NOTHING? ANOTHER
STRAIN IS GOING AROUND!” I shoot them a look to convey my
gratitude, but they seem too riled up to notice. The guy across from
me listens to music through his headphones and drums a beat. The
coughing guy looks at his combatant and mutters, “Fuck you, fa—.” I
can’t tell if he says ‘fat- something’ or ‘faggot.’ He rises to get off at
59th and once again yells, “have a nice day fa—” but again I can’t hear
what he says because he’s so soft-spoken. His rival bellows, “YO GET
YOURSELF CHECKED OUT! YOU HAVE THAT COUGH BUT
IT MIGHT HAVE GONE TO YOUR BRAIN! HOW ARE YOU
GONNA YELL AT ME BECAUSE YOU DONT HAVE A MASK
ON?!?” The closing doors jingle plays as the coughing man walks up
the steps on the platform. The person who spoke up shakes their head,
and we exchange a glance. I shake my head and smirk. The bubble has
popped.
Within about thirty minutes on one car on the C train, I felt affect
accumulate and erupt, not just through movement and capture, but also as
transmission between individual bodies. In the summer of 2021, the
transmission of affect happened to follow the same trajectory as the potential
transmission of Covid-19. Due to the ubiquity of information on the
transmission of Covid-19, the public has experienced a heightened awareness
of the permeability of the body via the breath. The threat of Covid-19
highlights our interconnectedness, as well as our separation, from other
68
humans and threatens to violate our boundaries. Perhaps the coughing man’s
intrusion and refusal to maintain physical boundaries reminded his opponent
of the impossibility of sealed borders. Covid-19 exposes the unfoundedness of
the Western idea of enclosed physical bodies, sometimes with fatal
consequences, only amplifying the existing anxiety surrounding proximity in
the subway.
The implicit impetus for the conflict was the other passenger’s fear of
catching Covid-19 from the coughing man. However, the focus placed on this
concern conceals the looming contagion of affect. Would this interaction
have happened if not for the intrusions of the shirtless man, the screaming
woman, the running man, and the panhandler just a few minutes prior? To
what extent had their presence agitated the affect in the car through their
transgressions, building the tension, the intensity that I also experienced,
such that it needed to be compensated for via capture and transmission? I
wondered if the anger the passenger conveyed was an expression of
discomfort with the transgressions and their subsequent transmission of
affect. Similarly, I wondered to what extent their anger stemmed from the
larger context of death, loss, and precarity outside the subway, their own
accumulated “potential” they brought into the subway to transmit. To what
extent was Covid-19 and the (absence of the) mask, as the available social
symbol of the virus, a catalyst for the passenger to make sense of and express
their discomfort, their pain? There is no way to know for sure. I only know
the tension and release I felt as affects accumulated and dispersed.
Contamination and Affect: The Social Value of Disgust
Just as affect motivates us to support or deplore the social rules that
protect us from the transmission of Covid-19 in the subway, the transmission
69
of Covid-19 seemingly brings about affective reactions that, I argue, might be
unrelated to Covid-19 alone. However, these reactions depend on Covid-19 as
a material justification of the reaffirmation of our boundaries, the
transmission of affect, and our feelings of disgust toward others.
Through proximity with others and the transmission of affect, affect
and even individuals themselves can contaminate. The subway is one of the
only places that individuals from disparate backgrounds regularly come into
close contact with each other. As diverse as New York is, boundaries are pre-
constructed by neighborhood, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, gender, and
race, and are only reified by the perceived threat of proximity to the “other.”
As Douglas argues in Purity and Danger, feelings surrounding physical or sexual
contact with others can symbolize one’s place in and attitude toward the
social system and its hierarchies. In this way, physical contact or proximity
that is “polluting” (in her example, sexual activity, but in the case of the
subway, social mixing) can represent the dictums of a social system, such as
racism, or the violation of a social boundary, with the consequent
transmission of affect. Douglas explains, “What goes for sex pollution also
goes for bodily pollution…bodily orifices seem to represent points of entry or
exit to social units.”
129
Although in the subway we have learned to socially
distance to avoid pollution and the transmission of affect, we have become
more aware through the Covid-19 pandemic that our skin alone does not
mark our corporeal boundaries, but rather, so do our orifices, as Douglas
argues. Today, we are more aware than ever that, when we inhale and exhale
in public spaces, we take in the breath of others. When we might have
previously felt comfortable in the subway distancing ourselves from
129
Douglas, Purity and Danger, 3-4.
70
“polluting” entities and identities, our paradigm for what is polluting has
shifted. While masks conceal facial expressions, they do not always prevent
the contaminating transmission of affect or the fears of social pollution.
With her theory of “dirt,” Douglas thus lays the groundwork for an
analysis of contamination and contagion on the subway. She asserts that dirt
is merely “matter out of place.”
130
Further, she claims that the existence of
“dirt”—here encapsulating anything material, social, or symbolic—hinges
upon the existence of an order or “classification of matter” based on its
perceived value, as well as upon its violation.
131
Dirt is a relative condition: Its
existence is premised on the relationships between objects.
132
Thus, those
who are “out of place” on the subway may contaminate the space and others
in it with their mere presence. Their example has the power to encourage
more people to transgress and transform the taboo against such transgression
altogether. Although the subway is a public space, the understanding of what
is appropriately “public” is somewhat narrow. Certain behaviors and identities
are considered “dirt” from the vantage point of bourgeois values and
sensibilities.
Douglas concludes: “Our pollution behaviour is the reaction which
condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished
classifications.”
133
This pollution behavior responds to the perceived
unleashing of contagious forces, including affects, via the transgression of
social classification and boundaries. Pollution behavior can be observed in the
subway as reactions to things or people marked as “out of place,” which
130
Douglas, 36.
131
Douglas, 36.
132
Douglas, 37.
133
Douglas, 37.
71
Cresswell also flags in neoliberal policies barring those considered “dirt” from
public space.
To avoid viral and affective contamination, passengers tend to disperse
within subway cars, maximizing the distance between themselves and
strangers. The pursuit of personal space surpasses a mere desire for physical
comfort and a range of movement. In the subway, “personal space may be
defined as that area surrounding, or belonging to, a person, which is cathected
consciously or unconsciously to the self.”
134
Since our affective selves extend
beyond our skin, we feel the need for personal space beyond the borders of
our skin. To reassert our boundaries, despite the permeability of our bodies,
we distance ourselves from others, as did the passenger who moved away from
the coughing man. Other ways to distance are to avoid meeting another’s gaze
via civil inattention and to adopt a blasé attitude.
135
This performance
reinforces the boundary between the individual and any affective
“impressions” they encounter.
136
During rush hours, when physical contact is
impossible to avoid, tension and discomfort can build as passengers struggle
to maintain their physical and affective integrity.
Although the social distancing practiced during Covid-19 is distinct
from that solely brought on by the transmission of affect in situations of
physical proximity, it is still surprisingly affective. If we did not develop
intense affective attachments and reservations surrounding Covid-19, we
might not so vehemently abide by or disobey the medical knowledge that
informs our behavior and the science-based precautions deemed necessary to
avoid transmission. Consequently, the transmission of affect brought about
134
Fried and DeFazio, 49.
135
Boy, 195.
136
Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 6.
72
by Covid-19, through news coverage and political polarization, is one of the
very forces determining whether people follow Covid-19 precautions and,
thereby, impacts the transmission of Covid-19 in the subway. Affectively
charged opinions and the lengths that people are willing to go to to abide by
new norms compel us to “other” those with opposing views. We must
separate ourselves from those “others,” whose breath threatens to permeate
us. In Covid-times, these “others” either penetrate us through an
infringement on our personal liberties (such as to go without a mask) or
through a potential or imagined transmission of Covid-19. Therefore, we can
view the structure of feeling of Covid-affect not as a novel form of sociality in
the subway but as a routine—if exacerbated—manipulation of affect to
negotiate boundary formation.
The involvement of disgust, an embodied emotion, in the conflicts
surrounding Covid-19 further illustrates the relation between the transmission
of affect and the transmission of Covid-19. During my affectively charged ride
on the C train, I felt the visceral sensation of disgust as the coughing man
spat mucus onto the platform. Everything indicated that the person who
yelled at him also acted out of disgust, along with other emotions (anger,
perhaps fear). The production and expression of the feeling of disgust
depends upon our immersion within hierarchical social structures. In the
West, disgust is often described as corporeal in ways that other “emotions”
are not. It is a sensation frequently felt in the stomach and, in cases of
extreme disgust, can produce nausea.
The physicality of disgust, however, is often conflated with instinct.
Due to this conflation, Durham argues that the visceral aspect of disgust is
precisely the source of its naturalization and power. However, like Douglas’s
73
“dirt,” disgust is relational.
137
Something is not inherently, universally, or
naturally disgusting. Bataille explains, “We imagine that it is the stink of
excrement that makes us feel sick. But would it stink if we had not thought it
was disgusting in the first place? We do not take long to forget what trouble
we go to to pass on to our children the aversions that make us . . . human
beings.”
138
Here Bataille upends the claim of essentialism, arguing that
disgust, because it is based on taboo, humanizes the subject, but in doing so,
animalizes the object and by extension organizes social hierarchies.
Durham takes the argument for the social construction of disgust one
step further. She adopts William Miller’s cultural argument in The Anatomy of
Disgust that something becomes disgusting only when it threatens to
contaminate the self through proximity.
139
Accordingly, if we go by
developments in the West, “The unwashed poor are pathetic, admirable or
disapproved, and different while living in distant fields; when they come into
the cities in masses with industrialization, they become disgusting, as people
[the emergent bourgeoisie] draw up new moral and aesthetic boundaries.”
140
The historical European imagination of certain ethnic groups as malodorous
similarly works to construct moral boundaries by evoking disgust and
motivating social distance between ethnic groups. Durham argues that, as this
classist, racist, xenophobic mentality suggests, disgust requires an imagination
of the self as or in proximity to the object of disgust.
141
Disgust creates
relation between the object of disgust and the “sphere of intimacy of the
disgusted bourgeoisie.”
142
In bridging subject and object, disgust creates and
137
Durham, “Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination,” 136.
138
Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, 58.
139
Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, quoted in Deborah Durham, 148.
140
Durham, 148.
141
Durham, 149.
142
Durham, 149.
74
reifies identities and boundaries. This argument speaks to the ways that
bourgeois values became naturalized as the norm, assisted by the physicality
of disgust.
143
This physical proximity between strangers in the subway leads people
to consider intimacy with the “other.” In the subway, many people engage in
the solitary contemplation of their surroundings. This contemplation amid
physical proximity leads me, and many others, I would assume, to become
curious about and feel an empathetic proximity to other passengers. Yet, this
imagination of proximity, despite efforts to maintain social distance,
establishes the perfect conditions to also feel disgust.
8/7/21 3pm Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn College-bound 2 Train
As I get on the train at Atlantic Avenue-Barclay’s Center, an odorous
man encrusted in grime is kneeling and panhandling, crawling down
the car. A man standing up acts as though they had an encounter
previously and tells him: “Get the fuck up!” They begin cursing at each
other and the panhandling guy starts crawling towards the other man,
screaming, “I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!” He’s coming toward me,
but I’m not worried about his violence. He seems pretty incapacitated
and also only directs his anger toward the other man. I’m just trying to
get out of his way so his dirty clothes don’t touch me. I quickly swerve
out of the way, accidentally stepping into a woman’s personal space. I
apologize to her, but she seems to understand my impulse and smiles,
saying: “It’s ok.”
143
Durham, 136.
75
My visceral expression of disgust and fear at a panhandler encapsulates
the social construction of disgust. My impulse to recoil was so strong and
internalized that I momentarily lost awareness of the social norms of social
distancing with other individuals in the car. My disgust reaction, to increase
distance between myself and the man, was heightened, with the aid of my
“tactile eye,” as he moved closer to me. His increased proximity actualized my
imagination of physical touch, a necessary condition for the experience of
disgust, according to Durham. My disgust was then validated by the white
woman next to me, who seemed to share my social position and similarly
construct the man as “other,” as worthy of disgust.
The rise of Covid-19 in March 2020 heightened people’s feelings of
disgust. While the city’s middle and upper classes fled the subway and cars
became less crowded, the known circulation of the virus shifted the paradigm
for what was determined as a comfortable level of proximity. Passengers
required greater social distances than previously to avoid the sensation of
contamination. The sporadic solidarity once experienced deteriorated as
varying Covid-related behaviors amplified tensions and feelings of suspicion.
These behaviors surpassed commonplace etiquette. Rather, the variance of
conduct highlighted political and social polarization, which only became more
legible with mask mandates.
This visible new form of radical social difference further promoted
disgust because disgust involves a relation to an “other.” Our fear of contagion
deepens in the company of someone, like the coughing man, who improperly
wears or fails to wear a mask, because with this behavior, the likelihood for
transmission rises. But with the emergence of Covid-19 our sensation of
disgust went beyond this knowledge. The presence or absence of a face mask
has been commonly interpreted as political affiliation. Non-abidance of the
76
mask mandate in spaces like the subway pointed to the position assumed by
the far right and by politicians toward whom many liberal New Yorkers feel
disgust. Conversely, anti-maskers might feel disgust as they are surrounded by
mandate-abiding liberals whose presence galvanize anti-maskers’ revulsion at
the idea of wearing a mask themselves. The coughing man’s disgust toward
masked people only escalated when he was verbally attacked by someone in a
violation of civil inattention, transferring affect to him. Hence, the disgust
directed at the coughing man converted, probably alongside anger and shame,
into emotion, which he expressed through his use of profanity. Perhaps a
subconscious discomfort with the transmissibility of affect was the reason the
coughing man also reaffirmed boundaries by labeling the passenger as a
member of a stigmatized identity, an “other.”
