The Secret World of Doing Nothing 9780520945708

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The Secret World of Doing Nothing

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

The Secret World of Doing Nothing Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ehn, Billy, 1946–. The secret world of doing nothing / Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26261-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-26263-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Leisure—Philosophy. 2. Leisure—Psychological aspects. I. Löfgren, Orvar. II. Title. GV14.E35 2010 790.1—dc22 2009035812 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Waiting 9 Chapter 2. Routines 79 Chapter 3. Daydreaming 123 Chapter 4. In the Backyards of Modernity? 207 Appendix: Doing an Ethnography of “Non-events” 217

Notes 229 References 243 Index 259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, a special thanks to Stan Holwitz of UC Press, whose support for this book has been crucial. A big thanks also for the constructive and inspiring comments from our three reviewers: John Gillis, Katrina Moore, and Melissa Caldwell. Third, a warm thanks to the two who guided us in the later stages of the work: our copyeditor, Juliane Brand, for her careful and creative efforts, and our editor, Emily Park, for her continuous support. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the grant from the Swedish Research Council for the project “The cultural dynamics of the inconspicuous,” of which this book is one result.

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Introduction

It is 4:45 P.M. on an ordinary Thursday afternoon at the supermarket. In the long checkout lines people are standing patiently, staring into the air or making small talk. Some of them seem to be daydreaming, while others look around curiously. An everyday scene, trivial and unexciting. It isn’t easy to know whether people are present or not. In their minds they may have traveled to a totally different place. They have shopped at this supermarket so many times that they could almost do it in their sleep. They know how to navigate their shopping cart down the aisles without bumping into others, and they know exactly where to find the nonfat milk, the detergent, and the virgin olive oil. Their routines draw invisible maps and create manuals that make the everyday work. A man arriving with a well-filled cart needs to select a lane. Which is the fastest one today? With an experienced glance he scans the people in the different queues and the contents of their carts. A senior citizen who will probably want to change one or two articles, several students in a hurry, parents with small children who are toddling up with new items they want to add to the cart. There is much to consider. Our man chooses checkout number five and notes those who have that moment joined the queues to his left and right. The competition has started. He gets annoyed at some dawdlers he sees ahead, and he looks anxiously at 1

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the people on either side. Momentarily he moves ahead of his serenely unaware competitors, but suddenly his line slows: a woman has started arguing about payment, and he is losing ground. His excitement grows with every inch he gains. When he is finally able to place his purchases on the belt he gives the young couple ahead of him, who are fiddling with their credit card, an angry glance. This time it looks as if he will have to resign himself to a second-place finish. He had overestimated the time it took the family in the queue to his left. Unexpectedly he gets a second chance. The young assistant packing bags for the winning family is hampered by the help she is getting from the threeyear-old boy. With a little luck our man can still be the first one out of the checkout. I won, he exults silently, and he casts the family a triumphant glance. The mother, catching his expression, looks surprised. A scene such as this on an ordinary day at an ordinary supermarket started us wondering about what is actually happening when nothing special seems to be going on. What are the hidden significances of people’s routine lives? Our supermarket man transformed standing in line into a little adventure, if only in imagination. Is he exceptional, or is his behavior common practice? 1 When we started asking people about their experiences of mundane tasks we collected a wealth of material. Many men and women told us that they fabricated all kinds of secret competitions. In an informal inquiry among five hundred male and female students, one student sent us a detailed description of just such a competition: I am out biking in the city. I hear a car somewhere behind me and see a lamppost some fifty meters ahead and Bang! With that the competition begins. Sure, it must look pretty ridiculous when I pedal like a maniac on my one-speed bike. But when I get there first I am very happy. . . . After such a victory I walk on air for the rest of the day.

Among this group of students, all in their twenties and thirties, secret competition turned out to be an important pastime. Many of them were a little embarrassed to reveal their competitive mentality in activities that might be

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considered silly. As one of them wrote, it is rather childish always wanting to win. But when they understood that their mates were doing similar things they opened up, and quite a few of them admitted that “I compete in everything I do!” In their imagination any everyday situation could become a game; any public space—street, pavement, escalator—could turn into the arena of a heated contest. Thus commonplace urban landscapes become racetracks. Every green light can serve as a starting signal, every lamppost as a finishing line. Every day people are quietly beating their own personal records on the way to work. The inventiveness in this secret world is impressive. Will I manage to get upstairs and into the apartment before the front door closes? Can I bike all the way to school before the tune in my iPod has finished (the shorter the tune the more exciting the competition)? How far can I drive on one tank of gas; how many steps do I need to take to reach upstairs; how long can I walk without stepping on a pavement crack? For some people life seems to be permeated by competitions, both against themselves and against unaware cocompetitors. I apportion points to almost everything I do—cleaning up, cooking, working, earning money, picking an apartment for the best view, keeping my photo albums in good order, traveling to other countries, and working out.

This kind of imaginative ingenuity ritualizes and dramatizes daily life. Informal competitions, usually experienced only by one person, who may even think of them as an embarrassing whim, are actually part of a broad movement. Events we believe we have invented, rules we believe we have created, and the imaginary winners’ stands we triumphantly climb, all turn out to be shared with others—but in secret.2 In sifting through the answers from those we have interviewed, several themes surfaced again and again. Asking people about secret competitions turned into a good starting point for exploring other activities that are usually not considered important or even noticed. These themes had not

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caught our attention earlier, probably because we had thought of them as “non-events,” and thus as rather boring moments. Like many other cultural researchers we had been preoccupied with the explicit, eventful, and dramatic. Then we decided to focus on the many parts of everyday life when nothing seems to happen—the world of transit spaces, in-between times, pauses, moments of waiting or indecision. When nothing seems to happen, a lot is nevertheless going on—but what? One of the themes we selected was the activity of waiting for something or somebody. Another theme was routine, the performance of mundane or repetitive tasks to which one doesn’t give much thought. Both waiting and routine are conducive to a third activity, daydreaming, fantasizing while physically doing other things. There are many other types of activities we could have included, but we decided to stay with these three because we saw them as the most promising ways to explore what people actually do when they are “doing nothing.” To examine the infra-ordinary, as the French author Georges Perec (1997) has called it, the part of our lives that is so familiar that it has become almost invisible to us, we had to develop special techniques; we had to unlearn the obvious, look again at what we thought we had already noticed or had previously taken for granted. Joe Moran (2007) has likened this to that of a “quotidian detective” who sifts through bits and pieces of the mundane.3 Our interest in the secret world of the infra-ordinary is rooted in a branch of anthropology called European ethnology, a discipline focusing on everyday life in Western societies, past and present. Unlike scholars who travel to exotic cultural settings, our job usually takes us into the realm of the familiar everyday that surrounds us all. We do our fieldwork in both rural and urban settings, and in domestic and public arenas.4 Over the years we have increasingly come to feel that there are many phenomena and activities that we hadn’t noticed, or had failed to grasp, because they were either too ordinary or too insignificant. Instead we looked for “where the action is,” and in doing so we often mistook the visible for the important.

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In this book we try to redress the imbalance by focusing on a cultural analysis of the uneventful, ephemeral, and elusive.5 In ethnographic descriptions of non-events we will talk less about firm identities and structures and more about the subtle knowledge of everyday skills and shared competences and understandings. We ask to what extent trivial, everyday pursuits provoke thoughts about what people take for granted and consider to be normal and natural. The concept of non-events usually stands for anticipated events that either do not materialize or turn into anticlimax. They thus become pseudoevents that do not live up to expectations. In this book, however, we use the term non-event in a slightly narrower sense to capture mundane activities that are generally considered inconspicuous and unimportant—not worth paying attention to—or pursuits that remain unnoticed by others.6 Taking an ethnographic approach, we started by trying to capture such non-events, describing them in detail and using different kinds of empirical materials.7 To tackle the often secret worlds of waiting, routine, and daydreaming we have had to develop more unconventional methods. The invisible adventure at the supermarket was eye-opening and produced two questions we have returned to again and again: How can we understand what is really going on when nothing important seems to be happening? And where are people mentally when they are physically present? Doing nothing is a concept that has interested scholars as well as debaters. Discussing the topic has repeatedly turned into an ideological battle about where society is headed. Controversial because it is morally charged, the concept tends to evoke heated reactions. Doing nothing can be equated either with laziness or with a protest against the busyness of contemporary society—with, that is, a political and philosophical project, a “noble art.”8 Followers of Tao and Zen believe that doing nothing may be a sign of wisdom, the highest good, its aim that of being in the here and now, fully aware of the present and not planning or striving for the future. This approach to the subject is often tied to a critique of what is seen as a contemporary Western obsession with productivity, the cult of speed, and

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a fear of wasting time.9 In the United States, it has been argued, multitasking is not an option; where hyperactivity is the norm, multitasking is a lifestyle. For people who equate losing time with inefficiency, the notion of free time, of simply letting the days pass, is uncomfortable. These people consider an active life to be morally superior, the tradition of being busy to be a necessary part of the moral fabric. The debate about busyness has a long history. There is also a polar view, which argues that the cult of speed creates secret fantasies about not working. These are dreams of leisure, imaginings of an idle, pleasant life, and they incorporate the longing to be purposely inactive. There are several books on the market that try to teach this art, and, like many of the contributions to this field—including those of scholars—they often drift into moralizing.10 We have used this debate as one of our starting points but want to avoid getting trapped in questions of evaluation—good or bad, too little or too much; that is too slippery a moral terrain.11 Rather, we want to comprehend what is going on when people feel attracted to or repelled by the prospect of “doing nothing,” waiting patiently or furiously, performing routines absentmindedly, and “escaping reality” in more or less fanciful daydreams. We are also interested in how these activities may be interconnected and how they have evolved and changed in different cultural contexts. By making a cultural analysis of these three themes we may approach the question the sociologist Georg Simmel (1910) asked a century ago: How is society possible? In what ways do such mundane activities as waiting, following routines, and daydreaming—which are often solitary—organize and support everyday life? How can they tell us something about larger social and existential issues? To get at questions like these we have combined different kinds of research strategies, as well as drawn inspiration from a diverse set of scholars that includes Walter Benjamin, Christina Nippert-Eng, Gaston Bachelard, and Elisabeth Shove, to mention just a few. So as not to burden the text with too many references or digressions, much of the academic discussion has been restricted to the notes.12

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Our three themes mirror different entries into the world of the uneventful. By studying waiting we focus on how people spend their time, whiling it away by occupying themselves with other things, or being totally absorbed by the slow clock. Routines illustrate how one can make the body accomplish things without needing consciously to think about them, thus saving time or creating opportunities for more important matters. While waiting and routines may be possible to observe in others, daydreaming is a more hidden activity, during which people are mentally absent, away from the here and now, and yet interacting in their imagination with the environment around them. The choice of issues called for experimenting with new approaches to cultural analysis.13 “Why not begin by questioning your teaspoons?” Georges Perec (1997: 206) suggested; from there one can then move on to the mundane world of objects and routines that surround us, “bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms.” We followed his suggestion and used a close scrutiny of everyday materialities and movements as one entrance to the field. Another concern of ours was how body and mind interact, for example in the ways people mentally move in and out of a situation. Our methods have thus been based on a bricolage of materials. We started with informal surveys among students, then continued with interviews and observations, and also looked for examples and ideas in novels and poetry, films and art projects. We surfed the Web for ongoing debates on our subjects and moved back in time for historical perspectives. We have explained this way of doing ethnography in the appendix to this book. In the following chapters we shall explore how seemingly marginal activities may be all the more influential because they are usually neglected or go unnoticed. We shall investigate how individual habits, thoughts, and feelings are culturally shaped; how uneventful moments of waiting camouflage vivid parallel activities; and how daydreaming changes physical presence into mental absence. While people are occupied with something easily observed and understood, they may well be doing things that are hidden from those

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around them—and sometimes those things are hidden even from themselves. What can such oblivious activities tell us about how people make sense of their everyday lives? We shall conclude with a discussion of how the location of these phenomena in “the backyards of modernity” allows them to influence social life in surprisingly powerful ways.

chapter one

Waiting

In the early 1980s the Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson and Prime Minister Olof Palme had an appointment with Saddam Hussein in one of his Baghdad palaces. They had to wait at their hotel for a few days before, late one night, a limousine with black windows arrived to pick them up. They were driven around in the city for an hour so as to make them lose their bearings. Next they had to pass a security control and were led into a waiting room decorated with gold and oak paneling. After being left for a long time in this luxurious setting they were taken to yet another waiting room, where a chief of staff received them. Ten minutes later a door was thrown open and they were led to a third room, and there he stood: Saddam. With his staff huddled behind him, and holding a hand out stiffly, the dictator greeted the two Swedes. It was insulting but also somewhat ridiculous, Eliasson remembers, and he pointed out that Saddam was using an age-old trick to diminish one’s opponent and enlarge one’s own importance (Kantor and Keller 2008: 42).

An Elusive Microdrama Our interest in waiting as a mode of doing nothing started with less dramatic situations, among them the mundane scene in the supermarket described 9

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earlier. We began by looking for examples of inconspicuous non-events in unglamorous activities such as waiting for a bus and standing in line. But we soon found that “waiting” covers a wide range of behaviors and emotional reactions. Refugees wait anxiously for asylum. Prisoners count the days until their discharge. Bored workers and schoolchildren look at their watches every five minutes toward the end of a day. Yet other variants include waiting for a plumber who never shows up, or for one’s beloved, who is late. What kind of “doing nothing” constitutes waiting? What lies hidden behind this insignificant and seemingly inactive pursuit, when one has to “simply wait,” as Estragon expressed it in Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play, Waiting for Godot? 1 To explore these questions we started with the concrete infrastructure of waiting, the material locations where we observed the activity. From there we went on to look at the nature of waiting time. How do people experience and handle that kind of time in different situations? Next we turned our attention to how people learn to wait in different cultural settings. We investigated one of the most institutionalized forms of waiting— queuing or standing in line, a behavior that is permeated by rules, norms, rituals, and feelings. This theme took us further into the emotionality of waiting and how, as in our example from Baghdad, waiting links to power. Who waits for whom, who can make others wait, and what difference do gender and class make? We have focused on waiting as a cultural practice, one shaped by shifting historical and social conditions and something that people learn to handle, a skill that must be trained and developed. The examples are collected from different situations and parts of the world, from hospitals, street corners, travel experiences, and the final weeks of pregnancy. Waits can be short—as during the time it takes to ride with strangers in an elevator—but they can also feel interminable or fill an entire life. For some people waiting seems to be a full-time activity that takes up all their energy and being. This certainly applies to a Chinese physician named Lin Kong. In the mid-1960s he worked at an army hospital in a city somewhere in China. He was married to a peasant woman whom his parents had chosen

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for him and whom he did not love. He had left his wife in the village to take care of their little daughter and his old parents. In the city he fell in love with Manna Wu, a nurse at the hospital, and thereafter, every summer for seventeen years Lin returned to his village to ask his wife for a divorce. But in vain. Because the hospital authorities did not approve of a liaison between them, Lin Kong and Manna Wu refrained from a sexual relationship—day after day, year after year. Eighteen years passed before, in 1984, Lin Kong was allowed to divorce his wife and marry Manna Wu. Ha Jin tells this story of extreme patience in his novel Waiting (2000). The reader might well wonder how it would feel to wait for a loved person for almost twenty years, seeing and talking to the beloved every day during that time. In Lin Kong’s case waiting became a way of life; we will return to Lin and Manna, for the novel opens up interesting perspectives. When we considered more mundane situations of waiting we were struck by the ways in which they constantly alter shape, direction, and meaning. How to study such a multifaceted and elusive activity? At first we enthusiastically gathered ethnographic observations in train stations, doctors’ waiting rooms, and ticket lines. Quite often we returned with photos and descriptions of what on the surface seemed trivial non-events, over which we often pondered for hours, trying to see below the surface. At 12:25 P.M., a middle-aged woman in a blue gown arrives at the bus station in a Swedish town. She is looking around the waiting room with a gaze that finally stops for a few seconds at the electronic timetable high up on the wall. Then she walks resolutely toward one of the exits and takes a seat on an empty bench next to the door. She looks hesitant and a little nervous. Again and again she touches her hair, as if to check that it is in order. After a little while the woman takes a cell phone and a magazine from her bag and holds them in her lap. She looks for the bus ticket in her purse and finds it. Then she sinks her chin in her hand and glances at a young couple in the corner of the waiting room. Shortly before the bus is scheduled to arrive she joins other travelers in a short queue, everyone keeping approximately one meter’s distance

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from the others. The woman waits patiently in fifth position, holding her phone, magazine, and bus ticket, until the bus arrives and the front door opens. It is now 12:37 P.M., and the woman steps on board.

Returning home with this description of an everyday moment we had to think about what was actually going on during this fifteen-minute wait for a bus. Interestingly, while trying to observe people in such situations we found ourselves caught up in the boredom and restlessness that emanated from our subjects. We found ourselves losing our concentration, our thoughts began to wander, and we forgot what we were there for and started thinking of other things. After all, nothing seemed to be happening, unlike situations where others are doing something—as, for example, after the waiting is over.

Doing Something—but What? Like many other examples of “doing nothing,” waiting turned out to be a phenomenon that is difficult to study head-on. Clearly we needed alternative ethnographic approaches to de-trivialize the mundane activity. We started by looking at artists who have explored waiting as a strange country, among them the Swedish artist Elin Wikström, who in 1994 molded the paradox of waiting as a passive activity in a performance titled Rebecka is waiting for Anna, Anna is waiting for Cecilia, Cecilia is waiting for Marie . . . For the duration of a performance, female volunteers selected by the artist come to a café at the gallery at a scheduled time and wait for fifteen minutes. They sit at a table among other gallery visitors, as if they were the first to arrive for a rendezvous and wait for their date. Occasionally they look at their watches, rummage through a bag, and read a magazine. At a prearranged time they leave the gallery, one at a time, to be replaced by other women, who continue the everyday theater of waiting for someone who never arrives. In this exhibition waiting is presented as a meaningless effort. The women’s ostensible expectations are never fulfilled. Wikström puts it like this:

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It’s like when you’re meeting somebody and you’re the first one there. You’re waiting for other persons and you go through a lot of emotions. You’re worried about what happened to them, angry they’re late, and it’s also a loss of prestige because people are thinking, “Oh, she got stood up.” The performance wants to give an alternative view of women. In commercials and films, they are always depicted as waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting for Mr. Right, waiting to have kids and waiting for those grown kids to come visit them. Always this passive idea of waiting. So for once, I wanted the women to be waiting for each other.2

Even waiting in vain is at least doing something. Men and women resort to all kinds of mundane activities while waiting, as if to deny that they are waiting or to try to forget the fact: reading, talking, listening to music, watching television screens, making cell phone calls, or gaming, WAPing, and playing or working with their laptops. They also tend to be, to some degree, tense and irritated, as is obvious from their looking at clocks, wrist watches, timetables, graffiti, and litter on the floor, or staring absentmindedly into the distance with an inward look. In such situations there is always the question of how and where one should look when among strangers, or what strategies to develop for “averting the gaze so as not to engage in interaction” (Bissell 2007: 285). Some people watch eagerly for the bus or train they are waiting for, as if they could conjure it into existence. Or they may camouflage their pursuit by eating, drinking, or smoking, as if they were not waiting at all. The choreography of waiting is rich. Depending on personality and circumstances, people stand or sit still, balance on their feet, lean against walls or pillars, squat, lie down, or walk to and fro; some people whistle, hum, sleep, or close their eyes. They wait alone or in a group, in an orderly line or randomly dispersed, with their arms folded or hanging loosely, hands in pockets or in their laps. For an ethnographer there is in fact much to observe. The dominant impression of passivity is contradicted by all the small movements and diversions. Above all, however, waiting seems to be a state of mind, a psychological condition that is not directly observable. An observer can learn to see what

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is going on at bus stops, for example, or in the waiting room of a dental office. But no one can really know what others are up to, what they are feeling or daydreaming. Instead of guessing at what people were thinking while waiting we decided to try a more physical approach. What could an “ecology of waiting” be? How is its infrastructure organized? What kinds of social interaction are involved?

VENUES OF WAITING

Any location can become a waiting area, but when asked to name the first places that came to mind people cited those traditionally associated with waiting: ticket offices, highway toll booths, department stores, and the places connected with waiting for transport—gates, lounges, platforms, benches, and shelters. Other oft-cited places included schools, prisons, business offices, hospitals, and dental offices. All these “container spaces,” as David Bissell (2007: 282) has called them, “are designed to hold the body, where the body is prompted to remain inert in a form of temporary stasis.” Such places possess a character and traditions of their own. Lining up at the supermarket is not the same as standing in a theater queue. Waiting one’s turn at a golf course is surely different from waiting in a courthouse corridor. Both the physical context of the place and the cultural expectations of the individual affect the experience of waiting. Some objects—the life vest under the seat, for example, or the emergency ladder on the wall—fall into the standby category. Other things inhabit a mode of alert passivity—the fire station, the rocket on the launch pad, the bottle of vintage wine being saved for a special occasion. Still others, among them certain electrical appliances, must never go out; they must rest with one eye open, watchful technological wild beasts. And then there are settings and objects that rest in a kind of cultural latency. This condition has been discussed by Jonas Frykman (2005), who exemplifies his case with the many monuments left over from the Communist

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era in Eastern Europe, which people don’t know what to do with. For the time being, many statues and monuments have been left in parks and marketplaces awaiting whatever future use or destruction may lie ahead.

Ecological Supports Above all, waiting transforms the location in which the waiting occurs. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the American sociologist Barry Schwartz (1975: 15ff.) made several empirical studies of what he called the ecological supports of waiting and queuing. Through what means are queuers channeled to keep the order of “first come, first served,” he asked. He found that queue discipline is always tightest in those settings that provide a good infrastructure for waiting. In the United States, for example, barriers, signs, and directions of all kinds—including twisted cords and red ribbons between chrome poles in cinemas and amusement parks, and painted floor lines with foot-shaped marks—suggest where one should stand in line or what distance to keep from others in the queue. Some places even have line managers and queue supervisors, with or without uniforms. These kinds of props all have their own history and reveal interesting national differences. Take, for example, the advent of what was called the “thinking ticket machine,” which was developed in Sweden in the 1960s and came to revolutionize waiting. The technology could be puzzling to the neophyte, for there were no orderly queues but only a seemingly disorganized crowd of people holding little paper slips with numbers, which they glanced at now and then. It was no longer possible to know who was next in line. Yet today these machines are part of the waiting ecology at many service facilities around the world, where they have transformed collective waiting in queues into a successful individual activity. One of the most obvious ecological supports for waiting is the transit shelter. The Swedish architect Lena Hackzell (1999) developed a passion for this service to travelers. For several years while traveling all over the world she documented different kinds of waiting shelters.

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Impressed by the diversity of forms and functions they represent, Hackzell describes these shelters not only as accommodations for waiting but also as places to meet, and thus places that are often permeated with the magic of travel. She observed that many dreams can be symbolized by the little buildings that provide protection against inclement weather. She also noted that the length of time travelers are expected to have to spend in a shelter to a great extent governs its design. Travelers to the Galapagos Islands, for example, can have a long wait for the boat taxi. Thus the hard benches here were supplemented with comfortable hammocks. One of the photos in Hackzell’s book shows men lying down and talking while they wait for the boat. Shelters in the Indian countryside where traffic is sparse have special requirements. Passengers who have missed the only bus of the day are allowed to sleep overnight on the roof of the shelter, where it is cooler and safer. The women of the village make sure that pitchers of fresh water are always available. The roof also has a specially designed surface and a shelf, where it is possible to cook. Hackzell found that a shelter can have a double function. It can be built as both a classical temple for worship and a gathering place. Even those who do not actually intend to travel get together there just to look at other people and feel a part of things. All over the world human beings have always congregated at bus stops and railway stations, to be with others and see life in action. Such places tend to be full of possibilities and surprises, and there the magic of travel overshadows the tedium of waiting. The very fact that someone is sitting in a shelter with a suitcase arouses the imagination of those who see her. Where may she be going?

Framing the Passing of Time Waiting rooms such as halls, lobbies, and corridors are easy to recognize even if they are not labeled. Presumably there is something about the layout of the space, the choices of wallpaper and furniture. Or could it be the colors, the smells, the subdued soundscape? Inarguably, though, there is an

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aura emanating from these locations that influences people’s behavior and moods. One should, however, be careful not to exaggerate the similarities between waiting places. Each place also has its own features, which depend on what kind of waiting is done there and by whom. While she was a patient at a Boston-area breast center, Laura E. Tanner (2002: 117) found herself moved from a tastefully furnished outer waiting area into a space that felt like both an actual and a symbolic assault on her autonomy. In this room she felt that it would be impossible to establish the kind of personal territory that is possible even in crowded locker rooms or transit waiting areas. Inhabited almost entirely by women in hospital johnnies waiting for mammograms, ultrasounds, or biopsies, that inner waiting room, with its bare-bones décor of chairs, women’s bodies, and magazines, threw into relief dynamics less visible in the softly lit public space of an outer waiting room furnished with antique reproductions. In this room, strangers sat stiffly beside one another in rows, clutching the tops of gowns that threatened constantly to open. Handbags—large and small, leather, vinyl, scuffed, shiny—perched on laps. In the corner, one gowned woman cried silently, while another stared blankly ahead. The sound of nurses’ clogs on the Formica floor preceded each announcement of a patient’s name.

Official waiting rooms are often described as boring places with neutral curtains, indifferent art on the bare walls, withered plants, uncomfortable chairs arranged symmetrically, old magazines, a gloomy atmosphere, and long waits. Such spaces may be replicated a thousand times over and yet look essentially the same. Designs in chromium and artificial leather, linoleum floors, fluorescent lights, and hard plastic chairs, found in so many anterooms of officialdom such as workplaces, surgeries, and unemployment offices, are anonymous yet instantly recognizable. There are of course more opulent waiting rooms. Given money or rank, it is possible to upgrade the quality of spatial design. There is a hierarchy of designs, from first-class saloons to business lounges. The central railway station in Stockholm still has a waiting room for royalty. It is a large hall

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with heavy silk draperies, soft carpets, and rococo furniture. Three magnificent cut-glass chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Four royal palaces are painted on the walls. The antique pendulum clock is said always to read 8:42. The place feels forlorn, as if it were waiting in vain for its visitors.3 How do people experience different waiting rooms? Through photographs and installations, the British artist Hatty Lee has reflected on the coexistence of the public and the private, and on the architecture that frames the passing of time. Some of her minimalist pictures show red seats on a green synthetic carpet in front of plain white walls. A solitary flowerpot in the corner tries to provide distraction. This is the generic waiting room, where it is impossible to decide for what purpose one is expected to stay. Similarly nondescript rooms are often used to represent waiting per se, as in this student’s complaint in our survey: Often it’s like hanging around in a big empty waiting room where a friendly nurse sticks her head out every so often and says, “Just a few more moments and we can see you,” and then nothing for hours. You’ve read all the magazines lying on the chairs and tables, you feel a sense of urgency to get on with it that nothing and no one else seems to share. Meanwhile, everything seems to be happening, but not to you.

Hatty Lee’s installations work like a kind of time machine, where the viewer is reminded of the emptiness of waiting (Morrisey 2000: 16). There is nothing to do in Lee’s spaces but wait, or think about waiting. The rooms become physical metaphors for formless space and the overwhelming materialization of time, the kind of experience we have when in the hospital or at the dentist. Some of these spaces show attempts to provide distractions, but even the droning TV channel and collections of tattered toys and old magazines often just add to the feeling that time has stopped. Especially in the waiting rooms of hospitals, Laura E. Tanner (2002: 124) has noticed, reading becomes oddly difficult. It is harder to leave one’s body behind and let a book or magazine take over the imagination while worrying, being ill, or in pain, though that is just the time when one may be most in need of such escape. In the medical waiting room even a short magazine

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article can elude our attention, Tanner observes, “distracted as we are by the tick-tock of our own uncomfortable embodiment.” In Swedish waiting rooms, silence or very subdued conversation usually rule, but etiquettes of behavior vary. “People are forgetting their manners and imagining that the waiting room is like their car—private and soundproof,” an American woman angrily writes in her blog on the Internet.4 She calls for explicit waiting room etiquette: Don’t use cell phones; turn off the sound of your laptop; don’t chat loudly; don’t sing while listening on your iPod; if you bring children, take care of them; leave magazines and other things where you took them; make room for others; and, finally, sit quietly.

Learn the Zen of doing nothing, this woman concludes her lesson. Comments from visitors to this woman’s blog suggest that many people strongly support her rigorous views.5 Some waiting spaces create their own unwritten rules and traditions. In a study of low-income, pregnant Latinas in Cleveland, Ohio, the anthropologist Kate E. Masley (2007) observed that her subjects managed their pregnancies amid trying social and cultural conditions. She conducted ethnographic research in the waiting room of an OB-GYN clinic, a place that to her represents a microcosm that many doctors, nurses, and other health workers rarely have the opportunity to see and understand. Powered by fluorescent lighting, the small waiting room of the OB-GYN clinic has no windows. There are twenty-two chairs lined up in horizontal row formations. Health and clinic information cover the bulletin boards along with seasonal holiday decorations. The usual sounds are the television, running of the air-conditioner or heater, children laughing, crying, playing, and running around, nurses chatting and moving in and out of rooms, patients conversing, people sighing, laughing, supporting one another, and parents and family members talking to and reprimanding their children. (Masley 2007: 23)

In material ways this is an ordinary waiting room, but the social life it holds makes it different from others. The pregnant women are not in the least

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practicing “the Zen of doing nothing.” Instead they are using the space as a platform for talking about matters of common interest, particularly their kids, and for giving and receiving support. It thus becomes an arena where their voices, feelings, and experiences can be heard. The anxiety that these women may bring with them from the world outside the clinic is diminished by their shared cigarette breaks, consumption of soda, candy, and snacks, and confidences. Displays of mutual affection and the sight of children at play may help to buffer the stresses that the women encounter while waiting for appointments and interacting with doctors, nurses, and administrative assistants. In her fieldwork Kate E. Masley observed that the waiting room space represents an informal social institution where low-income women of different ethnicities possess some authority, take up space, and feel relatively secure. Studying a waiting room brings to light both cultural rules and potential conflicts about appropriate behavior. A seemingly insignificant activity is directly connected to the existentially urgent questions about how time ought to be spent, which laws of behavior should be upheld, and who should decide these matters. Waiting does strange things with time—but also with social order and power relations.

TIME—STICKY, WASTED OR DEAD? I wonder how many days of one’s life are made up of dead time, only spent waiting for it to pass. Right now I have zero desire to do anything. I am really just looking at my watch, waiting for it to be time to cook. Eating is always a good way of killing time. Sure, I have a lot to do; pack my suitcase, finish a paper, empty the memory card, and buy hair conditioner. But all those things are so boring that I prefer to sit here and just wait.6

When people like this young person talk about their experiences of waiting, they generally complain about three things. First, that it is boring to wait. Second, when forced to wait, people experience time passing much more slowly than normally, and, third, they feel that they have wasted—“killed”— the time. The perceived difference between slow and fast passage of time is

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a relative matter, of course.7 Looking forward to something delightful is certainly a different time experience than worrying about something such as a doctor’s verdict of one’s health.8 The quality of waiting time constantly shifts. Life stops for the second before the energy-saving bulb lights up and for the minutes spent waiting in the line at the ATM, and it drags during the long teenage years before one attains adult status. To say nothing of the eighteen long years our Chinese couple waited. Almost every moment they must have been thinking of what they were longing for—and at the same time they were busy getting through their everyday chores. Waiting can thus be an anticipatory mode of being, during which the very act of waiting draws attention to the passing of time. Without inherent content of its own, the time spent waiting passes more slowly because one is so preoccupied with the clock. It is not uncommon that a two-minute wait can feel either like the blink of an eye or like “forever.” At one Web design firm many of the young employees let their computers stay on overnight because they didn’t want to wait the thirty seconds for the machines to boot up in the morning (Willim 2002: 102ff.). Similarly, the moments waiting at a traffic light can be disproportionately stressful. This can be exemplified with a detailed description of the experience one of us had during a long wait at a car repair shop.

Sticky Time How long will the regular maintenance service take, I ask, leaving the car key at the desk. We ought to be done before lunch, is the answer. It is now 7:10 A.M. During the wait I take a walk downtown, have a cup of coffee, read a book, and do some errands. I don’t spend much time thinking about the car. Around twelve o’clock I return to the repair shop. The car isn’t ready, so I have no option but to sit down in the reception area, where there is a coffee machine and local newspapers. Other people are also there waiting. Now I become more conscious of the fact that I am waiting for my car. Earlier I had camouflaged it with other tasks. But once I had completed my

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errands I found myself in a vacuum. Now waiting itself is the focus of my attention, and I feel boredom, irritation, hope, and finally anxiety about what the service will cost. I have no control over what is happening. I am at the mercy of others. I begin to wander about restlessly. For a while I study life at the desk, observing the behavior of the mechanics and the customers in this male environment with its established routines. Then I wander to the shop around the corner and look at the car accessories, but with no special interest for the moment in polishing wax or engine heaters. Now and then I glance at the serviceman with whom I had left the key, but he is busy with other customers. I decide to restrain my irritation. I suddenly find myself daydreaming about buying a new car, maybe one of the shiny Audi Quattro in the showroom—much too expensive, of course, but if I buy a lottery ticket and win a million dollars . . . I wait for another three quarters of an hour, and then the car is finally ready. I have to take a queuing number to close the transaction. The man behind the reception desk mutters something about the slow computer connection. Then he goes to the printer and stares at it until the receipt prints, as if by doing so he could hurry it along. My choosing to pay with a credit card leads to another delay while the machine contacts the bank. The serviceman taps his fingers on the desk and looks at me meaningfully. I respond with a smile but refrain from yawning, tramping, or twiddling my thumbs. By the time I have the car key back in my hand I had spent six hours waiting. If I had not jotted down these notes, I would probably have forgotten the boring wait. The first five hours were by conscious intent spent as if they were not really devoted to waiting but rather as an ordinary morning spent doing things, where it’s not necessary constantly to look at one’s watch. Pretending not to be engaged in waiting differs only superficially from sitting down in resignation, counting the minutes, and being bored. With make-believe one is trying to ignore what is actually going on. On that particular morning make-believe worked rather well, and time passed smoothly until twelve o’clock. After that, however, the waiting should have been over and the car

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ready to pick up, and then time took on a new quality. It became sticky, or gluey, caught in the friction between my hope and my impatience. At that point the seconds and minutes bent into a form in which I had to experience them slowly, one by one, each demanding my full attention. After twelve o’clock it had become impossible to pretend not to be waiting. It then became impossible to concentrate on reading a newspaper or thinking of something else. Body and mind became dominated by the irritated longing for an end to the drawn-out event. The restless walks around the repair shop, the impatient glances toward the servicemen were those of a prisoner of waiting. For such prisoners the world outside loses its significance; they become confined in a bubble of almost motionless time. At that point daydreaming is the only release, allowing time for a while to lose the sticky quality.

Handling a Wait What would David H. Maister (1985) have said about the repair shop experience? He is one of many business consultants who have tried to develop techniques for facilitating waiting in the service sector. His six principles dealing with this problem can be applied more generally. The first principle is that people want to get going. At a restaurant, for example, the time spent waiting for the menu can seem longer than that spent being served, even if by objective measurement the latter takes ten or twenty minutes longer. As Maister has noted, pre-process waits are perceived to last longer than in-process waits, the former often accompanied by the fear of having been forgotten. The second principle is that uncertain waits are longer than known, finite waits. The most profound source of anxiety in waiting is how long the wait will be. A patient who is told that the doctor will be delayed thirty minutes experiences an initial annoyance but then probably relaxes into an acceptance of the inevitability of the wait. However, if the patient is told that the doctor will be free soon, but not exactly when that will be, she spends the whole time in a state of nervous anticipation, unable to settle down, afraid

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to leave even briefly, just as in the repair shop. A wait for a predetermined time is finite; beyond that point there is no known limit. Third, unexplained waits are longer than explained waits. At the repair shop there were no reasons given as to why the car was not ready, and that made the wait much harder to endure. Most people are prepared to be a great deal more patient when they understand the causes for delay. Airline pilots are used to applying this principle; on-board announcements of postponements are replete with explanations about tardy baggage handlers, fog, safety checks, and air-traffic controllers’ instructions. Fourth, unfair waits are longer than reasonable waits. When a receptionist in an office answers the telephone while you are waiting to be served, the distant customer is being given higher priority than you. As Maister has pointed out, this does not feel OK. Why should you, who have made the effort to come to the service facility, wait while the caller, who has merely picked up a telephone, doesn’t have to? Cultural notions of fairness here come into play, an issue to which we will return later. Fifth, the more valuable the service, the more patience the customer will show. Waiting for something of little value can be intolerable, whereas people such as Lin Kong and Manna Wu are ready to spend a large part of life in patient endurance. Maister illustrates this principle with a description of how eagerly airline passengers jump out of their seats the instant the airplane reaches the gate, despite knowing that it will take time for all the passengers ahead to disembark, and that they may well have to wait after that for their baggage. The same passenger who sat patiently for many hours during the flight suddenly exhibits intolerance for an extra minute or two spent disembarking, maybe even fury when his baggage is delayed yet another few minutes. Such passengers are motivated by the thought that the flight is over and that there is no more value in remaining seated. Lastly, Maister claims, solo waits feel longer than group waits.9 In air terminals or train stations one often sees individuals sitting or standing next to each other in silence—until an announcement of a delay is made. Then they suddenly turn to each other to share their irritation and discuss what is

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happening—a temporary community is created. A similar phenomenon occurs in queues for concert tickets or at popular bars and fashionable restaurants, where the waiting then becomes a part of the experience. The exceptions to this rule, as we saw in the car repair shop, happen when a customer feels that the other customers are competitors for service rather than fellows in waiting. What happens when these principles are applied in a very different field, for example that of international refugees waiting for asylum or the return home? In Sweden in the early 2000s about thirty thousand refugees arrived annually from many different countries, mostly Asia and Africa. Roughly 50 percent of the asylum seekers were expelled. It could take several years, however, for the asylum seeker to get either a residence permit or the order to leave. This policy forces the refugees to live with uncertainty, as the sociologist Jan-Paul Brekke (2004) has pointed out. The only stable thing in their everyday life is waiting for a decision. This kind of waiting is above all a matter of coping with sticky time. Daily rhythm is dominated by thoughts about the mail carrier who will eventually deliver the longed-for letter. The day is divided into two parts, expectation before the mail carrier arrives and disappointment after, when no letter has appeared. According to Maister’s fifth principle—the more valuable the service, the longer the customer will wait—the refugees must show considerable patience. During the wait the refugees are in a transition stage of liminality, neither here nor there, neither inside nor outside the country they are hoping to live in. The ethnologist Rebecka Lennartsson (2007) has interviewed asylum seekers who had spent many years of their life in such liminality. They talk about the waiting as an “empty time,” a period of boredom dominated by anxiety, nervousness, and confusion. In this emotionally vulnerable and powerless state it is impossible for them to forget that they are waiting. Maister’s second principle, that uncertain waits are longer than known, finite waits, is illustrated by the statement made by a young man from Afghanistan, as quoted by Brekke (2004: 29):

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We have no life apart from thinking about this residence permit. Whoever you ask, you get nowhere. They just tell you to wait. But for one more day? One more month? One more year? How much longer must I wait to know what my destiny is?

Many refugees feel set apart from ordinary life. Day-to-day existence is ruled by waiting. Their enforced passivity stands in sharp contrast to their active journey or dramatic flight from the home country. One man said that he used to spend much time in front of the mirror in his room, just looking at himself. He found waiting and doing nothing mentally exhausting. A woman from Ukraine put it like this: “You just wait for something, something that is empty, which does not exist.” She felt that she was in limbo, in a directionless time. A man from Syria said he could not start his future. He had left his past behind, his future was blocked by the pending decision, and his present was in between the life he had lived and the one he hoped to live in Sweden. “You are nobody while waiting,” a man from Sudan told Lennartsson. But generalizations can be misleading. “You wait in different ways,” one of the refugees explained, meaning that this experience is perceived differently depending on whether one has recently arrived or been an asylum seeker for a long time. The experience of waiting is also affected by comparisons with other refugees. As David H. Maister argues, if others receive an answer before you do, despite having arrived later, your waiting will seem even longer and more unfair.

Waste of Time Maister’s six principles do not necessarily illustrate a panhuman attitude toward waiting; more probably they summarize a modern Western version of coping with time as a limited good that people do not want to waste. For some people, having to wait feels like being paralyzed or stuck, as this woman in our student survey told us: The worst is when you are not able to influence what is going to happen. You feel completely powerless. For example, when you call the

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social security office and they tell you that you have position 43 in the waiting line. In order not to suffer from stress I always have a book or a magazine at hand. Then, waiting is not felt as meaningless, I have in any case done something. If I don’t activate myself during the time that is only passing I lose my temper. I can’t stand to just “be,” all the time I must do something, otherwise time is wasted.

Another woman talks in an interview about waiting for her husband to call. She wanders about and is unable to concentrate on anything. Why doesn’t he call? Has something happened? After he calls she stops worrying, but now she begins to wait for him to come home. She is mystified by her subordination to this impatient, nervous, and unproductive waiting, which she defines as a “waste of time,” a slow time that she ought to “kill” by using it in a better way. Her disposition to spend whole days in a state of limbo makes her angry with herself. Waiting can help us to understand the various ways in which time is constructed. We have seen how it can be reified into a sticky, gluey mass, time slowed down almost to a standstill. To Lin Kong, when his wife at last agreed to a divorce, the two minutes while the judge considered his decision—whether to grant the divorce application or not—felt immense and were, paradoxically, harder to endure than the year he would have had to wait until he could apply again. Many people have much to say about the different qualities of time spent waiting and about their feelings and moods while waiting. The question arises: what produces all the anxiety and emotional energy that people invest in waiting and the changing experiences of time? A large body of scholarship now exists on the creation of new and more disciplined conceptions of time in Western modernity and on how these conceptions are linked to ideas of investment and waste. Waste, it is suggested, becomes a major source of anxiety when “productive time” is honored at the expense of “idle time.” In situations where imperative norms of punctuality have developed, the consequent avoidance of delay accelerates the tempo of everyday life. Being inactive, taking a break, and resting are not considered meaningful activities

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in their own right. “Doing nothing” is seen as a waste of a person’s skill and potential, the prevention of possible accomplishment. For those who regard waiting as “corporeal stillness” (Bissell 2007: 284), it is culturally, economically, and politically better to be mobile than immobile. The accelerated pace of everyday life in the Western world is often said to have influenced the way people feel about waiting. A whole industry has been built up around diminishing delays. Eviator Zerubavel (1981: 58) and James Gleick (1999), among others, have explored well-known modern techniques to get things done faster and save time. They view these techniques as expressions of a deeply negative attitude toward waiting and manifestations of an impatient speeding-up of life.10 This “phobia of time waste” and the preoccupation with efficient scheduling make pauses of all kinds a dilemma. Interruptions have become an unavoidable part of life in Western societies, constituting both threat and promise (Hillman and Phillips 2007: 8). Without the stoppages and breaks in activity, there is often no cadence to life, the sociologists Dennis Brissett and Robert P. Snow (1993: 247) claim in a critical discussion of the exaggerated demands on punctuality in contemporary American life. The compulsion to conduct daily life efficiently is often described as being typical of the so-called Protestant ethic, which includes a belief in the immanent value of being busy.11 If work is considered to be the greatest virtue, waste of time becomes the deadliest of sins. This ethic is supposed to have had its greatest impact in the Northern hemisphere, and linked to it is often a belief in the lack of punctuality and efficiency among “Southern peoples.” Of course, this is a simplification, but it reminds us of the cultural aspects of time management. Everyone has to learn to wait, but depending on what part of the world you were born in, the ways and reasons for waiting may differ widely.12

LEARNING PATIENCE AND IMPATIENCE

A Latin-American man whom we interviewed about the years he spent as an immigrant in Sweden told us that he was struck by the obsession with

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punctuality in both private and public life, but when he returned to Chile he was immensely irritated by the lack of timekeeping in his old homeland. He had effectively been socialized into a Northern pattern. But how did this happen? What complicates the issue is that Western modernity developed not only new forms of impatience but also certain ways of virtuous patience. Some kinds of waiting are regarded as productive, others are not.

Talent for Waiting One way to endure waiting is to develop Zen-like meditation, a talent that is said to have been largely lost in modern society. There are nostalgic sighs about “golden times,” when people still knew how to wait patiently and the pace of life was slow. These feelings surfaced in the postmodern movement of “slow living” that was popular in the early 2000s. The Western wonder about ways of waiting turns above all to foreign cultures. “These people have a fantastic talent for waiting!” an Englishman who has lived in Ghana for many years told the Polish reporter and author Ryszard Kapus´in´ski. With that he meant that people in Ghana had “talent, stamina, and some peculiar kind of instinct” to endure long waiting periods. In one of his essays Kapus´in´ski (2001: 17ff.) tried to capture this “fantastic talent for waiting.” Somewhere in the countryside of Ghana he observed people at a bus stop. He writes that he saw them fall into the state in which they spend a great portion of their life, “a benumbed waiting.” What does this dull waiting consist of? People know what to expect; therefore, they try to settle themselves in as comfortably as possible, in the best possible place. Sometimes they lie down, sometimes they sit on the ground, or on a stone, or squat. They stop talking. A waiting group is mute. It emits no sound. The body goes limp, droops, shrinks. The muscles relax. The neck stiffens, the head ceases to move. The person does not look around, does not observe anything, is not curious. Sometimes his eyes are closed—but not always. More frequently, they are open but appear unseeing, with no spark of life in them. I have

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observed for hours on end crowds of people in this state of inanimate waiting, a kind of profound physiological sleep: They do not eat, they do not drink, they do not urinate; they react neither to the mercilessly scorching sun, nor to the aggressive, voracious flies that cover their eyelids and lips. What, in the meantime, is going on inside their heads? I do not know. Are they thinking? Dreaming? Reminiscing? Making plans? Meditating? Traveling in the world beyond? It is difficult to say.

This description may reveal more about a Western attitude to waiting than about that of the Africans. Kapus´in´ski, who portrays the behavior of these waiting people, probably mostly men, as something exotic, does not seem to recognize his own cultural projections. Or would he, one wonders, have described a group of waiting Europeans as “crowds of people in . . . state of inanimate waiting,” absentminded, and “with no spark of life” in their appearance? Ambivalence can be noted in other observations of apathy and resignation in non-Western cultures. The descriptions show both a lack of understanding for the context and a nostalgia for “the lost art” of waiting. Ethnocentrism can slip in easily when Westerners discuss the behavior in cultures where people do not seem to be in a hurry and clearly have different perceptions of time, and where the words “now” and “soon” have meanings that Westerners may not be familiar with. This attitude is sometimes labeled as a “mañana mentality.” The anthropologist Arne Johansen (2001: 74ff.) is among those who have shown that people in other parts of the world wait in ways that are astonishing to Westerners, but he states that apparently passive waiting is not necessarily a sign of resignation. Instead, he claims, people are often patient or indolent because they assume that an event begins “when everything is ready” or “when it is called for.” Things simply “take their time,” and nobody becomes anxious while waiting until the time is right. People in those cultural settings, therefore, perceived time spent waiting not as dead time but rather as no time at all. A slow working rhythm does not necessarily signify inefficiency. According to this point of view, time

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accommodates to the working rhythm—and not the other way around. When one is not doing something one is not producing an event, consequently there is no indication of the course of time. Then time stands still. It cannot be wasted.

The Art of Self-Discipline In most cultures learning patience is a central problem of childhood socialization. The process involves a subordination of personal needs to an impersonal allocation principle and, to be learned well, must be encouraged early in life. Impatient children can, for example, be taught to “take turns” in organized games. The young, as Barry Schwarz (1975: 94) has observed, do not wait of their own accord. Learning to wait assumes different forms in different eras and cultural contexts. Children are taught how to postpone important matters for future action and not give in to sudden desires. In societies where self-discipline is an important virtue, giving in to the desire for immediate gratification is seen as evil. Here we enter a morally charged terrain. Victorian middle-class childhoods illustrate one strategy of socialization that still shapes much of Western life. The sociologist Walter Benjamin (1991), recalling his Berlin childhood in the early twentieth century, wrote that people often described him as a patient man. He regarded this not as a virtue but as no more than a tendency to see important things approaching from far away. For this reason he felt cheated of what he thought of as the greatest pleasure of traveling when he was not allowed to wait for the train. Similarly, he loved giving presents because what came as a surprise to the receiver he as the giver had already known long before. And because he enjoyed waiting, a woman became more beautiful the longer he had to wait for her. During his life in exile from Nazi Germany Benjamin learned to wait— for publication, money, recognition, and the love of his life. Waiting is the lining of boredom, he writes in his texts from The Arcades Project (1999), where that theme surfaces in many contexts.

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The emerging middle classes in nineteenth-century Europe wished, with such virtues as patience, impulse control, and long-term planning, to distinguish themselves from both the decadent old aristocracy and a working class that was seen as “living only in the moment.” Learning to control and economize everything from money to emotions was materialized in waiting— waiting for one’s turn, for a reward, for the right moment, for something fun. The training grounds differed and could sometimes be found in surprising settings. In middle-class Swedish childhoods of the early twentieth century one striking arena turns out to be “learning to wait for Christmas,” a feature of childhood that in many ways became more and more elaborated during that century (see Löfgren 1993). Waiting for Christmas involves many of the classic rules of organized patience. The rituals of countdown included the Christmas calendar, where a new window can be opened every morning, a new candle lit every Advent Sunday before Christmas, and a wish list be prepared in which desires are to be disciplined and prioritized. In middle-class childhood memories these rituals stand out clearly. Sneak previews of Christmas food, presents, or activities were banned. Christmas trees could not be lit until Christmas Eve. Given this kind of moral economy, other and less normative ways of celebrating were seen to be slovenly and undisciplined. Tensions between class, gender, and generation surface in the material. As a result, working-class families were accused of skipping the proper rules of waiting, boys were excused for breaking the same rules, being “less patient than girls,” and older generations complained of the waning of old rituals of waiting for Christmas. When the institution of Saturday candy was introduced, children had to wait for their weekly treat of a candy bag. In these cultures instant gratification ranked lower than the individual’s self-imposed control of desire and postponement of satisfaction.13 Children in these cultures were taught that Later is better than Now, and those who cannot handle such a system have to shape up. Such judgments still surface in the recurring discussions of classbased patterns of consumption, as for example in criticisms of parents

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who have not taught their children restraint and moderation. The critique of younger generations returns again and again: “Children or teenagers of today do not learn self-control but demand instant gratification.” Among American sociologists the study of “deferred gratification” became a theme in the 1950s. How has this virtue of learning to wait—the self-imposed postponement of satisfaction—been linked to middle-class values and what role has it played in upward mobility (Schneider and Lysgaard 1953)? Learning how to wait is linked to the larger cultural context in which the person waiting confronts different values and lifestyles. Further, the knowhow of waiting changes over the life cycle of an individual and from one group to another.

Just Hanging Out “Everyone Experiences Boredom, But It May Be Worst for Teens” was the headline of a 1992 article in the Washington Post that discussed the restlessness of contemporary girls and boys. The reporter stated: “Teenage boredom doesn’t always have a name; it can be the heavy sighing, the rolling of the eyes, and the tapping of the foot.” (Quoted in Spacks 1995: 262.) Categorizing the adolescent years as The Time of Boredom runs through the history of modern teenage life from World War II to the present. Youngsters learned to turn boredom into an art form, a visible, ritualized form of waiting for something—action, adventure, most of all adulthood—to happen. In their performances we can see how waiting is linked to the life cycle. The impatience of the five-year-old is different from that of the fifteen-year-old or of a person in her sixties. Novels, mass media, and memories sometimes cast the hectic teenage years as indolent waiting. An example of this genre is a newspaper feature portraying a typical Friday night outside a fast food place. “Everybody is waiting for something” the reporter states, but as he continues to describe what is going on, the reader begins to understand that the scene is full of activity—teenagers drinking, eating hamburgers, joking, walking around,

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talking on their cell phones, planning for the future, hugging and kissing. Not much passivity here.14 And yet it is the waiting mode that is seen to be dominant, whether during lessons at school, at the drive-in, or at home. This mode, as described in a Swedish memoir of youth in the 1980s, is very much an aesthetic style: We were “hanging out.” No more time for play. At school passivity was made an art form. Every school break became a demonstration of our skill at performing “doing nothing,” just waiting for the real life to start. (Hammar and Wiking 2003: 82)

This excerpt describes the social construct where composure is meant to communicate to others that the here and now is hopeless and boring. Fifteenyear-olds a century earlier probably did not possess this skill. It is interesting to contrast such memories with the diaries of several elderly people who describe daily life in a retirement home, where waiting has again become a fundamental part of the life cycle. The question how much of one’s life is left is punctuated by the small diversions of the everyday. How long until the six o’clock news, lunch, or coffee? Has the mail arrived yet, maybe the grandchildren will call later today? To make the time pass, the day must be cut up into smaller waits. A special rhythm is created.15 Teenagers and older people of both sexes handle sticky time in different ways. For young persons, what they see as a fight against excruciatingly slow time flow is of course also a fight against the adult world that denies them the fulfillment of all sorts of desires. Endurance—among the ninth-graders at the playground or the eighty-year-olds in the retirement home—is one of the most important resources in the pursuit of “doing nothing.”

Red Lights In the modern world one of the basic ideas is that both individuals and societies are on the path to a better future. The linear conception of time is part of this, as is the disciplining of time and space. The need for effective timekeeping called for technologies that made waiting manifest.

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“The more life is regulated by administration, the more people will have to learn to wait,” Walter Benjamin (1999) wrote, and in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscapes of production, consumption, and bureaucracy many of the techniques were developed that we today take for granted: waiting rooms, red lights,16 tickets, and the conventions of queuing and taking turns. But it is also in such contexts that ideas of wasted or dead time, and more restless forms of waiting, take shape. The fear of empty time is a strong force in “the experience-orientated economy of our time,” Arne Johansen (2001: 74) has argued. Something must be happening all the time—preferably faster. Enforced inactivity is made to feel like a torment, and all waiting becomes insufferable. This is a rather sweeping argument. Does it apply to all people and all situations? And here we risk joining the commonly debated question “Where is our society heading?” It may be more fruitful to look at how acceleration is handled in different situations. People develop new forms of coordination to master a quickening pace. An example is the intense concentration that the pioneer generations of radio listeners and television viewers had to develop to be able to follow a program. Today, television shows and movies from the 1960s and 1970s may seem irritatingly slow and explicit in their narrative structure because viewers have acquired a capacity of understanding compressed storytelling and rapid cuts from scene to scene. It is the culturally acquired competence in understanding pace that decides whether something is experienced as slow or fast. The growth of restlessness is linked to new attitudes to waiting and time management. This process becomes very evident in new phenomena, such as mass travel, that emerged during the nineteenth century.

Dynamic Impatience The new infrastructures of mass travel—which include railway stations, bus stops, and airports—became great places for learning punctuality, patience, and impatience. What happens to time while you are waiting in

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such different places? How do you handle delays, one of the most acute examples of waiting? The sociologist Phillip Vannini (2002) addresses these questions in an essay on the experience of waiting times in two separate settings. The first experience was seven hours at a train station in Agra, India; the other was four hours at Hong Kong’s international airport. “Like many, I have always hated to wait,” Vannini exclaims, but stuck in these two places he begins to reflect on what waiting is doing to his experience of time. He is also paying attention to his surroundings. The ticket counter hall in Agra was full of people who were there not to travel anywhere but to gaze at travelers or offer them services. There was nothing fleeting or temporary about these people, and Vannini describes his feeling as one of an intense presence. All this feels present, immediate, and real—here and now. . . . Minutes and hours seem to make less sense in this room. The flow of time has become alive here. Its passage is continuous. Every moment flows in bringing something new.17

In Hong Kong, Vannini’s experience was different. He felt as if he were in a non-place. The airport looked familiar. Everybody was in transit. Here he found himself beyond traditional space, lounging in an artificial environment that protected him from the natural phenomenon of space itself. His body was desensitized from the natural experiences of process, activity, or movement. I have this strange feeling of being home here. My rootless-ness here, my metaphysical invisibility, my feeling of being considered nothing but a customer. . . . I am bored, sensorially underexposed, captured by predictability; something I am used to.

Here Vannini questions the traditional view of waiting as a static and empty experience where nothing is happening and time passes slowly. Instead he considers it as containing possibility for change and becoming. Waiting does not need to be passive and subordinating but can instead be goal-oriented and meaningful. For those who see life as taking place in “mean times,” as

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being made of in-between moments that offer the opportunity of becoming, waiting can be a dynamic activity and not a static waste of time.18 Indeed it is through my waiting in India that I was able to meet strangers, explore unknown places, understand the continuity of time and myself, and ultimately use my experiences to change as a person. It is also through my waiting in Hong Kong that I was able to reflect on the redefinition of space and on the restructuring of relative time afforded by technology.

Vannini’s comparison of the Indian railway station and the Hong Kong Airport reminds us that these experiencescapes for waiting have a specific ecology and history.

How to Behave Like a Legitimate Traveler How and where did people learn to be on time, form a queue, organize a farewell, pass time while waiting, or handle a sea of strangers? The new virtues of punctuality, for example, were taught in many ways. Railways standardized various local times that used to be common in many countries into one set national time. In railway stations, time was everywhere, from the huge monumental clocks to the innovation of the timetable—another product of the railways. Railway times, unlike coach connections, which often gave time in even hours only, were exact to the minute. The first timetable was produced in England in 1838 and set the standards for future time-tabling in all kinds of spheres and activities of modern life. This emblem of modernity also became a test of citizenship in the modern nation. The pioneer generations of travelers had to learn to read a table properly and to decipher the many columns, footnotes, and bits of fine print. It also came as a surprise that trains held to the new punctuality. In the beginning latecomers sometimes complained that the train ought to have waited for them. Disciplined time gave new meanings to waiting. As travel incorporated an exact amount of time between two locations, people started to look more often at their watches. The monotony of standardized travel, with

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its clicking rail joints, led to restlessness and produced a new kind of boredom. At the station one found all kinds of people waiting side by side, but all waiting for different things. Youngsters were “hanging out” to watch the action, homeless people were waiting for the day to pass, and prostitutes were waiting for clients. This mixture created a strong consciousness of how to behave like a legitimate traveler. Movements might give you away. Were you there as a traveler, your mind set focused on the rhythms of arrival and departure, or were you just trying to kill time? The history of railway travel shows how this special mood of waiting is produced, controlled, or transformed over time. The stressful may become restful, excitement turn into routine. The materiality of the emotional landscape of the railway station is also different from that of the airport.19 The choreographer Akram Khan’s 2008 ballet Bahok follows eight men and women who are stranded in a sterile airport terminal, confined in a small transit space where the only connection with the outside world is a large monitor sending out messages such as Delayed, Please Wait, Rescheduled, Cancelled. The dancers convey the experience of being stuck in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but pass the time. In the meantime they try to communicate with the strangers next to them. On the stage the dancers give bodily expression to the mixed feelings of boredom, frustration, and curiosity. They intensify all the familiar behaviors that skilled travelers hardly notice until they come to dominate the scene totally. Today airports may seem like a strange mixture of hedonist shopping malls and well-guarded fortresses. This mixture took shape in the 1970s, when airports became waiting spaces with a very special ecology. The attempts to turn them into shopping malls and entertainment centers coincided with growing fears, first of hijacking and later of terrorist attacks, which restructured them into a heavily policed zone nerveuse. “Never leave your baggage unattended!” The architectural historian Anthony Vidler (2001) talks of another polarity, comparing airports with a synthesis of hotel lobby and unemployment office. Luxury shopping and cocktail bars are combined

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with a “demoralized waiting” orchestrated by the many microtechnologies for producing feelings of uncertainty. One moment one is waiting at the security check to have such mundane objects as nail clippers and bottles of mineral water confiscated and be stripped of belts and shoes, the next minute one is in a seductive temple of perfume and special offers. A party-going atmosphere merges with a feeling of being herded like cattle, through one-way labyrinths and enclosed spaces. Both the airport and the railway station have been important training grounds for styles of waiting to get somewhere else—and to do it in the correct way. In nineteenth-century cities questions of legitimate waiting behavior were frequently discussed. The meditative behavior of a fashionable flaneur in front of a shopping window signaled a different mode than that of an unemployed person hanging at the street corner. A woman who waited on the sidewalk could risk being taken for a prostitute. Who had the right to be at certain spaces at certain times, and how did one know? A study of late nineteenth-century prostitution in Stockholm notes that the city code forbade prostitutes to wait for their clients at street corners or under street lights (Lennartsson 2001). They had to remain in constant motion. As a result women who were not prostitutes had to monitor their behavior in the cityscape. How should they act so as not to be accosted by men or make the police suspicious? People became very observant of styles of waiting. The same kind of self-monitoring is observable at a railway station. What do you do with yourself when you are just standing there, waiting? Some people become self-conscious, feeling awkward and under observation. Today there are technologies of monitoring that may enhance the selfconscious scrutiny of performance. Station signs tell travelers to report “anything suspicious,” and surveillance cameras scan the crowds, some of them programmed to identify “any deviant behavior,” that is, breaking what is accepted as normal waiting manners. How does one avoid becoming a suspect? What does behaving normal mean? One of the most common situations confronting people with such questions is when standing in line, waiting more or less patiently for one’s turn.

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QUEUING CULTURES

“When a lot of people start to gather a so called ‘queue’ should be formed,” a Swedish railway handbook from the mid-nineteenth century states. In the crowded railway stations new customs for waiting, claiming space, and keeping one’s distance emerged. The newfangled French term queue was imported into English and Swedish. Queuing, or waiting in line to be served according to order of arrival, is one of the most obvious cases of waiting all over the world.20 Since queues always have the potential of leading to conflict, given the imbalance between demand and supply, rules governing them mirror basic cultural assumptions regarding time and order. For how long are people prepared to wait and under what circumstances? Queues also constitute situations that can attract attention. They are a favorite topic of storytelling and lead to opinions and discussions almost everywhere.21 Why? Probably because queuing is about saving or losing precious time. Moreover, they require people to cope with the emotions that standing in line evokes, among them boredom when the queue is very slow, and injustice when order is threatened. Enjoyment of queuing seems to be rare. There are different ways of amusing oneself and turning dull waiting into something else.22 Consider the fantasy in Woody Allen’s 1979 film Annie Hall. His and Diane Keaton’s characters, Alvy and Annie, are standing in the line at a cinema to watch a documentary about Nazi terror. The queue seems to be immobile, and behind them a man is loudly declaiming pretentious opinions to his girlfriend about the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Alvy, annoyed, steps out of the screen and brings McLuhan in, who promptly tells the pompous man “you know nothing of my work.” Alvy then turns to the audience and asks: “Don’t you wish life were like that?” Etiquette and Aesthetic Charm Is there some kind of queue here, a girl asked with a confused smile when she and a friend arrived at the counter of a Swedish McDonald’s restaurant.

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She had reason to ask, as a number of people were standing there, waiting to be served, but not in an apparent line. For Swedish circumstances this was an unusual demonstration of non-order, and there was uncertainty as to whose turn it was. With her loud question the girl helped to organize everybody into a little line. That was how it ought to be!23 How are orderly queues sociologically possible, Barry Schwartz (1975: 107) asked in his analysis of norms and behaviors in crowded waiting areas. One of his conclusions was that the well-disciplined line, irrespective of its practical value, possesses an aesthetic charm that may suffice to justify its existence. But queue aesthetics of course show cultural variations. The beauty of people standing in line might not be the observer’s first thought when considering queues, but it was on our mind when we started to observe waiting behavior in different contexts. On one Sunday morning in April tourists waiting to buy entrance tickets outside the Tower of London had formed three long, completely straight queues. Very, very slowly people moved forward, two or three persons abreast. It was an impressive still-life procession. We focused on two parents with small children at the moment when they joined the end of the line, fifty meters from the ticket office. One hour later it was their turn. During the entire time the family members had obviously been in a good mood. They and the people around them, well-trained queuers, had endured the long wait and slow ticket operation patiently. Without irritation, complaints, head-shaking, or eyes rolled to heaven. Nobody stepped forward to speed up the intricate ticket transactions ahead. Rather, people looked about them cheerfully, chatted, and balanced on their feet as if they felt they were in the right place, exactly where they had expected to be, before being let into the Tower. The children played quietly a short distance from their parents. The father in the observed family went away to buy a soft drink, and when he returned to his group, they had hardly moved at all. This queue was “aesthetically charming” because it communicated the cultural competence of tourists from all over the world to form a perfect line. They were skillfully practicing, in silent agreement, the basic principle

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of “first come, first served.” This principle constitutes (in many contemporary Western societies, at least) the normative foundation for most forms of queuing. Another tourist queue we observed, to the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican in Rome one weekend in October, was much longer than the one in London, and this one moved a little more irregularly. Already in the morning it stretched for more than five hundred meters along the wall by Via Porcari, filling up the pavement with four, five, or six people standing together, though not necessarily in company. This queue looked messier than its English counterpart. In some sections people stood very close to one another, in others there were large gaps. People faced in every direction, and they moved freely—sitting down on the pavement, standing with arms folded, leaning against the wall, reading maps or guidebooks, selecting supplies from their bags or knapsacks, and composing small groups of chatterers. It seemed as if the wall on one side and the busy street on the other were all that kept these tourists in order and channeled them into a line. This queue was not as disciplined and “aesthetically charming” as the one in London had been. Every queue, wherever it is occurring, is a special social occasion with its own characteristics regarding waiting time and social order. Some rules, however, seem to be more widely accepted than others.

A Normative Territory As a general rule, whenever services are involved, we feel that people should queue up in order of arrival. This reflects the basic equalitarianism of our culture. . . . The rich and poor alike are accorded equal opportunity to buy and be waited upon in the order of arrival.

This basic rule was formulated by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1959: 157). Whether people are camping out overnight for tickets to a rock concert or waiting to get their car washed, they should be treated in the same way as all others. No one shall have the right to cut in; being beautiful, wealthy, or well-connected should mean nothing once you are standing in line.

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Images of the bad old times often include situations where power and privileges gave certain people the right to jump a queue. An old farmhand remembered waiting at the local store, where it was taken for granted that the storekeeper would attend to people according to rank rather than moment of arrival. Hall’s view generalizes several modern Western ideals, but although ideas of fairness often are strongly linked to queue cultures, reality is more complicated than would be indicated by notions of “basic equalitarianism.” Queuing is a normative territory, full of unwritten rules and regulations that an outsider may have difficulty understanding. A contributor to an American blog writes how he has been observing the etiquette of keeping one’s distance from the person in front: Stand too close, and, as one unlucky girl found, you get a faceful of hair as your neighbor executes an essential, head-flailing grooming maneuver. Leave too much of a gap, and you’ll incur the wrath of those behind you, despite the fact that the gap has no bearing on their place in the queue whatsoever. “Excuse me,” hissed one girl, as she saw a gap a little way ahead widen alarmingly; the offender immediately snapped out of her daydream and moved forward a few paces. No reply was necessary; she knew that she just had to keep her wits about her, and not make the same mistake again.24

The fact that queues mainly consist of face-to-back relations led Barry Schwartz (1975: 180ff.) to reflect on the symbolic properties of the back. To be compelled to bear witness to the back portion of another’s body, he writes, has long been a source of subordination and debasement in Western society. The practice of “turning one’s back on another” is generally considered to be a form of ritual rejection. Lining up in close proximity to other persons is therefore a symbolic contamination. When Schwartz starts to talk of his own experience of staring at backs that “are likely to be rumpled, stained, or sweaty,” a note of personal irritation over what he sees as a lack of aesthetics creeps into his text. Maybe it is “the norm of inattention” that makes back watching a minor problem for most queuers. This protective rule causes some people

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purposely to avoid contact with one another and maintain a respectful distance. Members of a queue may appear totally unmindful of one another— which, of course, they seldom are. This skill of inattention was developed as city people learned to handle anonymous crowds. It is, moreover, an extremely attentive inattention, since one has constantly to check the behavior of other queuers. What happens to inattention when one of the basic rules is suddenly broken?