Gritty City: Dirt and The Pursuit of Authenticity in the Subway
Although those marked as “out of place” or “dirty” in the subway may
contaminate the stability of a car by transgressing bourgeois social norms,
provoking feelings of disgust, Bataille addresses the thrill that such threat of
contamination can provoke. When not persecuted, transgression has the
power to transform social norms. Transgression marks a forbidden appeal to
animality, which becomes desirable with the normalization of taboo. Such
transgression thus is closely tied to simultaneous sensations of anxiety and
excitement. It can provoke repulsion, like when I encountered the man
crawling on the subway car’s floor, but it can also provoke a certain kind of
attraction.
144
This attraction to the edgy, the transgressive, the potentially
144
Bataille, Erotism, 38-9.
77
polluting in New York City’s spaces like the subway reflects the imaginary of
an “authentic,” gritty subway or city.
7/8/21 (Tropical Storm Elsa hits New York) 6:15pm Downtown E Train
A maskless bottle blond woman with a Prada handbag gets on at 63rd
Street. Lots of people in suits get on. As we move downtown, a huge
gushing sound emanates from the outside of the train as water splashes
off the roof and windows. “Jesus!” one man yells, as another laughs and
says, “There’s gotta be more germs in that water.” At Penn Station,
another points his finger. I look over to where he points and realize
that water is gushing out of a hole on the platform, probably from a
broken or overflowed drainage pipe. Passengers flock to the window to
catch a glimpse, as people on the platform crowd around the flooding
platform for photos. The Prada woman grins excitedly and takes a
photo. She smiles down at her phone for the rest of the ride.
This exhilaration transpired on a downtown-bound train during rush
hour, which implies that people were heading home for the day. The E line
ends in Manhattan, meaning that many of these people, like the Prada lady,
lived or socialized in some of the most expensive neighborhoods there. The
broken water pipe, evidence of a system in disrepair, represents the grunge
quality associated with the city. The passengers’ attraction to this sight, which
was repaired by the time I returned about twenty minutes later, is contrasted
by the storm’s impact on subway stations in neighborhoods with greater
immigrant, low-income, and Black and brown populations than downtown
Manhattan. Videos of passengers wading through waist-deep gray water to
enter and exit subway stations in Washington Heights and parts of the Bronx
78
spread rapidly across the media.
145
These conditions seriously disrupted
people’s commutes and lives and were dangerous.
The impulse of the passengers on the E train (myself included) to
photograph the burst pipe illustrates the way that overwhelmingly white
middle and upper-middle classes fetishize grit. Zukin, who analyses urban
gentrification, elaborates: “The slums so feared by the righteous middle
classes continue to appeal to artists and intellectuals because of their reservoir
of danger and decay as well as their tolerance of or unwillingness to police
cultural diversity.”
146
Similarly, the passengers I observed delighted in the sign
of the subway’s decay, exemplified by its flooding during Tropical Storm Elsa.
Their behavior represents a desire for spectacle, grunge, and proximity to a
radical diversity of people and a storied but aging infrastructure that excite
and terrify in their ability to generate and transmit affect.
Classing “Crazy”: The Conflation of Severe Mental Illness with
Homelessness
The most prevalent contaminating figure in the subway is the ideal
type of the “crazy person.” For those who view the subway as a zone of social
abandonment, “crazy” can be a euphemism for “homeless” or “mentally ill.”
For others, “crazy” can describe an irritating subway experience or a quirky,
quintessentially New York City occurrence. I argue that “crazy” is an
umbrella term that serves both romantic and anxious imaginaries of New
York and subway grit, spectacle, and authenticity.
147
It can refer to a person
145
Julian Mark and Timothy Bella, “New Yorkers wade through waist-deep floods to reach
their trains as storms pummel the city.”
146
Sharon Zukin, “CONSUMING AUTHENTICITY: From Outposts of Difference to
Means of Exclusion,” 729.
147
Zukin, 745.
79
who brings disorder, unstable affect, and animality into the subway. The
persistence of this derogatory term in a fairly liberal city, in reference to
nonconforming behavior, indexes the attraction and repulsion the liminal
space of the subway exerts in the imaginaries about the city. The “grit”
exposed in craziness straddles the boundary between scary and alluring, yet
hails the “real,” the “authentic” New York.
But what do these terms mean? In snap judgments of who should be
avoided on the subway, how do we determine who we believe to be
contaminating? By what criteria are we defining people we interact with in
transit as “mentally ill”? Where does this narrative come from and how are we
using it to manage our discomfort around strangers in the subway?
Goffman explains the source of such judgments. He argues that the
social contract among strangers in public places depends upon
demonstrations of trust and trustworthiness—a demonstration implied by
affective decorum and adherence to social norms. However, we do not
imagine all who break social norms as “mentally ill.” Some people we assume
to be mentally ill wear dirty or disheveled clothing, speak in ways one should
not, reject the social rules surrounding gaze, fail to perform a blasé attitude,
etc. Perhaps we interpret these clues we cull in brief encounters as evidence
of mental illness because we have conflated poverty with mental illness to
reject those struggling with poverty from public life. Indeed, Bataille signals
how often one’s ability to avoid social prohibitions, an ability attributed to
moral status, depends on wealth, thus classing the concept of “refinement.”
148
Goffman leads us to question these immediate judgments:
148
Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, 67-8.
80
. . . What can be more pleasing to one’s sense that all is right with the
world than to be given . . . evidence that the kind of bad behavior we
cannot explain by our other methods is simply due to the sickness of
the person who so behaves . . .? Whatever psychiatry does, then, for
the offender . . . it functions additionally to protect the sanctity of the
social occasion.
149
Although mental illness likely is one plausible explanation for errant
behavior, perhaps we depend upon mental illness as an attractive explanation
for transgression because it does not seem to threaten the stability of the
status quo. Regardless, most of those who transgress are not cast out of the
subway. But for many, their presence contaminates by exposing people to
unbridled affect.
Anthropologist John Marlovits describes his ethnographic research at
sites of community mental health care in Seattle to address the construction
of the category of the “homeless mentally ill.” He claims this category
emerged because of the “psychiatrization” of poverty.
150
This category
encapsulates how I, and many of my interlocutors, seem to classify the subway
riders whom we associate most with social pollution, the transgression of
social norms, and eruptions of affect. Many of my interlocutors, like Sam,
Quincy, Mario, and Ernie, spoke about the “homeless issue” as a part of the
subway’s social profile that they accept and often take for granted; this issue
has been around as long as they can remember. They offered various
explanations, ranging from lack of government investment in homeless
services, inadequate mental health services, drug addiction, the skyrocketing
cost of living in New York, to dangerous conditions in shelters. Ernie, a
station agent at the MTA for twenty-five years, explained: “The homeless are
in an imperfect situation because there’s no housing in New York and a lot of
149
Goffman, 235.
150
Marlovits, “Mental Health as Ruination: The Psychiatrization of Space and Poverty in
Seattle.”
81
them probably suffer from mental illness, and it’s an inconvenient situation
for us all.”
Like Ernie, other core interlocutors like Alessandro, Sam, Mario,
Richard, Adam, and Lowell suspected that the underlying reason that
seemingly homeless individuals congregate in the subway is severe mental
illness (SMI). This belief is somewhat backed by data, such as the estimate
that over half of single adults in homeless shelters have some undiagnosed
mental health issue, a percentage that rises among people staying on the
streets and subway.
151
However, this statistic includes conditions like anxiety
and depression, conditions common among the entire population, not only
the homeless. The “mentally ill” or “crazy” people my interlocutors refer to
fall more neatly into the MTA’s official, purposefully vague, and politically
correct term “emotionally disturbed persons,” or EDPs, as Mario tells me.
This broader label aims to group together people based not on a fixed
condition but on circumstantial observation: anyone who is experiencing big
emotions for any host of reasons, such as drug addiction, mental illness, or
developmental disability, and is (potentially) disruptive of the subway’s
function. The MTA’s somewhat sanitized terminology aspires to objectivity
and resists both the conflation of mental illness with homelessness and the
criminalization of homelessness. It also demonstrates how the subway serves
as one of the sole spaces where individuals in a state of “abject
abandonment”
152
are not entirely “out of place.”
151
Southall, Sandoval and Goldbaum, “Four Subway Stabbings and a Young Man’s Downward
Spiral.”
152
Biehl, Vita, 2.
82
When I asked Sam who qualifies as “crazy,” a term he used to describe
people in the subway, he gave the typical answers: “homeless”
153
folks and
intoxicated people. However, Sam had divulged information to me only
minutes prior that placed him in the category of “crazy,” as he defined it,
although I do not think he realized this. When I asked about his hyper-
vigilance, Sam had described his familiarity and feeling of comfort on the
subway. He was even so at ease there that, “I’ve like, passed out drunk on the
train before and ended up in like Jamaica Center.” “Crazy” is subjective and
fluid, not a clear-cut identity entirely contrary to “sanity.”
154
As a term of
judgment or perception used when language fails, rather than of identity,
“crazy” or “sane” are labels we all move between as we capture and release
affect.
At certain moments of my fieldwork, during lapses of judgment, I was
perceived as “crazy” by others in the subway.
6/29/21 Manhattan-bound A Train 10:15 AM
I’m running late, and swipe into the turnstiles at Nostrand Avenue
just as my train pulls away from the station. I check the screen above
me, which says I have an eight-minute wait time. I pace impatiently,
shifting my weight from one foot to the other, when I notice a middle-
aged white man without a mask. Especially annoyed by white men
lately, perhaps because of their protagonist role in the anti-mask
movement, I get irritated and motion to him to put a mask on. He
turns to me with a quizzical look on his face as though he has not
153
Sam did not explain what he meant by “homeless” and how he determined whether
someone he saw on the subway was homeless or not.
154
Kafai, “The Mad Border Body: A Political In-Betweeness.”
83
understood my command. I motion again. He gets angry, points at me,
and then twirls his finger in a circle around his ear while whistling, a
gesture for “crazy.”
In this instance my failure to perform a blasé attitude made me
“crazy.” However, different forms of transgression and different contexts in
which they take place complicate the question of who is perceived as “crazy”
or emotionally disturbed, and by whom. I recorded field notes on an instance
on the A train near Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in which a woman preached.
She swayed as she wailed: “Jesus is coming! It is your choice, come and live
with Jesus in the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Lord save my soul, I’m a sinner.
BELIEVE!” While I found this woman’s actions non-normative, some of the
people around me expressed outright irritation at her disruption. They did
not consider this woman “crazy,” but rather, disrespectful. This interpretation
suggests that she could be held accountable for her behavior, whereas the
silence often met by an EDP on the subway implies an understanding of their
lack of agency as, in the words of Goffman, a “non-person.”
Otherwise sanctioned transgression of social norms may be accepted
when justified as religious behavior.
155
Goffman argues that the difference
between impropriety coded as mental illness and merely offensive
impropriety is the offender’s situationally dependent ability to make others
accept the violation.
156
The preacher asks for and largely receives such this
acceptance, through religious pleas, a relatively acceptable behavior in a
culture where Christianity is mainstream.
155
Goffman, 240.
156
Goffman, 240.
84
Another common transgression that can justify the designation “crazy”
and evoke experiences of affective contamination is panhandling. Our
reactions to panhandlers reveal our priorities on the subway and our
willingness to risk contamination and eruption of affect as a result of contact
with a transgressor. Do we consider panhandlers untrustworthy and
responsible for their own condition and thus, believe that institutions of
“character reform” should mediate between those who give to charity and
those in need?
157
How do we discern when and to whom we give? Might our
decisions in the presence of panhandlers actually revolve around our desire to
avoid contamination?
Marlovits argues that, since the establishment of the Community
Mental Health Act, as a society, we have employed psychiatry as a credible
authority to designate the poor and vagrant as “the mad.”
158
By de-
historicizing the experience of extreme poverty, we brush it off as the result
of individual rather than systemic issues. In so doing, to the extent that “the
mad” are treated as non-persons and relegated to “zones of social
abandonment,” the psychiatrization of the poor “writes the poor, via medical
paternalism, out of the social contract.”
159
7/26/21 6:00 PM Times Square Station
I get off the E train and grumpily amble through the crowded rush
hour station toward the 1 train. As I walk through a tunnel, a
presumably homeless Black man walks toward a Black guy wearing a
cross necklace, almost colliding with him. The guy wearing the cross
157
Marlovits, 90.
158
Marlovits, 92.
159
Marlovits, 92.
85
necklace tries to dodge him, chest puffed, and shoulders spread. The
presumably homeless man asks the guy to help him out and the other
guy yells, “Are you crazy, man??? You’re crazy!”
When the man asked the other man for financial assistance and
bumped into him—transgressing social norms of gaze, involvement, social
distance, the blasé attitude, etc.—the man wearing the cross necklace
responded as though the man’s proximity to him was offensive and
contaminating. Furthermore, he labeled him as “crazy,” perhaps suggesting
that the man was experiencing some form of mental illness that led him to
completely disregard the personal space of the man with the necklace.
In this instance, like so many moments of transgression on the subway,
proximity to a person transgressing social norms, perhaps due to poverty or
SMI, becomes intolerable. A common example of this behavior is when
people distance themselves from a sleeping body on the train. Elsa, a middle-
aged U.S. Army and Navy Reserve veteran with long brown hair, explains this
reaction:
Last night, I was changing at Union Square from the 6 to the 4/5, and I
saw a guy sleeping across the seat, and I'm like, I don't want to go in
there. And I feel terrible for people that are homeless, you know, but .
. . I mean, it’s disgusting. I mean, I went in one car a couple weeks ago,
and the smell was rancid. At the next stop, I switched cars, and so did
a lot of other people that had just gotten on. If it’s someone that's just
like, laid out sleeping, you know, I’m leaving.
I argue that this behavior results from a tacit belief that impropriety,
which designates its actors as “non-persons,” as Goffman calls them, is
contagious. Impropriety is contagious because affect is contagious, and norms
organize affect. Hence, the transgression of norms destabilizes, providing a
heightened potential for the eruption and transmission of affect. As Goffman
argues, people who transgress social norms signal to others that they cannot
86
be trusted to maintain peace and order—they are thus perceived as more
likely to engage in further transgressive, antisocial behavior or in affective
disturbances that can include violence.