Queue Jumping “I learned to cut to the front of lines with an extraterritorial smile,” says the Pakistani narrator in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007: 65). He mentions this competence as one of the essential methods he used in his endeavor to become, or at least behave as, a real American. He had observed how some people conducted themselves in New York City queues and drawn the conclusion that they had incorporated certain techniques of queue jumping. This is, however, a major breach of etiquette. More than one hundred years ago Charles H. Cooley (1902: 281) made a sharp observation about “edging the line”: Suppose one has to stand in line at the post office, with a crowd of other people, waiting to get his mail. There are delay and discomfort to be borne; but these he will take with composure because he sees that they are part of the necessary condition of the situation, which all must submit to alike. Suppose, however, that while patiently waiting his turn he notices someone else, who has come in later, edging into the line ahead of him. Then he certainly will be angry. The delay threatened is only a matter of a few seconds; but here is a question of justice, a case for indignation, a chance for anger to come forth.

Eighty years after Cooley made his statement the social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1986) and his colleagues conducted a scientific experiment to investigate what happens when someone breaks this rule. They wanted to test the idea whether people might refrain from breaking the rule not only

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because they were afraid of how others would react but also because they felt it was wrong to do so. The experiment was conducted in 129 waiting lines at different locations in New York, including Grand Central Station. One of the research associates calmly approached a line of people waiting and said in a neutral tone: “Excuse me; I’d like to get in here.” Before any responses could be made, the intruder injected him/herself into the line and faced forward. If the experimental intruder was explicitly advised to leave the line, he or she did so. Otherwise the intruder remained in the line for one minute before departing. The associates felt badly about the task of breaching the social norm. Several of them dragged their feet as they approached the line, felt nausea, paced nervously near the target area, and regretted their involvement in the experiment. And how did people in the line react to the queue jumping? Physical action against the intruder (laying hands on him or her, tugging at the sleeve, tapping the shoulder) was very rare. Verbal and nonverbal objections, from the polite to the hostile (dirty looks, hostile stares, gestures), occurred more often. Most objections came from those standing just behind the point of intrusion, because they were felt to have a special obligation to deal with the situation. If the queuer right behind the intruder did not protest, it was less likely that anyone else would do so. In more than half of the lines no one objected to the intruder at all. Why? One explanation is, as Barry Schwartz (1975: 96) also pointed out, a general reluctance to enter into a public confrontation with strangers, given the risk of shame and embarrassment. Moreover, confrontation might disrupt an otherwise orderly social scene, and that would threaten the norm of the queue itself. A special kind of queue jumping is found in VIP shortcuts, as in high-class restaurants and popular nightclubs, where the doormen let in celebrities and other VIPs before they let in others.25 A classic example is the well-known Studio 54 in Manhattan, where the owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, are said to have invented a new form of queue method in the 1970s to

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increase the club’s attractions. Instead of having people stand in orderly lines, they let the doorkeepers pick guests out of the crowd, which was kept behind a cord. These doorkeepers pointed at people they thought were sufficiently beautiful, rich, or famous to honor the club with their presence. Today this principle is found all over the world, resulting in frustrated scuffles and angry reactions.26

Nobody Wants to Be a Sucker—and Other National Stereotypes There was a wrestling match at the ticket window instead of a queue, because everyone wanted to be first; and as most people were carrying chickens or children or other bulky items, the result was a free-for-all out of which feathers and toys and dislodged hats kept flying. And from time to time some dizzy fellow with ripped clothes would burst out of the mêlée, triumphantly waving a little scrap of paper: his ticket. Rashid, taking a deep breath, dived into the scrum.

Salman Rushdie’s vivid account (1990: 32) of the chaotic waiting for bus tickets in India is paralleled by many complaints from Western travelers, who are irritated by the lack of queue culture in other parts of the world. In discussions about queuing, surprisingly many grand ideas and moral stands about national mentalities surface. Why is it that some examples of conflicts about queuing are used to construct national stereotypes? Here, for example, is a strong reaction from an American visiting Poland: The only negative to the trip (besides the fact [that] it is a 9-hour flight to get there) was how incredibly rude the Poles were about lines. I have never seen such obvious disrespect for other people when it came to cutting in lines, even when it meant that the person who cut would have to stand in front of you in line for the next 15 minutes. In the United States, people will cut in lines in cars, but usually not when on foot, because of the discomfort of having people you just mistreated standing next to you. A car provides insulation from the social stigma. In Poland, no such distinction appears to be made.27

Several individuals challenged this generalization, and one of them pointed out that

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In places where people do cut lines, nobody wants to be a sucker. And in places where everybody respects the line, the social stigma is much higher. My experience suggests that people from cutting or non-cutting in lines places adjust quite fast to a new equilibrium when they travel.

A recurrent statement in this context is that the English, especially, are famous for strictly democratic queuing behavior. According to this typecasting, they do not see a queue as an inevitable and irritating consequence of demand’s outstripping supply. Instead we almost enjoy the prospect of standing in one, to the point where, if we turn a corner and see one, we might utter the phrase “oh god, look at the queue” with a mixture of recognition and surprise, coupled with a sliver of relish—even excitement.28

Even the Swedes are said to be a queue-loving people. A refugee from Iran living in Sweden is baffled by what he sees as a Swedish love of order and people silently queuing everywhere. “In my country, Iran, it is different. There queues are more like untidy hair.”29 Where does the myth of the English as virtuoso queuers come from, Joe Moran asked. He tells us (Moran 2007: 61) that in 1837 Thomas Carlyle referred to the new habit of queuing for service. But he praised not the English, but the French, for their talent for spontaneously standing in line. In 1944, Moran continues, George Orwell pictured an imaginary foreign observer being struck by the orderly behavior of English crowds and their willingness to form queues, an idea that developed with the shortages and rationings during World War II. Discussions about national differences in queuing manners clearly show how culturally charged this everyday activity is. Waiting is something everyone has to learn, train, and adjust to in different situations. Some people become sensitive to differences, both national and class-related, in carrying out the principle of “first come, first served.” One man for example tells that he loves “the Cuban way,” because in that country, he asserts, you do not have to stand in line at bus stops.

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When you arrive you just say “El ultimo?” and the last in the line raises his hand. Then, when the bus arrives—after two hours—you just go behind that person.30

If queues attract generalizations about national character and values they can also easily become political symbols.31 Behind the Iron Curtain after World War II, long queues came to be metaphorically linked to the inefficiencies of command economies (Moran 2007: 64). Russian shops are, for example, said to have had an infamous three-queue system that required customers to line up first to view goods, a second time to pay for them, and finally yet a third time to obtain them. Joe Moran (2004: 220) tells the story of the queue culture in East Berlin, where waiting was a part of the fabric of daily life. As in other Eastern Bloc countries, it was common in the GDR for people to join the ends of queues without knowing what was at the front; in a nation of shortages a line of people was likely to have something useful at the end of it. The cumbersome state machinery also meant that waiting lists for consumer goods were extraordinarily long: ordinary citizens had to wait some twelve years for a car and thirteen for a telephone. These long periods of waiting produced a different attitude to time, in which the whole pace of social life was slower than in the West. Primitive technology, such as hand-operated barriers at level crossings, increased journey times; cars with two-stroke engines went slower; speed limits were lower; traffic lights even remained on red for longer.

It is also known that in East Germany the regime suggested that waiting was a practical lesson in Communism—describing a queue as a Wartekollektiv or a Wartegemeinschaft (a community for waiting). It was an attempt to fill queuing with a collective spirit—similar to the Chinese campaign before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, when the authorities tried to eradicate the capital’s usual queue-jumping convention. On the eleventh day of every month thousands of volunteers went out on the streets to persuade people to wait obediently in line and thus present a better image to visitors. The

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campaign was launched under the slogan “It’s civilized to queue; it’s glorious to be polite.”32 During the years of socialism in the countries of Eastern Europe, queuing for all kinds of goods remained an integral part of life throughout the regime. The anthropologist Kathy Burrell (2003) interviewed Polish men and women who remembered how they had learned to survive the food shortage by means of different techniques of queuing. The collected testimonies demonstrate that unpredictable conditions simply demand special, tailormade strategies. One Polish man, who emigrated to Britain in 1987, explained how he used to stand in line each Saturday for meat, and occasionally for cheese and butter. The queues were terrible. When my daughter was born I remember I used to go on Saturday morning to buy sausages and meat, we had coupons so people could buy, I don’t know, two and a half kilos of meat per month per person. I was like queuing from six o’clock in the morning on Saturdays ’til one o’clock or two o’clock to buy meat. Sometimes I queued for butter like I was going to work and I just stopped because there was a queue to buy butter.

While doing fieldwork in the 1970s in the southeast of Poland, Billy and Siv Ehn lived with a peasant-worker family and observed another way of handling queues (Ehn 1977). The family was planning to erect a new house and worked hard to acquire building materials. There were queues or long waiting times for almost every item they needed. You could not buy everything at the same building company. But this family mostly edged the lines by using a wide network of personal contacts among dealers and officials—or by bribing them with vodka and sausages from their farm. In Burrel’s study nobody mentioned such unorthodox methods. Instead, shortages necessitated being ready to purchase goods whenever and wherever they were available. People constantly looked in store windows to see what could be had and asked those standing in line what they were waiting for. One man confirmed that, “whenever something appeared in the shops people queued to buy whatever it was, even if they didn’t need it.”

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Rather than focusing only on the inconvenient and divisive nature of queuing, Burrel claims that the accounts also depict the queuing culture in Poland as a complex phenomenon that enabled extended social contacts. One man she interviewed, for example, recounted that he used his time queuing as an opportunity to discuss politics. Another man recalled: It was a huge social system, queuing societies and discussion clubs developed, and a beautiful system of reserving places in queues. You stood in one queue and said, sorry I’ll be back in ten minutes, and then go to another queue and reserve a place in that one, and then you come back. So it was a huge social life around these queues as well. Of course, a lot of fighting and arguments also, but it was a complex cultural structure.

Temporary Communities There are thus national variations regarding queue culture, many shaped by economic and political conditions or local etiquette. But it is also possible to find striking similarities in how temporary microclimates have evolved in queues, as in the following three examples from different parts of the world. In a study of people lining up for Australian football tickets the sociologist Leon Mann (1969) analyzed the queue as an embryonic social system with a set of norms for controlling conflict. Mann and his assistants interviewed more than two hundred people (probably mostly men) in the long queues outside the football stadium. Many of them faced disappointment because there were not enough tickets for all. As in any informal queue Mann observed that there were many signs of organizational control and orderly behavior. Of special interest were placekeeping privileges, sanctions against pushing in, and rights of temporary absence from the waiting line (Mann 1969: 353). Brief leaves of absence were allowed in the Australian football queues. But one had to validate one’s position and somebody else needed to hold the place. It was also possible to “stake a claim” by leaving some item of personal property such as a labeled box, a folding chair, a backpack, or a

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sleeping bag. Rules regulating time spent in and out of the line were the essential core of the queue culture. The study confirmed that one of the fundamental aspects of queuing is about time: how to spend your waiting time, how to control it, and how to react when somebody is stealing part of it from you by edging the line. Over the years the ticket queues developed as a kind of cherished tradition or ritual. People even enjoyed the queue as an adventure. In bad weather they might erect a shantytown of tents and caravans outside a stadium, making the scene resemble a refugee camp. Dedicated queuers turned their little patch of pavement into a home, complete with tent, sleeping bag, thermos, and reading matter. Some enthusiasts even moved out of their homes and took up formal residence in the queue. Thus outside the stadium something of a carnival atmosphere prevailed. The devotees sang, sipped warm drinks, played cards, and huddled together around the big charcoal braziers (Mann 1969: 342). In another part of the world, Nigeria during the acute petrol shortage in the 1970s, John A. Wiseman (1979) observed a somewhat similar pattern of behavior. Vehicle owners regularly had to spend lengthy periods of time in queues to obtain petrol. In the early days of the shortage the idea of forming orderly lines was absent, and total anarchy reigned at filling stations. But within a few weeks the formation of queues became the general rule. Lines rapidly developed as the focus of everyday activities. Petty traders sold drinks, food, cloth, and newspapers. Local beggars arrived. People gathered to see friends and acquaintances. Petrol stations became centers of entertainment. Wiseman was especially interested in how Nigeria’s system of ethnicity and stratification worked in this peculiar situation. In the competition for a scarce resource, it might have been expected that manipulation of ethnic categories would have been used, as well as social status in a stratification system. But this was not so. In fact, Wiseman observed that individual social status and ethnic particularity did not determine the queueing behavior of cars and motorbikes. Vehicle owners preferred the neutral role of queue participants to an ethnically or hierarchically defined role. Traditional stratification remained

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significant, but its importance was not transferred to the new situation. Wiseman concluded that petrol queuing at that time may have been the most egalitarian institution in Nigeria. A third type of waiting organization and coping with “passive time” was observed in the early 2000s in New York City by the anthropologist Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky (2004). She undertook a study of day labor among Latino and Eastern European male immigrants at an informal work site in Brooklyn, whose organization she called “marking the queue.” The men patiently stood or sat at certain street corners near the laundromat or along the cement base enclosing the nearby cemetery, leaning on fences, or just sitting on the pavement outside the corner bagel and deli shop. Day after day they waited for someone to pull up at the curb looking to hire a worker. The men passed the time talking, playing cards, smoking, or reading newspapers. Nothing in the scene revealed any queuing order among the waiting men. But when they heard the beeps or honks of a truck pulling up at the street, the men came to full attention. Conversations stopped. Heads looked up from newspapers. Those who had been sitting now stood. Bodies leaned forward and faces looked curious as they waited to hear a call from the driver. And instead of all rushing forward at the same time to expose themselves for the work hirers, the men approached the driver one by one or in small groups. This behavior demonstrated to Turnovsky that despite the fact that the men came from different parts of the world and did not even speak the same language, there existed beforehand a collective agreement about the order of priority. The studies of Mann, Wiseman, and Turnovsky treat different kinds of queues as social microsystems that have the function of managing order and justice during waiting times. The studies also illustrate the kinds of bonds that can be established in such situations. Generally people already have one important thing in common—they are all waiting for the same reason. But many other things can strengthen short-term relationships— not the least of them being envy of those who had the foresight to arrive earlier than others.

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The problem of the queue as a social system also interested Jean Paul Sartre (1960). In his classic theory of series he argued that many gatherings of people that are seen as groups should, rather, be analyzed as temporary series united by a common situation. For example, a bus queue is composed of individuals with different backgrounds and futures. They are joined together only by what they are doing in that moment—waiting for the bus in that same shelter. If the queuers begin to talk to each other about the weather or the timetable, they may constitute a series with a transitory identity—like the workers at the Brooklyn street corner. But only when something extraordinary occurs can a real social group, or a temporary community, emerge. A car crash nearby would create a common focus and make some queuers engage with the accident, while others, who continue to long to be somewhere else, would guard their position in the now more disorderly queue.

In and Out of Control In crucial situations queues may be transformed to more active communities when the persons standing in line experience collective emotions and common sufferings. In Poland, a country whose regime aimed, although unsuccessfully, to limit collective social autonomy, Kathy Burrel (2003) noticed that the queue offered an unregulated arena for open discussion. Lined up outside shops, queues created forms of sociality that demonstrated common values and solidarity. While not in itself overtly political, the act of queuing for food carried with it the potential for political dissent and engagement. Similarly, local protests, strikes, even revolts all over the world have been ignited in peasants waiting for grain, workers waiting for their wages, or citizens caught up in bureaucratic red tape. Queuing is a rich and intriguing way of doing nothing. It is also an extremely social activity, unlike more solitary waiting activities. In urban settings complete strangers succeed in arranging themselves in more or less straight lines. People spend time together, either in silence or chatting, depending on local or national cultural traditions. In this way queuing is also

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an educational activity, which has tacit rules and allows people to make covert observations of one another. Queues can produce surprises of different kinds. The frail community can break down suddenly when somebody ignores the social order and threatens to appropriate the time that others have invested in waiting. The social psychologist Roger Brown (1965: 716ff.) once told a story about a resort hotel where the guests were waiting in the lobby one evening for the restaurant to open and serve dinner. There was no queue; the guests were standing and sitting in no visible order, except that everyone—just as at the Cuban bus stop—knew who had arrived after themselves. Here, instead of a line, Brown suggested that there was an implicit social contract built on that knowledge. Guests who had been longer in the lobby were nearer the door than those who had arrived more recently. If each guest were to walk, not run, to the door once it opened, the probability was that she or he would be admitted at a time proportionate to the length of the wait. Whenever a recent arrival moved closer to the door, the people standing there, in apparently casual postures, proved surprisingly unwilling to step aside. Openings the recent arrival had seen just ahead closed as she or he approached. Eyes hardened, chins squared, and the interloper stayed put. When, exactly on the hour, the maitre d’hôtel moved to the diningroom door, drew it open, and turned to greet the first guest, he narrowly missed being trampled to death. EMOTIONAL CLIMATES Waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time consuming and incredibly expensive. (Advertising copy for FedEx)

As we have seen in our discussion of queuing, waiting generates feelings of different kinds, most of them negative. When we asked people what they think about waiting, a common answer was: “I just hate to wait! It’s so boring.” Why does such an apparently insignificant, but time-consuming, activity provoke such strong reactions? It would be just as possible to be indifferent

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to life’s in-between moments and uneventful intervals. But many people are in fact far from unaffected. In a study of what it is like to wait in a critical care waiting room, Debra A. Bournes and Gail J. Mitchell (2002) tried to catch “the essences of the experience of waiting.” They describe what they observed as focused, persistent, and diligent watchfulness, a feeling of grueling, unsure stillness, but also as calming comfort in the helpful company of others.33 Above all, the interviewees spoke about the mixed emotions they had while waiting. It’s horrendous—you’re almost suspended. It’s like you’re frightened and hopeful at the same time. It’s all those mixed up emotions—fear and uncertainty and worry and tension. You almost feel numb, and you get terribly tired because all this energy is being spent in worry and concern. . . . Waiting is as if somebody’s got hold of your heart, and they’re just kind of squeezing it, you know. (Bournes and Mitchell 2002: 62)

In looking at the emotional aspects of waiting—emotions such as boredom, irritation, and nervousness, as well as hope and longing—we are more interested in their cultural and historical variations than in their psychological nature. Here, too, time management is a main concern, especially regarding time as it is perceived and felt through the body. How does the corporeal stillness of waiting conceal a more vivid emotional life in relation to enduring passing time?

Boredom: Being Stuck in the Present Waiting in Western societies is often seen as dominated by modern forms of boredom, a diffuse emotional mood that may color a whole situation and channel energies in different ways (see Spacks 1995). But what does it mean to be bored? As the philosopher William James once observed, boredom results from being attentive to the passage of time.34 In the confrontation with nothing, where time is not filled with anything that can occupy our attention, human beings experience time as just that—time. The absence of variation creates a thick blanket of sameness that covers meaning and

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suffocates interest. Time is then experienced as an oppressive void. This kind of time must be killed before it kills. One strategy is to search for change and novelty. Boredom and waiting used to be linked, as if they were two facets of the same phenomenon. One does not know what to do, nothing is going on, everything is as usual, and one is a prisoner of one’s habits. Existence is ruled by drudgery, monotony, and tedium. Being fed-up and stuck in the present creates feelings of emptiness and restlessness. All you can do is yawn ostentatiously.35 In an essay about people’s tendency in Western countries, especially the United States, to be dependent on routines of safety and security, Dennis Brisset and Robert P. Snow (1993) link boredom to the absence of adventure in daily life. Americans today, they say, have fewer chances to be stimulated by engaging with the future implications of their current conduct. They believe that an appreciation of uncertainty is the essence of whatever boredom is not. Modern society, according to them, provides little in the way of nurturing nonboring experience. Although waiting appears to be a matter of not doing anything at all, some thinkers suggest that it is something one can do either poorly or well. The philosopher Michael L. Raposa (1999: 169) has observed that in contemporary cultures, organized around fast food, sound bites, and virtually immediate access to information, waiting can be perceived as a sign of weakness. Boredom, then, becomes “a failure of imagination,” a situation where one does not take advantage of the chance to daydream about being somewhere or someone else. Instead of using the monotony of waiting time as an essential precondition for the imagination’s proper exercise, people allow it to close their mind.36 In Western society, the sociologist Peter Conrad (1999: 132) suggests, people demand stimulation from certain events and feel bored when those events fall short of their expectations. Repetition, lack of interaction, and minimal variation are among the reasons for such misaligned expectations. When Conrad lived in Indonesia he often had to wait for long stretches at

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the bank or in government offices. Whereas he and other Americans tended to get bored and impatient with the waiting, he observed that local Indonesians saw it either as something to be expected or as an opportunity to play, socialize, or daydream.37 Like many other scholars the anthropologist Yasmine Mushharbash (2007) sees the Western version of boredom to be very much attached to modernity and secularization.38 Using ethnographic data from the Australian aboriginal Warlpiri in the settlement of Yuendumu, she argues that boredom is a culturally constituted problem of meaning. She tried to avoid treating this phenomenon as an emotional state. How do we know what people are experiencing when we think that they are bored? Unless verbalized, the feelings can only be inferred from bodily expression, as when people yawn or sigh. At Yuendumu the boredom is mostly created by a lack of social interaction and engagement. Nothing is happening, the frustrated Warlpiri exclaim. They experience the flows of time as endless repetition. The present becomes oppressive, like a cage where the same thing keeps going on. To kill this time, Musharbash has observed, some Warlpiri engage in destructive practices, such as drugs, promiscuity, and violence. They also search spatial getaways by cruising in their cars to look for action. But this is not the whole story of boredom among Warlpiri. In fact they themselves labeled only a few events as boring. Musharbash noted that the Warlpiri, like the people Kapus´in´ski observed in Ghana, showed an ability to be fully in the here and now. Living in the present seemed to be a crucial social trait. She quotes the anthropologist Sylvie Poirier (2005: 59), who wrote about the Aboriginals’ “infinite patience.” On one occasion, when the car broke down during a trip, [f]ar from being concerned or in a hurry to repair it, the friends with whom I was traveling took it as an opportunity to invest themselves in the immediate place where the event occurred. Some wandered about looking for animal tracks or edible plants, while others sat around or gathered firewood. In other words, they established camp. It was as if

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the breakdown was an occasion to engage themselves with the place, an opportunity to feel the place and the moment and see what would happen in that space, that time, that moment.

In their waiting these Aboriginals did not show the signs of weakness that Michael Raposa had observed. In this case boredom was not “a failure of imagination” but instead an occasion for the proper exercise of imagination.

Irritation: Road Rage Although many people have learned patience and know how to endure long waiting times, situations often arise where this competence is replaced by irritation or even anger. Those feelings can start as a vague sensation in search of an object, perhaps the obnoxious person next in line, an arrogant official, or a troublesome gadget (Ngai 2005: 195ff.). A special arena for emotional waiting and irritated reactions is that of cars and traffic. What is “the structure of feeling,” to borrow a term from Raymond Williams (1977: 132ff.), in living fender to fender, getting stuck in traffic jams on the highway, interacting with others by means of a machine like the car and the infrastructures of roads, parking lots, and gas stations? What does driving do to waiting, and how have restlessness and frustration molded traffic behavior? The United States seems a good place to start when looking at such processes; it was here, much earlier than in Europe, that the first car society evolved.39 Already in 1929 the French author Paul Morand exclaimed, “America is the fastest country in the world,” and he was thinking of the new automobility. That same year saw the publication of the pioneer ethnography of everyday Middle America, Middletown, which includes the description of a schoolteacher asking her pupils whether they can think of a temptation of today that Jesus had not known. “Speed!” one of the boys answered enthusiastically (Lynd 1929: 258). The car had radically changed life in Middletown, as elsewhere in the United States, introducing new ideas of

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speed and flow. In 1930 Ford Motor Company had marketed a new model: “It is a car for speed and freedom, a car for independent, level-headed youth.” This promised new intoxication; the car was about individual movement—being auto-mobile (Hillman 1991: 177). One of the main functions of the car was to help people avoid being trapped while waiting for trains or buses. The aim was to break out of the collective. Moreover, the car was empowering and changed perceptions of time and space. As the Russian car enthusiast Ilya Ehrenburg (1929: 129) put it, “The heart is just a poetic relic that in a human being contains two standard gauges: one indicates miles, the other minutes.” Americans started to measure driving distances in minutes and hours. How far could one get in an hour or a day? This focus on freedom and mobility not only produced the exhilaration born of speed but also new frustrations, as new impediments blocked the flow of automobiles and led to new forms of waiting caused by interminable red lights, jungles of irritating stop signs, slow drivers, and opportunists trying to jump the queue in a freeway jam. Moreover, people now had to line up for gas and jockey for empty parking spaces. People developed all kinds of driving tactics to circumvent waiting and slow traffic. In his ethnography of driving in Los Angeles, the sociologist Jack Katz (1999) discussed the kinds of irritations that take place in a driving culture and how they are expressed. He also noted how frustrations were intensified by the private shield of the car interior. Drivers who succumbed to road rage made rude signs, shouted their annoyance, and vented their anger. The cult of acceleration further intensified the claustrophobia and powerlessness of being stuck in traffic. People felt totally immobilized, but this kind of immobilization was different from that of waiting for a train, letter, or husband.

Nervousness: Travel Fever “I’m traveling in some vehicle / I’m sitting in some café . . . I’m porous with travel fever,” sings Joni Mitchell in Hejira. But what kind of emotional fever is that? The equivalent Swedish term resfeber, which came out of nineteenth-century mass travel, tried to capture the mood of nervous

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travelers experiencing both anxiety and anticipation. It is a specific structure of feeling that we think many people have—to a greater or lesser degree— when traveling. In this emotional mix, waiting and longing combine with fear and fascination of the unknown. Travel fever colors the perceptions, producing minds that cannot wait for the body to start moving. In their imagination people have already started traveling faster than their legs could carry them. One can observe travel fever in many places—train stations, airports, and traffic jams—and while people walk, wait, and drive. The state of travel fever combines motion, emotion, and materiality. Travelers try to control their anxiety by pacing the floor, shifting their balance, or seeking temporary security on a bench in a corner. There is constant fidgeting with luggage, passports, or exact change. Small objects become magically important and reassuring because of their stubborn materiality in this world of flux and flow. In a footloose state people may hold on to such comforting objects as handbags or slips of paper with an address. Every minute they make a renewed search for the ticket in the breast pocket. One can observe constant sensual interaction with the surrounding world, as the traveler’s eyes scan flashing notice boards and the ears try to decipher loudspeaker messages. There are also bodily sensations that shape the situation—aching muscles from having dragged too much luggage, and nervous limbs. A split develops between body and mind, because in their thoughts travelers may already be at their destination or worrying about whether they locked the door back home. With the beginning of mass travel the emotional state of “travel fever” was seen as a new modern condition of nervousness, the result of new pressures, overstimulation, and anxieties. “American nervousness is the product of American civilization,” wrote the physician George M. Beard in his 1881 book on nervous ailments. Civilization itself is not enough to produce this modern problem, he stated, and added five more factors: “steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women” (see Lutz 1991: 4).

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Railway station architects, travel organizers, and doctors discussed travel nervousness and its remedies. New ailments such as agoraphobia and claustrophobia came to be linked to exposure to vast public spaces like train stations and to confinement in cramped railcars. Agoraphobia was thought to be caused by fears of open spaces, anonymous masses, and observation from passing strangers. Many travelers found it taxing to stand passively waiting because they felt under constant observation. The “dizziness of place” (Vidler 2001: 29ff.) carried an emotion of being both footloose and exposed. Agoraphobia, however, also has a flip side in the tensions between the desire to be seen and the anxiety about not living up to the silent judgment of others. Controlling travel fever involves cultural skills that are not learned through manuals or travel guides but only by observing others. Patterns of travel and waiting behavior have slowly been institutionalized and ritualized into actions and ideas that are now taken for granted. Travel fever is of course linked to longing—longing for the train or airplane to leave, for reaching one’s destination, and for getting in touch with what is waiting there. Travelers may also hope intensely that there will be no delays and that the journey will be safe. Hope and longing is experienced and expressed in multifaceted ways, shifting between wishes, fatalism, and resignation.

Hope and Longing: The Uncertain Future Summer after summer Lin Kong leaves the hospital and returns on annual leave to his home village and asks his wife for a divorce. Obediently she says yes, but when they arrive at the court she has changed her mind. Her relatives and the judge also reject Lin’s wish, and he must return to Manna and tell her that they must wait yet another year before being able to try again. In spite of her misery Manna agrees, and the two lovers continue to see each other without engaging in erotic contact. One day Manna, tired of waiting, borrows a room in the city to have an opportunity to see Lin in private. In fact she desires to make love to him,

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but when she tells him about the room, he does not want to go there with her. The risk of public humiliation is too great. Both their lives would be ruined if it became known that they have an intimate relationship. They would be stripped of their rank, transferred to faraway parts of the country, and separated for good. Lin and Manna endured the eighteen years of waiting in a state of hope and longing. They were able to refrain from the happiness of the present by anticipating a possible, but not guaranteed, future together. In general, hope is the kind of waiting that is characterized by uncertainty. One may long for something but not know whether it will happen. There is nothing to do but have faith and hope for the best. Even ordinary waiting might be in vain— the bus may never arrive, a favorite sports team may lose every game, a pregnancy may result in a miscarriage. In a study of white South African men and women during the final period of apartheid the social anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano (1985: 42ff.) observed that his subjects were captured in “a structure of waiting,” a pattern of emotions and attitudes that governed society at large. Their life was ruled by an indefinite hope for a solution that they could not describe even to themselves. They were afraid of what was going to happen, and that fear intensified their indefinable state of being. They fled into a world of wishes, longing, and dreams. In their waiting they often glanced backward, seeking for security in the experience of the past and taking consolation in history. Among these South Africans hope was a fatalistic approach that allowed people to take refuge in the company of each other, from where they passively looked at ongoing life. The present became secondary to the future. It was held in expectation, filled with suspense. But hope and longing may also be common strategies to avoid the problems of the here and now in everyday life. “Next vacation will give our marriage another chance; my job is boring but soon the weekend will come; we lost this game, but there will be a new one next week.” Postponing unpleasant tasks and putting them in quarantine turns life into waiting. When Lin visited his wife and daughter in the village he spent most of the

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time postponing the discussion about his next divorce application. “Waiting for the right moment” may be an effective way of getting stuck. The intertwining of hope and waiting is sometimes transformed into a lifestyle. In Sweden people who have been ill for a long time may feel that they have entered a no-man’s-land. Since they have not been able to work they may now be waiting for a change—maybe their early retirement pension, an offer for work training, a phone call from the employment office, or a letter from the social security office. Slowly but steadily waiting takes over their life, as it does for asylum-seeking refugees, and from that position emerges what Swedish authorities have called a “waiting culture.” In this culture refugees and people on the sick list drift into resignation, which for some turns into despair. The ultimate case is when all hope is gone. One drug-addicted woman infected by HIV described her state as follows: I have no children and no future. Maybe I will live for some years more, but what shall I do? We are only sitting here in our filthy shack and getting older and uglier. We are doing absolutely nothing and when something is happening it has to do with drugs. I don’t know. . . My dream is to work with animals. But someone like me never gets a job. So I have nothing to do but wait for death.40

The polar opposite to such hopeless resignation is when existence is governed by the longing for something wonderful that promises personal fulfillment, as, for example, when expecting a baby. But pregnancy can also involve a more complex case of emotional waiting and “doing nothing.” An Expectant Mood: Pregnancy Being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what once had been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. (Lahiri 2003: 49)

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Ashima is one of the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, an Indian housewife living just outside Boston who is trying to adjust to her new homeland. She has just gone through her first pregnancy, but the experience lingers. Pregnancy has in many ways become the dramatic archetype of being “in waiting” and often the idea of pregnancy is used as a metaphor in many ways—from references to being pregnant with ideas to the description of silence as “pregnant.” All over the world pregnancy is an organized wait that is directed by cultural rules, practices, and ideas. It is not a typical “non-event”; the nine months are, on the contrary, full of symbolic elaborations. The months illustrate dimensions of waiting related to time awareness, human control of the course of events, and varying modes of emotionality. “I hate to wait,” a Swedish woman writes in her blog. She enumerates several examples of what she calls “small waits.” To wait for the bus mornings and evenings is a dull experience for her, while waiting for the plumbers to come and fix the leak in the bathroom is half dull. But then there is the waiting with a capital W: The greatest waiting at the moment is for our daughter (or son). That’s an OK, but a little nervous waiting. Now it’s only one month left, give or take some days. Then she will arrive. Right now it feels as if she won’t come fast enough. At the same time it feels as if she might as well stay where she is for a while. I’m both ready and not. At the same time. That is the main waiting for the moment. Waiting for Felicia. A good waiting.41

For many expecting parents pregnancy is both a wonder and the most important wait of their lives. Many experiences and feelings are molding this time. Pregnancy is an organized and dramatized countdown, penetrated by scientific advice and market forces. Biological and cultural processes are intertwined in a complicated way that differs according to local context. Pregnancy is never an unmarked category; in every society it is the occasion for special attention and treatment, and it takes forms that vary widely. Childbirth, Clara Hanson (2004: 175) concludes in her book about the

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cultural history of pregnancy, is an extremely diverse, and classspecific, experience.42 In the contemporary Western world, pregnancy is to a large extent object for medicine, psychology, literature, and professional guidance, as well as for commercial interests.43 A pregnant woman seeks counseling from her obstetrician, and routine visits to the clinic give her waiting period structure and rhythm. Highlights in this schedule include moments when she hears her baby’s heartbeat, feels the baby move, and sees the first picture of the baby from the ultrasound machine. Eagerly she awaits the due date her physician has set. She will also compare her experiences with that of others, as related by friends, books, and magazines. Already in the 1990s the Internet became an important arena; many blogs outline this special kind of emotionally charged waiting in stories, photographs, and video clips. One woman, who also showed pictures of baby clothes that she had crocheted, wrote: Hey everyone. I’m pregnant with our second child—eight months along! I am very excited and have crocheted all sorts of baby wear, such as beanies, booties, jackets, blankets and even a Victorian Cape (well, some are half finished). Somewhere along the way, I lost enthusiasm and need to get it back to finish my projects. The baby will be here in six weeks! I’m finding I’m spending too much time cleaning and organizing my home in preparation. In the meantime, I count the weeks in anticipation of the birth. I’m feeling huge and uncomfortable and can’t even turn over in bed. I’m counting the days . . .44

Pregnancy is narrated in many different ways. It can be described as a wonderful idyll, an adventure, or long suffering. The storytelling creates a consensus among those who recognize themselves in the description, while others may feel left out. There is strong normative pressure on how this kind of waiting should be experienced, and on how one ought to behave. There is also a marked oscillation between private and public. The conspicuously growing stomach, a “waiting room” for the baby, is a private concern that nowadays becomes a public matter—commented on, patted, and admired. 45

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As a result the woman’s nine-month-period of waiting is ritually dramatized as a process of liminality by a series of events in which she transforms herself into a mother. The waiting is so to say staged by new habits and rules of conduct that are supposed to control the biological process. Old routines drop away and new ones develop as pregnant women struggle to find a way of doing something as simple as tying their shoelaces, and as complex as balancing their increasing needs for emotional support with the demands of marriage and career (Davis-Floyd 1992: 24). All the advice and admonitions can introduce anxiety and insecurity into “the happy waiting.” Even the feelings and fantasies of the future parents are often made public, as the parents claim their child in advance by deciding on a name, buying or making things that they will need, and rearranging their home. While looking at baby carriages they may be fantasizing about themselves as parents but also rehearsing their parental roles. Maternity clothes have both a practical and a symbolic function. Trying to imagine the future makes people feel more in command of their situation. By inventing new routines and daydreaming about the baby the woman takes charge of the waiting time and molds it in her own manner. The intersection of the passivity of “just having to wait” and the activity of making practical preparations causes the nine months to stand out from the rest of life. Some women talk of their pregnancy as a life stage when their experience of time entirely changed character; they passed into a more inwardturned, contemplative mood, which in some ways distanced them from the expectations of other people. They were absorbed by waiting.

Ambivalent States of Mind From an emotional perspective, waiting conceals something more dramatic than just doing nothing. It is something one has to learn and train to master in the right way. But even after that has been accomplished, waiting may evoke many different reactions. One can feel trapped in enforced idleness, frustrated by subordination and powerlessness, even paralyzed. One can be annoyed at the slow passing of time, when nothing seems to be happening

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and time is being wasted. One may also be reminded of unpleasant memories, as this female student in our informal survey wrote: It’s tough to wait. I can’t stand it, I have no patience. To wait for the train makes me anxious. I can’t just “be,” I always have to do something. I have friends who say that they like to wait, because then they have time to think and look around. But I’m not such a person, I just get restless. Maybe I dislike waiting so much because I always had to wait for my mom when I was a kid. When she should pick me up at school she was at least half an hour late every time and I was constantly worried.

Waiting is thus often thought of as a negative experience—boring, irritating, and anxiety-ridden dead time. But sometimes it is linked to more positive feelings and conditions such as hope, longing, and expectation. This is an important theme in much popular culture, for example in the many songs about bittersweet yearning for love.46 One further benefit of waiting is when it is experienced as a relief, a moment of rest from one’s busy life, and an opportunity to clear one’s mind. In a temporary liberation from time-is-money economics, waiting may become a meditative space and lead to unexpected insights (Schweizer 2008: 2). In this kind of waiting people are freed from their usual duties, since they are occupied with waiting and cannot be expected to do anything else. Business-class airport lounges are said to be a second home to frequent flyers and busy people who otherwise do not have time to slow down. In those breathing spaces they have the opportunity to indulge in doing nothing (Schwartz 1975: 191). Some of the students in our inquiry described the relief: Sometimes it is nice to wait, you get a moment to be by yourself and think, or just to breathe and look forward to something good. Right now I am waiting for the summer, I’m longing so much that I’m almost dying from it. But before summer I’m going abroad and it will be super with all preparations for the travel. It’s all right with me to spend hours at the airport, since I am so full of expectations.

One of the reasons so many feelings are generated by waiting may be that people have time to consider the question of control over their life. The

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emotionality of this rather inconspicuous activity points toward an often hidden power dimension: how can waiting be used to secure advantages or create subordination?

POWER GAMES

Lin Kong and Manna Wu were forced to hide their love. Family obligations, and even more so the constant monitoring gaze of the Communist Party, ruled their lives. While waiting for the next advancement in their careers they had to watch themselves. One false move or piece of gossip could block their future. Here the relationship between waiting and power is very obvious. Vincent Crapanzano (1985: 45) asserts that waiting produces feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and vulnerability—infantile feelings—and all the rage that these feelings evoke. We seek release from these feelings, from the tension and suspense of waiting, from the anxiety of contingency, in many, often magical ways. We tell stories. We lose ourselves in the swirl of everyday activity. We pretend to ourselves that we are indifferent to the object of waiting. We invent our own magic, personal taboos, and idiosyncratic rituals.

Although the literal act of waiting might seem to imply a form of physical stability, that stability is frequently experienced as a collapse into the powerlessness of pure object status, Laura E. Tanner (2002: 121) writes. In many situations a person cannot simply walk away from her waiting position because she is symbolically immobilized. She feels trapped and, with little control over time and activity, temporally suspended and temporarily unproductive.

Keeping Others on the Tenterhooks The power to make other people wait, and the subordination of having to wait, are two major aspects of all social relations. Having to wait for some-

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body means that your time and social worth is less valuable than the time and worth of the other person. The rich and privileged are seldom humiliated as badly as were the two Swedish state officials whom Saddam Hussein kept on tenterhooks in Bagdad in the early 1980s. In most cases the wealthy enjoy immunity from such treatment, since they have the resources to demand VIP privileges. Often the only way the poor can avoid waiting is by agreeing to settle for no service at all. To keep someone waiting is a simple and effective demonstration of superiority, and this power play has its own stage design. Delegations, applicants for assistance, clients, and lodgers of complaints are reminded of their own insignificance at the forecourt of the palace, or in the corridors of bureaucracy. Simply having to wait for a door to be opened brings with it the understanding of a power relation. The small red, yellow, and green lights at some offices, which imitate traffic lights and communicate “occupied,” “wait,” and “enter,” are likewise power symbols. In such places increasingly irritated subjects often form temporary communities. They have been scraping their feet, giggling nervously, adjusting their clothes, composing their features, and evaluating their possibilities. On the other side of the closed door the powerful man or woman is wondering if the subjects are sufficiently softened up. Is it time to ask the servant or secretary to open the door? Please, you may enter now. Such power games surface when people are placed in a situation where the rules for the order of priority are ambiguous or unintelligible; a good example of this kind of situation was the confusion at the resort hotel before the dinner restaurant was opened. In an e-mail message, one of our colleagues told us a story about a Saturday morning in October when he and his pal had their boat lifted from the dock in preparation for winter. It was the first time they had done this, and they were not acquainted with the process. Early one morning, at “the appointed time” for the crane lorry’s arrival, they were in the harbor in the company of other boat owners, their boat fastened to a pole. After several hours nothing had happened, and they had received no information.

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At last the crane lorry arrived. The driver and the harbor master had a chat. I began to lose my sense of time. My stomach was rumbling, but we did not dare go home and eat in case it should suddenly be our turn. We did not even know which position we had in the queue. The first boat was lifted. The procedure was repeated a few times. Then the driver of the crane lorry took a break. He assembled sandwiches and a thermos and sat down on the lee side with the harbor master. We contemplated this conspicuous waste of (our) time with resignation. Then we watched boat after boat being lifted, slowly and carefully. By this time we had some idea of our position, so we were able to anticipate our turn with equanimity. I think we were the tenth or eleventh to be hoisted up. Around three o’clock, after seven hours of waiting, we were finally finished.47

The uncertainty and dissolved perception of time in this situation was a result of vague instructions and an invisible order of priority. Perhaps the two new boat owners were unaware of a local code for queuing and a timetable for this yearly procedure? Nobody else seemed to bother about the apparently anarchistic order and the long waiting time. By the following spring, when the boat was to be lifted back into the sea, our colleague would presumably not take “being on time” for granted. By then he would know the unwritten rules and no longer be at the mercy of the lorry driver in the same paralyzing way.

Who Waits the Most? Barry Schwartz (1975: 19) reminds us that the more powerful and important a person is, the more others’ access to him or her must be regulated. The most powerful can be seen only by appointment, whereas, concurrently, the least powerful must almost always be available. On the ground floor of an office building are the employees you can walk right up to. They are usually behind a counter waiting to serve you. As you move up the building the inaccessibility of the bureaucracy increases at every floor.

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Making others wait can be seen as an aggressive act, as when a superior nonchalantly chooses to be late. Those who are rendered motionless by someone else’s tardiness experience one of the most humiliating forms of subordination. It is a kind of “ritual waiting” (Schwartz 1975: 125) that is not necessarily related to the superior’s busyness. That superior may merely want symbolically to demonstrate his or her importance by stretching out the subordinate’s waiting time. On the other hand, there is also self-inflicted waiting, when a person arrives a little early as a sign of reverence.48 Power is a noticeable part of many other social relations. Power certainly plays a role in the relationships between children and adults, and between the two partners of a couple in love, where one, more absorbed by yearning, is more willing to wait than the other. The relationship between Lin and Manna, for example, demonstrates a subtle and often unconscious power play over the years. Who waited more? The novel shows us how differently the same waiting situation may be perceived and handled by different individuals. In art, literature, and mass media, from Penelope waiting for Odysseus to “Desperate Housewives” in American suburbia of the early 2000s, the waiting woman is a classic icon. Women are depicted waiting for their men to come home from the sea, from war, or from the office. Such images of course hide a more complex situation, but the asymmetry of the situation may organize everyday routine.49 In a study of people on a Norwegian island, the social anthropologist Jorun Solheim (1998) has analyzed how waiting time is molded by both material conditions and gender patterns. Many of the men on the island worked on the oil rigs far out at sea for periods lasting from two weeks to six months, while their wives took care of the home and the children. Solheim observed that the women rarely went outdoors. Mostly they spent their time indoors, waiting and working. The women’s movements were delimited by the occasions of the husbands’ departures and returns. Households were therefore organized into two periods, “the home time” and “the away time.” One of the main duties of the wife was to make the

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transition between these periods as smooth and painless as possible. In fact, Solheim suggests, the wife constituted this transition in herself, body and mind, by acting as the practical connection between the home time and the away time. One paradoxical consequence of this arrangement was that the wife had to “make room” for the husband when he was at home. That did not mean that he participated in the housework—the wife did the same things as when he was away—but now she also had to take care of him. When the husband was at home he became “unnecessary” and was in the way. Now the wife waited for him to leave again for the oil rig so that she could “close the room” she had made for him.

The Choice of Tactics From Solheim’s study we learn how waiting may be shaped by work organization and gender relations. But we are also reminded that waiting may be concealed, forgotten, or camouflaged by people being busy doing other things. We cannot know for sure if a person is completely occupied by waiting for something or somebody, or if she is daydreaming, eavesdropping on others in a queue, or doing something else that makes her forget that she is in a situation of subordination and postponed satisfaction. Another tactic consists of exchanging a big, numbing wait for lesser, more bearable ones. Instead of waiting for one’s life to change or a divorce to come through one may start longing for the coming spring, next weekend, or an upcoming coffee break. A classic scene of paralyzing waiting is sitting at home expecting the plumber or the TV repair person who has not shown up at the agreed-upon time. Most people have an irritating story to tell about tardy workers. Such overgeneralized stories resemble the descriptions of the Africans’ “inanimate waiting”; there, too, “we” observe the strange behavior of “others” to whom “we” have been exposed and do not yet understand. In his book One Year in Provence Peter Mayle (1989: 41ff.) tells a story of waiting for builders. He is renovating the house and finds himself living with

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dormant concrete mixers and forlorn, uncompleted rooms. In such a situation there are two ways to respond, Mayle suggests. Neither response will produce immediate results, but one way will reduce the frustration, the other will add to it. The Mayles tried both tactics. To begin with they made a conscious effort to become more philosophical in their attitude to time. They tried to treat days and weeks of delays in “the Provençal fashion”—that is, to enjoy the sunshine and stop thinking like city people. This month, next month, what’s the difference? Have a pastis and relax. The other tactic, which increased their sense of impotence, was to try to get firm dates from the workmen. It was an educational experience. We learned that time in Provence is a very elastic commodity, even when it is described in clear and specific terms. Un petit quart d’heure means some time today. Demain means some time this week. And, the most elastic time segment of all, une quinzaine can mean three weeks, two months or next year, but never, ever does it mean fifteen days. But, despite their genial contempt for punctuality and their absolute refusal to use the telephone to say when they were coming or when they weren’t, we could never stay irritated with them for long. In the end, they were worth waiting for.

Here Mayle is using a well-known and -worn (usually middle-class) genre: we all know how craftsmen are. But his irritation may also be about some of the other themes in this chapter related to time and control. The relation between the “unreliable” craftsmen and their furious clients is also a struggle for power. To minimize their idle time, those who sell their skills prefer that their clients queue for their services. That may be the reason for the widespread practice of overscheduling. By doing so the service provider converts his clients’ time to his own use.50 Another kind of waiting conflict involves strong needs, dependency, and unclear expectations. In a love relationship, who is waiting for whom, who waits at the telephone, at the café, or while pacing the floor at home? Lovers can be kept on the rack by their beloved. Roland Barthes (1977/1990:

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39ff.) has described this as the tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved one and being subject to trivial delays. There are special stage designs of waiting, Barthes continues, and we are reminded of Elin Wikström’s elaborated performance of women waiting at an art gallery. The setting can represent the interior of a café: he and somebody shall have a rendezvous, he is waiting and looks at his watch several times. Was there a misunderstanding as to the time or the place? What is to be done? Try another café? Telephone? But what if the other were to come while he is away? (This was of course before the advent of the cell phone.) The power of the other to keep him waiting is only too obvious. Everything around him seems unreal. He looks at people entering. They chat, joke, and read calmly; they are probably not waiting. But he has to sit in a chair, not doing anything else. “Am I in love?—Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late, but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

In his vulnerable mood Barthes looks for strength in the story about the mandarin who fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away. In this moral tale the strength of patience is balanced by knowledge that you also have the power to leave. The enforced passivity that waiting causes contains a message that can be translated in different ways, depending on one’s imagination. Even if one has to wait, one does not have to think about it. That is a way of disarming the power of others to control your time. A male New Yorker, waiting with us at a restaurant for his delayed girlfriend to arrive, exemplified this idea:

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Some people have the habit to let others wait to show off their own importance. They almost always arrive too late and force others to be patient, count the minutes, postpone the meeting, or keep the dinner warm. Probably they think of themselves as worth waiting for and that other people’s time is less valuable than theirs. I myself am a person who would rather wait than be late. It’s all right if I have to wait for other people, but not that they must wait for me. I have no problem entertaining myself during waiting time by daydreaming, reading, or watching other people. I can make up whole life stories about strangers whom I see at cafés or from my position in street corners.

Another way of counteracting the humiliating experience of being kept waiting is to pretend that one is not doing that at all. To disguise the fact that they are being exposed to the arbitrariness of others, some individuals camouflage their feelings behind various other activities. By using the technique of impression management they make believe that they have some control over the situation. They try to look relaxed and easy, for example by leaning against a wall with their arms folded, as if they were not bothered at all. In order not to appear trapped in waiting they avoid looking eager or irritated. Hungry guests at a restaurant resort (desperately) to small talk or rereading the menu.

PARADOXES OF WAITING

Finally, after eighteen years, the day has come when Lin Kong can use the legal right to divorce his wife without her consent. The long wait is over, and he and Manna get married and have two sons. Yet life does not turn out to be as happy as they had dreamt that it would. Was it really worth waiting for? Lin reflects on the ways in which waiting has changed them both, not only in the aging of their bodies but also in distorting their minds. He wonders whether he really cares for Manna; married life is so tedious, so chaotic, so exhausting. What does waiting do to people? One evening Lin hears an accusing voice inside his head. Let me tell you what really happened, the voice says:

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All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by other’s opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that you were not allowed to have what your heart was destined to embrace. (Jin 2000: 295)

Lin cannot help imagining what his life would have been like if Manna and he had gotten married earlier. The long waiting has dissolved her gentle nature, wiped out her hopes, ruined her health, and poisoned her heart. Lin got what for so many years he had longed for, but now he thinks that he waited in vain. In fact, he thinks he waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting. It is not only in the world of fiction that waiting can become a lifestyle, a dominating mood of passivity. The many paradoxes of waiting also emerge in more mundane examples and become evident in how time is organized, experienced, coped with, and transformed in different historical settings. What is striking about the time management emerging in Western modernity is how waiting time is given an almost physical character with a rich collection of labels. Time is described as sticky, empty, dead, wasted, or infinite, and it can change pace or direction. In many cases waiting experiences have come to acquire strong emotional charges, but they also lead to bodily reactions, for example, when limbs start fidgeting, get jittery, or go numb. People develop all kinds of tactics to handle time, from patient endurance to attempts to ignore or speed it up. A short wait may take all one’s attention, whereas longer waits make it possible to move in and out of the situation, doing other things, or letting the mind wander. Again, the ecology of waiting creates different conditions; a traffic jam, bus queue, or late guest not only choreograph movements and evoke emotions but also open and close alternative escape routes. Longing for something or worrying about the future creates different time experiences. Time also changes character, depending on where one is, in whose company, and what one is waiting for. Delays, postponements, and yearnings are but some of the many characters of time. Thirty annoyed seconds in front of the computer are very different from twenty gluey

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minutes in the supermarket queue or two anxious hours at the hospital— and not only as measured by the clock. Nine months of pregnancy differ from the teenager’s eager wish to get adult privileges and from Lin’s and Manna’s longing to marry. Waiting time is both a personal and a cultural creation, marked by gendered and class-specific values and charged with different emotions. To understand what is happening while somebody is waiting one might be guided by Ryszard Kapus´in´ski’s questions about what is going on inside the heads of those who are waiting. Are they dreaming, reminiscing, making plans, or traveling far away? But you should also be prepared to accept his conclusion: it’s difficult to say. What can actually be seen, in different ecological settings, is that waiting is internalized from childhood on. This involves long historical processes of learning and unlearning, with training grounds ranging from childhood Christmas rituals and teenage identity play to the unwritten rules of queuing and work habits. As time is given new virtues, the need for patience or impatience is taught, for example, in moral slogans like “Patience is important,” “Time is money,” “Waiting is good for you,” or “Never waste a minute!” Often such norms are communicated in indirect ways that may hide their role as a disciplining instrument of class and gender. Lin and Manna demonstrated the self-discipline that was necessary to survive in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Victorian middle-class children received messages that were quite different from those that children receive a century later. The power dimensions also surface in questions such as who has to wait for whom and who decides when you are entitled to get what you want. To be kept waiting produces strong emotions, and in contemporary Western societies waiting is rarely described as pleasurable—not even by the advocates of a Zen-like lifestyle who believe in Zen’s long-term benefits to mental well-being. The predominant response to waiting is usually disapproval, and negative energy is directed toward people who do not behave as they ought in queues, car traffic, waiting rooms, or protracted bureaucratic situations.

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There are, however, exceptions. The delights of longing hopefully for something that is anticipated to happen may color the here and now rosy, for example when hoping for romance, expecting a baby, or anticipating a journey. There are also inventive strategies for turning a boring wait into a more enjoyable situation, as when people create temporary communities or develop secret games. The emotions evoked in waiting have above all to do with the experience of time and how it is spent and controlled. When people feel like a hostage to restlessness and worry, waiting time can be experienced as an intense frustration—causing them to feel that they are just vegetating and blocked from real life. The “doing nothing” variety of waiting shows itself to be a surprisingly paradoxical activity. Inertia hides what is actually a dynamic and morally charged activity. Doing nothing is not only a state of mind but also an ordered and symbolically communicated behavior that people have to learn and develop over a lifetime. It offers unexpected possibilities to counteract the very boredom, anxiety, and powerlessness that it generates. When trapped in waiting, people are often able to be simultaneously occupied with something else; likewise, people can be physically present in a waiting space and yet travel far away in the mind. Above all it is the liminality of waiting that makes it a special kind of doing nothing. In-between events can make people feel stuck, but such events can also generate new possibilities. Waiting produces a “sleepwalking” mood, in which the asylum seeker or the pregnant woman may feel removed from the world or flow of time. Waiting also makes some people see their material surroundings, the strangers next to them, and their own lives in a new light. Waiting can be a source of intense boredom but also of surprising insights. As we shall see in the next two chapters, this dual mechanism of opening and closing off works for other kinds of non-events as well, including those of routines and daydreaming.

chapter two

Routines

Every weekday Harold Crick brushes his teeth seventy-six times, thirtyeight times back and forth, thirty-eight times up and down. Every weekday for twelve years Harold ties his tie in a single Windsor knot instead of a double, thereby saving forty-three seconds. Every weekday for twelve years Harold regularly runs fifty-seven steps per block for six blocks just in time to catch the 8:17 A.M. bus. At work he reviews 7,134 tax files every day as an IRS auditor. Beyond that Harold lives a life of solitude. And every night at precisely 11:13 P.M. Harold goes to bed, alone. This was until Wednesday. On Wednesday morning everything changed. While brushing his teeth Harold began to hear a voice commenting on his every move and following him around the apartment while he tried to stick to his morning routine. Marc Forster’s 2006 movie Stranger than Fiction is about that ordinary man, Harold Crick, whose perfunctory life changes completely when he discovers that he has become the main character in a novel. What he hears as he carries out his mundane tasks is the voice of the female writer who has decided to turn his boring life into a book. How can he get rid of the voice that is stalking him? The answer seems to be: by becoming unpredictable. And so we follow Harold trying to break out of his self-made prison of routines. 79

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The movie is an example of that well-established genre with the moral: never get trapped in the monotony of routines, get a life instead! Routines are a category of non-event that has often had bad press, as exemplifying a dull and predictable existence, but there is much to be said about this seemingly insignificant activity.1

Straitjacket or Supportive Corset After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing over and over.

This is “Okusan,” the housewife in a short story by Haruki Murakami (1993: 96).2 She has stopped sleeping and spends the nights reading Russian novels, enjoying the nightly freedom from her snoozing family. It works fine, because the daily chores are just a flow without friction; she doesn’t have to invest much energy or emotion in them. Once one has developed routines, everyday life takes care of itself. Murakami’s short story, like the movie about Harold Crick, catches many interesting dimensions of routines, above all the tension between their potential to be either a supportive corset of security, helping one along during the day, or a cultural straitjacket, trapping one in monotonous activities and blocking personal growth. Murakami’s heroine lives in a marriage that has turned into a “boring routine” and therefore caused her to develop a nightly life of her own with new habits and rituals. She longs for pastimes of her own that would allow her to set the pace and construct a personal rhythm. She sees what happens through the day as “mainly going through the same motions over and over” and saves her energy for the innovative new habits of the night. For most people, routines are linked to order, predictability, and control. To imagine a life of momentary impulses and short-term actions, devoid of sustainable routines, a life without habits, is, as Richard Sennett (1998: 44)

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has put it, to imagine a mindless existence indeed. Viewed from that perspective, routines can be seen as helpful tools for organizing the flow of time. They create rhythms and patterns by sequencing and synchronizing time. They also work as manuals for what has to be done in the course of a single day, or as maps of life at home and at work, where many activities are charted in detail. As economizing devices they may help one avoid making a myriad of choices, or having to reflect about various alternatives in recurring situations, something that might drive people crazy. The autopilot mode takes care of daily tasks and sets the body or mind free for parallel activities—as could waiting. Alternatively, routines may be seen as something that induces lack of initiative and flexibility. Mechanical habits such as those that snared Harold make life shallow. Their reliability becomes a problem rather than a resource. Many discussions of routines are, as we shall see, shaped by these two polarized metaphors of corset and straitjacket, but these concepts tend to obscure more interesting dynamics. Routines are not only survival techniques or perfunctory patterns; as has been shown by more recent scholarly approaches, they also constitute a cultural field full of tensions.3

Cultural Paths The word routine is actually the diminutive of route, a small path. This metaphor made us think about how routines are created in a similar way as paths, through a lot of repetitions, but also about how they become overgrown. We would therefore like to focus on the ways in which routines are made, unmade, and remade. Another issue is how their repetitious nature often hides important changes that eventually may transform them into something else. There are different strategies to make self-evident routines visible, for example by looking at how they are lost or challenged in situations of crisis. In extreme situations of war and catastrophe people try to reconstruct whatever they can of normal life, but they also discover how important some of their former trivial habits really were.

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Another approach is to develop thick ethnographies, like the stalking author’s voice that monitors Harold’s every move. By describing routines in detail, it is possible to discover how they are put together and coordinated, how they are synchronized with other tasks and become part of a daily rhythm. This kind of ethnography raises questions about how routines are learned, perfected, or changed. Deeply rooted habits have often sunk into invisibility, naturalized as something given. But they can be made conscious when they are brought up to the surface and discussed as “cultural stuff” (Wilk 2009). How is a new activity gradually transformed into a familiar habit? Like the path we mentioned earlier, how does one step follow the next, and then the next? Is this a practical solution to a specific problem or a way to order the pace of a day, week, year, life? When one arrives at a new place, the first thing one usually does is get a sense for how it is organized. Where are all the things one needs and how do they work? How to learn to find one’s way around? One winter evening Veronika Bergman, in a novel by Linda Olsson (2005), arrives at a dark and deserted house in the Swedish countryside. She has borrowed the house to start writing her new novel. Snow has fallen and the air is dry and cold. Her life feels as uncertain as the winter light. She has to make herself feel at home in this unfamiliar place. On the second day the house still keeps its distance. Veronika feels like an orphan tenant in an orphan house. Only slowly does her life find its own organic rhythm. After a week she has established her morning routine. She got up early, had coffee at the kitchen table and watched the room absorb the growing daylight. It felt as [if] the house had accepted her, as if they had begun their life together. The soles of her feet had become familiar with the wooden steps of the staircase, her nose accustomed to the smells of the walls, and she was gradually adding her own imprint, leaving minute traces. (Olsson 2005: 4)

Veronika takes possession of the house by adjusting her body to it but also by “adding her own imprint.” She makes a home and a workplace out of the

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unfamiliar space by shifting the sofas in the sitting room, buying a potted geranium for the kitchen windowsill, and finding a place for her laptop. Each day begins with a walk, regardless of the weather. The new routines make Veronika feeling comfortable and secure and leave space for more important tasks. As Colin Campbell (1996) has pointed out, certain choices of actions may be the starting point for creating habits that will sooner or later turn into something taken for granted. The integration of tasks, skills, and objects into the patterns of everyday affairs is a basic process in individual and social life. By repetition, novelties become effortless activities and gradually descend into the unconscious. Consider the middle-aged smoker. When he tried his first cigarette back in the 1960s and learned to hold the cigarette as nonchalantly as Humphrey Bogart, he had no idea that he was entering a new universe of daily rhythms, rituals, and social exchanges—the world of the habitual smoker. Gradually smoking became one of the routines that organized his day, linked with the morning cup of coffee, motivating work breaks, and adding that extra something to mundane situations. He learned to scan new terrains for ashtrays, matches, and fellow smokers. It is only when he runs out of cigarettes that he realizes their force in his daily life, or in later years when he finds the growing trend toward antismoking policies that put new restraints on his beloved habit.4 There are many other examples of how such powerful landscapes of routine are made, including the purchase of one’s first car and getting a dog for the kids, but perhaps the most striking case is that of setting up a new household.

CLOCKWORK JUGGLING

Open the door to any home, and what will one stumble over upon entering? Furniture and personal belongings, of course, but also all the domestic routines hiding inside. “What defines a home?” Mary Douglas (1991) once asked. Her answer: not a building with four walls but an internal order with rules, habits, and rhythms. The home is above all a web of routines,

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silent agreements, and ingrained reflexes about “the ways we do things here.” The participants learn how to survive a stressful morning, how to store the food in the fridge, how to sort the laundry, and much, much more. Harold Crick’s regimented domestic life may seem an extreme example, but this kind of construction work goes on everywhere. The home is a space of repeated actions and experiences in endless varied constellations that include watered plants, messy cupboards, crumbs on the kitchen table, stacked telephone bills, and more or less finished home improvement projects. Amid the chaos of conflicting plans and desires, routines maintain order, which is, however, easily threatened. Secret coded messages and hints fly through the air, sometimes interrupted by outbursts of questions and complaints. Where’s the remote control? How many times have I told you not to leave clothes on the floor? Isn’t it about time someone took out the trash? Who keeps turning down the thermostat? Many domestic routines are invisible for the inhabitants of the household, but for the visitor they surface in ways that sometimes become problematic.

The Planned Life In an ethnographic study of the pulse of everyday life, three anthropologists, Charles N. Darrah, James M. Freeman, and J. A. English-Lueck (2007), followed the daily activities of fourteen middle-class California families for a year. They observed the family members trying to manage time, obligations, and the consequences of option overload. One assumption was that for many Americans, busyness is often so deeply ingrained in daily life that it is taken for granted. Contemporary society is characterized by increasing shortage of time. People talk about being rushed or harried, having to juggle activities, and trying to fit it all in. This is, of course, nothing new; there is a long history of complaints about being “busier than ever,” but each generation faces different forms of overload and develops new coping methods. In the early 2000s personal digital assistants (PDA), cellular phones, e-mail, and pagers became the accessories of modern

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busyness. While these items did indeed help people cope with time shortage, they also created additional tasks and new demands. A central part of busy family life was the establishment of routines to provide stability. One of the families being studied, the dual-career couple Suzanne and Humberto, devoted much time and effort to making daily plans and building a predictable environment for their two daughters. By planning life in detail they hoped to be able to keep control over situations that threatened to get out of hand (Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007: 26ff.). Suzanne shared a marketing position in a high-tech company with another woman. She remained at home on Mondays and Tuesdays and went to work Wednesdays through Fridays. Humberto, a firefighter, worked three twentyfour-hour shifts, separated by days off and followed by four days off. This schedule was repeated year after year. The children’s daily routines likewise remained unchanged and included leisurely early-morning play followed by drives to their respective day-care providers. Suzanne and Humberto insisted that the carefully structured day-care routine was an important part of a well-lived life. They kept busy doing many things at home and at work; they scripted their days tightly, and their unscheduled time was scarce. When it did occur, they often considered it “wasted” time. They regarded not being busy as not having a full life. The family routines provided a basis for the focused attention needed to accomplish things, and the sense of security was supposed to reduce stress. They hoped to achieve the goal that their daughters would learn to cope with the abundance of stimulation found in contemporary society. One of the routines was the ritual of attending mass every Sunday. In church the children learned that there are times to be silent, times to sing, and times to pray. At the dinner table at home they learned the ritual of talking about the reasons for being grateful. Even if Suzanne and Humberto viewed stable routines as the foundation of their family life, their planning also required the flexibility to know what to do when order was interrupted. When, for example, the car broke down on the way to the children’s day care, they experienced this as an attack on

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their organized life. Many of the other families in the study had similar responses to the “logistical nightmare” of broken schedules, when everything needed to be done at once, and nothing was working as planned. Despite the carefully laid plans and robust routines that people such as these middle-class California families establish to protect themselves from uncertainty, coping with surprises is a part of daily life. When surprises hit, everyday order is disrupted, even when one has done all one can to establish security. At that point routines turn out to be little more than a sort of faith that they have the power to impose order. For that reason, the three ethnographers concluded, the tacit work of keeping control is important. But they also noticed that this work is not talked about much. As far as the families were concerned, the task of coordinating their activities with family members and friends was just the backdrop of the real stuff that filled their lives. That three professors were being paid to study what to them was an unavoidable, humdrum part of life seemed mildly bizarre. Yet life is largely lived in the humdrum minutiae of everyday existence. It is highly significant that individuals talked so little and so inarticulately about their coping but spent so much time doing it. Ubiquitous coordinating was clearly a high-stakes game, for days and weeks could fall apart if an appointment were overlooked or if someone failed to be precisely where and when had been agreed to. (Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007: 106f.)

Domestic Science Let us turn to another household, this one in Montclair, New Jersey, where the ordering of everyday tasks is an even more daunting project than in the California home described above. Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth have twelve children, and in their home routines are constantly being monitored and improved to fight the danger of domestic chaos. Dad installed process and work charts in the bathrooms. Every child old enough to write—and Dad expected his offspring to start writing at a tender age—was required to initial the charts in the morning after he had brushed his teeth, taken a bath, combed his hair, and made his bed.