The Subversive Performance of “Crazy”
8/10/21 12:25 PM Woodlawn-bound 4 Train
At Grand Central I board the Bronx-bound 4 train. The car is nearly
empty, and as I take a seat on the surgical-blue bench, I have the
whole side of the car to myself. At 59th street, a Black woman wearing
a navy-blue scarf over her face enters through the central doors.
Immediately one man across from me puts on headphones, as if to
buckle up for the tornado he can tell is about to blow through the
train. I’m suddenly curious. The woman seems to be talking on the
phone. She rips the scarf off, and I realize she has no headphones on
and there is no phone call, she’s just talking aloud. Something about
her tone is personal, like she is telling a story. She does not seem to be
talking to someone or something I cannot see—it more seems like
she’s performing. She begins by talking about a cuckoo’s nest. She
covers so many topics, so quickly, it’s hard to follow. Within twenty
minutes she covers convoluted stories about celebrities, a recipe for
apple turmeric tea, a biopic proposal, and more I could not catch.
Eventually, she announces: “That’s why I had to come out in my Mona
Lisa shawl. To tell my story…” She never finishes articulating any of
her thoughts. They fracture, each one triggering an affect potential
that continues to develop in others but leaves much of her meaning up
87
to interpretation.
160
She slides her shoes off for a moment and says,
“You see how Taylor Swift is wearing her sandals, and I’m wearing my
J. Crew? That’s on Barack Obama.” I’m wearing sandals. Am I “Taylor
Swift”? I notice the guy across from me crack a smile beneath his
mask. He looks over at the guy with the headphones next to him, who
laughs a little. “So, imagine that Taylor Swift is upset with us hood
people.” Is she incorporating me into her story because I am watching
her? She laughs, then says, “I’m gonna slide over to Taylor Swift.” She
moves onto the end of the bench I am on, next to another woman.
People pretend not to notice. Occasionally, people look around at
each other with a facial expression that seems to express the
sentiment, “What is going on??” In these non-verbal communications,
we bond in the absurdity of this experience. We could all easily switch
cars, but we choose not to. Right before we hit 149th street, she says,
“It don’t make no fucking sense! IF OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS AN
INVISIBLE MAN—” For the first time since she got on, someone
else dares to cut her off: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE
TALKING ABOUT,” the guy with the headphones chuckles, “Man,
nobody gets you, girl.” She does not acknowledge that he has spoken
to her. She just moves on. A woman in her twenties gets on, and Mona
Lisa starts speaking to her, “Oh, you was the girl they saw in the
Bronx? THE GAY GUY, MAGIC JOHNNSONNNN!!! MAGIC
JOHNSONN, I saw that!!!” The woman looks uncomfortable, keeping
her eyes down. As I try to decipher the meaning of her words, I
become paranoid, trying to find connections where there may not be
160
Massumi, 40.
88
any. She alternates between statements that are entirely convoluted to
ones that sound like the tail end of a regular conversation. She goes
from, “How you gonna get all the other runaway slaves and you gonna
boss those bitches around” straight into “I thought maybe I should
find something else to do, so that’s how I ended up in retail.” All is
silent on the train except for the alternating monologues of Mona Lisa
and the train announcements. “I wanna know who’s on the drugs now?
Is it me, or is it it? Somebody, tell me who’s on drugs,” she snickers to
herself. As the doors open at 176th she abruptly stands up and gets off.
The doors close, and the chime sound reverberates throughout the
silent car. The man with headphones says, “Yo, we been through this
for 45 minutes, this shit crazy!!” Right before Kingsbridge, he says to
me, “What a ride, right?”
This encounter on the train shows the process of “tactile optics,”
interpretation, and judgment we participate in constantly on the subway. I
had no awareness of the wider context of “Mona Lisa’s” life—I did not know
anything about her mental health, her substance use history, her employment
status, or her relationships with others in her life. However, like we do to any
person garnering attention on the subway, I attempted to code her social
status out of habit, just like the man across from me coded her behavior as
“shit crazy.” She drew attention to herself by speaking aloud to no one in
particular, a transgressive act in a transportation space that depends upon
engagement in civil inattention and the blasé attitude for its smooth
functioning.
161
161
Goffman, 214.
89
As Goffman states, when someone publicly transgresses a social norm,
they immediately become “other.”
162
When we cannot detect an external
reason behind the transgression and the transgressor does not attempt to save
face in response to their “excommunication,” we assume these individuals
suffer from a psychological condition.
163
Goffman argues that our
interpretations of an action as a transgression or, in his words, an “occult
involvement,” do not revolve around an engagement with a fantasy or
hallucination but, rather, the way she approaches a social norm others
recognize.
164
In the case of Mona Lisa, what drove my interpretation that she
behaved “abnormally” was not that she seemed to hallucinate or genuinely
believe delusions (although she may have) but that she seemed unresponsive
to social norms and to the people occupying the space around her.
Furthermore, she did not attempt to save face in response to her
“excommunication,” or the ways in which people laughed at her, avoided
proximity, and averted their gaze.
165
In a public space where nuance isn’t the
norm, she fulfilled the basic social requirements for someone who was, in the
words of the man with the headphones, “crazy.”
However, Mona Lisa’s transgressions seemed indeed more nuanced
than symptoms of mental illness. As Goffman explains, a person is not viewed
as “mentally ill” when their transgression is understood and excused. But, in
the subway, when we are not familiar with those in copresence with us, and
when we generally do not converse with them, there is little opportunity to
162
Goffman, 234.
163
Goffman, 216.
164
Goffman, 77.
165
Goffman, 216.
90
explain or defend transgression. Mona Lisa was unable to do so, and so I, and
others, deciphered her social position.
In many ways, Mona Lisa did not fall into the ideal type of a “mentally
ill” person—she did not act paranoid or visibly distressed, she was not sullen
or panicked or strung out, skinny, and nodding off. She herself pointed out
her elusiveness, her refusal to be categorized—“Is it the drugs, or is it it?
Who’s on drugs?” She subverted our assumption that she was on drugs
without outright denying it. She simply questioned who was actually on drugs,
which to me translated to the question of whose behavior is truly “normal” or
“natural” in this car. And what was this “it”? Was “it” our social norms? Or
had her rant reeled me in to try to make sense of her irrational thought
pattern?
What was most legible to me about Mona Lisa was that she seemed to
enjoy her performance. She clearly maintained a spatial awareness of the
bodies in the car, and at one point even motioned as if to offer a seat to a
woman who declined and moved away from her. She riffed off characters in
the train, like police officers, a woman, and me. She frequently erupted into
laughter at her own outrageous statements, perhaps because she was aware of
how ridiculous they were.
Mona Lisa seemed, to me, the perfect example of what Goffman calls
“civil alienation.” Alienated individuals assert their disapproval of the
institutions or systems shaping their alienation by intentionally
demonstrating an “involvement” characteristic of the stereotype attributed to
them, and in the process suggesting it is not their real or natural personality.
Alienated individuals often utilize strange clothes, like Mona Lisa’s scarf, to
91
represent their social distance.
166
In performing this “self-sabotage,” an
alienated person “demonstrates, at least to himself, that his true self is not to
be judged by its current setting and has not been subjugated or contaminated
by it…The aim, then, of some of these bizarre acts is, no doubt, to
demonstrate some kind of distance…from the setting, and behind this,
alienation from the establishment.”
167
Mona Lisa seemed to revel in shocking
other passengers, who followed social norms. Following Goffman, I heard
Mona Lisa questioning the bourgeois social structure of the Taylor Swifts of
the world that perhaps had alienated her as “hood” or “crazy,” a result of racial
or class prejudice or, perhaps, her behavior and personality. She evoked this
critique by adopting a role she perhaps believed was expected of her.
Mona Lisa’s alienation, communicated via passengers’ civil inattention,
laughter, and deriding comments about her “craziness,” serves to reaffirm
social rules despite their transgression. Goffman contends that one way to
restore the social norm after transgression is to “look upon the offender as
someone who is unnatural, who is not quite a human being, for then the
offense becomes a reflection on him and not on what he has offended.”
168
If
the offender is unnatural, they are inherently out of place, Douglas’s “dirt,” in
a public space. Through this process, the offender becomes a disruptive
contaminant of the social order, but ultimately unthreatening as their
membership in the social order is revoked.
169
At the same time, contamination of the social order can be a spectacle.
Mona Lisa seemed to enjoy the attention she received, and others, like myself
and the man across from me, were entertained by her performance. Our
166
Goffman, 222.
167
Goffman, 225.
168
Goffman, 235.
169
Goffman, 144.
92
reactions to this non-threatening form of transgression speaks to our desire
for or at least our acceptance of the “edgy” or “grunge” as part of what makes
New York and the subway “authentic,” and our attraction to and curiosity
surrounding transgression, contamination, and affect.
The Racialization of the Transmission of Affect: Proximity as
Pollution
As an enclosed site of ethnic and class mixing, the subway is a site
especially prone to increased anxiety of contamination, which unfortunately
can result in heinous acts of violence. While there is an extensive history of
scholarship on Blackness being seen as polluting, because of structural racism,
it is safe to assume that, in the subway, many tacitly feel and exhibit a more
general disgust reaction to encounters with ethnicities other than their own.
In 2015, a study of the neural basis of disgust in racism found that levels of
implicit racism could be predicted by brain functions related to disgust.
170
The underlying disgust involved in racist sentiment makes sense, as the
development of disgust is a method for creating distance and deriding
proximity to the “other.” In the Western construction of race, whiteness is
imagined as superior and thus contrives its imagined “others” as inferior.
When white people encounter people of color, particularly if they are
working class or working poor, and when they are subconsciously compelled
to imagine both emotional and physical proximity, sensations of disgust may
be stimulated due to internalized racist biases.
This insight about the link between racism and disgust is not new. In
Black Skin, White Masks, Franz Fanon discusses his experience as the target of
170
Liu et al., “Neural Basis of Disgust Perception in Racial Prejudice.”
93
racism on a public train. He writes, “In the train… I existed triply: I occupied
space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not
opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea . . . I was responsible at
the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.”
171
Fanon explores
his experience of the white gaze on him as he occupies physical space in the
train and moves closer to white people, noting how his presence represents
not only their imaginations of proximity to him, but also to Blackness writ
large. Fanon alludes to the sensation he believes his presence elicits—nausea,
an embodied indicator of disgust. He goes on: “Little by little, putting out
pseudopodia here and there, I secreted a race.”
172
Fanon’s particular diction in
this passage suggests that his imputed race violates a boundary. The biological
nature of Fanon’s description, paired with its focus on boundary violation,
evokes in the reader an association with hygiene and contamination, as
“secretion,” is, in Douglas’s words, matter “out of place.” Fanon’s presence on
the train, as a Black man, might be interpreted as disorder and animality, or
“dirt.”
8/19/21 12 PM Bay Ridge 95th Street-bound R train
A wet, disheveled Black man with matted hair walks through
the gangway and begins to panhandle, getting down on one knee.
Everyone studies the floor. He carries a Dunkin’ Donuts cup and
pleads for spare change with his head down and his palms spread open.
A Black man in his thirties wearing a suit gives him a dollar, as does a
Brown man. The car is made up of mostly white people, and I begin to
wonder about those who decide to give him money, and how and why
171
Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks, 84.
172
Fanon, 92.
94
they decide to do so. I think about the possibility of an implicit racial
bias at work in these choices, along with other factors.
Suddenly, I recall a video of a racist attack on the subway that
went viral in late 2018. In the video, a manicured middle aged white
woman with bleach-blonde hair bumps into a young Asian girl as the
train swerves. This incident provokes the white woman to begin
yelling racial slurs at the girl, spitting on her, kicking, and hitting her
with an umbrella. Some of the other passengers intervene physically
while others intervene verbally, as does the videographer, a Latinx
Black man, who occasionally turns the camera on himself to say things
like, “Oh, HELL nah! Your white privilege ain’t working over here!” or
“You know she voted for Trump!” When the woman sees him
recording, she says, “What are you, her attorney? Fucking
Mohammed,” to which he replies, “What? Bitch, I’m Dominican!”
After they disembarked, the videographer performed a citizen’s arrest
on the woman until the police arrived to detain her.
173
I’ve never witnessed such overt racism on the subway, but I
know it certainly exists. As I watch the people ignore the panhandler
and feel the tension in the car until he passes through the next
gangway door, I consider whether the silent, insidious kind is more
common.
In the video that went viral the increased proximity within a diverse
crowd prevented the management of boundaries and the containment of
affect. The violation of physical boundaries prompted the white woman to
173
Remezcla E-Staff, “Meet Plátano Man, the Dominican Who Went Viral for Stopping a
Racist Woman on the Subway.”
95
transgress social norms of composure by responding with racially motivated
disgust as she targeted non-white passengers who she felt violated her
personal space and were thus “out of place” or “dirt” on the subway. As
Fanon delineates, most implicit racial and class bias on the subway is
conveyed silently via the transmission of affect, which is often articulated
through the gaze, body language, and social distancing. Gwendolyn Purifoye
describes countless instances in which white folks squeeze into half-seats in
between two white people rather than sit next to a black person in a seat with
more room.
174
In my example, however, such disgust is expressed verbally and
explicitly. Therefore, the woman’s disgust reaction, mediated by the
transgression of the norms of civil inattention and a blasé attitude, elicited
disgust in other passengers.
In Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies, religious scholar Rima Vesely-
Flad dissects the history by which the concept of pollution in the United
States became tied to morality and linked to race and class, bolstering the
relationship between race, class, and social pollution in the public
imaginary.
175
Vesely-Flad argues that, today, the justice system has enhanced the
link between morality, pollution, and race. Black and Latinx individuals are
disproportionately imprisoned, and “the violence of prison excessively
damages those individuals who are already associated with moral pollution
and marginalized in mainstream society,” which only perpetuates the belief
that people of color pollute “pure” white society.
176
Campaigns to control
174
Purifoye, “Nice–Nastiness and Other Raced Social Interactions on Public Transport
Systems,” 300.
175
Vesely-Flad, Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle
for Justice, 3.
176
Vesely-Flad, 99.