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At night, each child had to weigh himself, plot the figure on a graph, and initial the process charts again after he had done his homework, washed his hands and face, and brushed his teeth. Mother wanted to have a place on the charts for saying prayers, but Dad said as far as he was concerned prayers were voluntary. (Gilbreth and Gilbreth Carey 1949/1973: 2)

Frank and Lillian were hardly an ordinary suburban couple. They were two of America’s leading scholars in the development of scientific management, successful pupils of its inventor, Frederick Taylor. Two of their children have written about their childhood during the first decades of the twentieth century, describing their home as “a sort of school for scientific management and the elimination of wasted motions—or ‘motion study,’ as Dad and Mother named it.” (Gilbreth and Gilbreth Carey 1949/1973: 1) Dad filmed the kids washing dishes to find out how this routine could be speeded up and improved. He found that he could save four seconds by buttoning his vest from the bottom up instead of top to bottom. He used two shaving brushes to speed up shaving, and experimented with double razors, but found that he lost extra time by the frequent instances when he had to bandage cuts. He called the children together to instruct them in the most time- and motion-saving way of handling a bar of soap in the shower. The Gilbreth family became a household obsessed with the regular scrutiny of routines and doing constant battle against irrational habits. Frank’s and Lillian’s jobs, both as parents and as work consultants, made invisible practices very visible. The world of the Gilbreths, as well as that of their mentor, Frederick Taylor, is interesting because they succeeded in creating an anatomy of routines. They documented routines, took them apart, and analyzed their tiniest parts, including the movements of hand and eye. Then they tried to reassemble them into new and more efficient habits. Betterment rooms was what Frank called the spaces he organized when he came as a consultant to a factory to rehabituate the workers. The job was to break a habit and create a new routine that would become an unconscious reflex.5 When Frank died, his working partner, Lillian, found that she was no longer welcome in industry. To make a living she had to develop a new

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arena for the anatomy of routines; she therefore took scientific management into American homes and the lives of American housewives. Lillian and Frank had regarded unskilled workers as a group who needed to be broken of old work habits and taught new routines. Now housewives were seen as a group that needed to be reeducated to become modern homemakers. In a sense, this second homemaking campaign followed on the Victorian one. In the transformation of domestic spaces during the nineteenth century the ideal of the nuclear family had come to replace that of the loosely organized household: families were supposed to create their own cultural microcosmos at home—their own world of style, manners, atmosphere, and traditions. The Victorian middle-class housewife was seen as the person responsible for this important task of homemaking. Her often unappreciated job was to provide a reassuring structure of family habits.6 By the early twentieth century there was, however, a growing critique of housewives as clinging to traditions instead of embracing modern routines. The Western world saw the emergence of a new movement of home consultants, teachers of domestic science, and state research institutions. The chief task of these professionals was to scrutinize domestic habits and promote modern routines. Lillian Moller Gilbreth was a leading figure in this development. Her betterment room became the kitchen. The aim of the domestic science movement was benevolent—to make the work of housewives easier and more effective—but there was also a moral power dimension. Did mother really know best? Routines became a battleground, and insecurity developed. What many of the teachers of domestic science did not see was that a form of middle-class morality was often in play. Traditional habits were bad, but why? Reform was not only about efficiency, hygiene, or labor saving but also about new middle-class norms. The message was that there is a time and place for everything; never mix activities and functions; don’t eat while walking; food should be served only in the dining room; and the kitchen should not be a space for socializing or children’s play. In the United States the class dimension also became evident in the reaction to all the unsuitable habits that immigrants brought with them, cooking

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strange kinds of stews, for example, and mixing all kinds of ingredients instead of organizing a proper American meal of white potatoes, meat, peas, and sauce tidily and separately organized on the plate. The energy invested in debates about bad habits and good modern routines—the correct ways to eat dinner, make a bed, or use the living room—also created resistance. As frustrated reformers complained (see Löfgren 2003), well-meaning campaigns for better housekeeping often fell on deaf ears.

Floating in the Sea of Serfs Harold Crick had a minimalist home and perfect web of rational routines that probably would have impressed Lillian Moller Gilbreth. But with Harold we enter a new era, one in which the reform movement of the Gilbreths a century earlier came under criticism. What had been seen as rational routines now came to be seen as a lack of creativity and flexibility. The film Stranger than Fiction is part of a late modern movement to battle rigid habits. It is no coincidence that Harold is given the job of a tax auditor. During the twentieth century, bureaucrats emerged as the new symbols of mindless work, seen to be trapped in enslaving routines and totally lacking inventiveness. Their work was likened to life at the conveyor belt, another favorite metaphor for stereotyped existence that Charlie Chaplin immortalized in his 1936 movie Modern Times. Harold’s workplace consists of white work cubicles and corridors of filing cabinets. His well-organized work schedule would have made Frank Gilbreth smile. The open office landscape, which borrowed its structure from factory production, was in Sweden nicknamed “the sea of serfs,” to describe a dreary setting where office clerks were chained to their typewriters and the panoptic gaze of the controlling boss. This land of endless routines is depicted in comic strips from Dagobert to Dilbert. Harold Crick has many colleagues in the armies of mindless bureaucrats. Ragnar Thoursie is a Swedish poet who made his living by working all his life as a state administrator. Like Harold he works for the government as an auditor, treating insurance claims for workplace injuries. He describes his

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workplace in great detail in an autobiographical novel where he addresses the question as to what the long office years have done to him: His work turned into clockwork, something automatized that needed to be neither checked nor wound up to function punctually and precisely. As the years passed it became habit for him to work like that, doing the same tasks, following the same routines. He turned into a habit of himself, so to speak. (Thoursie 2003: 409)

At the Department of Work every day is a blueprint of the preceding one, week after week, year after year. Exactly at nine o’clock the messenger arrives with his trolley and leaves a stack of applications for work injury claims about three feet high. The job as auditor has a conveyor-belt quality. Everyone has to try to finish each day’s stack to make room for the new cases being transferred from the trolley to the desk. Thoursie writes about waiting for clocks to strike and longing for the next coffee break, about files that almost sort themselves in well-thumbed covers, and forms that the ballpoint pen has learned to fill out without needing much involvement from the brain. He notes with an almost ethnographic gaze how the three-foot pile is reduced with signatures—accepted or denied—and how the experienced hand grabs the rubber stamp, next please . . . All the routines stretch out to form a career path that likewise has its prescribed form. As a civil servant he is part of a regulated promotion plan, and he knows how many years and days are left until he will be an executive officer at salary grade twenty-five. At the same time the standardized work offers possibilities for creating playful routines to undermine the monotony. Once he is an executive officer the poet gets a room of his own with an elegant planner, meant for those higher up on the career ladder, which he has acquired through his contacts with old friends at the service desk. The new executive officer feels proud when he looks at the inviting blank pages, but what kinds of important appointments and time schedules can he fill them with? Most of what he can think of—when he arrives at work, when it is time for lunch, or when he can clock out—isn’t

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really suitable. Then he gets the idea to create his own system, using a secret code: It is CC, CK, CDC, CMC and so on, covert reminders. Call the Children, Call Karin, Call the Day-care Center, Call the Medical Center. It looks pretty good. Secretive. Important. (Thoursie 2003: 409)

Maybe he should create more routines by starting with the most common, for example every incoming phone call. When, who, about what. He fills his planning calendar with new codes. This is Thoursie’s picture of the life in a government agency half a century ago. When we interview auditors nowadays, some of them talked longingly about the old order: At my workplace structures are becoming more and more diffuse. We never get to finish a job properly; we are supposed to be creative and innovative, move swiftly from project to project. Sometimes I long for change-resistant zones, fixed routines, and predictable workdays.

The first day at a new job describes a situation where tricky choices and possible alternatives pile up. How should one organize the desk drawers and relate to unknown colleagues in the corridors? What are the digits for the door locks and the codes for the computer? What does the boss mean when she tells you to write a PM? Should one open one’s mouth at the first big meeting; maybe there is an implicit routine of turn taking? As time goes by and one acquires a set place in the lunchroom and learns all the appropriate lines for coffee break conversations, the memories of those pioneer days when there were no routines fade.

Disturbing Monotony Both at home and at work there are tensions between constant repetitions, which serve to maintain order and predictability, and more or less sudden deviations, which serve to provide some sense of freedom. Every social organization includes this balancing act to avoid either destructive chaos or numbing discipline. Even extremely standardized workplaces, such as those

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where military recruits work, have some opportunities for individuals to stir up monotony. Many new recruits have described the shock of being thrown into a life full of inspections, parades, and drills, and a system obsessed with rules and regulations about everything from making the perfect bed to the correct order for dismantling a machine gun. During military training, constant repetition, such as marching in step, is thought to create the right kind of discipline. But even in this world there are free zones and alternative solutions. As the recruits learn to master routines, the possibilities for stretching or escaping them also increase. In an everyday that seems overcontrolled there is a constant search for gaps, getaways, and informal solutions, sometimes even with the officers’ tacit consent.7 In both private and public enterprises the balancing act between secure efficiency and killing monotony has been a steady theme over the last decades. In the 1990s the idea of the creative office was launched to fight what was seen as the deadening effect of routines. Creative offices were designed everywhere. Futurelab, a part of an energy combine, located in a postmodern office block in southern Sweden, was one of these new office designs. Futurelab provided an open officescape with panoramic windows facing the sea and was designed for creativity, flow, and flexibility. There were no phones, no filing cabinets, and no stacks of papers—only laptops and cell phones. An open kitchen area made up the center of the workplace and provided a hub for social interaction. Here people were supposed to drift in and out and exchange ideas. The few enclosed spaces were fenced in by glass walls that offered full visibility. Small labels with names such as “room for decisions,” “the living room,” and “the temp room” were scattered around. The doors to the bathrooms were not made of glass, but they were decorated with such words as “innovation,” “imagination,” “stimulation,” “commitment,” and “inspiration.” Taken on a tour of the office by one of the executives, we passed a desk cluttered with papers, piled high because of the absence of shelves or filing cabinets. He apologized by saying that some of the staff had not yet adjusted to the idea of the paperless, mobile office concept.

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This futuristic studio mirrored a global concept of trying to design and choreograph creativity. The slogans on the bathroom door were printed in a style imitating hasty handwriting, whereas the coffee tables were designed to allow inspiring dialogues with a maximum of five standing participants. Ladders led up to a podium bearing a comfortable chair with a view of the ocean; this space was clearly designed for elevated thoughts and productive daydreams. The atmosphere was one of built-in creativity, playful atmosphere, and constant vigilance against monotony. Futurelab and places like it, which reproduce the homelike atmosphere of work, far removed from the old sea of serfs, may turn the workplace into a more restful space than the actual home, as Arlie Hochschild (2003: 198ff.) has shown in a study of working life in the United States. At the office it is business as usual, whereas chaos and demands wait at home—a much more unpredictable world, if one does not succeed in planning daily life as meticulously as Suzanne and Humberto or the Gilbreths have done. For some workers, homecoming is a transition they brace themselves for, and they stay at work as long as possible. The polarities between home and work also give routines of leaving and coming back a special charge.

MORNING HABITS AND RITUAL SPEARS

If one asks people about their routines they often begin with their morning habits, and this is not only because morning feels like a natural start—when one is staggering from sleep to awakening, to get body and mind ready for a new day. Mornings are vulnerable times. What is so loaded about morning routines? The sociologist Christina Nippert-Eng (1995: 113ff.) asked the question in an interview study of how Americans organize their lives between home and work. When preparing ourselves for a new working day, routines may act as a warm-up activity, she says. They make the shift easier. Mindless activities prepare us for the mindful ones. Some people always find this passage demanding and require small tricks of mental reframing. Before they have left the breakfast table, they are, mentally, already out of the house.

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One of the informants, June, needs to vacuum the kitchen floor before leaving; others keep checking their tie knot or shine their shoes in anticipation of the entry into public life. When Nippert-Eng listens to these morning stories she thinks of the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of Nuer men who carried ceremonial spears not as weapons but as mental supports. Where do we find such ceremonial spears in American life, she asks, and decides that it is the coffee mug carried in a firm grip on the way to work. There are, however, many other ways of equipping oneself with protective armor.

Like a Song and Dance Nicholson Baker (2003), a writer who is fascinated with the microscopic routines of everyday life, has written a novel about an academic who gets up an hour before everybody else in the family so that he may have a time of solitude. He turns his universe of morning routines into small adventures with rules he has set up. He follows the same program each morning. First the stove has to be lit without switching the light on. All necessary movements must be so ingrained that he can move silently through the dark rooms, get the firewood, and find the box of matches. He feels a special pleasure to let senses other than sight direct his activities. Making coffee in the dark is an enjoyable challenge; tactility and fingertips guide him, they have learned all the details—the rough surface of the used coffee filter going into the bin, the coolness of the water faucet, the weight of the container when it is full, and the thumb leveling a scoop of coffee. Ingrained routines become pleasures when they are handled like a song and dance. There are people that enjoy their proficiency in rinsing a mug without wasting water, starting the CD player with an elegant press of the right button, or tying a perfect shoelace knot. One of Baker’s reviewers pointed out that he is an author who can turn the mundane act of putting on a sock into an almost religious experience, and in the novel the morning tasks are in fact described almost as if they were sacred pursuits. Here we meet routines that slowly evolve into rituals.

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The same is true of another literary character, portrayed in a short story by Somerset Maugham. Mr. Warburton is a colonial civil servant stationed in the jungles of Borneo. His link to the outside world consists of The Times, which arrives in batches, weeks old, with the riverboat. Mr. Warburton would never dream of opening the latest issue in the batch first. Every Monday he starts with the oldest Monday issue, next day the oldest Tuesday issue, and thus works his way forward until the next old batch arrives. It was Mr. Warburton’s especial delight to break the wrapper as he sipped his tea and read the morning paper. It gave him the illusion of living at home. Like his habit of dressing for dinner it was a tie to civilization. . . . And it was his pride that no matter how exciting the news was he had never yielded to the temptation of opening a paper before its allotted time. . . . Mr. Warburton took his Times and neatly slit the wrapper. He loved to unfold the heavy, rustling pages. (Maugham 1951: 1369ff.)

As for many others, the morning reading has turned into a routine that activates all senses. The special feeling of opening the day’s paper, the rustle of pages untouched by others (and thus keeping the aura of news), the smell of ink, tea, and buttered toast—even the crumbs gathering in the creases—all this makes it a special morning ritual. For some persons the strict adherence to this custom becomes obsessive. Nicholson Baker and Somerset Maugham describe men for whom habits have become existential. But despite secure routines, every morning can harbor anxiety and moments of alienation. Baker’s hero often ponders why the day needs to start in this way. Sometimes he wakes up in a bad mood and worrying thoughts attack him; life suddenly feels fragile. “The first thing you do can influence the rest of the day,” he thinks, looking back on all his experiments with reassuring routines. For Mr. Warburton the daily decision not to give in to the impulse to open the most recent newspaper is a moral victory, the kind of self-control in waiting discussed in the previous chapter. One day his new assistant, who is not a “proper” gentleman, opens the batch of Times editions in the wrong

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order so as to look for the latest sports results. Mr. Warburton is furious. He thinks the assistant has committed an unforgivable crime against the rules of civilization, and this act poisons their relation forever.

Getting Ready for the World From this male universe let us turn to a different terrain: the morning routine of putting on makeup. This practice has complex meanings and calls for a great deal of training before it can become a mechanical undertaking. It is also a habit charged with different contents, ranging from daily minutes in front of the mirror to conscious and well-planned rituals while preparing for an exciting date or an important public appearance.8 We assumed that this territory is rather well known to women all over the world, whereas many men may consider it exotic. When we asked several hundred female students, aged mostly between twenty and forty, to write down their morning makeup habits and then interviewed others, the answers turned out to be diverse. One woman said that being asked to describe her morning makeup routine, which she said usually took ten to fifteen minutes, made her realize how little she usually reflects about it and its complexity. There are many details that have to be organized into order and rhythm: cleaning the face, putting on foundation, adding shadow to the eyelids, brushing the eyelashes, using a mascara pen for the eyebrows, and finally applying lipstick and rouge, to name a few of the basic details. The hands move fast and confidently among the heap of tools, containers, and other props in the cosmetic bag, searching for the right ingredients, colors, and mixes. “Even if I have done this a thousand times,” she said, “it still calls for concentration and a steady hand.” But this does not prevent her mind from wandering. Putting on makeup is for her a moment of daydreaming and planning. This is a morning situation when both the body and the mind are being prepared for the coming day and public appearance. It also calls for certain

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choices—about colors and clothes, improvisation, or perfection. Should one use makeup on days at home or during vacations? It can happen that I forget to put on makeup, but never if it is a day of work or a party. When I was younger, makeup could feel like a must, something my social environment demanded of me, but as an adult I can feel okay without it.

Many women remember vividly how they first learned to master the skill, starting with experiments on dolls or secret sessions with friends. One woman we interviewed began using makeup as an eleven-year-old and was taught by her older sister. She recalls the excitement that came from its being an act of rebellion against the teachers at school, who had forbidden makeup. The use of makeup has always been surrounded by many unwritten rules, moral judgments, and taboos. And questions abound: What is too much, vulgar, or just right, what is discrete, and who decides? Should women use cosmetics at all? One need only go to the Internet and read the intense discussions about right and wrong in questions relating to makeup to realize that it is a complex moral and ideological universe, a private routine linked to a multinational cosmetics industry, animal experimentation, and gender struggles. But let’s return to our latest informant. When we asked her why she puts on makeup she told us: It’s a way of feeling good, you wake up pale and grey, but afterwards you suddenly look alert and nice, with rouge and all that other stuff. It’s also a way of getting a calm and steady start of the day, always the same movements.

Makeup thus serves two purposes of organizing time. It is directed outwards: with the help of more or less expensive tools one can accomplish the goal of looking better and eliciting appreciation from others. But it is also an inward-directed, private, meditative act that allows a woman to daydream or ponder existential questions. One woman described the meditative aspect as follows:

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I always daydream for twenty minutes every morning when I put on makeup. I don’t really remember what I used to think about, but it has turned into some kind of meditation, that I can’t live without, because it makes me feel good about myself. To some people this may seem like vanity, but I don’t care. This is the time when I fantasize about positive things that might happen.

In this morning ritual the personal and the cultural encounter each other in the repetition of a number of acquired skills. The ego is meant to be strengthened, and at the same time individual egos are symbolically connected to millions of other egos. Putting on cosmetics is certainly an intensely private and solitary routine, but it is also a collective act and can involve going to makeup parties, visiting a beauty saloon, or getting together with friends. It also provides a popular topic for conversation between women, who enjoy trading tips on new brands or techniques and remarking on the looks of others. Many of the students in our informal survey told us that putting on makeup is important for their appearance and self-esteem—“the most important ten minutes of the day”—whereas others think it is a waste of time and money, and that it is better to look “natural.” For some women it is a cherished moment of stillness and self-absorption, but others said that they hate it as a stressing and demanding time thief. In some cases the stress increases when small children, teenagers, or a partner compete for the bathroom space. Although some women felt that they were painting their face to emphasize their “true self,” others said that they paint a mask to hide behind. The mirror (in the bathroom, the car, the gym, the subway window, or the cell phone display) plays an important role in this routine, as either a flattering friend or a ruthless witness. Ethnographies of makeup teach us much about how routines are made and transformed, depending on context. The continuum of makeup as an activity ranges from being an insignificant, mundane task to being an act with strong symbolic charge. On the one hand a banal pursuit, on the other a cultural practice full of meanings and judgments concerning gender, body, power, and the politics of beauty.

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To many men this bathroom activity may seem exotic, but what do they do when facing the morning mirror? Michael John Pinfold (2000), discussing the male rituals of shaving and grooming, has looked at the bathroom as a male terrain where the potions and the liquids and the foams are on display, where the ritual can be performed, where close attention to details takes precedence, and where narcissism is allowed full rein. These are moments when men are like beauty queens—maybe only fractions of a second, where some point of admiration is found—for the self and others.

But, as he points out, these are moments that men do not discuss freely. It is “a language beyond language, one which men understand but rarely utter.” Bathroom routines also include less striking activities. Again, it is hardly a coincidence that the film about Harold Crick starts with his brushing his teeth, an act that has become the routine of routines. The same moves, day after day, year after year. The technology may change; people might experiment with different kinds of brushes and new toothpastes. But at the same time everyone while brushing encounters something different in the mirror each day, a face that some mornings seems very familiar and other days disturbingly strange.

SMALL ROUTINES, BIG CONFLICTS

Harold Crick falls in love with the baker Ana Pascal—a very capricious person, he finds—whom he is auditing for tax fraud. Through her he is confronted with a totally new lifestyle. The coming together of a couple is one of those situations where routines all of a sudden become visible arenas of social and cultural conflicts. Two individuals, each with an individual set of ingrained habits, have to negotiate a shared household. My normal routines are confronted with your strange habits.

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The First Morning Together The French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann (2002) has analyzed such encounters in an interview study about “the first morning,” recollections of the start of a new relationship. People remember how it felt to wake up in a new setting in what may be the first morning of a lifelong relationship but might just be a passing love affair. As they start to share their everyday life, two strangers often find themselves maneuvering as in a minefield, where the tiniest routine may become either endearing or provocative. For some of the interviewed couples the magic of romance made everything acceptable, while others look critically at the new partner’s morning routines to consider whether this might be the kind of person they are ready to live with. What Colombine remembered about a first morning was that in the beginning this was an unknown house, with strange drawers and food you normally wouldn’t eat—it was a journey of discovery, a total discovery.

Eyes wide open, she entered the bathroom, checked the fridge, and surreptitiously glanced at the photos on the counter. As a guest in this new morning universe she was cautious and let her new partner choose the breakfast menu and give the morning its shape and rhythm. Anna recalls waking up surrounded by her new partner’s family. Despite the friendly atmosphere she tried to make herself as invisible as possible, all the time afraid to lose face. Every gadget or task seemed like a potential trap. Vincent, another interviewee, recalled that it was not until the third day that he realized he had committed a breach of family etiquette by using the lefthand washbasin in the bathroom. This basin was strictly reserved for the father of the house, and the rest of the family used the one to the right. “I thought this was comical, I just couldn’t get it,” he remembers. A new couple watches each other’s behavior and either adapts or gets annoyed. Many feel petty in their judgments of the other person’s habits; the smallest detail gathers great significance. Is it right to shower after breakfast,

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can one blow one’s nose in a piece of toilet paper? What is cute, and what seems awkward, perhaps even revolting? As morning follows morning, routines are established or changed. What kinds of habits are people ready to compromise about? As the first intense passion fades, tolerance for what is seen as aberrant behavior diminishes. The new partner no longer wants to live as a guest. When Isa visited Tristan she felt like a different Isa, one who accepted the strangest habits—Tristan’s habit of spaghetti and cheese for breakfast, the slow rhythm of his morning routines. But the day she decided to move in with him she started to see his habits with new eyes: “As I opened my suitcase I felt like changing everything according to my own needs.” Others tell that it was through confrontations like these they realized how obsessed they were with their own routines. Why are these routines so immensely important?

A Cultural Battleground As new couples build a daily life, accommodating each other’s interests and habits, they create a shared choreography of working together in the kitchen and maintaining a certain order in the bathroom. In the process another aspect of routines comes into the foreground: their potential to be a battlefield. Since routines are most often taken for granted and anchored in the body—“They are just a part of me!”—it is no small thing when they are challenged, but this often happens in new domestic partnerships. In a study of young Danish couples, Sarah Holst Kjær (2009) follows her subjects from the kitchen sink and bathroom to the sofa in front of the TV. She shows how important it is that the couples synchronize their individual habits into common routines. This is very much a question of finding a shared rhythm, and the process involves much discussion about the kinds of everyday behavior each finds “immensely irritating.” Stereotypes of male and female are reproduced and often used in arguing for what is or is not essential. Who takes on the role of the expert on how things should be done in the kitchen, and what kinds of arguments about right or wrong are used?

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Lifelong divisions of labor or hierarchies of routines may be established in the course of such early maneuvering.9 Even as households and families develop steady patterns and practices, divergences continue; even the smallest of these can drive people crazy. Most of us can for example hear who is coming or going just by listening to the way the door is closed or left open. One couple in a study of domestic conflicts (Lindvall 1983) waged a constant battle about the door to the kitchen. As surely as the husband kept it open, the wife closed it with an irritated slam. Their different routines turned out to be linked to their different class backgrounds. He had grown up in a working-class family where the kitchen was the center of the home, a place where everybody congregated and all kinds of activities occurred. In her upper-class childhood the kitchen was a territory strictly reserved for cooking; the smell of food seeping through the rest of the apartment was a sign of vulgarity. Sarah Holst Kjær recounts a visit to an older woman whose husband has just died. The woman is sitting at the kitchen table with bruises on her forehead. She tells Sarah that she has only now realized that her husband silently closed all the kitchen cabinet doors that she used to leave wide open. Routines may also be used deliberately to create and maintain social order in different contexts: this is particularly true in relation to children and adolescents. Many adults feel that young people are a threat to order and have to be trained to follow rules and practice steady routines. They should, for example, learn to be patient, stand in line, and wait their turn, but they must also learn to cooperate and behave well in social groups. The overall aim is that of creating a certain measure of predictability in social life. One of many places where this tutoring may be accomplished is in daycare centers for children. One study (Ehn 1983) showed how daily life at a Swedish day-care center was thoroughly planned by the preschool teachers, —who exhibited a similar spirit as that of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Every hour was arranged; to-do lists told the children exactly what was expected to happen, not only when they should eat, sleep, take walks, and go for excursions but also when they should play by themselves. There were even regulations for these periods of “free play.” In this case the adults battling

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“the anarchy of children” employed many scheduled practices to diminish the risk of chaos. Each day was a long run of repetitions about basic questions of order and discipline. Who shall fetch lunch, who shall set the table, who shall sit over here, whose toys are these, who shall play together? One of the daily routines at this day-care center was the morning assembly, when the children sat together in a circle on the floor. The staff had a conversation with the children about different subjects, for example about the present season. What is typical of the autumn? Which berries and mushrooms can you pick? It was also a time for singing, reading aloud from books, and telling stories. These assemblies were developed into a ritual during which the children collectively were reminded of how things should be at the day-care center. Times and places were brought into play to teach the children when and where things would happen. First we do this; then we do that. You are not allowed to eat in the playroom. Everything has its own place. When the children started to play with something that was not defined as a toy, they were reproached: “This thing is not meant to be thrown about or jumped on!” Gradually the children learned to direct such admonitions at each other. At Swedish day-care centers one could get the impression that the agendas, rules, and routines were used as magic rites against the potential anarchy of the children. “If we changed the routines, the whole system might break down,” one of the preschool teachers anxiously put it. Mindless or Soulful Every weekend I go downtown and spend a lot of money, getting drunk, saying silly things, stealing something to wear on my head, trying to pick up the bartender. Vomiting in the neighbor’s rose bush. Having a ladder in my nylon tights. Waking up the day after with headache and a map of hell in my eye. You are saying that my life lacks routines. But you bet your bloody life that it has nothing else.

In the Norwegian comic strip Nemi by Lise Myhre10 the black-dressed Goth girl Nemi longs desperately for love, family, success, and popularity. But she sabotages her dreams through her own crazy habits, bad timing, and

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excessive expectations. What for others would have seemed like a dramatic Saturday night had for Nemi become a predictable pattern. In the same way, it may surprise someone experiencing an unusual and dramatic event to encounter a person for whom this is just ordinary routine. Sitting at the undertaker’s, full of grief, trying to adjust to the sudden death of a family member, you realize that for the man before you, working his way through the form, this is purely professional routine: choice of flowers, model of coffin, hymns, music—any extras? There are many such situations, especially in the experience market, where event managers sell, package, and perform “a unique event,” again and again. In a science fiction story by Ursula Le Guin (2003) we are taken to a planet where the Great Joy Corporation has turned festive ritual into mass production. Every day visiting tourists can celebrate Christmas, New Year, or Easter according to a set program. On New Year’s Island, New Year’s ceremonies take place every evening, complete with champagne, balloons, Auld Lang Syne, New Year’s promises, and fireworks. Next day the staff clean up and set the stage for another special New Year’s celebration. For them it is a boring routine that they have to hide from the happy participants. Some people try the same strategy in real life. One Swedish family, for instance, decided to celebrate Christmas every evening. This habit at least brought them media attention. Studying the transformations of routines into rituals and vice versa teaches us something about the dynamics of these two cultural forms. Ritual is supposed to be the opposite of routine, its basic elements—high attention, strong emotional charge, elaborated symbols, and sacred aura—signaling a break with the mundane. When ritual turns into “soulless routine” it no longer keeps one’s attention and instead feels mechanical, empty, or worn. We encounter the reverse process in the morning routines of Nicholson Baker’s hero, or in those of Mr. Warburton in the jungle. Here seemingly banal practices become ritually charged. When we asked people about making such rituals, we were told about minor events that people have invented to organize everyday life into a series of anticipations—for example arranging for Tuesday lunches with a special friend, coffee breaks with cake,

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after-work beer with colleagues, or watching particular TV programs with the family. But we were also told about more or less secret habits that had developed into cherished or obsessive rituals. Among these habits are phobic movements of assurance such as touching a door handle three times before opening a door, doing a little song and dance in front of the mirror each morning, or checking five times whether the stove is switched off before leaving home by counting one, two, three, four, five (Ehn 2006). Some people link the obsessive to what is often condescendingly called the pedantic, or excessively meticulous. There are many parallels to Harold Crick’s life, lives in which people try to create control in a hectic everyday with repetitive behaviors, or by maintaining perfect order among all the objects threatening to clutter a home. There are rituals of classifying, sorting, and cleaning, and some people allow nothing to disturb the pattern. An interesting aspect of this includes battles about what makes a routine healthy rather than dysfunctional or obsessive-compulsive. Where to draw the line, and who should draw it? Pelle Sandstrak has grown up in a small village in northern Norway; he shows a great talent for ice hockey, and he is good at dating girls, but there is something wrong. In his autobiography Sandstrak (2008) describes how he slowly became more and more obsessed with routines. For his everyday to work, certain tasks have to be carried out in perfect order. At first he tries to hide his obsessions behind clowning, but the routines develop into a complex system of rituals. Shoes that have to be washed in disinfectant, door thresholds that can only be crossed in certain ways, colors and letters that he must avoid at all costs in choosing everything from vegetables to coffee blends. After school he moves to Oslo, tries to get an education and jobs, but now routines and rituals totally take over his life. If the ways in which passing through a door, washing his hands, or making coffee are not carried out perfectly, they have to be done again—ten, sixteen times, if necessary. Now the most mundane routine can take hours to carry out, and he has to hide from the consternated looks of others. He ends up living in an old car in a

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derelict part of town, barely surviving on a diet of fruit juice and cold spareribs, never using soap or running water. His life starts to change when he meets an understanding psychotherapist who tells him that he has Tourette’s syndrome, a rare but powerful obsessive condition. For weeks he has to practice changing his routines, taking a shower, drinking a blend of coffee with both red colors and a Z on the package. The therapist produces instruction tapes for him to follow, which involve drying himself with a towel for thirty seconds, or reading a morning paper without repeating every word twenty times. It is as if Frank and Lillian Gilbreth had taken all of his habits apart and then constructed a detailed scheme of step-by-step instructions for how to pass through a door or wash his hands. To change Sandstrak’s everyday routines takes months of hard and anxious work, but he finally manages it and can start to live a new life that is “close to normal.” He ends up with a successful career as a stand-up comedian, but Mr. Tourette always hovers in the background.

MULTITASKING

In the busy lives of the California families described earlier, one of the main tactics for resisting overload in everyday life was multitasking, the art of using a familiar routine as a platform for the combination with other activities. One such art—daydreaming—will be the focus of the next chapter, but here we want to explore how developing routines is a condition for multitasking. We began by posing a fundamental question that has interested researchers, counselors, marketing people, and many others: How much is a person, a family, or a workplace able to handle at the same time?

Sensual Excesses In his history of attention, Jonathan Crary (1999) looked at the debates a century ago. Already in 1892 Max Nordau had worried about what kinds of burdens modern consumption and technology would present to human-

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kind. Maybe later generations would be better at handling the stress than his contemporaries were. The end of the twentieth century, therefore, will probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone, to be thinking simultaneously of the five continents of the world, to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine and . . . know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited by millions. (Quoted in Crary 1999: 30)

Multitasking is a skill that must be acquired, and once learned it is often invisible, “it just comes naturally.” Drawing on material gathered from different generations of Swedes who have narrated their experiences with mass media, it is possible to see that such abilities emerge gradually.11 For the pioneer generations of radio and TV users, the intense concentration that was initially needed to view a TV program or listen to the radio was striking. No distractions could be allowed; to follow the voices in the loudspeaker or the flickering figures on the screen required full attention. A Swedish ad from the late 1920s recommends bananas as the perfect food for concentrated radio listening, as they are easy to handle and soundless to eat. Step by step people developed the skill of listening with half an ear or merely glancing at the television set. If we turn to documentations of domestic life in the 1970s, a present-day observer might find the media uses familiar. The documented families spoke of gathering every evening in the TV room, where everyone had a set place: compared with earlier generations, they have acquired some multitasking skills. The radio has already moved out of its once sacred position in the living room; now there is a transistor radio in the kitchen, and the first person down each morning turns it on; for the rest of the day that radio provides a soundscape for other kitchen activities. People have learned to listen to the news, leaf through the morning paper, and have breakfast at the same time. The wife puts the ironing board in the living room so that she can iron and watch television simultaneously. It feels restful. Special tapes are produced for entertainment while driving the car. A common worry at this time was

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about teenagers who insisted that they could do their homework while at the same time listening to music: background music was regarded as a serious challenge to intellectual work, and the cassette recorders in the teenagers’ rooms a threat. Next let us compare these 1970s households with the family presented in Time magazine (27 March 2006): “They’re e-mailing, IMing and downloading, while writing the history essay. What is this digital juggling doing to kids’ brains and their family life?” The reporter had visited an American family of four who “occupy the same three-bedroom home in Southern California, but psychologically each exists in his or her own little universe.” The teenage son is chasing images in Google for his Windows Media Player slide show while he carries on several online conversations on MySpace. Music is coming from iTunes, and somewhere on the screen there is a Word file in which he is writing an essay for school. His sister has the same strategy. “You just multitask,” she explains to the reporter (Wallis 2006). In the early 2000s multitasking was a popular theme in public debates and media. Was it efficient, was it good, or had it been carried too far? Psychologists were called in to give their verdicts. In these years multitasking was above all seen in terms of new communication media such as computers, cell phones, and MP3-players. There are many examples of how a routine can be changed or enriched by adding more sensual dimensions to it. For Murakami’s Japanese housewife, Okusan, the secret nightly routines around novel reading became more and more elaborate. She bought a bottle of Rémy Martin and got a new crystal glass and some good chocolate. The hours with Anna Karenina on the sofa were elaborated in ways that followed well-established cultural patterns. Okusan became part of the tradition of reading that involves all the senses. For a long time people found it hard to master silent reading. Texts were read aloud and called for intense concentration among both readers and listeners. Silent reading turned the consumption of books into a more private ritual.12 At the same time, as reading became more mobile, the techniques of “a good read” slowly emerged: a great novel, a favorite armchair, a nice

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box of chocolates, and some background music. It was a multisensual activity that had to be staged with a certain set of props.

Less Is More The practice of multitasking, doing a number of routines concurrently, has led to heated debates. It has also been condemned as a provocative instance of inattention and shallowness, an escape from the demands of presence and awareness. A good example of this critique is found in Staffan BurenstamLinder’s influential book The Harried Leisure Class (1970: 79), where he argues that a new form of stressed consumerism is killing the quality of life. As people cram more and more activities into their everyday, quantity replaces quality. Burenstam-Linder describes a man who may find himself drinking Brazilian coffee, smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading the New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife—all at the same time.