96
crime in the 1980s and 90s, such as the War on Crime and War on Drugs,
further racialized criminality and thus contamination. They targeted Black
communities and depended on a “pollution” rhetoric to convey the alleged
threat to white and middle-class society. For example, the language of
“cleaning up the streets” was popularized in discourse on policing during this
period.
177
In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Étienne Balibar
articulates that segregation is “. . . the need to purify the social body, to
preserve . . . identity from all forms of mixing . . . articulated around stigmata
of otherness (name, skin colour, religious practices). It therefore organizes
affects . . .”
178
The boundaries imposed to “purify the social body,” though
previously enforced by law, are today enforced by the transmission of affect
and stereotypes, which are not absent from the subway.
The sensation of contamination induced by the violation of racial
boundaries is negotiated on the subway, a site that facilitates the
congregation and flow of a radical diversity of social groups. In recent
decades, conflict has centered on the Asian-American community, first after
9/11 and recently during the pandemic. In New York City, where sixteen
percent of the population is Asian-American, hate crimes against Asian-
Americans and Pacific Islanders rose from three in 2019 to twenty-eight in
2020 after Covid-19 emerged.
179
The extreme violence arose as a form of
scapegoating for the spread of Covid-19, which originated in Wuhan, China.
Once people associated Asian-Americans with the virus, the imagination of
contamination associated with Asian-Americans multiplied, and hate crimes
escalated. So many incidents occurred on the subway itself that in 2020, the
177
Vesely-Flad, 86.
178
Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 17-8.
179
Petri and Slotnik, “Attacks on Asian-Americans in New York Stoke Fear, Anxiety and
Anger.”
97
MTA launched the “Hate Has No Place” ad campaign to draw attention to
and condemn the hate crimes.
180
“Crazy” that’s Catching: Subway Contagion and Containment of
EDPs
Few identity groups are as widely avoided on the subway as the
“mentally ill” and the “homeless.” Whereas racial and ethnic groups are visible
to a certain extent, although of course race is socially constructed and not
identifiable outside its proper context, mental illness is even more ambiguous
and difficult to identify in strangers we encounter in public. And although
most people can explicitly acknowledge that mental illness, unlike a virus, is
not contagious, public behaviors and attitudes suggest otherwise.
Western society has a complex centuries long history of establishing
separation between “mentally ill” individuals and the wider public, whether
through, asylums, hospitals, or other means. Implicit beliefs in the contagion
of mental illness may be among the factors.
181
I argue that an underlying fear of
contagion of mental illness may also be a factor accounting for how people
often increase social distance from those who transgress in public, such as
those who sleep on the train.
Many of the manifestations of “craziness” or the presence of EDPs in
the subway are the result of a national mental health crisis, which stems from
the deinstitutionalization policies of the 1950s and 60s. The unsupervised
release of patients experiencing severe mental illness (SMI) and the closure of
care facilities has led a large percentage of the severely mentally ill in the
180
Martinez, “2021 Saw Another Surge of Anti-Asian Hate Crimes in the Subway.”
181
Walsh and Foster, “A Contagious Other? Exploring the Public’s Appraisals of Contact
with ‘Mental Illness,’” 2.
98
United States to become incarcerated or homeless, living in public spaces,
which thus become “zones of social abandonment.”
182
These consequences of
deinstitutionalization further stigmatize people with SMI, as their mere
presence in public is transgressive, which leads those around them to
animalize them and reaffirm the fear of contact with them.
Informal social and journalistic consensus suggests that SMI persons
are more prevalent in the subway in the last year, despite a lack of supporting
data. News coverage of violent crimes committed by SMI individuals in the
subway has skyrocketed. In February of 2021, the serial “Subway Slasher”
cases drew attention to this issue, as a homeless man repeatedly stabbed and
killed other homeless individuals in and near the subway on four occasions.
183
According to The New York Times, felony assaults in the subway have
increased twenty-five percent since 2019, despite a dip in ridership due to the
pandemic.
184
Of the increase in crimes, track pushings, have multiplied.
Although stories of attackers with SMI receive great attention, it is unclear
what percent of the felony assaults were committed by individuals diagnosed
with mental illnesses.
185
The number of homeless people in New York City with serious
mental illness rose from 11,500 to 13,200 between 2013 and 2020, according to
Federal Housing Administration data.
186
This rise was as a result of a decision
to cut Medicaid reimbursement rates for psychiatric stays.
187
These policy
182
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2015 Annual Homelessness
Assessment Report.
183
Tulley and Southall, “Woman Pushed Onto Subway Tracks ‘Never Saw’ Her Attacker.”
184
Newman, Schweber, and Marcius, “Decades Adrift in a Broken System, Then Charged in a
Death on the Tracks.”
185
Newman, Schweber, and Marcius.
186
Newman, Schweber, and Marcius.
187
Newman, Schweber, and Marcius.
99
changes have resulted in a system increasingly dependent on short-term
psychiatric care, and many hospitals have begun to refuse to admit
particularly “disruptive” patients or admit them only to immediately release
them without an aftercare plan. Several times throughout my fieldwork in the
subway, I came across individuals who seemed dazed wearing hospital tags on
their wrists.
Thus, the subway has become one of the most visible “zones of
abandonment” and sites for the imagination of mental illness and the
negotiation of the future of psychiatric services in New York City. Kendra’s
Law, a seminal piece of legislation that legalizes court-ordered psychiatric
treatment, was a response to a subway murder by a SMI man in 1999. The
news coverage on mental illness in the subway increases when there is a
violent crime even though most individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses
are not violent and have a sustained presence there. Similarly, the subway
attack during the pandemic by a Black homeless SMI man on an Asian
woman
188
condensed, in the public imagination, the anti-Asian bias spurred
by Covid-19 and reinforced the collective imaginary of racialized SMI
individuals as violent and contaminating in their eruptions of affect. Affect’s
constant construction and rupture of boundaries feeds and transforms the
bourgeois imaginary of order and disorder in the subway.
188
Newman, Schweber, and Marcius.
Chapter Three: Surveillance/Solidarity
102
Passenger as Stranger: Surveillance Among the Masses
Simmel posits the stranger, due to her position as an outsider, as
occupying an objective positionality.
189
The stranger engages in a behavior
similar to the blasé attitude, “not an aloofness that lacks involvement but
rather a curious combination of closeness and distance, of detachment and
engagement.”
190
The premise is that this is possible because all humans share
some inherent quality, but the potential for bonding weakens as group size
increases and the group’s exclusivity decreases.
191
So, if there is a potential for
solidarity, or a sense of commonality, among strangers in the subway, it is due
to our common humanity, our proximity, and our shared experience of travel.
Key to Simmel’s definition of the stranger is that the stranger is
different from the “other” since “the Other is denied the common
characteristics that count as fundamentally human.”
192
The stranger must be a
part of the in-group and have the potential to be known and to foster
solidarity with those in his copresence.
193
However, as Simmel argues, in
places like the subway, it is difficult to determine a common “outsider,” since
such a wide variety of people ride the subway, each an outsider in their own
right. No relationship is devoid of some degree of estrangement.
Furthermore, the group size and the element of chance that dictates sociality
in the subway hamper a solidarity that is binding.
194
Jacobs also elucidates the role of the stranger as it relates to solidarity
and safety in urban areas. In cities, residents must carry out their lives in the
189
Simmel, “The Stranger,”177.
190
Simmel, 177.
191
Simmel, 178.
192
Simmel, 179.
193
Simmel, 179.
194
Simmel, 178.
103
presence of strangers, many of whom are “nice,” as Jacobs writes, and others
who are not.
195
Jacobs argues that peace in cities is not kept by the police but,
“primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls
and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people
themselves.”
196
These controls and standards are social norms enforced among
strangers via mutual surveillance and solidarity. The medium of Jacobs’s
analysis is the city street. She argues that a successful and safe street is one
where there is a clear demarcation of the boundary between public and
private space. An advocate of public spaces where there is a significant flow of
people, she argues that safety comes in the form of “eyes upon the street, eyes
belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street” who
have a personal stake in maintaining its safety.
197
However, the sort of intervention that results from mutual surveillance
when someone does indeed transgress a social rule differs in the street and in
the subway system. This disparity can be explained by Jacobs’s claim that
intervention “usually requires, to be sure, a certain self-assurance about the
actor’s proprietorship of the street and the support he will get if necessary.”
198
It would seem that such proprietorship exists minimally on the subway, which
explains why lay passengers rarely intervene in situations of conflict or
transgression. Jacobs notes the analogous circumstance of a street with
apartment buildings that experience frequent population turnover and where
fewer residents feel invested in keeping watch of their street. Transience thus
impedes surveillance for Jacobs, leading to weaker enforcement in places like
the subway than above ground.
199
195
Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 30.
196
Jacobs, 32.
197
Jacobs, 35.
198
Jacobs, 38.
199
Jacobs, 39.
104
Although there are no “natural proprietors” of the subway because the
subway is a mode of transportation, a “nonplace,” in Augé’s analysis, Jacob’s
theory of the importance of “eyes on the street” still applies to the social
context of the subway. If the subway is a nonplace with the function of easing
passenger circulation, it is also a workplace. I argue that the workers of the
MTA often take on the role of “natural proprietors” in order to maintain
safety in the subway, demonstrating the ways in which the subway is not a
zone of social abandonment, as Biehl might argue.
Michel Foucault relies on philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s model of the
prison panopticon to illustrate how social systems of surveillance regulate
behavior. The panopticon is a “strategy of space” invented by Bentham to
control human behavior. The prison panopticon contains a guard tower with
clear visibility of the prisoners in their cells at all times. However, the
windows of the tower are tinted such that the prisoners can’t see the guard
and know whether they are being watched at any given moment. The purpose
of this model is to instill in prisoners a feeling that guards are omnipresent,
motivating prisoners to self-discipline and comply with prison rules.
200
Foucault adapts the architectural model of the panopticon to the social
process of normalization.
201
In Foucault’s analysis, the surveilling body is not
just the State. “In the disciplinary society,” he writes, “power is dispersed and
hidden in processes of conformity present in different places … it moves
across different institutions, it links and prolongs them, making them
converge and function in a new way.”
202
Norms are thus formed and enforced
through the interplay of a variety of institutions and social spaces. In this way,
surveillance is fluid.
200
Galič, Timan, and Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond,” 12.
201
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 183.
202
Galič, Timan, and Koops, 16.
105
In the subway, the application of a tactile eye and the performance of
civil inattention by a majority of riders, alongside the unreliable surveillance
cameras in every station, works like a panopticon.
203
There, we are not
necessarily watched at all times, but there is always the possibility that we are
being watched. It is this possibility, like Jacobs’ “eyes on the street,” that
dissuades passengers from the transgression of social norms, from mere
violations of etiquette to violent crimes. This potential surveillance instills in
us an unconscious mechanism of self-control that allows us to follow the
norms without thinking. Moments arise, however, when this is not sufficient
to prevent eruptions of affect, to offset deviance from social norms. In these
moments, the gaze is not enough, and other forms of discipline must be
enacted.
Safety on the Subway and Bystander Intervention
Alessandro recounted how, during the early months of Covid-19, he
had to take the train a few times a week to pick up his son. He remembered
how dirty and empty the subway was but also how territory was negotiated
differently than it had been in the past. He remarked, “It didn’t feel safe . . .
because it was empty. And because also you have the homeless people there . .
. I remember cars would be taken over. There were like tents, you know. So,
each one or two [homeless] people would just claim a car . . . So, it didn’t feel
safe.”
Alessandro’s experience represents a specific period during late March
and early April 2020. He points out a paradox that emerged during this
period: Because Covid-19 brought about a fear of crowding and many middle-
class riders fled the subway, leaving some homeless people empowered to
203
Meyer, “All of NYC’s 472 subway stations now have security cameras: MTA.”
106
occupy entire cars with their belongings, the more spacious cars were safer
from the danger of contagion but became frightening in other ways. This
occupation of a public space, which was not socially acceptable or tolerated
legally prior to the pandemic, could occur because fewer people were present
to surveil and impose bourgeois social norms via the threat of the gaze. The
dispersion of people enabled previously persecuted groups to assert authority
over territory in the subway and shift the power dynamics between social
groups, transforming the subway into a complete zone of social abandonment.
To Alessandro, the absence of strangers to enforce social norms made
the cars feel unsafe. If people felt empowered to violate certain social norms,
such as congregating in tents on the subway, who knew what other norms
they might violate? The lack of an internalized discipline and civility based
upon normative social values unnerved Alessandro, as it suggested that, with a
weakened panoptical gaze, these individuals could be capable of committing
the greatest possible violations: acts of violence.
Sam told me about an experience he had had on the R train as the
doors opened: “This guy immediately stumbles in. And he was, like, shouting
and, like, clutching his chest, and he collapses on a bench and throws up all
over the floor. Like right, like almost right in front of me. And I was like,
with a friend. And she was like, ‘Yeah, that’s heroin withdrawal. Like, that’s
totally what that is.’” I asked if anyone reacted or tried to help the man, but
Sam said the majority of the people on the car just switched to another car
although he did not. When I asked what happened next, Sam said, “He like,
just kind of like fell asleep, at least I hope so, I don’t know.” Sam’s words
slowed as he spoke, and he averted his gaze, looking up at the ceiling, as if
reconsidering his recounting of the experience or his behavior in the event. A
heavy sense of doubt hung in the air. I wondered if he was thinking that the
107
man might not, in fact, have fallen asleep but gone into shock or died because
no one intervened. After a while, Sam broke the silence in a soft, resigned
voice. He sighed, “It’s like, you know, with situations like that… I don’t know.
I don’t know how to react to that.”
The man who passed out in the subway was too weak to inflict
violence on anyone, and yet Sam describes people fleeing the car. Their
motivations were tied less to immediate danger than, it would seem, to a fear
of contamination or sensation of disgust toward an “other” that was no longer
just a stranger. Solidarity, in these situations, is harder to come by. If you can
simply move cars and no longer have to experience the disturbance of
otherness—of unpleasant emotions, smells, and sights—that option is often
the preferred mode. As Sam said, one can feel at a loss as to how to respond
to transgression when one is not already bonded to the person transgressing.
Many prefer to not see it at all. For others, like Sam, feigning ignorance in
critical moments like these feels in itself like a transgression of morals, of
civility, and yet they struggle to put their bodies on the line to act beyond
mere surveillance, to form community and solidarity with the struggling
bodies in front of them.
Every once in a while, however, people do intervene, and, although the
reasons and the ways they do so are ambiguous, they seems to be linked to an
experience of accumulated affect.
7/12/21 1:20PM Hoyt Schermerhorn A/G train platform
It’s a typical New York July day—the blistering heat and humidity
make it hard to breathe. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn plaform is
unbearable. I wipe away droplets of sweat that dot my sternum. A
Black man on the other side of the platform jumps into the tracks and
108
picks something up that he perhaps had dropped, then jumps back up
onto the platform. He begins to throw trash into the tracks, and I
realize I’ve seen him here before, emptying his plastic bags of trash
ontro the tracks. A Black guy on my side of the platform shouts,
“Come on man, that’s how you start track fires!” The man on the other
side doesn’t react visibly but turns and throws the rest of his trash into
the trash can. The G train hurtles into the station and fills me with a
gratitude beyond that typical of just any smooth commute. In the
summer, the arrival of a train represents the imminent relief of air
conditioning. I step onto the car and sigh as my body quickly forgets
the agony of the platform.
Although much of the time the subway is an uneventful space through
which we can pass without much commotion, conflicts do arise with certain
regularity. As passengers, we choose how to respond to incidents involving
others on the train—sometimes we ignore them, continuing in our
performance of the blasé attitude and civil inattention. Other times we
actively witness them but stop short of getting involved. Yet others, we
perform solidarity by intervening and enforcing social norms, in whatever
form that takes.
In the moment described above, a passenger enforced the rules about
littering on the tracks. In doing so, he performed solidarity by preventing a
track fire, which endangers passengers and workers alike. Others, like myself,
simply looked on or ignored the man’s transgressions.
Adam has been a train operator for nine years. He reminded me that
bystanders can often prevent emergencies simply by surveilling properly, but
he feels this is rare on the subway today. People are too focused on their
109
phones and no longer adequately carry out their collective responsibilities.
Not enough people are intervening, he said, but merely watching. His
message to passengers is to “be vigilant. If you see people that look like
they’re a little bit close to the platform or you see someone acting erratically,
and it’s in your power to do so, don’t just film it, don’t pull out your camera,
don’t just try to film it, try to stop it. In this day and age, people just normally
take their phone out, take a picture, take a video and then post it or send it to
the news.” Of course, taking footage of an incident can be helpful to
investigators, but Adam argued it would be more helpful to prevent the
incident in the first place.
In research following up on the well-known (subsequently discredited)
1968 study identifying a diffusion of responsibility in emergency situations,
the so-called “bystander effect,” Parks et al. found that the failure to intervene
depends not simply upon the number of bystanders, but also upon contextual
factors, including gender of the victim, exhibition of aggression, and
intoxication levels.
204
The form of aggression, the relationship between the
parties involved, and whether the bystander perceives the situation to be life-
threatening also figure in the decisions, according to another study by Fischer
et al.
205
The importance of the bystander’s relation to the place and to others
present aligns with Jane Jacob’s emphasis on the role of “natural proprietors,”
those who have a personal stake in the maintenance of safety in a space due to
their relationship with it.
And in many cases on the subway, people do intervene. In fact, the
MTA’s fire safety and evacuation training is built around the expectation of
bystander solidarity. In observation of the training, Noah McClain noted that
204
Parks et al., “Third Party Involvement in Barroom Conflicts.”
205
Fischer et al., “The Bystander-Effect.”
110
“a minimum of four helpers would be needed for a simple evacuation. Without
the assumption that passengers lend a hand, the whole training protocol would
make no sense.” Interviews with workers also revealed that workers expect
passengers to help them maintain order, such as doctors and nurses who aid in
medical emergencies or “those who spontaneously arise to deal with a
miscreant.”
206
But, what causes witnesses, such as those in Sam’s story, to choose not
to intervene in a moment of crisis? Fischer et al. argue that bystanders
consider the personal risk of intervening before doing so and weigh it against
the potential impact of the crisis.
207
But the personal risk in Sam’s story
seemed minimal since the man was incapacitated and incapable of violence.
Perhaps a better explanation is that people conformed to the actions of the
first few individuals who fled, a form of contagion of affect otherwise known
as flock-mentality.
208
But, ultimately, because these spontaneous decisions are
often affectively-motivated, the motives are difficult to pin down.
(Un)Natural Proprietors: Surveillance and Solidarity as Labor
The position most explicitly tasked with visual surveillance in the
MTA is the Station Agent, who sits inside a glass booth in nearly every
station. Station agents are responsible for preventing fare evasion but also for
answering all sorts of passenger questions, and helping people buy
MetroCards. Ernie, a station agent, explained how his surveillance work
changed constantly depending on city and MTA politics and how it can lead
to rule enforcement but also to solidarity. He described how, especially under
206
McClain and Molotch, “Below the Subway: Taking Care Day In and Day Out,” 61.
207
Fischer et al, “The Unresponsive Bystander: Are Bystanders More Responsive in
Dangerous Emergencies?” 276.
208
University of Leeds, “Sheep In Human Clothing: Scientists Reveal Our Flock Mentality.”
111
more conservative administrations, his job was at times ethically complicated
for him:
Like I came in ’95. I believe Giuliani was the mayor if I’m not
mistaken, so when I came, they arrested fare beaters regularly. So that
really decreased the fare evasion for a long time. People jump [the
turnstiles] if they can, but nobody wants to get arrested for beating the
fare. We’re always put in a predicament where people will just say they
don’t have the money, can we let them on? And those situations are
always tough. I think the general rule was people had to pay the fare.
There was no sort of language that was written down that said you had
to let people on if they don’t have the fare.
Ernie paused for a moment before describing how the unofficial rules shifted
throughout his time with the MTA. He explained,
But you know, the thing is, there were always circumstances
where you would allow people, like sometimes children don’t have
their fare. I myself, I’ve let thousands of children in who didn’t have it,
maybe they didn’t have their school pass or this and that. Sometimes
you had pregnant women, you know? And it puts you in a very tough
place. And over time, one thing that happened that was interesting
was management wanted us to be more lenient with people. They were
telling us to give people the courtesy for various reasons to be more
customer-service friendly. And then I think it actually increased the
fare evasion ‘cause—and there may have been different factors—but
the fare evasion got to a level that it just seemed like people were just
beating the fare, and it seemed like they were no longer arresting
people. And I think that the Manhattan DA some time ago had said
that he was not going to prosecute fare evasion cases. So, in turn, okay
they’re not going to prosecute. I guess a lot of the cops were more
laissez-faire on it. Then, I guess the Transit Authority lost money, and
they were asking the police, ‘Hey we need to stop the fare evasions.’ So
it’s kind of like a back and forth sort of thing, and again I said, it puts
us into a precarious place in some instances because sometimes you
don’t let people in, [and] they’re mad at you. There’s scammers,
sometimes transit workers get assaulted. Different stations have
different environments and different cultures.
Other MTA employees are charged with surveillance of other
activities. Whereas Ernie surveils fare evasion, often leading to moments of
solidarity, John, a conductor for twenty-three years, surveils platform and
112
train car transgressions, such as panhandling and Showtime-style dance
performances, a task that is not in his job description.
209
I’m like always hearing this voice. ‘Someone help me. I’m four months
pregnant, please help me.’ I looked out, I said, I know this woman.
Opened the door . . . Wow, always pregnant still?! It’s been five years!
Man, call Guinness Book of Records, she’s been pregnant for five
years. That’s a hell of a gestation period. I said, ‘One word, you’re off.’
She was good for uh, one stop. Caught her again. Kicked her out.
When you hear it [Showtime dancers’ music], ‘Turn. That. Shit. Off.
Now.’ Some days they’re like, ‘Fuck you, I do what I want.’
John and his wife Janet, a retired bus-operator, emphasized to me that
MTA workers are never allowed to touch passengers to enforce the law or
make them leave a car and often must rely on verbal de-escalation, a rule
which forces MTA employees to develop the pacifying, persuasive skills of
social workers.
Emilio, a maintenance supervisor, is not required to interact directly
with passengers. He spends a lot of time in the underground tunnels and
surveils these and surrounding areas to prevent accidents. He, nonetheless,
must occasionally intervene but from a distance. He explained:
I’ve been encountering people on the tracks since I remember. So it’s
not that surprising. Once in a while, you can see the people live there,
because you see luggage, you see cardboards on some areas. So we call
our department that is in charge of making sure that those situations
don’t happen. But it’s hard to stop it all. Anytime that I encounter
somebody on the tracks, I don’t, I no longer feel safe, because I don’t
know the mental stage of the individual. So I try to not confront them.
And we are asked not to confront them, if we see them, report them,
and move away from the area and make sure they don’t get hit by a
train, that’s the priority. I only have the need [to notify an incoming
train of someone on the tracks] one time. I actually didn’t even have
time to make the call. Because I know the train was coming. So I have
to give the train a signal to slow down, and he was able to slow down
enough so not to hit the person, and then we call the police at that
time from the radios and the person was escorted out to the station.
209
“Notice of Examination: Conductor,” The City of New York Department of Citywide
Administrative Services.
113
MTA surveillance and solidarity illuminate the fact that, although for
passengers it may fit into Augé’s concept of non-place, the subway is also a
workplace, the site in which a large number of employees spend their days
and develop relationships, construct histories, and hone their identities. The
articulation of these relationships, through solidarity and surveillance, is
contingent on the job, the location, and, of course, the individual personality
of each employee. Despite formal guidelines, the responsibilities of many
positions remain open to interpretation. Depending on the employee, their
sociability, and their personal beliefs and ethics, they may choose to act as
just another pair of “eyes on the street.” Many employees I spoke to, in fact,
felt a profound sense of responsibility for maintaining safety in the subway, as
quasi-“natural proprietors” of the space, because for them, it is a place to
which they feel attached, not a non-place.
Transit Work as “Social Work, In a Way”
As I spoke with MTA employees at various points during the
pandemic, their work presented unique challenges but revealed the same
truth: that regardless of their jobs, MTA workers bear the weight of social
service work in the absence of a functional social service system. With no
clear “natural proprietors” of the subway and with woefully inadequate
resources for those struggling with poverty or mental illness, subway workers
fill those roles. Even those who work primarily in maintenance, rather than
more customer-facing positions, must adopt responsibilities of social service
workers merely by stepping into uniform.
Stations agents, more than workers in any other position, interact with
the public on a regular basis. It is a customer service position and, as a result,
requires making decisions on the spot to best serve both riders and the
114
interests of the MTA. McClain and Molotch report that some station agents,
in violation of official MTA policy, disengage the turnstiles to permit free
entry, explaining that they do this during school release hours, for example,
when large packs of children enter the subway, many jumping turnstiles or
swiping MetroCards in rapid succession. Disengaging the turnstiles thus
prevents injuries during rush hour, albeit at the financial expense of the
MTA.
210
Ernie explained that, due to the need to form snap judgments on who
deserves free entry to the subway, he has developed affective relationships
with some passengers, another counter to Augé’s argument that, as a space of
circulation, the subway is a non-place. While many pay and enter without
interacting with him, and others grow angry with his decisions to bar entry,
yet others look to Ernie for financial support and service on a regular basis.
They depend upon him to aid when they are unable to access government
assistance programs. As a quasi-natural proprietor, Ernie has an impulse to
prevent the subway from becoming a zone of total social abandonment. He
has thus formed a relationship with some of these customers similar to social
worker and client:
When I was new, there was a lady, she looked like she had an
addiction problem. And I remember she would come to the train
station and sometimes she would have it [the fare] and sometimes she
wouldn’t. And there were so many times when I actually—you know,
I’m not supposed to do this—but I actually paid her fare, you know.
This woman had three small kids. And I saw her about a year or two
ago, and she recognized me and she was with the kids, and they were
like in their twenties, and she told the kids, ‘He was so nice to me back
then.’ And she looked—and not to judge just by looking—but she
looked great, let’s just say that. So that was just like something I
thought about, when you’ve been in the station, been working places
as long as I have and you see people grow up and you see people
change. I say it’s social work in a way. Not to disrespect or minimize
or be disingenuous to social workers because I’m sure what they do is a
lot more than just deciding on whether or not somebody can get on
the train.
210
McClain and Molotch, 64.
115
John also self-identified as a social worker. Conductors, like station
agents, often assume a customer service role as well. At each stop, they
answer passengers’ questions, open and close the doors, and ensure that
passengers are securely inside the car before leaving the station.
211
But conflict
mediation between riders in the cars also falls under the jurisdiction of the
conductor. John explained:
I had a guy in my train beat up a guy cause he stood too close to him. I
mean, he literally decked the guy in my cab, it was unbelievable. I got
the other guy, [and asked] ‘You ok?’ [He responded,] ‘Yeah.’ [I asked]
‘Do you wanna change cars?’ [He said] ‘No, I’ll stay here.’ I told the
guy, ‘you’ll sit here by me by my car. I’ll keep an eye on things. [I told
the other guy] ‘I’ll throw you off.’ Crazy!
The social worker role of conductors can extend beyond providing
conflict mediation or financial assistance. John informed me about their
responsibilities in 12-9s, or the MTA radio code for a train collision with a
person. He explained that deaths on the tracks are somewhat common and
that he had many coworker friends who had experienced them. John himself
had a close call in which he had to, once again, adopt the role of a social or
mental health worker:
I had a girl a couple of years ago tried to commit suicide. On my train.
Yeah, the train operator comes on to talk, turns off the third rail. He
sees her [and] calls me up. ‘Talk to her.’ She asks me, ‘Which one’s the
third rail?’ I go, ‘See that one right there? Where the wheel is, that’s
the third rail.’ She steps on it. Nothing happens, we had already pulled
the power off. She wanted to commit suicide by me and my partner.