Half a century later, the 1960s as here described by Burenstam-Linder seem peaceful, restrained, and reasonably gadget-free. His examples remind us that ideas and practices of multitasking have changed over time. They exist in all societies and eras but are often naturalized into invisibility. Sometimes the incorporation of new technologies makes people aware of this phenomenon. Burenstam-Linder writes with irritation about the new habit of shaving with electric razors while driving to work, but he does not think about all the other activities he customarily combines with driving. As a learner behind the wheel one’s concentration is intense; later one learns to whistle, daydream, turn on the radio, and engage in conversation. Looking further back in history, campaigns against bad habits during the Victorian era also focused on ideas about what could be combined when and where. Certain mixtures—like eating away from the dinner table—were considered vulgar or wrong. Many people fought a constant battle against what they saw as the excesses of earlier generations and those of the lower

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classes. It was during this period that opera audiences learned to be silent. The indulgences of eating, drinking, flirting, and talking during opera performances had to go—the musical experience should be pure. This also meant that music once written as table entertainment for noisy aristocratic banquets now began to be performed in the dead silence of a concert auditorium, preferably with the audience’s eyes shut to further enhance the experience. There was a new cult of concentration under the battle cry “less is more.”13 This picture is complicated by the parallel fight against laziness and inefficiency, the mission that the Gilbreths took part in. Frank Gilbreth surprised his children by bringing home two brand-new victrolas. This elicited great enthusiasm—now there would be music in the home! Then the kids discovered that Frank was planning to install the machines in the bathrooms, and that the music rolls he had brought were in fact boring lessons in French and German. Frank’s idea was the children could combine the routines of washing and brushing their teeth with learning a new language. This was an example of modern and efficient multitasking. The Victorian combat against improper forms of combining different activities may serve as a reminder that there is always a power aspect in debates about multitasking.14 Which combinations are culturally acceptable, and which are defined as tasteless? This question may even creep into scholarly texts, as when the anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1996: 203), in a critique of new consumer habits, replaced Burenstam-Linder’s villain with a working-class man “watching the Cowboys play the Steelers, while eating Fritos and drinking Coca-Cola, while smoking a joint, while one’s girl sits on one’s lap.” Class is one important dimension in this cultural struggle; gender is another; for example when women are defined as better suited for multitasking because of their genetic makeup. Many descriptions of the division of labor in Scandinavian peasant societies, which reflect a polarization between what was called men’s work and that considered women’s chores, incorporate the gender explanation. Men were described as task-oriented (plowing the

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fields, felling trees, hunting animals), whereas to women is attributed the inborn knack of coordinating a number of smaller activities, one eye on the stove, another on the baby, while keeping the spinning wheel going. This division of labor also brought with it an upgrading of “real” (male) work and downgrading of “insignificant” (female) chores. In reality, gendered patterns of multitasking in these peasant settings could be rather flexible. In regions where the household economy was based on the ingenious combination of a wide range of activities, it was necessary constantly to develop new skills of multitasking. In nineteenth-century Swedish villages where producing socks for the army was an important source of income, we find both boys and girls learning the art of knitting while doing other tasks such as herding cattle, walking to the market, sitting and waiting, etc.15 Some routines, then, have the capacity to blend rather easily with other activities. Today cell phones, iPods, and magazines keep commuters occupied. Other routines are used to create private space, as when stressed parents sit down before the TV and demand not to be disturbed, rather like the nineteenth-century women who resorted to embroidery to relax and withdraw into themselves without being accused of “doing nothing.”16 Out in the countryside the woodshed could serve the same function as a refuge for privacy and rest. In the 1940s a Swedish sociologist traveled through the villages of northern Sweden asking people about their “hobbies.” A farmer confronted with this newfangled word hesitated, then answered “chopping wood.” For him life was not yet divided into the modern polarities of work and leisure.

No Toothpaste on My Brush Anymore One of the lessons from the history of multitasking is that getting out of a habit may be a rather unnoticed or even unconscious process. But in such transformations the power of the insignificant is revealed. A woman talking about her divorce tried to reconstruct the gradual breakup of the marriage.

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Every night for many years I or my husband, whoever was first in the bathroom, used to put toothpaste on the other’s brush. It was a habit that signaled love and care in a small detail. Every time I seized my prepared toothbrush I smiled and felt a greeting of love from my husband. One night there was no toothpaste on my brush. Not a long time after that we understood that our love had vanished.

When Murakami’s Japanese housewife got back into the habit of reading in the still of the night, she recollected how she had lost this routine. As a child she had been always reading, devouring books. Now she could not remember the last time she had sat down to read. Sometimes she picked up a book during a pause in her domestic chores, but her mind always started to wander. She ought to fix the fridge. What should she wear at the wedding of her cousin? How will Daddy’s stomach operation turn out? She had simply lost her strong reading habit and could not figure out how this had come about. She had never made a conscious decision, it just happened; other things got in the way. This can happen to anyone: Waking up one day one suddenly finds old routines gone forever. This situation is described by people encountering what has been called “the empty nest syndrome.” After a life spent building a web of daily family practices, the children move out and people are left with a new order. In an interview study of middle-aged women confronted with this change, the empty nest is described as a sudden cultural vacuum, now that all the tasks of caring and coordinating are gone (Brembeck 2006). This should be a happy time allowing them to start a new life, but many of the women found it hard to give up old routines and daily schemes because, as they belatedly realized, so many of these seemingly trivial tasks had become an important part of themselves. It is sometimes harder to let go of a habit than to create a new one. Other people feel exhilarated by the new freedom offered by such change, as when the breakup of a long-standing relationship allows someone to start living independently again. Jenny Diski (1999: 213) described how her old habits helped her reclaim the apartment and take over every corner of it:

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It is almost like a dance, a floating self that breathes its way around the place while you only seem to brush your teeth and make a cup of tea. It is a celebration of solitude that won’t be broken by people coming in from the outside world with their own stories and their own internal speed.

Diski writes about the freedom of not having to synchronize her movements with those of someone else. Reverting to old schedules is the signal that one is taking back one’s own space. Conversely, maintaining the common habits after a broken marriage or the death of a spouse can keep the memory of that other person alive. The other part of one’s self has disappeared, and only the routines are left. Repeating the routines gives the impression that everything is as it was. Handbooks for caretakers of elderly people often stress the importance of allowing them to stay with what they used to do. It can be frightening to caretakers or family members when elderly relatives drop lifelong habits or they simply fade away. An old man decided one day that he would not listen to the morning and evening news on the radio any longer. “But you always wanted the radio on every morning,” his caretaker said. “Don’t you want to stay in touch with the world?” No, was the definite answer, and it provoked her. A lifelong habit coming to an end just like that, what a shame! (Pörtner 2005: 50)

CRISES AND CONTROL

In his song “It’s all too much” Joe Jackson complains how hard it is to get started on some days: “Wondering which shoe to put on first, or should I brush my teeth before or after I put on my shirt.” So many big decisions every morning. “I’m so damned open-minded. Used to think I’m lucky but I’m cursed,” he sings. Routines liberate us from energy-demanding choices such as whether to first put on the left or the right shoe, and whether to boil, fry, or scramble the breakfast egg. But there are situations where routines are of little help, as when you try to work at home while taking care of small children.

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Keeping Chaos at Bay 12:10 Tried to write a bit while they’re asleep. Needed to turn off their Gnotte game on the computer first. Forced to go thru a lot of moves, before I can shut it down, must catch a load of damned red balls before I’m back in their Gnotte cave. Fuck, how slow it works. Fuck, fuck, I need to write before Hanna wakes up. 12:25 Yippie! The Gnottes are gone. 12:26 Hanna wakes up. After that I don’t really remember, time just disappeared, I dried wet noses, wrote lists about stuff to remember. Buy some fish, write a column about luxury shopping in New York, change batteries in the Tinky Winky. Buy one of those tiny screwdrivers needed to change Tinky Winky batteries. Buy new name labels and sew them on the kids’ clothes. (Skugge 2006: 188)

Sylvia tries to combine parenting with her job as freelance journalist. It is not easy because her husband, the actor, would rather tour with his theater group than ask for parental leave. The days become a chaotic mix of snatched moments at the computer, searches for runaway Barbie shoes, time spent making oatmeal, and emptying the washing machine. Sylvia is the heroine in Linda Skugge’s novel; the author is herself a freelance journalist with small children and thus an expert on the kinds of multitasking demanded by a working mother in the early 2000s. Sylvia must negotiate with her editor on the cell phone while sorting laundry or trying to separate fighting kids. She must produce her newspaper columns while answering a barrage of questions from her little daughter. She has to learn to keep a number of balls in the air at the same time. Out of this chaos new routines are born. Sylvia’s world is about what happens when children arrive and break down all prior domestic arrangements. The kids take over everything, and as a result the adults develop new multitasking skills, among them getting the children dressed for day care while arguing with the four-year-old that it is a bad idea to wear the pink summer dress on this February morning and thinking about dinner plans. Sylvia laboriously constructs her everyday and, like Okusan, often feels that the daily chores are choking her.

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Another contemporary Swedish novel depicts the gradual breakdown of a young mother who cannot cope with her expectations and those of the people around her. Some days it feels as if the home were aggressively observing her and accusations whirling around the rooms like dust. Pack, clean, make dinner, take care of the flowers, the windows striped by dirt, mercilessly exposed by the spring light. Anders will be late. If only the kids could keep quiet. I need to clean out the fridge, dinner, fish fingers and mash. (Sandberg 2003: 30)

Domestic routines turn against her. The homemade orange cake collapses, and the icing starts dripping onto the table, the fridge door makes itself sticky, and the kitchen smells of burnt fat. Crises caused when ordinary routines break down may do something surprising to one’s senses. People have to find solutions to practical problems; sometimes it helps to recall old ways. Then one suddenly notices the importance of small and forgotten details, such as the way the teakettle sings. In Doris Lessing’s novel The Summer Before the Dark (1973: 6f.) a labor strike causes repeated power outages. Kate Brown’s daughter and son have gathered fallen wood and built a fire in the garden. They are cooking water in a tripod made of scrap iron. This fire, the cooking on it, the watching of it, the joking about it, had been the family’s point of enjoyment all day. Kate, however, had found it all rather irritating. The kettle had taken twenty minutes to reach even the stage of singing: she could not remember having heard a singing kettle for years. Electricity brought water from stillness to turmoil in a moment, and singing was bypassed altogether.

When Everyday Life Collapses What happens to routines when life simply becomes “too much,” when flow turns into friction, and stress mounts at work or at home? In the late twentieth century, discussions about a new form of stress-related disease was very much in the forefront in Sweden; often called “the burnout syndrome,” the illness was defined as a personal collapse caused by overwork or emotional

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overload. The reasons for the almost epidemic development of such states (which show strong national, social, and regional variations) will not be discussed here; interpretations vary.17 What is of interest in this context is how people describe themselves (or are described by others) as cases of burnout. We interviewed people who had lived through this kind of crisis and ended up having to take extended sick leave while they tried to get back to a normal life (Löfgren and Palm 2005). In the past, overload had not been a problem for them. It had been their pride that “no” was not an answer. They were workaholics, stretching themselves thin, living at an accelerated tempo that in retrospect often had a manic element to it. Lars, who had built up a small electronics factory from scratch, described himself like this: Haven’t been able to say no. I always thought: speed up and it will be OK. I could walk through the factory and make twenty decisions in two minutes. I felt in full control, it was almost compulsive: what the hell, I could make anything work!

People like Lars had either never or hardly ever gone on sick leave before. As the stress mounted they felt irritable; they had problems sleeping and woke up early thinking about everything that needed to be done. Work had invaded most of their life. The road to breakdown was often long, a slowgrowing process. Many describe this phase of stress as including a mounting insensitivity. They ignored signals from the body and didn’t listen to the warnings of others until they crashed. Suddenly everyday life both at work and at home was chaotic, just “too much.” They found themselves sent home on extended sick leave. After Lars broke down he was unable to go near the factory; even his family became too much for him, and he spent long periods alone in a summer cottage out in the woods, staring at the walls. The flow of everyday life had turned into friction, order into chaos, and it became obvious how important the autopilot had been in dealing with work and home. Now they were at home, with all the time in the world on their hands, but life did not work in the domestic area as it normally would

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have. Many everyday routines had become Herculean tasks. “It could be a full day’s work just to take a shower and wash my hair,” one woman said. They had to make decisions about even the most trivial acts that had earlier been handled by the autopilot: “I remember staring at a flowerpot for hours, trying to make up my mind if I should water it or not.” In the crash landing of burnout, life gets out of synch. The usual habits are drained of content and become meaningless or mysterious. Nothing works as it should. Lars expressed it as follows: It’s damned hard to be on sick leave, all of a sudden you’re without routines and it was the routines that kept life running at work. It feels like the floor is pulled away from under you.

A striking theme in the interviews is how daily life had been transformed into new kinds of stress. The body was constantly in pain or a state of sensory and social overexposure. The TV screen flickered too much, noises were too loud, and smells too strong. The sufferers wanted to retreat to the bedroom and draw the curtains and just lie in the dark. Crises such as burnout may call for a drastic rearrangement of the everyday. There are other major life changes that have a similar effect, including the birth of one’s first child, divorce, unemployment, and retirement. The sociologist Scott Schaffer (2001: 1) has pointed to yet another life change with potentially grave impact: moving house. We work quite hard in our lives to attain a sense of the mundane— those droll aspects of our lives that, while we disparage them in our youth, make our adult lives actually work. We develop chore charts for our roommates in college to ensure that mold doesn’t grow in our sinks; we buy dividing organizers for our bills so we know when to pay what; we take months to figure out just where that pothos plant is supposed to go; and we set bedtimes and curfews for our children so they come to know the joys of regularity. And moving disturbs all of this—it forces us to struggle to deconstruct everything in our lives, from the alphabetization of our library to the IKEA shelves we stored the library on, ship it somewhere completely new, and then rebuild it in a completely foreign space. We also

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end up having to completely rebuild and remodel our personal and social lives.

Collective Breakdown There are of course even more dramatic collapses of everyday life that face not only individuals, as in the cases above, but whole communities. In her ethnographic study War Within: Everyday Life in Sarajevo under Siege the anthropologist Ivana Macˇek (2000) charts the collapse of the web of everyday routines during the long siege (1992–96) of the city of Sarajevo during the Balkan wars. Heavy bombardments and the ever-present fear of snipers drastically changed life for everyone. The most basic routines collapsed. Constant improvisation was needed to keep life going. The supplies of water and electricity became erratic, people had to spend a great deal of time searching for water and improvising new techniques for cooking and heating. Preparing a meal could become a very complicated task, calling for both innovation and patience. Would it be possible to make a small fire on the balcony? What would work as a water carrier? “If I have three children I will call them Electricity, Water, and Gas,” a ten-year-old boy said. He lived in one of the beleaguered housing blocks. If burnout is an example of a personal crisis, when old habitual skills suddenly disappear, the Sarajevo example highlights other aspects of the breaking down of routines. Life under siege illustrates the extent to which ordinary routines create seamless rhythms during the day. Now these normal rhythms were broken up. Is there any water in the tap; when will the electricity come back on? People had to devise new practices, such as sleeping with all the lamps in the bedroom switched on so that they would wake up if electricity came back on in the middle of the night; if so they would hasten into the kitchen to do the laundry or cook some food. By keeping the water tap on they learned to listen for sounds of water returning, often at the oddest hours. Instead of following familiar habits and rhythms people had to improvise constantly in response to the unexpected situations; there was no opportu-

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nity for long-term planning. The new life was based on a constant uncertainty, and this was a deliberate strategy of the attackers. By destroying normal, everyday life they created chaos and could force the civilians to their knees. The Sarajevo ethnography illuminates the ways in which in times of crisis routines that are usually taken for granted become elevated almost to the level of sacred rituals. In Sarajevo the phrase “to imitate life” became a common figure of speech. It signaled a desire to keep some of the well-known routines and thus create at least a semblance of normality. Even the most trivial practices acquired new symbolic charge. People would risk almost anything to bake a loaf of bread or dare the snipers by walking to a bakery. The smell of fresh bread was experienced as “an oasis of normality” (Povrzanovic´ 1997: 155). Taking a hot bath or dressing up for a visit to a neighborhood café could become an important event. Crises like these, from private burnout to a society collapsing during warfare, illustrate what happens when ordinary routines disappear and the basic task becomes survival. From a cultural perspective a crisis may, however, also generate incentives to search for new solutions that in their turn, after some time, become routines. This means that the breakdown of everyday patterns of behavior need not be entirely paralyzing. Once basic needs are satisfied again, the crisis can provide a chance for people to rethink and reorganize their life. Much that was once seen as a given or as absolutely necessary could turn out to be unimportant or could change into a new practice.

FORCE OF HABIT

At the same time that Murakami’s Japanese housewife, Okusan, created routines for an alternative, nightly life, her daily life became more perfunctory and robotlike. It was no longer a secure arrangement, a silent pact uniting the spouses. Her body was still there, but neither her feelings nor her thoughts were present. She could no longer tell the days apart. She felt that the everyday swallowed her completely and noted that “my footprints

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are being blown away before I even have a chance to turn and look at them” (Murakami 1993: 81). Routine belongs to the basic elements of life. The often voiced feeling about the chaos of contemporary life, about life being in constant change and flux, needs to be contrasted with the insight that most of our activities are in fact constantly repeated and predictable. Repetitive actions create the backbone of people’s lives. We only notice them when they break down or are challenged. Then we remember the singing of boiling water. If waiting can be described as a floating, in-between condition, routines are about being anchored in the everyday. At the same time both phenomena provide stages for daydreaming. Waiting and following routines have a lot in common, as both are attempts to control passing time, find out what is important, and decide to what extent one wants to stay in the present. The question is what is going on when nothing seems to happen. We started by noting that discussions of routines are often based upon polarities. The first polarity is the juxtaposition of routines as either constraining straitjackets or supportive corsets, a suffocating set of conventions, or a secure and economizing predictability. A second polarity concerns the degree of conscious reflection. There is a continuum from mechanical, reflexlike routines to emotionally charged customs, collective traditions, and elaborated rituals. Mundane activities can change in both directions: rituals can turn into mindless reflexes, and even the dullest routines may be transformed into more conscious and symbolic acts that people experience as reassuring—until they fade away. Suddenly the lovingly applied toothpaste on your brush is no longer there, and the person realizes that the trivial routine is not the only thing that has disappeared. The third polarity has to do with the idea that routines are collective patterns, as opposed to being intensely personal manners. Shared practices make society possible—as something we are forced to do to get things done as they should be done. Then there is the kind of recurrent act that may be described as a secret or mystical world, which we create on our own and that becomes a central part of our self-definition.

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Polarities such as these hide the constant possibilities of transformation. An unnoticed routine becomes an everyday ritual. A habit that affords feelings of security is transformed into one of constraint. Likewise an unproblematic practice develops into a heatedly contested practice. There is nothing routine about the making of routines. The force of habit lies in its ability to create continuity and exert some control over time. Boring repetition, through its predictability, has the power to move people ahead of the present. But repetition is also a way of hiding change, and then it has a subversive potential, as Judith Butler (1997) has pointed out. Small, gradual dislocations are hidden by well-known retakes; the same procedure as yesterday, but not quite. Because the gaze is turned away from mundane and seemingly unimportant alterations toward more spectacular changes, a free zone is created. Tom O’Dell (2006), borrowing a phrase from firefighters, has likened such creeping transformation to a cultural back draft. The fire is hidden in a smoldering, invisible ember in a closed room. Everything seems under control until someone opens the door and lets in the oxygen that causes the fire to explode. In everyday life small transformations smolder without becoming conscious until some later stage when they become obvious in a dramatic way that overshadows the slow, preceding change. It can be gnawing irritation about the bad habits of someone at home or at work that leads to the sudden explosion: “We can’t go on like this!” Business as usual stops, and new patterns emerge. Tension between recurring repetition and the more or less surprising deviations from the rehearsed program creates confrontation between routine and change. Moreover, there seems to be a constant balancing act in the humdrum of everyday life—not too many replays, but not too few. Invisibility possesses another kind of force. The degree of conspicuousness creates a power dimension. When routines come to be taken for granted they are often defined as insignificant. The labeling of habits as trivial is also a way of devaluing certain activities.

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The experiences of young mothers we have met illustrate this. Minor routines are often linked to domestic work and the female sphere, an ideological labeling that helps to cement female subordination. Women’s work becomes insignificant and also invisible. “So how has your day gone?” the returning husband may ask, full of news of all the important tasks he has been carrying out, while the wife at home with the small children may feel she has nothing of importance to tell. In this process of making some activities invisible, moral evaluations develop. Some activities are defined as less intellectually challenging than others. As we have shown, the reverse is often true; life with small children calls for constant multitasking and creative flexibility. But what happened to Harold Crick? The movie depicts his struggle to break out of the prison of his unimaginative routines. He is helped by his new love, the unconventional Ana Pascal. She becomes his savior, helping him to let go of his obsessive habits and become a liberated man. Is that indeed what happens? At the end we meet the couple in their new happy life, slouching on the sofa watching old movies, Ana feeding Harold his favorite cookies. It looks like a life full of warm and creative rituals—or are we watching the birth of firm new routines?

chapter three

Daydreaming

In the summer of 1826 nine-year-old Bramwell Brontë receives a gift of twelve toy soldiers, which he shares with his three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. The four children live in the vicarage of Haworth, overlooking the Yorkshire moors, where their father is a clergyman. A couple of years earlier their mother had died, and in the preceding year their two older sisters had succumbed to tuberculosis. With the help of the toys the children create a dreamworld for themselves—a magic African kingdom, the Glass Town, founded by a band of adventurers, the twelve soldiers. The children call themselves “The Four Genii,” and the fantasies of life in their new country draw on their reading of romantic stories and adventures of explorers, as well as on famous heroes and stories from the newspapers. The world they create mirrors their own dreams, aspirations, and worries. Slowly the daydreaming and the shared fantasies developed into the writing of plays and texts in miniature books, kept as a shared secret. These texts give insight into how a world of daydreaming can evolve and slowly grow into something else. The outsiders who came across the miniature books later did not immediately know what to make of them. What an early biographer described as the children’s “wild, weird writing, a curious phenomenon of childhood, 123

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hardly to be taken seriously” (Gaskell 1857/1997: 81) came to be recognized as being more than childhood play. Increasingly it was no longer seen to be an escapist daydream but an apprenticeship in writing (Glen 2006: xiii). Today scholars agree that the tales of Glass Town and the kingdoms of Angria and Gondal were a secret training ground for the world-class works of literature produced by the three Brontë sisters—books that had seemed to come out of nowhere. As Juliet Barker (2002: 153ff.) has pointed out, the daydreaming world of the Brontë children was not unique. Tales of magic kingdoms or fantastic adventures were invoked by many children of that period. This was an era that celebrated the power of the romantic imagination as a creative resource, and among the literate classes, daydreaming practices can be followed through letters and personal diaries. Daydreaming was not, however, an unproblematic activity. Throughout history there has been an intense debate on the dangers, especially for young women of good standing, of getting trapped in a fantasy world produced by the perilous state of “doing nothing.” Idleness and boredom were seen as platforms for unhealthy flights of fantasy. “The daydream has always been a crucial but indeterminate part of the politics of everyday life,” argues Jonathan Crary (1999: 77). To understand this paradox we first need to explore daydreams as an elusive cultural practice shaped by contexts and collective understandings that are learned, shared, and communicated in many ways.1 Setting the Stage It’s a little bit like shooting a movie in your head, and you’re the director, you write the script and you’re the casting director, and you decide who gets to star in that little movie.

This is Roy, trying to explain to the psychotherapist Brett Kahr (2008: 82) how he creates his fantasies. Kahr’s analysis of over twenty thousand sexual fantasies uses the metaphor of “staging our own private theater.” Here we shall take that metaphor further, looking at the stage design and choreogra-

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phy of daydreaming, as well as the choice of props and coactors. We shall also investigate the dramaturgy in the production of narratives and scripts. Daydreaming is of course linked to many situations of “doing nothing.” Previously we discussed the potential of doing nothing for waiting and routines, activities that offer spaces where the mind is free to wander in different directions. The scholarly literature on this subject is not extensive. The field is traditionally dominated by psychologists, who are often preoccupied with the questions of why people daydream and about what, and with how this activity relates to identity formation. We shall look at daydreaming as an everyday habit, a kind of mental work. Where, when, and how do people daydream? We found that a bricolage approach would be necessary and have considered different kinds of materials, ranging from historical records, psychological studies, and mass media to interviews and questionnaires. We asked people to write down their favorite fantasies or daydreaming settings. The world of fiction, autobiography, and diaries is another rich source, and this is where we shall start. Our perspective is mainly cultural. Although we have been inspired by several psychologists, those both with and without a psychoanalytical perspective,2 we shall focus on the more material aspects of fantasizing, and on the social and physical contexts. In exploring the stagecrafts of daydreaming we will use a bricks-and-mortar perspective for this seemingly ephemeral activity. In addition to Charlotte Brontë and her sisters we will introduce six other more or less famous daydreamers from different times.3 As these daydreamers have recorded in fictional and autobiographical form, daydreaming was an important part of their life. In the next section of this chapter, “Dreamers in action,” they will furnish us with material for further analysis. What kinds of arenas and situations are productive for daydreaming, and how are these arenas organized? How can they be enhanced by various technologies? In the section titled “Moving bodies, wandering minds” we will discuss how daydreaming activates both mind and body. In the third section,

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“Closing in, breaking out,” we will show how fantasizing moves between being stuck in a special place and leaving that place and temporarily attaining a feeling of freedom. Time is another important aspect, and this will be treated in the fourth section, “Dusk and dawn.” How does daydreaming interact with the changes of day and night, and in the evocative moments between light and darkness? From the material and temporal dimensions of daydreaming we will turn to “The stuff that dreams are made of,” which includes wishful thinking, fears, and anxieties. The specific contents of daydreaming are the stories that people tell about their fantasies. Finally, in “Politics of daydreaming,” we will discuss daydreaming dramatized as an ideological battlefield, a moral terrain with heated disputes about merits and dangers. Being absentminded and lost in a private world can, for example, be provoking to those who demand the dreamer’s mental presence and full attention.

DREAMERS IN ACTION

Daydreaming and imagination—expressed in stories, myths, and songs— have been part of life in every society. They are universal activities that take up much more of people’s time than they are probably aware. Millions of all kinds of fantasies may be had during a lifetime. Some psychologists argue that more than a quarter of our waking time involves daydreaming (Klinger 1990: 6), yet people seldom think about this activity in a conscious way. When people say that they rarely daydream they forget that most fantasies last just a few seconds. Most fantasies are here and gone before they are noticed, but they may still influence daily life in many ways, as a force of both memory and desire.4 In one of the few ethnographic studies of this mundane activity the anthropologist John L. Caughey (1984)5 described it as a form of mental travel. While outwardly participating in an activity, one can allow one’s attention to turn from what is commonly regarded as the real world and

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start imagining. Erving Goffman (1967/2005: 133) once likened this kind of inward emigration during unfocused interaction to being momentarily “away.”6 Daydreaming may be an escape from demanding realities or boring routines into a more rewarding fantasy world. But it is also a way to mold everyday life, fabricate biographies, plan and rehearse future action, and recapitulate past events. The “away” of daydreaming should therefore be merged with a “toward.”

Senses and Scenes Daydreams come in different shapes and sizes. All the senses are involved in this complex activity; sights, sounds, smells, and tastes trigger fantasies. Words and phrases such as mindwandering, mental imagery, flight of fancy, revery, obsessive idea, and escape route cover different aspects of daydreaming. They encompass both streams of consciousness, in which fragments and associations whirl past without a seeming pattern, and well-organized, repeated favorite fantasies. The categories are blurred, as are the boundaries among nightly dreams, the half-awake condition, and conscious thinking.7 Similarly it is hard to draw the line between a memory and a fantasy about the past. In this discussion we shall begin with a wide and vague definition. What forms does imagination take in everyday life?8 We asked a family of three about their favorite daydreaming situations. “My best daydreams are in the morning shower, imagining a new day,” was the answer given by the man of the house, whereas his wife said that playing solitaire in the evening worked as a great platform. “Boring math lessons, that’s my favorite daydreaming time,” said their teenage daughter. These three examples illustrate the interplay of modes and moods of daydreaming, as well as the microphysics through which slow movements create swift thoughts.9 The morning shower is a special kind of experiencescape, created by a mix of the mental and the material. In his Arcades Project, which preoccupied him during the 1920s and 1930s, Walter Benjamin (1999: 330ff.) points to

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the importance of passages between sleep and awakening. While entering the bathroom, one may be only half awake, and there may be moments of total alienation. The well-known everyday may appear in a different and strange light. The toothbrush, the strange shapes of shampoo bottles, all kinds of alien tools and containers—what are these things? The dreamlike state is prolonged by the streaming, lukewarm water and the familiar routines of using soap and shampoo. The brain is still associating freely, and the imagination travels in all directions, helped by the shower, which activates the senses through heat, damp, and the soothing sound of running water. After the sociologist Christina Nippert-Eng (1995: 133) interviewed people about their morning rituals she noted how commonly the shower was a liminal experience of mindwandering. The instant one turns off the water the ideas usually disappear as fast as they had come. Playing solitaire includes the secure pace of a routine that binds part of consciousness and blocks systematic thinking. While the hands deal the cards and the brain reads them routinely, the imagination is free to roam. During math class boredom creates a mental platform for mindwandering. The struggle to pay attention often has the opposite result, as research about attention spans has shown. The more people are asked to focus, the greater the risk that they will escape into daydreaming (Crary 1999). In the classroom the glassy stares of the pupils are drawn toward the windows, which help thoughts move out into the world. Running water, a set of cards, schoolroom windows—these daydreaming props would have interested the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who studied the materialities of daydreaming. Bachelard wrote several books on the role of the basic elements of fire, water, air, and earth as daydreaming materials, or “hormones of the imagination,” as he called them. Among the questions he asked were: How do such elements create conditions for daydreaming? What does the flowing water, the hard rock, or the frictionless air do to imagination? Asked to comment on the importance of the morning shower, Bachelard might have stressed the energizing potentials of water, how its mobility sets thoughts in motion. Water caused him to

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think about travel, gliding out, or getting carried away. He concluded that water has a dimension of cleansing and renewal but also of malleability (Bachelard 1942). In his fascination with the materialities of daydreaming Bachelard explored the kinds of fantasies that are facilitated by walking through an old house, sitting on a beach, digging a ditch, or kneading dough. An unabashed romantic, he often generalizes, but what may appear as naive praise of dreaming hides complex analysis. He is, however, mainly interested not in how the conditions for daydreaming shift among cultural and historical contexts but in timeless imagination.

Urban Imaginations “What’s going on in your head? Tell me and I’ll give you twenty-five kurus¸.” This is the classic question that Orhan Pamuk’s father often put to him, but he didn’t know if he dared answer. Had my father spent time in the other world, too? It would be years before I discovered that my strange pastime was commonly known as “daydreaming.” . . . Keeping the second world secret made it easier for me to come and go. When I was sitting across from my grandmother, and a shaft of light came through the curtains—just like searchlights on the ships passing through the Bosporus in the night—I could, if I stared right into it and blinked, will myself to see a fleet of red spaceships floating past me. After that I could summon up the same armada whenever I liked, returning to the real world as someone else might leave a room and turn off the lights behind him. (Pamuk 2006: 21)

Orhan Pamuk remembers his Istanbul childhood as being full of daydreams. When he got to dreaming in earnest his legs started swinging, and people knew he was elsewhere. Pamuk continued to be a habitual daydreamer; as an adult he continued, for example, his elaborate fantasies of killing people around him. Pamuk’s texts illustrate much of the gradual learning processes of a daydreamer who, step by step, incorporates new materials and techniques, or

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develops interests that alter his fantasy world. Pamuk talks of his changing need for “daydream energies” and for all kinds of props to help move the imagination along. The sofa becomes a cart, the flowery carpet a jungle. The impressions of the photos on the piano, the smell of his grandmother’s cigarettes, and the sounds from the streets at twilight help him exit into dreams. As he learns to read, new material opens up. Pamuk becomes fascinated by all the strange words on shop facades and in advertisements and magazines, and he turns them into vehicles for the imagination.10 Pamuk’s exuberance can be contrasted with that of another urban daydreamer, Fernando Pessoa. In 1933 he finished a manuscript later published as The Book of Disquiet (2001), an unusual attempt, with a strong autobiographical tone, to capture the life of a habitual daydreamer. The hero is the timid and lonely bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, whose prosaic life in the Lisbon of the 1930s moves between the office of the shipping firm Vasques and Co. and his bleak rented room on Rua dos Douradores, the street of the Gilders. Whereas Pamuk moves in an active social life and is surrounded by family and friends, Bernardo is a loner, his life eventless. A visit to a café and a ride on the trolley are major events for him. One evening he stands at his open window and drops an empty box of matches into the deserted street. The sound of the falling box is the most memorable event of that day. Bernardo’s “incoherent observations” are dominated by his fertile imagination. It is in his daydreams that his life really takes place; there the imagined is as visible and concrete as the seen. I am but a daydreamer, he writes during a break in office work, I let my thoughts wander freely. He never ventures outside Lisbon, but in his mind he travels everywhere. The city provides him with rich material, including people in the street, objects, lights, and sounds. Even while talking to others he can get lost in reveries. “I put dreams before life to such an extent that I manage in my verbal intercourse (I have no other) to continue dreaming.” (Pessoa 2001: 17) One morning he roams the city, attentive only to his senses, without thoughts or emotions.

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I come to the streets without preconceptions. I examine things like a person lost in his own thoughts. I see the way another person thinks. And a light mist of emotion rises absurdly in me; the fog lifting outside seems to infiltrate me slowly. (Pessoa 2001: 57)

Bernardo’s experience of the competition between the “real” and the imagined reality is a theme to which we will return. He is not alone in wishing to live in a wonderful world of his own imagining rather than in the harsh and depressing world he must share with other people. Pamuk and Pessoa offered starting points to our understanding both of how a daydreaming career may evolve and of how a given cultural context, in these cases different cityscapes, provides the material for fantasizing. What is it like to daydream in the streets of Lisbon in the 1930s or in Istanbul in the 1970s?