We all become a psychologist, psychiatrist [in this job]. We got her on
the train, got her on the platform, got the cops to come with EMS
observation. I was a lucky one. Other guys haven’t been so lucky. They
[MTA] tell them [workers] what happens, but, you know, you can’t
come prepared for someone to kill themself in front of you.
211
McClain and Molotch, 62.
116
In situations like these, conductors are also responsible for
maintaining calm among the passengers on the train during an incident. John
told me there are specific guidelines for what to tell passengers following a 12-
9 and other emergencies:
You tell them there is a customer injury and a police investigation. We
don’t tell them someone jumped in front of the train, and there’s blood
all over the place. No. When they go through a fire, it’s ‘an FDNY
investigation ongoing over here.’ You don’t tell them there’s a fire or
this guy committed suicide in front of the train. You gotta use the
right words. Not to get ‘em panicked.
Adam also spoke of his experiences working with EDPs. He
emphasized that his guide to this social work aspect of his job was to “treat
them all with respect.” Adam’s empathy for the EDPs he encounters
highlights a form of surveillance that doesn’t aim to discipline. Instead, the
MTA workers I spoke with surveil to mediate conflict, provide care, and
create an environment of solidarity in which everyone can travel with minimal
interruption.
Transportation as Essential: MTA Workers on the Front-Line
During the Covid-19 pandemic, MTA employees’ roles as social
workers transformed as they were labeled “essential workers.” They have
always in many ways been first responders, but the expectation that they stay
on the job during a raging pandemic, interfacing with millions of people every
day, took this requirement of their position to new levels. Other frontline
workers, like doctors, nurses, EMTs and firefighters, have been trained to
work during emergencies and crises, and have elected to work in a profession
that involves high risk, whereas MTA workers have not. Richard, a TWU
representative and chairman of the Stations Department, remarked, “Our
people have to navigate the unknown. Nurses and doctors know [how to
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handle disease]. We are the sacrificial lambs.” Ernie, on the other hand,
committed to standing in solidarity with other first responders: “And then
there were people who were saying we should stop working. But if the people
who work in the hospitals have to go work, people who work in the groceries
have to go stock the shelves, if the EMTs have to go pick up people, who am
I to stay home?”
If MTA workers’ status as essential, frontline workers was ever in
doubt or unrecognized, it became apparent during the pandemic. Their first
responder responsibilities, for example, became visible on 9/11, as they did
crucial work just like during more recent disasters in the city.
212
Alyssa, a
power cable maintainer and Union Representative, reminded me of the relief
work that MTA workers did following Hurricane Sandy, which flooded the
subway system.
I think we really stepped up in Sandy, and I think we really step up in
emergencies. Like the workers themselves, there’s nothing we won’t
do. These guys, they remind me of fire fighters….[During Sandy] we
had people doing different emergency-type work. And we had people
staying overnight in quarters to be available at any notice for anything
that was needed so a lot of staff, as far as maintenance is concerned,
even though the stations were closed, we were still at work, and we
were given a letter, and if we had to cross a bridge, like to go from
New Jersey to New York, we could show the letter, and they would let
us through. We were looked at more like first responders then. So, we
just dealt with a lot of the flooding issues…we got the water out of the
stations, just anything that you could do on a disaster management, we
knew how to step into those shoes. Transit runs 24/7 a day throughout
any kind of weather. [Disaster management is] part of our regular job,
as far as maintenance, because this is a system over a hundred years
old. If you want to see the rat infested, broken down manholes and
structures where cement is falling that we work in on a daily basis,
what emergency can’t we deal with?
Indeed. John even recounted a time when he provided physical
support to a passenger who was experiencing a medical emergency. He put his
212
New York Transit Museum, “Bringing Back the City: Mass Transit Responds to Crisis."
118
own body on the line, as first responders do. The passenger had passed out,
and John tried to lift her, injuring his back. MTA workers also respond to
fires and storms, blackouts and other forms of power failure. John
remembered that during the 2003 blackout, conductors stayed in the trains
overnight until power went back on. Conductors are also responsible, in all
sorts of emergencies, for evacuating passengers out of the subway’s tunnels to
safety, a kind of leadership that, like that of nurses and EMTs, depends on a
first-responder kind of sensibility and expertise.
Authority and Vulnerability: The Treatment of MTA Employees
Even when not recognized as first responders, throughout the city,
above and below ground, MTA workers herald respect. Ernie told me,
People are usually pretty respectful to us in uniform in general, like for
the most part…I’m a Black man, a Black American, so sometimes I
may have worked in areas where I may have been followed around a
store, but they never follow me around the store when I have my
uniform on. It’s unsaid, but you can feel it.
John agreed that the strictly enforced and detailed uniform code demands
deference.
But while they occupy a position of power in the subway, MTA
workers are also extremely vulnerable. Passengers direct their anger and
dissatisfaction with the entire system toward them, as the MTA’s uniformed
representatives. One source of dissatisfaction commonly projected onto them
is the MetroCard fare. Ernie reported to me:
The Monday of a fare increase would be the worst day . . . I remember
people being in really terrible moods, and you would definitely,
depending on what station you work at, you would have some stations
where you would get cursed out. So you would always brace yourself
for that. And you know, the increases, they’re always tough because
most of us, we ride the train for free, right? Which is great, but we
don’t get free MetroCards for our families so a fare increase still can
affect us. We’re not one and the same with management, we don’t
make those decisions.
119
Another typical source of accumulated affect directed at MTA
workers is train delays although the MTA claims that the primary cause of
delays is passengers holding open the train doors.
213
MTA workers also often
experience assault simply for maintaining order. The affective eruption of
frustration with the MTA unleashed on workers can take many forms, from
the verbal abuse Ernie described to extreme acts of violence. Mario told me
about one common offense: “I’m always scared, like, a big assault I had as a
conductor is someone spitting on you, believe it or not.”
John confirmed Mario’s statement:
I had a guy in my train when Covid first started taking up a whole
bunch of seats. Rush hour, back then, we still had a full train. I wake
him up. ‘Are you the police?’ ‘No.’ He spit on me. I’ve been spit on by
these guys [many times]. Another guy had a homeless guy smoking in
the train. He had people asking, telling him to, you know, tell the man
to put it out. He tells the guy to put it out. And the guy trips him. He
falls back, and the guy comes from behind kicks him in the small of
the back, bam, herniated disks from the kick. He was a conductor, a
friend of mine.
Conductors are especially vulnerable to assault because their job
requires them to stick their heads out of the train windows and look to each
side before closing doors at each stop. This is an especially defenseless
position as they cannot see assailants coming.
214
Station agents are also
frequent victims of assault. For this reason, station agents are instructed not
to leave their booths throughout their shifts, and their booths are made to be
bullet resistant.
MTA workers are vulnerable to much more than the aggression of
passengers alone. One major risk familiar to MTA workers is steel dust. As
Ernie explained: “If you’re ever in an underground station and you see that
213
Lisi, “Don’t Hold the Door! Subway Delays Up 44%,” New York Post.
214
McClain and Molotch, 62.
120
black soot that’s on the ceilings or, like, different areas, that’s steel dust, or
break dust.”
This dust can become airborne due to the friction and erosion of rails
and wheels, shedding particles small enough to be inhaled, containing toxic
levels of manganese, iron, and chromium.
215216
Studies of welders have shown
that high levels of these metals can lead to cancers of the respiratory tract,
Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and pneumonia.
217
Ernie understood this risk:
A lot of that [dust] gets into the lungs of people who work in the
subway. And we were always prevented by management from wearing
masks even though it makes sense in a lot of titles to wear masks…
People who are walking around with steel dust in their lungs to begin
with, that could exacerbate…respiratory conditions”
Ernie speculated that prior exposure to steel dust may have been one
of the reasons why so many transit workers fell ill with Covid-19 in the initial
months of the pandemic. This may also be a reason why workers continued to
fall ill in such high numbers during surges of Covid-19 throughout the past
two years. 6,000 workers had been infected and forty-one had died by April
2020,
218
and as of November of 2021, at least 173 workers had died.
219
There is reason to believe, furthermore, that the MTA repeatedly
endangered its workers and created an unsafe working environment that
directly led to the deaths of hundreds of workers due to Covid-19. Ernie
mentioned in passing that MTA workers were forbidden to wear masks in the
beginning of the pandemic for fear it would induce New Yorkers to panic-
purchase masks for themselves.
220
Alyssa illustrated a pattern of irresponsible
215
Chillrud, “Steel Dust in the New York City Subway System as a Source of Manganese,
Chromium, and Iron Exposures for Transit Workers,” 36-7.
216
Chillrud, 40.
217
Chillrud, 34.
218
Goldbaum, “41 Transit Workers Dead: Crisis Takes Staggering Toll on Subways.”
219
Hu, “Why Retired Subway Workers Are Getting $35,000 to Come Back.”
220
O’Toole, “New York MTA Forbade Employees from Protecting Themselves by Wearing
Masks.”
121
management during Covid-19, beginning with the mask prohibition. She
expanded on the context of that rule:
Transit has some titles, such as Bus Operators and Train Operators
and Conductors. They wear uniform, and they get written up if they
have something on different than a uniform. And number one, a face
mask wasn’t part of a uniform … They’re very slow to change policy for
something that’s positive in the worker. Their thinking is: ‘Does that
mean that we have to supply them? We don’t really have the masks,
now that’s gonna be an extra expense.’ So they used the CDC
guidelines and said, ‘Really we want the masks for the healthcare
workers,’ but you have first responders that you should be treating like
healthcare workers at this point. But it’s about money, most of the
time it’s about money. Money is the first thing they look at. Because
[they knew] after [changing policy] they’d have to supply [masks].
They tried to tell us we couldn’t wear masks, and masks are required
for our regular job; I mean, I wear a HEPA filter, I wear a half face
mask when I’m doing work with asbestos and stuff so, at the end of
the day, I told my guys if they don’t give you masks, bring your HEPA
filter and your half face. So we had those, but then [later] we [were
given] masks.
To Alyssa’s testimony, Adam added that in the beginning of the
pandemic, management even threatened to discipline workers for wearing
masks. In fact, it was not until March 27th, 2020, that the MTA announced it
would be providing face masks for its employees, shortly after MTA CEO
Patrick Foye began exhibiting symptoms of Covid-19 himself, and the first
few MTA employees had died of Covid-19.
221
But, as Alyssa detailed, even
after that point, the MTA struggled to maintain their supply of masks.
222
Alyssa also said that the MTA failed to equip workers with cleaning supplies,
which did not surprise her. As a result, employees took matters into their
hands by purchasing their own supplies and cleaning their workspaces even if
they did not work for the janitorial staff. The first months of the pandemic,
when how the virus behaved was still unclear, were surely chaotic for any large
workforce. However, for Alyssa, the MTA’s carelessness and disorganization
221
Pozarycki, “MTA Chair Pat Foye tests positive for coronavirus, isolated at home.”
222
Goldbaum, “41 Transit Worker Dead: Crisis Takes Staggering Toll on Subways.”
122
continued beyond the masks issue. From her perspective the MTA violated
standard procedure to keep the system running, without regard for the lives
of employees:
It’s really sad, but Transit does not care about its workers. Conductors
having to peep out the window and answer [passengers’] questions
because that’s where the customer stands when they wanna know
something. And then that conductor goes back to their work area. So
you have people who were in close quarters with a lot of other workers
who didn’t wear a mask who were in close contact with customers,
getting sick and getting each other sick. I know, if you understand
Covid in any work environment, if you get sick your supervisor is
supposed to say, ‘somebody on your shift got sick that you may have
been in contact with so you need to go home and be quarantined.’
But, according to Alyssa, keeping the system running was given priority over
workers’ health:
Managers were scared to do that because they didn’t want to have less
workers available. All over they did not quarantine the person that was
sick. But because they didn’t quarantine, other people that shared the
same work space as that person . . . got sick . . . and they never were
informed that a guy who shares their bathroom space, work space,
lunch space, were sick and in the hospital . . . And so you had constant
train operators getting sick to the point that they had to cut down
service . . . I’m a union rep, and I wrote a letter to my higher union rep
about how there was no checks and balances to see that these
superintendents [were] informing workers. And I told the
superintendent directly: ‘You have to quarantine these workers,’ and
you know what he told me? ‘Well, who’s going to do the work if I
quarantine them?’ I said, ‘Who CARES about the work, these are
people’s LIVES we’re talking about’ . . . so we had several deaths that
did not have to happen . . . blood is on the hands of ALL of them
[Management]. We’ve written to all of them, they know. Pat Foye, he
knows.
Ernie, on the other hand, didn’t blame the MTA for not being able to
supply PPE, since the entire world was struggling to obtain enough supplies.
However, he agreed that the MTA has exhibited and continues to exhibit a
pattern of neglect.
[D]ifferent departments are affected differently. You know … you go
into 2 Broadway, and they have, like something simple like Purell hand
sanitizer. We don’t have Purell anymore. …I don’t want to totally
blame Transit for not being able to get us masks when nobody was
able to get masks, and the federal government was very all over the
123
place with guidelines, but as far as why we weren’t allowed to have
masks in the first place for some other jobs from a health standpoint, I
think it was a pattern of employee neglect that was obviously in
practice…
Ernie noted the discrepancies between the treatment of the largely
Black and Latino blue-collar Transit workers
223
and of the mainly White
management workers, those who work at MTA Headquarters at 2
Broadway.
224
Richard was frustrated that management employees were able to
protect themselves with paid leave and by working from home, an option
blue-collar Transit employees did not have. Another issue was the delay in
providing hazard pay to frontline workers. Richard said the MTA, a
“billionaire cash cow,” was “paying for frivolous things,” but in June of 2020 it
had still not agreed to deliver hazard pay for workers. He said, “Are you
freaking kidding me?” calling the denial of hazard pay a “travesty” and “a slap
in the face.”
As Alyssa mentioned, the MTA workers are fortunate to have a strong
union, TWU Local 100, which works hard to protect its workers. Alyssa told
me that, to evade these strong union protections, the MTA hires contractors
to do unsafe labor that is prohibited for union workers.
They will hire all these contractors even though we have in-house staff,
and they will pay contractors ten times more than they would pay the
in-house staff. But there’s a reason. Because they don’t want to use the
in-house staff because of liability. See, if I get hurt when I’m doing a
job, I make them flag right. I make sure they don’t abuse workers; I
make sure they do the asbestos right. When they use a contractor,
whether the contractor takes shortcuts on asbestos, lead, or anything
else, they don’t care because the liability is on the contractor now.
Alyssa provided me with a recent example of how she fights for
worker’s rights. She said that a coworker,
had debris and cement fall on his helmet and crack his helmet, put a
gash in his helmet, and the supervisor didn’t want to write an accident
223
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Diversity Committee Meeting February 2020,” 57.
224
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Executive Leadership.”
124
report… So I have to step in and tell him to do it. It’s just crazy. I get
along with a lot of supervisors, but they use my name because they
don’t wanna report something. They say, ‘Oh, Alyssa had a problem,
there was water in the manhole, and she wouldn’t let us go in.’ …
[T]hat’s what led to me being kicked out because everyone used my
name. ‘Oh, Alyssa had a problem with the job.’ No, it’s the RULES.
You know?
The retaliation for speaking out against unsafe conditions, according
to Alyssa, is difficult to isolate from the discrimination she has faced on the
job. As the MTA’s first female Power Cable Maintainer, Alyssa faced gender-
based discrimination, for which she filed a lawsuit against the MTA. Once,
after she asked to be provided with bathroom facilities other than the men’s
bathroom, her shift was changed to the night shift as a punishment even
though she had kids at home. Alyssa’s grievances include being targeted by
the MTA for attempting, in her role as a union representative, to organize her
coworkers who had previously been disinterested in joining the union.
Although Alyssa’s commitment to her job brings her great pride, it is also
colored by her dissatisfaction with her treatment by management.
Solidarity Among Surveilling Authorities: The Transit Police
In their role of overseeing the daily functioning and safety of the
subway, MTA workers must also cooperate with the transit division of the
New York Police Department. Originally its own police department, the
Transit Police Department was established in 1940. However, due to
communication and efficiency issues, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani
integrated the Transit Police, as well as the Housing Authority Police, into
the New York Police Department in April 1995.
225
Under various
administrations, the NYPD’s role in subway security has shifted as the
225
Myers, “Giuliani Wins Police Merger in M.T.A. Vote.”
125
number of police officers deployed and the law enforcement methods
fluctuated. In May 2021, in anticipation of the subway’s return to twenty-
four-hour service, former Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to add 250 more police
officers to the 3,000 already patrolling the system, tipping the number of
police in the system to the highest point it has been in over twenty years.
226
MTA workers and policemen have often been able to coexist
peacefully. Ernie reported that he has always experienced a sense of solidarity
with police officers in his station. He has found it easiest to develop a rapport
with police officers when working in a low-crime area because the police are
less stressed. As Richard explained to me, there is a lot of overlap between
the demographics of police officers and MTA workers. In the early 1900s, his
grandfather became one of the first Black policemen in the city, and members
of his family have followed in his footsteps while others joined the MTA.
Ernie reported that the PBA, the Police Benevolence Association, often
supports TWU Local 100 in their rallies.
But this relationship of solidarity between the unions grew
complicated around the onset of the Black Lives Matter movement. Ernie
explained:
Eric Garner’s family, a lot of his family were transit workers. And so, in
certain circles, that may have caused some tension because, like the
PBA, they usually support us at our contract rallies. And then when
Eric Garner was killed, and his sister was a bus driver, his mother was a
train operator, and there were a number of TWU members that went
to fight against police brutality so that caused the tension.
The need for surveillance and the desire for solidarity can thus be at
odds. But Ernie said that this tension is complex. Policing is a difficult job. As
a station agent, he recognized a need for the police but expressed
226
Goldman and Kaske, “NYC Has Most Transit Cops in 2 Decades as 24-Hour Subways
Return.”
126
dissatisfaction with police brutality. As a Black man, Ernie has ample
experience with being stopped and frisked and has witnessed police brutality
time and time again. He agrees with criticisms of the police and is in favor of
police reform, replacing more arrests with tickets for common subway crimes,
such as selling swipes. “I think, unfortunately, you need police,” he concluded,
“and needing police should never be controversial. It shouldn’t be a situation
where you never wanna call police because they might brutalize someone.”
Alyssa explained that the solidarity between the police and transit
workers is multifaceted. She noted that MTA workers sometimes oppose the
police in an intervention or serve as intermediaries between the public and
the police:
Like when they had Occupy Wall Street, we joined their movement,
and we acted like marshals so that it wouldn’t be like a police clash. So
we acted as … mediator[s] between the protestors and the police.
Alyssa cited a more recent moment in which the MTA resisted the
NYPD. In May 2020, a video circulated widely, showing an MTA bus driver
stepping off and refusing to drive his bus which the police had commandeered
to take arrested BLM protesters to jail. Following this act of protest, TWU
Local 100 tweeted, “TWU Local 100 Bus Operators do not work for the
NYPD. We transport the working families of NYC, all TWU Operators
should refuse to transport arrested protestors… #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd.”
This resistance was carried out on behalf of protesting residents exercising
their rights, and highlights MTA workers’ responsibility to navigate complex
webs of solidarity.
Mario also expressed dissatisfaction with the police because, for him,
police do not actually respond to crime. Richard held a similar opinion,
stating that he has witnessed lots of police officers taking long breaks and not
doing their jobs. He added that he has not noticed a decrease in assaults on
127
MTA workers since an increase in subway policing. Richard told me that
increased police presence in the subway can feel tense for workers because of
the limited space. He expressed his frustration about policemen using MTA
breakrooms and, consequently, obstructing him from sitting down during his
breaks. For him, sharing a workplace with police actually inhibits solidarity.
In contrast to Ernie, Mario does not feel protected by police at all, but
feels there should be more police in the subway:
Are police there? Yeah, but they’re hiding! Or you’ll see five of them
on their phone at a station. So if I see five police at Dyckman Street,
can’t maybe two of them go to another station? Like at 168th or 181st,
where, before this [Black Lives Matter protests] all started, all I saw
was twenty to thirty people shooting up? Because there was no police!
So you had junkies out there, shooting up, it was the Wild West. I
wasn’t even thinking about Corona. I actually feel safer now with more
people in the system because you don’t feel by yourself down there.
But at the beginning of this, UGH, it was terrible. You know,
policing’s always been an issue.
Mario then pointed to yet another dimension of conductors’ labor. Only one
or two employees are needed to man a train with potentially hundreds of
riders. If all goes well, the low worker/passenger ratio isn’t a problem. But if
there is an accident or an emergency, the trains are woefully understaffed:
Me, personally, I think you should have a police officer on every train,
on every line. But I don’t think they had the staffing for it. Actually, I
feel trapped because I’m on the train and pretty much I’m like
responsible for all the passengers on that train. Like if you’re taking
the subway and you see somebody screaming, yelling, you see an EDP,
you can look the other way, let that train go by, even though you
shouldn’t have to do that, you have that option. I can’t. I’m stuck
there. So I really never felt safe. The city as a whole has gotten safer, if
you compare it to the 80s, the 90s. But do I feel the police are
protecting me? No. It falls on us, we call it in, we have a radio, and
they’ll say, ‘Signal for police.’ Okay, well, I mean something’s
happening right there. I’m not saying the police don’t come. But it
could take ten minutes. So… it’s basically you and your partner. And
he’s five cars ahead of you. So he’s pretty much alone, and I’m pretty
much alone.
Whereas Mario complained that there were not enough police in
stations, John actually reported to me that there were police officers at nearly
128
every station on his line. However, his issue with the police revolves around
their inaction, their slow reaction time, and the fact that when repeat
offenders of subway crimes are arrested, they often find their way back into
the system quickly. Regardless of the context, when workers feel a lack of
solidarity with police, workers can feel alone, as Goffman would put it, among
“non-persons.”
The Trauma of Affective Labor
In “Affective Labor,” Michael Hardt examines the affective exchanges
that public-contact workers, from fast food servers to bill collectors, are
responsible for on the job. He employs the term “affective labor” to convey
the regulation and performance of emotional expression that these jobs
require.
227
Arlie Hochschild, however, details how such labor is particularly
taxing because, in addition to explicit tasks assigned to them, workers must
suppress the transmission of negative affects, performing emotions they do
not feel.
228229
Workers who work for a fixed wage do not profit additionally
from the quality of their affective labor.
230
Many MTA workers, as public-
facing workers, experience the strain of affective labor in their customer-
focused, social-service positions.
Julie Beck expanded on Hochschild to describe the “invisible”
affective work entailed in maintaining the wellbeing of others.
231
The invisible
227
Hardt, “Affective Labor,” 96.
228
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 90.
229
I focus on Hardt’s term “affective labor” as opposed to Hochschild’s “emotional labor”
because I believe that ultimately they refer to the same concept but that Hardt more
accurately highlights the role that affect plays in this work. For the sake of consistency
throughout this thesis, I prefer to maintain the same definitions of “affect” and “emotion”
established in the previous chapter. However, Hochschild examines the lived experiences of
affective laborers and the negative impacts such labor makes, which does not figure in
Hardt’s work heavily and which is vital to my argument.
230
Hochschild, 131.
231
Beck, “The Concept Creep of Emotional Labor,” The Atlantic.
129
affective demands faced by MTA workers responding to passengers’
transmission of affect and their performance of social assistance work beyond
their official roles exemplifies this type of labor.
The demand for affective labor has grown for subway employees in the
pandemic and expanded to the care of other workers. After her own work
hours for the first several months of the pandemic, Alyssa provided unpaid
and behind the scenes counseling. In fact, at the end of our conversation she
had to pick up a call from a coworker who needed help managing his own
trauma from working during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I’m a woman in my section, but I have a lot of respect, and I get a lot
of phone calls. I have two phones, and so my phones were ringing and
pinging from texts all during the day… [A]t 4:30, I get home and I
would sleep and take a nap just because I was so mentally [drained].
And then the calls would start coming from my night crew. I had
people like ‘They want us to go to work when there’s Covid. I don’t
wanna go to work!’ [O]ne guy, I had to say, ‘Listen, straighten up.’ I
said, ‘You gotta be strong for your daughter, you can’t just lose it.’ I
said, ‘What I need you to do’—this was the thing I used to tell them—
I said, ‘right now is the zombie apocalypse.’ I said ‘I need you to get
your street head right and do what you gotta do not to become a
zombie and to protect your daughter from becoming a zombie’—this
is the only thing I could relate to the guys on. When they were like
yelling—I mean YELLING, I was like yelling at the top of my lungs:
‘Listen to me! Listen to me! I’m trying to tell you something! And they
were losing their minds… I just had to calm them down, and what
happened was I would get off the phone calls sometimes, and I would
just have a cry session.
Transit workers carry out serious affective labor to suppress the
transmission of negative affects. Regardless of what they are feeling, fear or
anger, they must perform calmness and authority in the face of emergencies,
serving as a model to passengers, much like the flight attendants Hochschild
studied.
232
Mediating the affects of passengers in high stress situations can
result in worker abuse and trauma, according to Richard. Similarly, John
disclosed to me his experience with trauma as a conductor:
232
Hochschild, 107.
130
Trauma, stress. You know, just like, you go along with your day and
everything’s fine, but… these 12-9s… I’ve never had that happen. And
it’s scary…. [A] friend of mine was coming to 38th Avenue in Queens.
Kid waved to him, ran up, jumped in front of the train. That guy didn’t
want to come back, but you gotta come back. A friend came back a
little messed up in the head…They let you stay as long as you need. It’s
worker’s comp. They pay you, yeah. They pay you to up until a certain
point, until your balance expires.
Richard, in particular, was concerned for the “long-term scars” that he
believed will be left by the high number of worker deaths. Ernie described to
me how it felt to have so many coworkers die in such rapid succession:
The two-month period from, I guess, maybe March to April,
somewhere in there, it was very stressful. We had like over 130 transit
workers that have died… we had supervisors that died, coworkers that
were sick… [O]ut of the essential workers there was a lot of people,
but out of the city employees, like between the cops, firemen, EMT’s,
I think I read that we had the highest number of people who had
passed away from Covid… [I]t was always a friend of a friend… And the
thing that was striking was that it was always somebody that looked
too young to just die. It was a very scary situation.
With a loss of workers and an increased need for sanitation services, the
MTA hired contractors to supplement the janitorial work being performed by
MTA employees, many of whom were not janitorial staff, as Alyssa
mentioned. This decision emerged as Governor Cuomo ordered that train
stations be closed from 1 to 5 AM daily for cleaning. These contractors, the
majority of whom are low-income immigrants from Latin America, were
brought in as an emergency measure during the summer of 2020. However,
they are still working in stations, and have taken on yet another role in the
ever-changing network of solidarity and surveillance in the subway.
233
8/5/21 6:00 PM 34th Street Hudson Yards-bound 7 train
At the last stop, 34th Street Hudson Yards, an announcement comes
on over the PA system asking everyone to leave the train. As I step
233
Correal, “What The ‘Invisible’ People Cleaning the Subway Want Riders to Know.”
131
onto the platform, I flag down two middle-aged men in MTA uniform
to tell them about my research and give them fliers. One of them says,
“Hey, I remember you! You missed the train at Main Street, right?” I
take a moment to remember—I had missed that train several hours
ago, as I transferred to from the Queens-bound train to the
Manhattan-bound train. “Yeah!” I respond. He chuckles. “I saw you
running trying to catch the train as we pulled away. I was the
conductor on that train,” he explains. I am surprised he remembers
me. His partner is more withdrawn but reiterates that they are both
interested in my research and plan to email me. The conductor shakes
my hand. Most people hadn’t responded that positively to me, and I
feel excited. I walk further down the platform as I wait to transfer to
the Queens-bound 7 train. I notice a woman who had been on the
train I was just on. On the platform a group of three or four men and
women sit congregated around industrial yellow mop buckets full of
grey water. Each of them wears a neon orange vest that says
“CONTRACTOR” across the back. As the train barrels into the
station, they stand up, at the ready. When the car doors open, they
hop on the train, running a mop down the speckled lineolum or
quickly spraying the seats and bars with some cleaning solution and
wiping them down with cloth. The woman from my previous train
boards the train and sits down. The contractors work around her and a
few others who have already taken a seat. I wait for them to finish
their work, then step onto the train.