In the Shadow of War In the autumn of 1914 two travelers facing World War I start to document their daydreams. One of them is Julien, a middle-aged Belgian working as an interpreter in the British army on the French front. The other is an eleven-year-old girl born in Paris, who has just emigrated with her mother and brothers from Spain to New York. “Linotte”—little bird—is the selfmocking nickname she has chosen for herself. During the retreat from Antwerpen in the face of the rapidly advancing German army Julien has lost the thesis that he had planned to submit to the university, but now he has a great idea. What if he were to write a new thesis based on his daydreams? He is inspired by Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of night dreams but can’t help thinking about the daily reveries that nobody has written about. He starts to make detailed records of his mindwanderings—the streams of thought that arise while hearing German mortar fire at night, the elaborated fantasies about taking revenge on a superior officer, the images of being severely wounded, daydreams of longing for home, and reveries of a future with the beautiful Miss X.

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Linotte’s real name was Anaïs Nin, and she left Barcelona with her mother and brother for the United States in 1914. Onboard the ocean liner she starts keeping the diary that many decades later would make her famous. She fantasizes about being an adult, and about having a wonderful house and a perfect husband, and she longs for her father, who has chosen to stay behind. Here we see two styles of recording daydreams. Julien works hard to write down all kinds of mindwandering; he always has paper and pen at hand but finds that it is very difficult to keep track of his dreams. He is especially intrigued by the ways in which his streams of consciousness move swiftly in time and space, often in absurd ways. One second he is in the London Underground, the next he is in a car in the French countryside. He fantasizes about what he would do after the war—courting Miss X, for example—and the next moment he is trying out clever tactics for securing an academic career in Belgium. Like Orhan Pamuk, Anaïs Nin was a habitual dreamer in her youth, and like him she took a determined approach to documenting her daydreams. If by romantic they mean someone who dreams, I am a romantic, but I shall keep it a secret and never dream except with my diary. The two of us, all alone, and I will dream peacefully when it is time for dreams. (Nin 1966: 185)

With Anaïs Nin we are back in a world not dissimilar from that of Charlotte Brontë. Nin finds herself daydreaming incessantly. She fantasizes about the good-looking purser on the Atlantic steamer; maybe he could take her back to Spain? There is no mysterious King Zamorna, as in Charlotte’s dreams, but plenty of teenage fantasies about fascinating men. On 16 June 1916, when she is thirteen years old, she writes: So I dream about a tall, strong man with black hair, white teeth, a pale mysterious face, dark melancholy eyes, a dignified walk and a distant smile. Something like the Count of Monte Cristo. Above all, with a soft, clear voice. I would like him to tell me about his life, which will be very sad and full of terrible, frightening adventures. I would like him to be rather proud and haughty, fond of books, and able to write or play some

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kind of musical instrument. We would spend every evening at home, in front of the fire in winter, in the garden in summer, with a book or a pencil, his hand resting on mine! Isn’t that the way husbands are?

She starts to call this imaginary man the “Shadow.” He becomes her imaginary dream partner, to whom she returns now and then. One night, with a calm smile, thinking no doubt of all the novels I have read, I took a large armchair and set it very close to my chair, and looking into the eyes of the one that my imagination placed there, I talked with him. (Nin 1966: 129ff.)

The war is present in the daydreams of both Julien and Anaïs. For Julien there are fantasies about being injured or killed. One of his fantasies starts while he sits working at his desk and hears a German shell explode at the other end of the village. When he sees a thick cloud of smoke rising his mind starts wandering. He imagines the scene of the explosion and visualizes one of his colleagues, taking care of two small children who have been wounded, getting blood on his uniform. The next moment he sees himself lying on the cobblestones in front of the butcher’s shop with both legs gone above the knee. He asks the butcher for his knife to cut off the last filaments, and in his dream he confidently directs the terrified onlookers on how to help him. Then he is delivered by a field ambulance to the hospital and says gaily to the doctor, “I am saved by my good spirits,” but he begins to worry about ending up in a ward with the rank and file—no, all of a sudden he is safe in a bed among officers. His brother-in-law comes to see him at the hospital with a box of five hundred Turkish cigarettes, and Julien starts saying to him in Flemish, “I sacrified my legs for my country,” but then decides to talk in French so that the nurse can understand. He dictates a telegram to his wife and tells her he will soon get a decoration for his bravery. All of a sudden he is driving around France in a car with his new artificial legs, and then he is in the London Underground, trying to use his crutches to get into the train. The other passengers look at him with respect. Inside the train he thinks about the many stairs of the school where he will go back

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to work as a war hero, and he sees himself smoking in the classroom, no longer having to go outside, thanks to his new handicap! Maybe he could also get free travel tickets for himself and the family. From there he moves on to the popular daydreaming theme “What if I die, what will people think of me when I am gone?” The war is present in very different ways in Linotte’s imagination. She is drawn into similarly heroic fantasies, but they feed on other kinds of props and raw materials, among them the patriotic images and stories she encounters. Shouldn’t she too be a soldier and save her beloved France: “If only I could cut my hair and put on a soldier’s helmet.” In New York it is hard to anchor such fantasies in a local context. There the war is far away, but she finds a statue of Joan of Arc, which is helpful. While she stands before it the statue comes to life and helps the French to a glorious victory. One night she lies down on her bed and starts fantasizing about fighting for France on the battlefield. She finds her father dying and her mother taken prisoner in a landscape with “blood everywhere” and “cottages, houses, castles and monuments, all on fire” (Nin 1966: 74ff.). This is war dreamed by a teenage girl. Julien Varendonck survives the war and finishes what was to become the first analytical work about daydreaming, published in 1921, with a foreword by the man who had inspired him, Sigmund Freud. Anaïs Nin grew up to be a writer and central figure in New York bohemian society, but her later diaries are less spontaneous and improvised than those of her youth. Linotte is transformed into a more self-conscious author.

The World Turned into Wilderness In a later generation of daydreamers, from the time of World War II, we meet another contrasting couple, Anne and Jerome. Anne’s daydreams we can follow in her diaries, which she started keeping at the age of thirteen, in 1942. Like Linotte, she too includes postcards, photos, and drawings in her diary and experiments with different forms of writing. She too wants to be an author. The diary is her secret friend, Kitty, someone with whom to share

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her longings. She fantasizes about boys and possible romantic love affairs, and about her future as an adult. While Anne is working on her diary Jerome is in the U.S. Army, but he finds that his childhood daydreams are still with him. During the many long periods of waiting during war he continues to fantasize about the imaginary football world he has built up over many years. Jerome is not a diary writer. We know his daydreams from his later attempts to reconstruct his intensive fantasies as a child and teenager (Singer 1976). He remembers his early daydreaming career playing with toys or makeshift props, talking out loud and actively playing the part of the various characters. Growing up in the United States in the 1930s, radio, movies, books, and comics provided important daydreaming materials. At the age of nine, like Charlotte Brontë, he creates a detailed world of his own, choosing his hero from a series of boys’ books. His fantasy hero, Poppy Ott, develops a sports career, a world of endless adventures and games that Jerome continued to elaborate on for many years. Like the kingdom of Angria, a whole baseball empire develops. Jerome drew entire league series, sketching highlights from imaginary games and maintaining statistics on the achievements of his imaginary players. As Jerome grew, so did Poppy and his fabulous career. But Jerome also had other fantasy heroes, from the adventures he developed with the help of Tarzan of the Apes to a figure he called “The Senator,” a political hero who could do no wrong. With a fantasy about being a fantastic piano player and composer Jerome also created his own imaginary world of music, opera singers, and composers. Jerome himself was a bad piano player, but as he banged away at the instrument he could hear the most wonderful music and symphonies emerge in his interior soundscape. Like Charlotte’s hero Zamorna, or Anaïs Nin’s Shadow, Poppy Ott accompanied Jerome year after year, but Poppy Ott also provided Jerome entry to an academic career. Jerome Singer became a professor of psychology and a pioneer researcher of daydreams. Anne Frank started her diary in June 1942, on her thirteenth birthday. Soon after that fears of Nazi prosecution forced her Jewish family to go into

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hiding in Amsterdam. For two years they lived in the confinement of an attic, under constant threat of discovery. In spite of these conditions Anne’s daydreams resembled those of other teenage girls. She created a special dreamscape by decorating her tiny personal space with her film star collection and picture postcards, and she fantasized about becoming a Hollywood star. Reading books and listening to the radio became two of her most important pastimes in the family’s cramped lodgings. On Christmas Eve 1943 she writes about what she longs for: I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free and yet I can’t let it show . . . I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever understand what I mean, if anyone will ever overlook my ingratitude and not worry about whether or not I’m Jewish and merely see me as a teenager in need of some good plain fun. (Frank 1997: 152)

In 1944 the family was betrayed to the police and arrested. Anne and her older sister, Margot, were sent to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. By then Anne had started to edit her diary to turn it into a document of life under the Nazi regime. One of the striking things about the unedited version is how it mirrors the world of a young teenage girl—a girl who resembles the kinds of girls in the daydreaming of Charlotte and Anaïs. But her daydreamings also include the constant threat of being arrested. In her thoughts she swings between hope and hopelessness. In one of the last entries from July 1944 she writes: I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death, I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. (Frank 1997: 328)

What can we learn from Anne Frank and the other six dreamers? Certainly one lesson is that although daydreams may convey strong feelings of freedom and weightlessness, even the loftiest fantasies are anchored in concrete objects, spaces, and time slots. Any one cultural setting or era produces its own frames for dreaming as well as favored themes and images.

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“In spite of the importance of daydreaming as a domain of resistance internal to any system of routinization or coercion, its history maybe never will be written,” Jonathan Crary (1999: 77) has argued. The examples above show, however, that a history of daydreaming can at least be sketched; more important, as the sociologist Colin Campbell (1987) has shown, it can become an important tool for understanding daydreaming as a historically situated practice. Comparisons of different times may help us to understand cultural differences of how, when, and where people let their minds wander— sitting at a campfire, dozing in front of the TV, or watching the dawn through the window of a commuter train. The seven dreamers show how they shape their personal fantasy worlds with the help of available scenarios they have learned from others. We see how they combine different raw materials—for example borrowing from mass media and popular culture, taking a scene from a film, or using fragments of a melody. Such daydreaming props may also consist of a box of wooden soldiers, a flowery carpet, a statue in New York, the sound of a passing train, or a favorite view. But how are they put to work? How does the mind choreograph them while the body is in rest or motion, walking, lying down, or traveling in trains, planes, and cars?

MOVING BODIES, WANDERING MINDS

“Gliding in and out of different worlds” was how Pamuk described his childhood daydreaming. Movements between settings, images, and activities— away and back again, forward and backward in time—describe how the imagination is set in motion. This theme fascinated Gaston Bachelard and other scholars. In the early twentieth century psychotherapists developed an interest in guided daydreams. Patients were led through fantasy journeys to see what kinds of settings were productive for reverie. The psychotherapist Robert Desoille, having placed his clients in a semidark room and asked them to close their eyes, guided them through different stations, for example a cave or a forest, and took them to the bottom of the sea or on flights upward. He

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found that such imagined movements often produced different feelings. The reveries of ascent, for example, produced euphoric feelings that “anything is possible” (see Casey 1979: 217ff.). Why does the thought of walking up stairs to an attic produce different kinds of moods and reveries than that of stepping down into a basement, Bachelard (1957) asked. His experiments along these lines tell us something about the relations of the movements of body and mind; even small shifts can cause the mind to wander in different directions.

Putting Thoughts to Rest As no other piece of furniture the couch opens a broad spectrum between dream and wakefulness, between debauchery and moral control. It works as a therapeutical instrument, as a place for free associations and as a tool for poetic production. (Marinelli 2006: 1)

This is taken from the introduction to an exhibition about the therapist’s couch that opened in 2006 to celebrate the 150th birthday of Sigmund Freud. The exhibition dealt not only with the founder and foremost symbol of psychoanalysis but also with the couch’s associations with lying down, thinking, and dreaming. What happens with mental activity when the body is stretched out and resting quietly? In nineteenth-century bourgeois homes the sofa and its more frivolous half siblings, the couch and the divan, were pieces of furniture where the body could relax in different ways. The couch created a space of intimacy where people sat close and could talk about private matters. It was as if the couch with its voluptuous curves, thick upholstery, and puffed-up cushions opened up a special space within the living room. It could be a disturbing element, neither chair nor bed, meant neither for deep sleep nor sharp awakefulness. In its voluptuousness it also had an erotic potential, for both fantasies and furtive meetings. An aura of coziness existed around it, but it also functioned as an aperture into the world and dangerous thoughts. For nineteenth-century medicine the couch became a working tool. Therapists told their patients, especially women with weak nerves, to lie

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down; they should relax and be protected from reality. Later, doctors discovered that this relaxed state put problematic fantasies in motion. In psychoanalysis the couch turned into a machine for concentration, creating paths to the unconscious. Freud described how both body and mind became open to repressed emotions and memories. Then the couch became more like an operating table than a homely living-room recliner. Freud and others discovered that something happens to men and women when they sink down on the couch. It turns into a ship sailing out into the world. Even tiny dislocations of the body have consequences for the consciousness, and it was interesting to note that thoughts are shaped by leaning backward, lying totally still, or suddenly getting up. Bodily positions and emotional moods are intertwined. So what kind of stage is the bed or the sofa? Two factors seem important here. First of all such objects constitute “a room in a room,” a small island in a wider space. Second, they allow the body to relax, and when the body is immobilized the mind becomes mobile in new ways.

Thinking with Your Legs The sofa is still a daydreaming space for many, but tranquillity may also turn into restlessness. It may become necessary to get up and start walking. “I can only meditate when I walk. As soon as I stop, I cease to think; my mind can only work together with my legs,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau (quoted in Solnit 2005: 27), one of many philosophers for whom walking was necessary for the production of ideas. Rousseau’s disclosure points to a link between meta- and microphysics. Edmund Husserl (quoted in Casey 1979: 224ff.) once pointed out that walking collects the body and turns all its parts into a whole, a very intense “here” on the move toward different “theres.” Mind and muscles work together as an exploratory power, the world opens up—and the ceiling is high for thoughts and fantasies. Even though everyone has probably experienced this phenomenon, it may be hard to remember how the imagination develops through walking.

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We can follow the process in detail in several fictional daydreamers, among them Leopold Bloom walking the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904 in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Mrs Dalloway on a shopping trip in London in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel. In both novels we are confronted with the strange kind of daydreaming called stream of consciousness. The psychologist Ethel S. Person (1997: 33) has likened the whirling fragments of the imagination to small fish that hide by taking on the colors of surrounding vegetation or by quickly disappearing behind a stone—fragments fly past, and there is a strange mix of colors, smells, and objects. While walking the streets Leopold Bloom observes the urban landscape—passing strangers, advertisements, and goods in the shop windows. He remembers bits and pieces, a newspaper heading, a music hall tune, a photo, and he does so at breakneck speed. Few have succeeded as well as Joyce in capturing in words this kind of daydreaming—for example, how a row of cans in a shop window sets Bloom’s imagination working. What results is not an elaborated narrative but a rhapsodic stream of consciousness, which is the elusive form that most daydreams take. As the author David Lodge (1992) has shown, Joyce demonstrates how people create their dream techniques. Joyce’s three main characters in Ulysses, Leopold, his wife, Molly, and the young Stephen Dedalus, daydream in different ways. Stephen’s daydreaming links metaphors, Leopold connects different phenomena in time and space with the help of metonyms, and Molly creates concrete chains of associations—one breakfast reminds her of another, one man of another. The work of their imaginations also depends upon bodily states and movements. Molly rests, dead still, in her bed in the dark and lets memories and dreams do the walking, whereas Leopold walks amid a stream of people and impressions. To lie down or start moving would change the preconditions for daydreaming.

Railway Dream Factories When we asked people for their favorite daydreaming situations, the most common answer was “on the road,” that is traveling by train, bus, or car,

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especially while commuting to work. For many this in-between space is not “dead time” but a chance for intensive daydreaming. It is not only the movement that stimulates the mind but also the passing landscape and the faces of the anonymous fellow travelers. “It can be anything that sets me daydreaming,” was one answer. “An interesting person in front of me, an advertisement, a big suitcase, a hat, or just a sound.” “For people of our times, railway stations are true dream factories.” This was one of Walter Benjamin’s (1999: 334) favorite quotes, made by a Frenchman in the 1920s. Some places are more productive of daydreaming than others. What are their infrastructures like? Benjamin talked of how Paris reminded him of his German childhood, and he looked for what he called “the collective dream architecture”—passages, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax cabinets, casinos, and railway stations. Experience the inner journey. That slightly absentminded look people have sometimes. Do you know what they do? They travel. We know, because we see it every day. The train has barely left the platform before a deep, unison sigh is heard in the compartment. Then they are gone. Not to worldly places like Östersund, Stockholm or Göteborg, but to an inner world. We don’t know so much about it, but people seem to feel better by visiting it now and then. Maybe there aren’t so many such places left in the world, where you can relax and fantasize? All that we loved as children but lost as we turned into adult time hunters. It is there on the train. Maybe you should try it sometime?

This was part of a big advertising campaign by the Swedish state railways in 1999, marketing the train as the perfect medium for daydreaming. Big posters showed travelers reflected in the train window amid a double exposure of dreamscapes with swaying palm trees and exotic women. The subtext was: “From Stockholm to Gothenburg via Tahiti.” But how did the train become a place for daydreaming? Early railway travel did not open up much space for dreaming. Mind and body found it hard to adjust to the unprecedented speeds of twenty to thirty miles per hour. The landscape rushed by and made people dizzy, the vibrations made them ill. Once the passengers had learned to fix the scenery

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outside with help of a panoramic gaze that ignored the foreground and focused on the horizon rail, travel became a more meditative experience, but also a more boring one. As travel changed into an exact amount of time between two locations, people started to glance at their watches. The standardized journey created a new economy of time—and the monotony caused by the clicking of rail joints. Gradually the train became the special microclimate for daydreaming that Jenny Diski (2002: 98) has captured in one of her books: Everyone knows the pleasure, even on the shortest train journey, of staring out at the world that goes by beyond the viewer’s control, to the accompaniment of the rhythm of the wheels on the rail and the swaying of the carriage. Hypnotic, the landscape forever approaching and passing, skimming along, the eye snatching a detail, noticing a cloud, a bizarre building, a blasted tree, a startled creature, but not being able to hold on to it as the view rolls by. Our thought processes work more slowly than the speed of the train or the eye.

Diski also notes how old memories and mass media images become part of the train panorama. When she travels for the first time through the landscapes of the classic American Wild West she notes that she has already been there before, a thousand times. The desert views are mixed with childhood movie memories. All of a sudden she can feel the special texture and smell the carpet of the movie palace and her dad’s cigarette smoke, soon the lights will be dimmed for another Sunday Western matinee. Right now she is both six and fifty years old. Like Diski, most Europeans know the American landscapes well, for they are crammed with associations to TV series and Hollywood movies. In their imagination they have already been to the United States, even if they have never left London or Stockholm. Experiencescapes are created by the cultural baggage people drag along as foresights that offer matrixes and shape expectations. Here we are at last, on a Florida beach, in Manhattan, or the Wild West, but we are not alone, we are accompanied by thousands of mediated images.

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“I daydream differently on a train than on a plane, I don’t really know what it is, but I feel much freer on a train,” a colleague told us, wondering about the different daydreaming capacities of the train, the airplane, and the car. The new feelings of security and boredom, the mastering of the gaze through the window pane, the rhythmic noises, all this slowly made the train a daydreaming space different from that of air or car travel.

Fears and Fascinations of Flying In his book on daydreaming and air, Bachelard (1943) explores the daily and nightly fantasies of weightlessness, of ascending and falling. In their minds people learned to fly long before the advent of hot air balloons in the late eighteenth century or the introduction of the airplane in the early twentieth. The airplane remained a dream vehicle well into the advent of mass flight travel during the 1960s and 1970s.11 All over the world people flocked to airports and air shows to watch flying machines and dream of becoming a pilot, to hover in the air, free as a bird, but with full control and detached from the mundane worries below. When the day arrived when ordinary people began to fly and found themselves packed like sardines in narrow planes, exposed to long flights and unpleasant landings, a new kind of fantasy evolved—the fear of flying. Aboard a plane, strapped into the seat, images of disaster may lurk at the back of the mind. Although one has long since stopped listening to the ritual presentation of safety precautions, one registers the solidly material world of danger. The life jacket under the seat, the oxygen mask ready to drop from the ceiling, the bag for airsickness. For a split second people may activate a fantasy of disaster and death. In the early days of railway travel such disaster fantasies were common. Indeed, modern trauma research started with experiences of train catastrophies, and researchers discussed all kinds of “railway sicknesses” (Höjer 2005). Railway fears soon faded, but up in the air—the safest transport system of them all— fears survive.

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Aviophobia has created a whole industry of therapy, counseling, and training courses; the phobia links a number of fears and anxieties, including the passenger’s feeling of powerlessness, claustrophobia, fear of heights, and fear of sudden, inevitable death (Thünnisen 1997). The airplane crash has remained one of the dominating death fantasies, sometimes well hidden or even repressed. The airlines did their best to project an alternative image of flying. When stewardesses were first introduced in the 1930s they were trained nurses, ready to take motherly care of the passengers, but they soon developed into glamour symbols, the next thing to a filmstar. Passengers had only to press a plastic button and one of these goddesses would sail forward to give them a cocktail. Stewardesses added a new element to male erotic fantasies, as the folklore of the 1950s framed the dream of the beautiful, smiling women always there to serve: “Coffee, tea, or me?” (Dienel 1997: 375). Daydreaming in the air is shaped by the special material setting. The soundscape of the deep but muted buzzing sound of the engine and wind, as well as the low vibrations, make people feel dreamy, but all of a sudden one can be jolted out of this meditative mood by the outbursts of shrill loudspeaker announcements from the crew. Outside, clouds move past in the same sleepy manner, their movements so slow that passengers feel as if they are hanging still in the air; strange cloud formations or the sunset in the horizon create special daydreaming landscapes. The first generation of air passengers found that landscapes viewed from above set their imaginations moving in new ways. At night, cities turned magical. Here is a German passenger in the 1920s describing his experience approaching Berlin in the dark: Forehead against the window, one hovers over the streets. One knows them, but can’t identify them after all. What ones sees is unreal and fantastical—glimmering arabesques, diamonds on black silk. (Fritzsche 1992: 169)

The night offered a novel city, full of unknown beauty and adventure. Airplanes gave new romance to the modern world.

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But the mood of daydreaming inside the shell can change drastically. The meditative experience in a half-empty flight is quite different from the stressed atmosphere of a delayed flight full of irritated, restless passengers.

Automobility Another and very different daydreaming space is the car. This twentiethcentury symbol of freedom makes people believe that they are in full control behind the wheel. A man talks enthusiastically about how important his everyday drive to work has become: For many years I have been commuting to work on the freeway, I have always been in a hurry to get home, but now in later years I have started to slow down, others overtake me the whole time. It is like I need this calm, it makes the day settle in the body and I think much better than at work. It is meditative.

Even the most trivial of journeys may create a richness of dreams; day after day you pass through the same landscape with the same sceneries, and they become part of your reveries. Another man talks about the large white building up on a high forested hill in the distance that he glimpses from the freeway. He can’t stop fantasizing about that house: Is it an old sanatorium, or the grandiose retreat of an old merchant? In my fantasies it reminds me of the hospital in a Hollywood movie, Cider House Rules, an isolated place, populated by strange characters. Every time I pass the house I start populating it with people and activities. What can be going on up there on the hill? I have even started thinking about making a detour and finding my way up there, but that will probably never happen. Why confront my daydreams with realities?

In her accounts of freeway driving in Los Angeles, Joan Didion (1979: 83) has described the trancelike condition that the veteran driver may enter. Freeways turn into places for the imagination and the car to a dream factory. You just go with the flow of traffic, time and space are dissolved.12 Daydreaming at sixty miles per hour is a skill that every driver has to

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acquire. Learners on the road do not have much time for mindwandering; the car demands their full attention.13 In American car culture the escape fantasy emerged as a popular daydream, shaped by several generations of artists, songwriters, filmmakers, and writers. With the help of different materials people created their own personal road movies of hitting the road—just getting the hell away. What if I were simply to turn away from my daily commute, travel at full speed along unknown roads with country-and-western music blaring from the speakers, the wind in my hair, in search of a new life or escape from an awful boss or boring husband? Such prefab fantasies may spin through the head of tired commuters, but the fantasies usually remain fantasies (Eyerman and Löfgren 1995). The car as a daydreaming tool is shaped by the sensualities of driving— the soothing vibrations from the car, the stillness inside and the wind outside, all the bumps of the road that are transplanted into the body as the landscape whirls past the panorama screen. The car becomes a part of the body, and the speed creates a feeling of weightlessness. “It is hard to worry at eighty miles an hour,” as the heroine puts it in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates (1997: 159).14 But a driver can also be haunted by fantasies of sudden death. Just a simple turn of the wheel and I can make this car crash through the railings of the bridge. People may feel embarassed by such morbid fantasies and try to comfort themselves that such fantasies are probably shared by many other motorists.

Choreography of Reveries Walking, lying down, and traveling in trains, planes, and cars—these are activities that choreograph daydreams in different ways. Above all they remind us how body and mind work together. Some daydreams make us restless, our feet start to itch, and we want to move. Conversely, such physical feelings can produce daydreams. Here the combination of small and large movements is important, the slow vibrations inside the car and the rapidly changing landscape outside, the feeling of stillness up in the air, or just the

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slightest motion of a limb when you lie in bed and let your eyes trace the cracks in the ceiling. Another dimension of daydreaming spaces is the participation of coactors. Walking the streets or traveling, strangers often get co-opted without their knowledge into someone’s fantasies, especially during a long, boring commute. Helen Hunt describes this preoccupation in her reflections on train travel back in the 1870s: Be as silent, as unsocial, as surly as you please, you cannot avoid being more or less impressed by the magnetism of every human being in the car. Their faces attract or repel; you like, you dislike, you wonder, you pity, you resent, you loathe. (Quoted in Diski, 2002: 186)

For Helen Hunt it was impossible to refrain from fantasizing about her fellow travelers, and when the journey was over she was quite exhausted by all the daydreaming. Waiting is another important force in daydreaming. Time spent squeezed into a train compartment, queuing at the check-in counter, or being bored in a waiting room offers good opportunities for fantasizing about the people around one. They can be given fanciful parts as heroes, villains, or simply extras, or they can be co-opted into unknowingly taking part in secret competitions. The anonymity of the public space gives scope to the individual imagination. Who is that man ahead of me? A woman told us how she watched a couple in a train slowly gliding past on the platform. Before they were out of sight she had created a fictive love story about them. The psychologist Diane Barth (1999: 47) has talked of her friend Barbara, who just can’t understand why people sit and read on the New York subway, when their fellow passengers are so much more fascinating. There are exciting stories to read in their faces, Barbara says, and she spends her time on the subway giving them a fantasy life. Take that young man with a backpack, for example, he’s probably on his way to start college. He seems like a smalltown boy with a troublesome childhood, and soon he will fall in love with a fellow student, but it won’t work out. Barbara’s incessant daydreaming turns out to be projections of her own problems, which she tries to escape

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in different ways. There is an interesting tension between such imaginary escapes and being stuck in physical circumstances. In the next section we will focus on the places and spaces for daydreaming. Are there landscapes that are especially good for mindwandering?

CLOSING IN, BREAKING OUT

Some dreamscapes are based not on mobility but on staying put in a special setting. On the night of the carnival in Turin in 1790 a young officer, Xavier de Maistre, was given forty-two days of room arrest for having engaged in a forbidden duel with a colleague. When he is allowed out of his room he carries a thick manuscript, Voyage Around My Room, which was published a few years later. To survive his entrapment and boredom he had decided to record his fantasies about being an explorer traveling around the room. Like Anne Frank in her confinement many years later, Xavier de Maistre has given us the chance to catch a glimpse of the interaction between restrictive material circumstances and the human capacity to overcome them through imagination. With time on his hands Xavier could experience his mundane setting in new ways. He scrutinized his image in the mirror, went through his papers in the desk drawer, fantasized about the paintings on the wall. A dried flower, an unfinished letter, all kinds of details trigger his imagination. Why do women dress the way they do, how do different colors affect mood? He tries different techniques to inspire the mind, dresses in his travel clothes and pretends that the chair is a stagecoach: “On my journey north from the armchair I encounter my bed.” Forty-two days later he has learned to see his familiar domestic settings in a new light, but he has also learned the power of daydreams to help him break out from conditions that close him in.

Domesticated Dreams Much daydreaming is produced at home, in familiar settings. Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space (1957) explores the potential of such

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domestic settings. Bachelard describes walking around a house looking for daydream energies and tools. He opens drawers and wardrobes, peeks into boxes. He squeezes himself into nooks and crannies to experience feelings of security or claustrophobia. He notes the effects of a dark entrance hall, lets the hand follow the rounded curve of a chair and feels the warmth it produces. He sits down and traces the landscape of fissures in the ceiling. He moves in “a vast museum of insignificant things,” reflecting on how spaces, objects, and small motions weave a fabric of reveries. Other authors, among them George Perec and Nicholson Baker, have perfected this genre of describing the role of domestic details for dreaming. The home is a special dreamspace, shaped by its overpowering materiality, memories, and array of familiar routines. Some everyday tasks are more important than others. A middle-aged man said that he missed the moments of washing dishes by hand, now that the family had a dishwasher. For him the haptic and sensual experiences at the kitchen sink produced a meditative situation—“a great moment for fantasizing,” as he put it. The warm water, the clouds of soap suds, the background soundscape of the radio, the familiar motions of the hands, and the kitchen window that pulled his attention outward—all these things set his thoughts free. Similarly meditative situations include vacuuming and ironing. We have encountered some of these activities in chapter 2, but there are also settings in the home that seem especially productive—or especially unproductive. Fourteen-year-old Anaïs Nin wrote about the domestic areas that are not good for dreaming, “the places, where one is supposed to be realistic, solemn, serious or perhaps cranky” (1966: 185). The sofa and the bed are sites of withdrawal that create a space within a space. Another territory often mentioned in this context is the bathroom. Remember the important routine of putting on makeup. The bathroom’s daydreaming potential lies in many things—in the seclusion and privacy of a small, confined space, the warm water of the shower, and the silence. A man we interviewed remembered his youthful bathtub fantasies. He used to withdraw to the solitude there to work on his fantasies of baseball, creating new players and inventing new leagues. In the rituals of a relaxing bath,

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daydreaming may be helped along not only by the weightlessness of the body in the water but also by fragrances of bathing oils or a scented candle. Over the last few decades the bathroom has been turned into an extravagant dream space, a room for pampering and luxury. Interior design magazines give advice about how to transform a bathroom into an Asian minispa, but people also have their own personal projects. There is the German couple who spend all their holidays in their beloved Greece and have decided to turn their bathroom at home into a small Greek temple, complete with pillars and ornaments bought from the local hardware store and holiday souvenirs and small statuettes. Every time they take a bath they travel back to holiday memories. Then there is the Austrian woman in her late thirties who had for years collected stones on the family’s vacation trips and now turned her bathroom into a special landscape. While finding her way around this rocky landscape she finds a memory deposited in each of the stones.15 For Bachelard (1957/1994: 145) a house may produce many nostalgic dreams and childhood memories. He also notes how an image of an unknown building, for example one favorite old print, can produce certain fantasies. What would it feel like to move in there? In short, houses are good for dreaming. They provide a stage for ideas about the perfect life, and such fantasies of “total makeover” are helped along by many tools. Teenagers such as Anaïs Nin may spend time fantasizing about a dream house, as a way of materializing the future and anchoring their longings in concrete objects and spaces. Leafing through an IKEA catalogue or an interior design magazine is another way. Many people talk about surfing the realtor pages on the Internet as a daydreaming event, or as one woman puts its: “I love finding a house for sale and then fantasizing how my life would be if I moved in there and started a new life.” Others talk about populating a house that they glimpse from the car window or the train, imagining the kind of life that might be going on inside. This kind of daydreaming is similar to window-shopping, when one mentally tries on new clothes or arranges the furniture from the store in one’s own apartment.

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Fantasies of moving are a way to escape feelings of domestic claustrophobia, of being stuck in the same old life. There are of course other escape routes.