One of the men I met at Hudson Yards texted my Google Voice
number a few times, but inconsistently, and I was never able to pin down a
132
time to interview him. Perhaps he was busy—this job, the stress it places on
its workers, and the affective labor it demands are unimaginably taxing.
Maybe these men were just being polite. But to me, it seemed that they were
simply enthralled by the affective camaraderie the subway enables. The fact
that the conductor remembered me made me feel cared for and connected to
others, as if the subway were not just an anonymous non-place. Likewise, he
also seemed to appreciate that our paths had crossed, an example of the
spontaneous moments of solidarity that the subway can afford.
Epilogue: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
131
“I have made the daily ballet of Hudson Street sound more frenetic
than it is because writing it telescopes it. In real life, it is not that way.
In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never
at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even
leisurely. People who know well such animated city streets will know
how it is. I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little
wrong in their heads.”
234
Approaching the End of the Line
In this thesis, I dissect the social norms embedded in the subway and
claim that they are constructed to manage the inevitable transmission of
affect. However, these norms alone cannot prevent transgression or contain
affect. Rather, subway authorities, such as MTA employees and police
officers, in addition to regular passengers, are responsible for upholding and
reproducing these norms as well as partaking in the process of constructing
new ones.
In my ethnographic vignettes, I have tended to focus on extreme,
liminal examples of transgression. As Jane Jacobs writes about her own work,
these moments of intense affective eruption and negotiation are not the
norm. Rather, much like Jacobs denotes about the city street, the subway can
run in an orderly fashion much of the time because of these norms. However, it
is moments of transgression that best reveal what these norms are and how
they function, as transgression “serves to foreground the mapping of ideology
onto space and place, and thus the margins can tell us something about
‘normality.’”
235
Social norms are often so naturalized and so internalized that
we find ourselves unaware of them until their transgression—as Bataille
argues, taboo is realized only in its violation.
236
And while the average subway
234
Jacobs, 54.
235
Cresswell, 9.
236
Bataille, Erotism, 63.
132
ride is surely composed of fewer explosive incidents than my work may
suggest, the dependability of the subway seems to be changing.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media has clung to
stories of violence in the subway—transgressive explosions of affect that often
involve “homeless” or “mentally ill” individuals—that (are meant to) arouse
horror in the readers. While data shows that violent crime in the subway has
certainly risen since the pandemic hit New York, the idea that “homeless”
and “mentally ill” identities are to blame is disputable. In fact, out of the eight
violent attacks in the system over President’s Day weekend this year, which
many pointed to as evidence of the “homeless” or “mental health” problem,
only one was perpetrated by a homeless person, and it is unclear the role
mental illness played in the rest.
237
Although there are undeniably many
unhoused and SMI individuals in the system, this is nothing new. Neither is
their scapegoating. In fact, the city has attempted to bar these individuals
from public spaces, including subway stations, for decades, dating back at
least to the rise of neoliberalism, as Cresswell’s 1992 study shows.
238
So why are we seeing this rise in violent crime in the subway, and to
what extent is the anxiety expressed by many a proportionate response?
Undoubtedly, the changes in eruptions of affect in the subway are at least
partially the result of the affective impact of the pandemic on the population.
In addition, these came at a time of a shift in government administration,
which always brings about a sense of change and instability, as 2021 saw
Andrew Cuomo’s abrupt resignation from the office of the governor and his
replacement by Kathy Hochul as well as the transfer of mayoral power from
the hands of Bill de Blasio to Eric Adams.
237
Newman and Ley, “A Slow Beginning for Plan to Move Homeless People Off Subway.”
238
Cresswell, 4.
133
Regardless, Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have
expressed their commitment to privatizing public space and perpetuating the
narrative that homelessness and mental illness are the root causes of the
violence. On February 18, 2022, Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy
Hochul introduced their “Subway Safety Plan” as a series of reforms aimed at
transitioning homeless individuals living in the subway system to shelters and
supportive housing.
239
This policy arose after the death of Michelle Go and a
spate of attacks involving “homeless” individuals during Covid-19. Although
the plan was presented as a public program to care for those who have fallen
between the cracks, it seems equally motivated by ridership rates, which have
failed to return to pre-pandemic levels, even as the city continues to loosen
pandemic restrictions.
240
A 2021 MTA study found that the top condition that would persuade
customers to return to the subway was a restored sense of safety from
violence, with Covid-related factors following.
241
Whether the narrative that
the subway has become more dangerous since the rise of Covid-19 in New
York matches the reality or not, the MTA is losing money. Without funding,
the decaying system risks closure. Adams and Hochul emphasize the financial
stakes this issue poses in the “Subway Safety Plan.” They explain how the
subway links people, business, institutions, and sites of leisure in the city,
enabling capital and labor flows: “As we emerge from COVID-19,” it reads,
“the subway system is a crucial piece of our economic recovery – transporting
students to school, helping workers back to offices, and allowing tourists to
travel our city. Our city’s prosperity depends on everyone feeling confident
239
New York City Government, 8.
240
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Day-by-day ridership numbers”
241
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Fall 2021 Customers Count: Customer Satisfaction
Survey & Covid Study Subway Survey Results.”
134
and secure when they enter a station.”
242
The government plan makes it clear
that the financial burden of decreased ridership on the MTA and the city is
also a primary motivation for this program.
While Adams posed the transition of homeless and SMI individuals to
supportive housing as the chief objective of his plan, he also indicated
intentions to shift the culture of the subway writ large. Utilizing the transit
police force, which has expanded in response to news headlines and public
discontent, the mayor plans to crack down on the violation of official MTA
conduct rules, which, prior to this plan, went largely unenforced.
243
Adams
pointed out issues not explicitly related to “mental illness” or “homelessness”
that he felt also needed policing, such as sleeping, smoking, and other “out of
place” uses of the subway not related to transportation. During the first week
of the program, the mayor’s office reported that 455 people were removed
from the system, but it’s unclear whether they were homeless. Out of those
455 people, only twenty-two people accepted help from outreach groups to
relocate to an alternative form of shelter, and it is unknown how many of
them even extended their stay beyond the night.
244
Even the head of the
Police Department’s Transit Bureau, Chief Jason Wilcox, demonstrated
awareness of the futility of the plan’s methods in relocating SMI and
homeless people: “We know that enforcement of rules and regs really is not
the long-term solution to getting them housing,” he stated, “but we’re also
deeply committed to enforcing order.”
245
Wilcox underscored that while the
plan’s campaign suggests an objective of social service, it also has ulterior
242
New York City Government, 4.
243
New York City Government, “The Subway Safety Plan,” 5.
244
Lam, “City's subway safety policy collides with reality as enforcement begins.”
245
Newman and Ley.
135
motives of strengthening social norms in the subway altogether, shifting its
culture of “craziness,” affective chaos, and transgression.
The broad scope of this policy could mean that certain regular
passengers and subway performers may be removed from the system, as many
non-homeless passengers engage in the broad category of transgressions noted
by Adams. In fact, during mundane moments in my long days of fieldwork,
when I had no destination, I occasionally dozed off on the train myself. The
new plan also focuses on the enforcement of the rule that all passengers must
exit the train at the end of the line, another rule I violated during my
research.
246
In violating this rule, I mirrored the path of the vagrant
individuals this plan targets; like me, many of them, as I noticed throughout
my fieldwork, do not present as non-normative. I have the suspicion that, due
to my racial and class privilege and my outward presentation of gender, I
would not be approached by police if I repeated my fieldwork today. I do
think I would reconsider my behavior because of the implications of this plan,
which aims to increase subway policing, in general.
In a news conference, Mayor Adams said, “No more just doing
whatever you want. Swipe your MetroCard, ride the system, get off at your
destination.”
247
He emphasized the ideal of the mundane subway scenario,
one that, although still common, has become less dependable. Adams’s desire
to enforce social norms and prevent transgressions seeks to banish affect from
the subway and foreclose the imaginary of the authentic, “gritty” New York
within the system. In this way, his proposal exemplifies the tension between
the two competing imaginaries of the subway. On one hand is the bourgeois
fantasy of a diverse, civil, solidary, and affectively contained “non-place” that
246
New York City Government, 6.
247
Newman, Rubenstein, and Gold, “New York City Plans to Stop Homeless People From
Sheltering in the Subway.”
136
enables the flow of capital. Conversely, the ambivalent thrill of the subway’s
edginess is what makes it an exciting, signature New York space.
Disembarking
As Mayor Adams works to reinforce social norms in the subway
conducive to civility and efficiency, the surveillance, solidarity, and affect-
driven behaviors of passengers, MTA workers, and police officers will
continue to dictate the overall culture of sociality in the subway. The MTA
Rules of Conduct have shifted throughout its history, but they surely have
never been the last word. The MTA, the city government, the NYPD, and
passengers themselves have decided which rules are most important to
maintain. This has been the case since the subway’s opening in 1904, when its
designers, aware of the need for subway-specific social norms, anxiously
spread official conduct guidelines, only for them to be partially followed and,
in some cases, totally disregarded. This sort of hesitant, uneven response will
likely also be the one to the new plan—one police officer confidentially
reported that the plan is “just another Band-aid on an open wound,” since
when people violating the rules are asked to leave the subway, they often just
relocate to another station. Furthermore, some police officers are not even
attempting to follow the new plan, as reporters Andy Newman and Ana Ley
noted a man smoking crack on a platform in front of two police officers at
110th street in Manhattan.
248
This image exemplifies the ways in which the
subway continues to be a zone of social abandonment, despite government
intervention. What is “public” about the subway thus gets defined and
redefined at any given moment as official and unofficial norms converge with
248
Newman and Ley.
137
government plans, law enforcement, transit labor, and transgressive, “out of
place” behaviors.
But the platform smoker’s transgression has always been a part of the
subway, and the fear, surprise, or outrage such an action provoke may be the
reason why the subway has always been a site marked by anticipation—a place
of routine transit on ordinary days, it is also a place where you never know
what will happen. This legacy of thrill dates to the experience its first
passengers had on its opening day as unruly crowds swelled, violated the
official rules, and released the first outbursts of affect in the space. Today,
MTA workers, the NYPD, and passengers all engage in surveillance and
solidarity, skillfully enacting their civil inattention and their blasé attitude.
And yet, underneath those performances, people maintain constant vigilance.
This carefully balanced form of attention relies upon peripheral vision,
Taussig’s “tactile eye,” which pursues an embodied attunement to the nuances
of a social atmosphere.
249
While this model of seeing and surveilling captures
perfectly the dominant, normative manipulation of the gaze in the subway,
Taussig originally theorized the “tactile eye” to elucidate the anthropological
gaze. Goffman similarly draws parallels between the sociological gaze,
sociology’s dependence upon vision as the principal sense through which
fieldwork is conducted, and the power of the gaze that all humans possess.
Likewise, Augé and Benediktsson describe the “contemplation” and
spectatorship of the flâneur as core to the visual experience of the subway,
highlighting the intersections of the anthropological stance and the
normative, social gaze.
Perhaps this is the very reason I was so drawn to an ethnographic
investigation of the subway in the first place: to ride the subway is to be an
249
Taussig, 152.
138
ethnographer. In many ways, throughout my fieldwork, I altered my
experience as a passenger—I rode lines for hours at a time, took notes, and
sharpened my attention to the scenes unfolding in front of me. Recently, a
friend asked me what it is like for me to ride the subway now. I told them
that it honestly feels the same as always. I flow in and out of consciousness, at
times engage in flânerie, transfixed by the others around me, and other times
get lost in thought. I realize now that growing up in New York City, riding
the train on a daily basis, I have always practiced participant observation on
the subway because it is almost impossible to do anything else.
7/21/21 4:15 pm Astoria-Ditmars Blvd-bound N train
At 36th Street, a middle school-aged boy and his mom get on
the train. He’s wearing a Sublime t-shirt and Converse high-tops with
anarchist symbols and upside-down crosses scrawled across the canvas.
His mom wears a woven Dior bag and applies a thick coat of mauve lip
gloss. He reminds me of so many kids I know who reject their parents’
normative self-expression for grittier aesthetics. A small woman in her
thirties wedges herself in between me and another woman, as if this
were pre-Covid times. She takes out a pen and a sketchbook and
begins to draw. Her elbow brushes mine as she makes broad strokes on
the paper. As her sketch materializes, I realize her attention is drawn
to the same thing as mine—she’s drawing the mother and son. At 57th
Street, she abruptly tucks away her pen and paper and hops off the
train.
In moments like these, I am reminded of the subway’s power to
connect. Within the system, there is so much to observe, to know, and so
139
many different ethnographies to write, but this woman and I were both rapt
by the same mother and son, whose opposing styles embodied the competing
imaginaries of the civil bourgeois fantasy and of authentic grit. What is
unique about the subway as a field site is that it is transient, ever-changing,
and devoid of a singular, coherent culture. In that shifting social scene, at
times, we experience solidarity, closeness, and a sense of familiarity with this
culture and its ethos that we take part in negotiating, producing, and
reproducing. That process, in itself, bonds strangers together. Augé explains
this feeling perfectly:
Transgressed or not, the law of the metro inscribes the individual
itinerary into the comfort of collective morality . . . [it is] the ritual
paradox: it is always lived individually and subjectively; only individual
itineraries give it a reality and yet it is eminently social, the same for
everyone, conferring on each person this minimum of collective identity
through which a community is defined.
250
These moments, in which solidarity and familiarity with the subway’s ethos
are confirmed, are gratifying, and instill a sense of closeness to a group, not
quite New York, yet not not New York— rather, to the subway itself.
250
Augé and Conley, In the Metro, 30.
140
141
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