Zero-Making Esterilizado Sterilisé Sterilised Sterilisiert. The four-language message on the plastic ribbon stretched across the toilet seat radiates reassurance. Other promises of pristine order are found in the bathroom of room number 1003 at the Hotel Presidente in Barcelona. Although the room also shows many traces of hard-drinking and hard-smoking earlier generations of visitors, the old magic of turning the key to an unfamiliar hotel room remains. This might be the first day of your new life; the euphoric feeling is supported by all the small gifts waiting for you: a piece of chocolate on the pillow, tiny shampoo bottles, and a small sewing kit. The miniatures create a childish anticipation, you suddenly feel like opening the minibar and celebrating with a drink—you are in the playful land of make-believe. Like a car, the hotel room reveals the importance for daydreaming of shell and scale, enclosure and miniaturization. As Gaston Bachelard (1957) has pointed out, dreams do not necessarily thrive in open spaces, where the ceiling is high or thoughts can fly toward the horizon, as at the beach or on the twenty-first floor. It is often the cramped space and the tiny object that, at the same time as they invite claustrophobic fantasies, produce grand thoughts. “I like hotels because in a hotel room you have no history, you have only an essence. You feel like you’re all potential, waiting to be rewritten,” the architect Rem Koolhaas (1995: 780) has said.16 Everything seems possible, and in such a state the imagination is given new spaces; hotel rooms both enlarge and shrink feelings. One can decide to ignore all the traces of previous visitors and fall for the performance of the faultless. Details become part of the fantasies; you open the door to something new by unfolding the towel,

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putting the jacket into the empty wardrobe, turning on the water faucet, and opening the folder with the hotel stationery. Isn’t this the time to write to someone? The hotel industry is well aware of this daydreaming potential. In a study of hotel design Maria Strannegård (2009) explored how the industry thinks about staging everything from the lobby to the bathrooms. How to transform a building into a scene for imaginations? With the help of slogans such as “You Are Where You Sleep,” designers and consultants try to create an arena where people can play with the idea of becoming someone else. They use every trick of the trade, including Muzak in the elevator, special lighting in the lobby, and a sexy atmosphere in the bar, as well as a myriad of design details. It is not, however, certain that such staging will work; sometimes it fails to set the right mood. In a hotel room the structure of feelings may change rapidly from euphoria to melancholy. In the midst of fantasies of a new life, boredom and homesickness may take over. The ghosts of hundreds of earlier guests suddenly make themselves felt and block the feeling of zero-making. The walls carry a soft melancholy echo, Daisann Maclane (2002: 159) writes. When the visitor first arrives the room is like a new friend: one opens every drawer, turns the lights off and on, and plays with the faucets. But hotel rooms often lack staying power, Maclane points out; the magic fades, as the visitor learns to explore the territories outside the room. Visitors also feel a constant tension between experiencing the hotel as a safe haven, a miniature home away from home, and experiencing it as an alien territory. Because of its anonymity the hotel may often produce feelings of vulnerability or alienation. There are even guests who play with the idea of making their hotel room a final destination. In Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel The Hours we meet Laura, a depressed housewife in the United States of the 1950s. One day life simply becomes too much for her; she drops her son off at the caretaker’s and drives to a hotel in town to get some breathing space. All of a sudden she is anonymous and unreachable. The room smells tired, like a place continually in use, but there is also a pregnant silence that seems unnatural. Laura feels far

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away from her old life. It seems so simple; she lies down on the big bed and starts fantasizing: She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid. Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren’t they. It is possible—perhaps even likely—that someone has ended his or her life right here, in this room, on this bed. . . . By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange. (Cunningham 1998: 151)

After a while Laura gets up, checks out, and returns to her old life, but the memories of the hours in that room never leave her. Hotel daydreams are not only about playing with thoughts of an alternative life. The long series of guests who have passed through the corridors and rooms may turn the imagination in other directions. In a novel by Jens Christian Gröndahl the main character grows up in a hotel in Reykjavik that is run by his family. He becomes obsessed with all unknown people who stay or have stayed here. He keeps fantasizing about their lives: I could become dizzy by thinking what had happened to them, all those who in turns had dreamt, made love, or lain sleepless and lonely in one and the same room. (Gröndahl 2001: 101)

The artist Sophie Calle put this kind of daydream into action. In February 1981 she took a job as a hotel maid in Venice and while cleaning the rooms looked for traces of their inhabitants. She went through the wastepaper baskets, peeked into drawers and suitcases, and read diaries. She took note of the orange on the windowsill, the squeezed tube of toothpaste, and the marks of lipstick on a napkin. With traces like these she fantasized about the guests. She did not want to meet them in real life, but she built fantasies of their lives from their mundane belongings and her own imagination. Inner Gaze at Work “I was very happy when I worked in a factory, because I could daydream all day,” the singer Ian Curtis from Joy Division used to say.17 With the

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emergence of modern industrial work, bringing with it regulated hours and routinized tasks, factories and offices started to be described as hotbeds for daydreaming. Fantasy came to be seen as a survival strategy to escape the monotony at the conveyor belt or behind the desk. The more regulated the work, the greater the need for mindwandering. When the ethnologist Gösta Arvastson (1987) interviewed auto workers in the 1970s and 1980s he heard about many examples of the need to daydream. Real life couldn’t be found in the factory but only elsewhere. Work was just a parenthesis while waiting for a win on the horses or from the lottery. The workers told Arvastson that they dreamed about being totally different people—someone with a secret talent, or perhaps someone with a relationship with Brigitte Bardot—if only people knew. . . At the same time they fantasized about workmates and gave them new names, identities, and pasts. They decorated workspaces and lockers with triggers for dreaming: almanacs with countdowns to the next holiday, picture postcards, romantic landscape sceneries, or voluptuous pin-up-girls—rapid means of transport to somewhere else. The drudgery of work helps shape the imagination. The manual laborer is digging, lifting, and carrying, his eyes are fixed on the shovel, earth, and stones, but his inner gaze may be directed elsewhere. He is the recipient of imaginary messages from distant senders, Bachelard (1948) believes; hard work produces featherlight fantasies. In the worn factory for metal stamping in the American Midwest that the photographer Alec Soth (2005) visited, the ambient noise was very, very loud. It was impossible to speak to the person next to one, and listening to music with headphones was not permitted. Thinking about the banging machines that spit out small peculiar metal components, and about the harsh fluorescent lighting, Soth wondered where the workers’ minds might be drifting during the day. He asked the workers to write down what they thought about while working. A:

When I’m stamping I think about what I’m going to do after work. If the job I’m working on is going well, sometimes I

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can blank out what I’m thinking about and get into a good fast rhythm. B:

When I’m punching I wonder just what some of these parts I’m making are for. I don’t have much of a life, so I concentrate mostly on my job.

C:

I think about how my life is going to change when my first child will be born real soon.

D: I think about my job and my boy and the people I work with and my position in this company—if they want to keep me. The point here is not what kinds of daydreams people have at their routinized work—the daydreams may in fact be as boring as the job— but how they are influenced by the special tasks, machines, and materials. The fantasies are about totally different realities—or about a way to transform the actual situation by playing with it, rearranging roles, manners, and objects. The author Luc Sante (2005) remembers similar monotony when as a young man he worked at a plastics factory in New Jersey. The same roar and the same mechanical repetitions, 1,800 stampings a day. First he tried singing loudly to drown the noise, then reading one sentence at a time from a book he rigged up on the machine. Another way of daydreaming was to make “homers,” strictly personal items fabricated at work using the equipment provided. This is a well-known survival technique for factory workers all over the world. But we could only make useless items from scrap, Sante remembers (Sante 2005: 123), things that occupied the mind and gave us something to take home and perhaps present to a slightly embarrassed loved one. The conveyor belt of daydreams is found not only in the factory. In all kinds of workplaces people explore alternative worlds. By playful dreaming it is possible to get a feeling of freedom in a situation otherwise controlled by others. Schoolchildren and prisoners draw escape maps, and workers and clerks invent games, personal rituals, and secret competitions to make time pass more quickly. Only recall the ingenious civil servant Ragnar Thoursie,

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who demonstrated that it is not necessary to be totally present while doing boring work if one doesn’t want to be. This potential absence was a central theme in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological study The Imaginary (1940/2004: 125ff.). He treated fantasy as a magical incantation to make the thing one desires appear in such a way that one can take possession of it—or make it disappear. In that act there is always a refusal to take account of distance and difficulties, Sartre thought. Daydreaming is, then, a way to make absent objects present or the other way around. Since the imaginative act is at once constituting objects and annihilating them, it controls reality and offers opportunities of freedom. Daydreams do not claim an action of me, Sartre writes. They are neither heavy, nor pressing, not demanding: they are pure passivity, they wait. The feeble life that we breathe into them comes from our own spontaneity. The objects of the imagination are artificially kept alive and, at any moment, close to vanishing. Even if daydreaming cannot fulfill desires it is not useless. If I desire to see a friend, I make that friend appear in my mind. If I long for the workday to come to an end, it will do so in my fantasy when I start planning what to do in the evening. Daydreams are thus both subversive and subordinating, they remind one of freedom—and of captivity in the prevailing circumstances. You cannot come and go as you please—except in fantasy. Living in the reality as it appears to our senses requires imagination. Being inside a room requires imagining being in that room. Staying at a workplace for eight hours day after day corresponds to being able to think of one’s occupation, bosses, and workmates as real. My situation is partly a result of my imagination, Sartre suggests. That means that human beings are not compelled to live in the world as they find it. They can and do act to change it, and this involves imagination. For Sartre fantasy and freedom were one and the same. Probably the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares at his shipping office in Lisbon would have agreed to that; he survived his boring job by constant daydreaming. Bent over the office ledgers he notes down “the meaningless history of an unimportant firm” but at the same time follows the route of a nonexistent

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ship along an Oriental coastline. Both worlds are equally present: the columns for debit and credit, and the ship’s deck, where he furtively looks at the row of deck chairs and the stretched-out legs of those relaxing in the sun. In the middle of his dull and meaningless daily work he envisions various getaways, traces of distant islands, festivities in old-time parks, foreign landscapes, and odd feelings; now he is someone and somewhere else (Pessoa 2001: 54).

Clouds as Weavings of the Mind For twenty years I have sat in my office for half an hour during the lunch break. It is then that I sail out to sea, steering toward the horizon. The sun is glittering in the waves, I listen to the sea, take the smell in through my nostrils. It is a kind of half sleep, and it gives me new energy. I know the place where I go for lunch every day. When I close my eyes I see a tent at the foot of a mountain. There I am, sitting in front of the tent, looking at the wide-open spaces. Sometimes I move to lean on a rock. That’s where I rest.18

This is two men talking of their favorite daydreams for escaping the confinement of the office. In the same way people often search out places in the open air that enable meditation or mindwandering. As a teenager Anaïs Nin (1966: 42) often biked to a particular spot: The place is a hill surrounded by trees, and the trees are not so thick that they prevent one from seeing the beautiful pale-pink sky. A large rock serves as my chair. Once there, I put the bicycle aside and give in to my thoughts, thoughts without end.

Charlotte Brontë loved daydreaming by the local river, watching the water while sitting on a stone, or getting trapped in a book of engravings and exploring the images. Orhan Pamuk and Fernando Pessoa drew on the moods, smells, sounds, and movements of the changing urban landscape around them. Another daydreaming mode that has turned into something of a classic is lying down in the grass and staring at the summer sky. Lying on your back, looking up in the sky, wondering what objects the steadily changing clouds

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might resemble next, embodies the sweetness of doing nothing and trailing after one’s thoughts, the ethnologist Dorothe Hemme writes. She mentions Søren Kirkegaard, a habitual and very skilled daydreamer, who found the sofa a great vehicle for this activity but was also fond of watching clouds as a meditative experience: There is no better image for clouds than thought and no better image for thoughts than clouds—for clouds are weavings of the mind and what are thoughts other than that? (quoted by Hemme 2008: 9)

It is no coincidence that the office clerks above chose two open vistas, the sea and the mountains. Confined spaces ranging from the train compartment to the hotel room create conditions that are different from those of wideopen spaces. The sea, the desert, the plains, and the mountains have a long and varied history as dreamscapes. What they share is above all the horizon and its power for the imagination (see Crapanzano 2004). In the following excerpt Herman Melville describes how office clerks in the mid-nineteenth century gathered on the outskirts of Manhattan and were transformed to “crowds of water-gazers fixed in ocean reveries”: Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look! Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand— miles of them—leagues. (Melville 1851/1983: 7)

This is from the introduction to Moby Dick, where Melville points out that everybody knows that water and meditation are forever united. Charlotte

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Brontë longed for the ocean; as a young woman she went on her first trip to the coast, and after that the rugged coastline and the rolling sea came back to her as a fantastic dreamscape (Gaskell 1857/1997: 135). If people today are asked to choose a landscape for daydreams, many pick the beach, but this is a maritime scenery that didn’t become popular until the twentieth century. For a long time the beach, with its cold winds, sterile views, irritating sand, and burning sun, was regarded as ugly. Slowly these elements came to be seen as a meditative place. As a sensual combination, with the pull of the horizon, they became a perfect space for longing. People learned to daydream even on crowded beaches, lying in the sand with closed or half-closed eyes, signaling that they are in their own private dream world, far away. Modes of awareness drift in and out: dozing, fantasizing, and sitting up to take in the scenery (Löfgren 1999: 230f.). An older rural society considered the forest rather than the beach to be the ideal daydreaming arena. There one could walk alone with one’s thoughts, a free space in a society where privacy was often hard to get. But there are forests and then there are forests. The French author Francis Ponge (1947) argues for the pine forests as a superior meditative space. Here it is easy to walk; you do not get entangled in shrubs or branches, you just glide ahead on the springy moss. The ceiling is high, it feels like walking in a hangar, Ponge writes. The imagination is moved by the play of shadows and the sun filtered through the crowns of the pines. Gaston Bachelard (1957/1994: 185ff.) talked about the immensity of the forest, an immensity that is different from that of the ocean or the desert. There is a deafening silence, the feeling of walking into a cathedral. Both Ponge and Bachelard are products of the romantic vision of the forest that developed in the nineteenth century and made it a fascinating wilderness. For earlier generations the forest had been another kind of dreamspace. The historians Jacques Le Goff (1992) and Jean Delumeau (1990) have discussed the forest during medieval times as a place populated by the supernatural and full of frightening things. In the forest anything could happen, and human beings felt small and lost. This was a world of fears.

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Le Goff’s and Delumeau’s descriptions are a bit misleading though, as they mirror the perspectives of those who lived in towns and plains. The forest people themselves had more relaxed relations to what was familiar terrain to them. In Scandinavian peasant lore the forest has an ambivalent position; it was a workplace but also a refuge and a magic space. One walked into the woods to be alone, to untangle problems or emotions. It was also a territory populated by strange magic powers. The forest could change people. The beliefs were many and created rich material to trigger fantasies. What was that sound coming from behind the trees, a bird or . . . ? The rustle of leaves, the fog lifting, a shadow in the dusk could spark imaginations fed by stories of finding treasures and getting captured by supernatural spirits. The forest contained infinite possibilities and dangers.

Indoor Landscapes The vaulted pine forest looks like a huge market hall, wrote Ponge, thus introducing a link to quite another kind of daydreaming arena. In an autobiographical novel by the Norwegian Per Olaf Fjeld (1996: 41) we meet a dreamer who travels back to the landscape of his childhood but finds that there is just too much forest, beach, and nature. He starts missing the supermarket: There he could walk among objects without anyone’s viewing him as a stranger. The great market spaces were undemanding. They offered space for forgetting. He rarely felt alone among the women and men in uniforms, the pregnant, those with baby carriages, men on sick leave with crutches or wheel chairs, senior citizens, and young people out of work—they all belonged in this place, where the objects fixed the time. He experienced the changes of seasons here. The spring fashions arrived before spring, he didn’t have to wait. Out there in the open he was always late. The landscape was always moving, and out there in the green he often became melancholy. The supermarket had its own seasons, freed from the laws of nature. Nothing in here was meant to last forever.

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At the department store he is attracted by the cosmetics section, which always seems to be waiting for someone. Here daydreams can be captured in the many mirrors and exotic fragrances. There is a paradoxical peacefulness to be found among a throng of people, commodities, and special offers. It is easy to get lost here, to forget time and space, and to be left alone with one’s own dreams. Sometimes they are helped along by a piece of music or a colorful advertisement. When the department store emerged during the latter part of the nineteenth century, techniques were borrowed from the stage to create a scene for consumer dreams. In the department store the modern consumer could feel intoxicated by sensual bombardment and move around, surrounded by tempting smells, sounds, and colors. It was a luminous spacious structure, a well-organized experiencescape. In a study of new discount department stores of the 1930s the ethnologist Cecilia Fredriksson (1998: 97) has shown how this consumer space also became a free zone. Women walked by the counters and seemed busy with shopping when they actually just wanted a moment of private daydreaming. “Passing through the glass doors was like entering a new world, all these wonderful objects that set your imagination moving,” a woman remembered. This was a safe public space where no one questioned her right to be.19 In his ethnological study of shopping experiences in malls Erik Ottoson (2008) noted the same dreamlike condition of people drifting between counters and special offers, vaguely searching for something but often just spending time there. He followed people in their wanderings, watched them handle things, feel textures, try on a sweater, and compare colors. What would this dress do to me or this sofa to our marriage? In such situations fantasizing is often more important than buying. The seaside, the forest, the mall—three very different kinds of immensities. By the sea the horizon pulls the mind outward and away. In the forest people may experience a strange interiorization of the immense. The embarrassment of riches and sensual bombardment of a mall make shoppers dizzy. Landscapes mold our daydreams as we internalize vast terrains. But it may also

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be the other way around: when we take posession of different sceneries we transform them in our imagination. A special aspect of such transformations is when mental life is influenced by the shifting atmospheres during the transitions between day and night, in the times of dusk and dawn.

DUSK AND DAWN

In his book In Praise of Shadows from 1933 Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1977: 1) wrote about the importance of shadows and darkness in Japanese culture, “a kind of music of silence and a visual play” that was about to be destroyed by the advent of electricity. His essay deals with the daydream potential of dusk, and he talks lyrically about spaces such as the Japanese outhouse in a corner of the garden, which is a place for meditating in semidarkness. What does the universe of the shadow contribute to everyday life, he asks. We shall take up his question and explore how the changes of light from dusk to dawn provide a rich source for daydreaming.

Keeping Dusk One autumn evening in the 1930s two young men were journeying through the countryside in northern Sweden. Arriving at dusk at a lonely farmstead they found the door open, and when they looked inside they saw the farm people gathered around the stove and the weak red light from the embers. Nobody moved or said anything. What was happening here? Later one of the men, recalling the encounter with this mysterious atmosphere, remarked: “It felt like a moment of devotion” (Garnert 1993: 105). But this was not a religious ritual; rather, it was an institutionalized way of “doing nothing.” The young men had encountered a waning Nordic everyday habit known by many names, among them kura skymning, hålla skymning (literally “crouching in the dusk” or “keeping dusk”). After a day of work people sat silently in the approaching darkness and let their thoughts wander freely. After a while, the light was turned on and the magic disappeared. It was one of many special daydreaming situations that still are

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remembered by older people all over Scandinavia, and some still practice it today. Traditionally the twilight zone has a very special position in the rhythm of the day. Sitting together in silence and waiting in the dusk has been common for a long time (see Gislason 1977). As one old woman remembered: The hour of dusk was a quite natural thing in my childhood. It even had no name; it was just something you did because it felt nice. I grew up on the Faroese Islands. When I was about eight years old I lived with my grandmother’s sister in a rural area still lacking electricity. I remember that when the day was drawing to an end we sat down quietly in the kitchen. Nobody said anything. The kerosene lamp was not to be turned on until it was totally dark. I remember that the children should keep quiet—we should just sit still and not say anything. Grandmother’s sister, her daughter and son-in-law sat down and we were all silent. A fantastic peace fell over the day. (Janakananda 1994: 3)

As darkness approached, people sat at home in silence; sometimes neighbors joined them; no light should be turned on, and no radio. “In the semidarkness memories and insights arrived,” another woman remembered. The tradition of “keeping dusk” was a way of creating a space of rest between day and evening. The actual lightning of the first candle or lamp turned into a ritual. Especially for children, but even for some adults, this period of rest could feel drawn out. “I am getting tired of sitting out this long dusk. Light the lamp, woman, hurry up and fetch the fire,” an Icelandic saying from the nineteenth century puts it (Gislason 1977: 76). To those who were not used to this kind of meditation the behavior could seem strange. In houses everywhere people sat staring, with the vacant gaze that is typical of daydreaming, at the fireplace, at the window, or out on the veranda. One Swedish writer was struck when he encountered old country folks in the 1960s who just sat silently. An old farmer used to sit on his porch every summer evening, or stare out of the window during the winter, slowly

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sinking into the landscape. When asked why he was sitting there, the laconic answer was, “It’s nice.” The author added that the question seemed to embarrass the farmer (Sjögren 1961: 207). The rich folkloric material on the cultural landscapes of dusk in nineteenth and early twentieth-century rural Sweden underlines another aspect. Peasant beliefs stressed the dangerous liminality of dawn and dusk. This was the time when supernatural forces were thought to be especially powerful. People remember childhood fears of the darkness gathering outdoors and how the play of shadows in a dying fire in the kitchen helped lead the imagination in scary directions.20 “Keeping dusk” reminds us that the transition between darkness and light is organized by means like fire, candles, street lights, or a pocket lamp in the woods—tools that help to organize daydreaming spaces. What happens, for example, when an ordinary workplace is plunged into darkness because of a power outage? Maybe people start to fantasize. What’s happening now? Can I work? What could I do instead? A special atmosphere and experiential space is created, which makes it easier to slip away from the “here and now.”

Spaces for Longing Although “keeping dusk” is a concept that has probably lost its meaning for most people today, the time of sunset still serves as a daydreaming situation. In its present, ritualized, and mass-mediated form sunset has a relatively short history as a product of the globalization of modern tourism since the nineteenth century. In an account of her African fieldwork the anthropologist Manda Cesara (1982: 55) recollects a remark one of the locals once made about his peculiar European friend who used to sit on the porch, cocktail in hand, and look at the sun setting. “Why should anyone sit and watch the sunset?” he asked. The same bewilderment could be found among the Swedish peasants who observed the first waves of urban middle-class tourists invading their countryside in search of scenic spots. Why go through all that work of climbing up the hill just for a view?

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The sunset panorama satisfied many emotional longings. Observing the view alone or with silent companions was a form of aesthetic worship, a profound experience of serenity. The absolute stillness, the dying day, the landscape opening before one, any of these experiences could give a feeling of total belonging. The experience is often described as “time standing still,” or, rather, entering a “natural time.” It worked like a ritual of returning to a mythical past or a more authentic existence. Feelings of nostalgia, homecoming, or traveling back in time, could also be part of it. The element of longing even took the form of a phrase that now seems rather worn. A Swedish sunset postcard from 1909 bears the scribbled subtext: “If only you had been here tonight!” The definition of the sunset as an intimate or romantic situation intended for loving couples or close friends took the form of “wish you were here.” The sunset thus came to represent not only a specific scenery but also a specific daydreaming mood (Löfgren 1999: 76ff.). Although this scenery has been trivialized by millions of postcards, romantic oil paintings, film scenes of the lone ranger riding into the sunset, and a multitude of tourist ads, it still represents a time for stillness and reflection. On the West Coast of Jutland in Denmark caravans of cars drive down to the beach on summer evenings and line up for the sunset. People leave their cars to sit on the dunes or stay inside; total silence takes over, and only after the sun has disappeared beyond the horizon is the spell broken. Then engines start and a row of noisy cars leaves the beach, which is soon deserted.

The Hour of the Wolf Earlier we discussed the bed as a daydreaming tool. Going to bed at night makes such liberating moods even stronger. In bed, in the dark, you are on your own; it is an extremely private situation. If you are sharing the bed you can create a private space by withdrawing into feigned sleep or just closing your eyes. In the study quoted earlier of the everyday relations of Danish couples, Sarah Holst Kjaer (2009) discussed the classic Hollywood

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movie scene of a couple retiring after a difficult day. There is an uneasy silence as the two lie on each side of the bed staring with a vacant gaze out into the semidarkness. Something is wrong, the audience knows, waiting for the opening line to be thrown into the darkness: “What are you thinking about?” Going to bed and trying to fall asleep at the end of a day constitutes a special phase or arena for daydreaming. Julien Varendonck (1921) complains: “Why is it that all my good ideas come when I lie down for the night, and next morning they are just gone?” Waking up in the morning might, however, turn out to be something completely different. In her poem “Things” Fleur Adcock (2002: 113) talks about waking up too early, at 5 A.M., and finding all the bad things stalking in and standing “icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse,” exposing her to all kinds of worrying fantasies. In Sweden this time is often called the “Hour of the Wolf,” that no-man’s land between night and day, from about 3 A.M. to 5 A.M., when fears and regrets and worries seize your mind so forcefully that you can’t sleep. If dusk is the time for meditative reflection and changing gears after a long workday, dawn activates other kinds of thoughts, which are tucked away in the dark. Nightmares belong to the hours of sleep, and the name comes from the peasant folklore of nightly possessions by creatures from the underworld. The daydreams of dawn are often more about disquiet than terror; other kinds of creatures appear in these fantasies. Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is rich in observations about the conditions of sleeplessness and what he calls the changes between “sleep and unsleep.” These are the hours spent half awake, feeling the small unevenness in the pillow, listening to one’s own breathing, or noticing distant sounds outside. All this provides rich material for wandering thoughts. Everything sleeps and is happy except me. I rest awhile without daring to sleep. And huge monster heads without being emerge confusedly from the depth of who I am. They are oriental dragons from the abyss, with red illogical tongues, with eyes that stare lifelessly at my dead life, which does not stare back. (Pessoa 2001: 88)

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Nightly dreams are also carried into the morning world of unsleep, sometimes in ways which make it difficult to know if you are awake or not.21 When dawn is a time of worrying about the future, it is a modern kind of anxiety, nurtured by slogans and clichés such as “This is the first day of the rest of your new life,” a motto that can produce as much depressing disquiet as happy anticipation. During the Hour of the Wolf we lie silently in bed exploring all kinds of corners of our lives we really don’t want to visit. At this time the imagination often deals with all the shoulds, musts, and ought to’s, as well as memories of embarrassing situations or unpleasant tasks ahead. For depressed people this time turns into a real torment when the level of anxiety rises (see Solomon 2001). In his autobiographical text The Crack-Up Scott Fitzgerald (1945: 74) talked about “the three o’clock demon” in the early morning that could give thoughts about a forgotten parcel the same tragic meaning as a death sentence. Simple nothings or trivial details are enlarged into major problems. What will go wrong today, what went wrong yesterday? The mind systematically explores minor worries that can be blown out of proportion to fill the void. One may challenge such anxieties by consistently trying to hold back the unpleasant thoughts that keep one awake, with the help of more pleasurable fantasies. Such attempts at magic spells can take many forms. A middle-aged man talks about a repertoire of counterfantasies he has developed to battle his morning worries. Some of them have been so worn by use that they no longer work. For many years he invoked an oil painting, a fantastic forest panorama with blue skies and happy clouds. The only element of motion in this picture was a small white airplane moving slowly across the total stillness of the wilderness. In a similar manner Jerome Singer (1976: 21) sometimes returned to his teenage daydreams when he had problems falling asleep. As he lay down he once more replayed one of Poppy’s favorite matches. The Hour of the Wolf is also the time for obsessive fantasies that one dreads or feels embarrassed about because they make one feel sick or mentally unstable. Such secret fantasies about harming others or experiencing

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personal tragedies surfaced from time to time in our study, and we will discuss them in greater detail in the next section. These fantasies cause people to hasten out of bed, and with that a new phase of daydreaming begins. Now it is time for the morning routines of getting ready to meet the world. In mentally preparing oneself, as darkness slowly gives way to light, daydreaming works as a mediator.

Modes and Moods We have looked at the ways in which daydreams are staged, how they colonize certain spaces and situations, and how they make use of sensual inputs as well as special raw materials. Daydreaming is extremely low tech—you can dream anywhere—but it is also high tech, as all kinds of sophisticated props and tools are used, for example in the routine car commute home from work in the gathering darkness. Along the roads lone figures behind the wheel are “keeping dusk” in a novel way. The vibrations of the engine accompany a contemplative atmosphere, in concert with memories of scenes from old road movies, the flickering of approaching headlights, or the view of a lit-up house swishing past. The cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1994:152) has described how different it feels to drive at night. Thousands of images from film and literature form a backdrop. The car is invaded by thoughts of the past, the job, or the family. The dashboard presents its informative figures, and the radio plays soft music. The dark landscape outside creates a liberating feeling of being placeless. The car speeds through the night, but the daydreams turn eventually to the past. People drive along one and the same motorway, but their imagination can travel everywhere. Although people experience being inside an intense private world, they are at the same time part of a cultural mass movement. This example illustrates how daydreaming is shaped by cultural and social conditions. Certain settings are turned into productive spaces for fantasizing. Dusk and dawn constitute two such twilight zones between light and darkness. This is a condition found in cultures all over the world, but

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in places such as Scandinavia it has been given a very prominent position in everyday life. Our three introductory examples started with the schoolgirl who escapes from the math lesson through the window—also a common daydreaming tool for window-shoppers and train passengers. The pane of glass organizes the tension between inside and outside worlds; it works both as a protective and as an excluding boundary. You are shielded from the outside because you are inside, but, alternatively, you can feel that you are looking out upon or into a different world (Baudrillard 1996: 227). Our second example was the woman who loved to daydream while playing solitaire. This link between a familiar routine and intensive mindwandering surfaces in a number of other situations, from washing the dishes in the kitchen to working at the assembly line in the factory. Finally, in the third story, the morning shower exemplified the importance of timescapes and the special mood of mornings, when the mind is exploring the possibilities of a new day. This discussion of the staging of fantasies has served to show how modes and moods of daydreaming interact. A special frame of mind is created—for example, the melancholy mood of nostalgia at sunset, the euphoria or anxiety of travel, or the boredom of waiting or routines. Dreamscapes are also exposed to cultural wear and tear. For the pioneers of flying, the landscape seen from above was a fantastic and surprising scenery, but later generations took this for granted. Charlotte Brontë spent years imagining the sea before she had the opportunity to see it with her own eyes. We have discussed the contexts and staging of daydreaming, and the actors, settings, places, and times of fantasizing, but what about the contents and forms of these fantasies? What do people say when one asks them about their daydreams?

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

The seven daydreamers we have featured illustrate how the stuff of fantasies may be organized and communicated. Something happens to daydreams

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when they are transplanted into diaries, fiction, and autobiographical writing, used as part of a scientific project, or turned into stories. The examples show that genres are blurred, as are the vague borders between fiction and nonfiction, and that personal fantasies become “culturalized” when they are retold in preexisting narrative patterns. In a study of German high school students and their daydreams the ethnologist Silke Meyer (2008) noticed that those she interviewed often used old patterns from folklore, especially when it came to fantasies about heroic deeds in the world of sport. They knew the familiar story lines from such other cultural repertoires as children’s books, fairy tales, newspapers, magazines, and television programs. Psychological research on daydreams often focuses on the narrative aspect. What is the message here, what’s behind the story? Psychologists such as Christiane Gold (1991), Eric Klinger (1990), and Jerome Singer (1976) have demonstrated the everyday workings of daydreams, including how long they last and what they contain. They show daydreams to be fanciful and removed from the here and now. Daydreams change as one gets older, and they differ between men and women. In the coming section we will look at daydreams as cultural products created out of raw materials and social contexts.

Mining for Raw Materials Even while the body rests on a sofa or with feet firmly planted in the sand at the beach, an individual’s earlier experiences, images, and readings blend with the present. The individual actively uses these previously existing components to construct an “as if” world. Of course the raw materials vary from person to person, and between societies and epochs. In his introductory discussion of daydreaming Brett Kahr (2007) considers the differences between the nineteenth-century world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and the world of CDs, DVDs, iPods, and Internet chat rooms that the clients he meets in his therapy practice inhabit. As a young girl Emma Bovary took much of her inspiration from the romantic novels she borrowed from lending

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libraries. She exemplifies daydreams that are produced in different media settings and given different mediated forms. Medieval churchgoers fantasized about the mural paintings above their heads, eighteenth-century readers were titillated by exciting novels, moviegoers in the 1920s had new worlds opened up to them by the dream factories of Hollywood, and later generations learned to surf the Internet. Our seven daydreamers illustrate the mixing of raw materials and techniques. For Jerome, Linotte, and Charlotte drawing was an important part of fantasizing. Jerome sketched cartoons, often just suggesting a plot with a few strokes, and he found that this was helpful in developing his fantasy play. The fact that I did rely on drawing played a part in feeding back for me more crystallized and vivid images of the characters. Often these visual images were made even more vivid by my tying them mentally to particularly appealing personalities I saw in the movies or met occasionally in real life. (Singer 1976: 19)

Jerome Singer, who later made extensive studies of the role of television for childhood daydreaming, points out that he himself grew up with radio, a medium that influenced fantasies in a different fashion than does television. Orhan Pamuk, however, argues that television in some ways came to replace another important dream tool: that of looking out of the window. When I was a child, boredom was something we fought off by listening to the radio or looking out of the window into neighboring apartments or people passing in the street below. . . . Looking out of the window was such an important pastime that when television finally came to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows. (Pamuk 2006: 381)

Charlotte Brontë drew on the odd collections of books and magazines found in the vicarage. She also used prints and woodcuts, newspapers, old geography books with strange illustrations, and the supernatural stories told by the old woman who came to help in the kitchen. Charlotte became an excellent storyteller, entertaining her boarding school friends with thrilling and scary

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stories. For her the landscape of the Yorkshire moors was a constant source of inspiration. Her fantasy life in Angria grew out of this mix. The fantasy was also mediated by being translated into playacting. In her study of small girls pretending to be their idols, the Spice Girls, the folklore researcher Helena Saarikoski (2008) discusses how the girls are realizing imaginary worlds in a shared activity based on material from television, records, and pictures. In their play they embody mental images related to popular culture. But the girls, Saarikoski observed, are not simply reenacting the glorious star life of the Spice Girls as told by the media. Instead, they reflexively perform the story of their own friendships in the very act of play. This complex interplay of different media is common. Why can’t I read books like other people do, asks Linotte when she is thirteen years old, why is it that I have to start playing with them? She wonders why she is “thinking of things that don’t exist instead of taking life simply and innocently as it comes, without trying to understand its mysteries, its windings and its depths” (Nin 1966: 145). Our seven examples show how daydreaming develops as both a cultural and a personal skill and how people come to fantasize differently at different ages. The adolescent girls Charlotte, Anaïs, and Anne belong to different eras, but they share a romantic style. They invent mysterious heroes in ways that demonstrate the stability of a genre with roots in novels and other mass media. “One day my prince will come,” as Linotte writes in her diary. Gender and class shape the landscapes of daydreaming, as well as different stages in the life cycle. In the novel The Dice Man Luke Rhinehart (1972: 194ff.) represents the seven stages between childhood and middle age (but not beyond) in the life of a “typical” American male. Whereas the little boy fantasizes about having enormous power and speed, the teenager mixes successes as a baseball player with fantastic sexual performances. As an adult he dreams of ruling the world, earning a great deal of money, and ending all wars (see also Gold 1990: 201ff.). Discussions of popular culture and mass media often elicit the fear that new media will destroy the enchantment of daydreaming. Jonathan Crary

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(1999: 77) sees a risk that the preproduced fantasy worlds of TV and the Internet may limit the scope of individual inventiveness. What we can learn from historical comparisons, however, is that the confrontations between personal fantasy and new media have the potential to create dynamic transformations. A kind of cultural alchemy is at work here, combining all manner of “stuff.” Some fantasies thrive on a lack of input, the boredom of “nothing happening,” whereas others prosper with a wealth of sensual stimuli. A wellresearched case is the role of computer games, where an imaginary world, like the kingdom of Angria, offers the players a starting point that they develop on their own, not only during play, alone or with others, but also in everyday fantasizing. Thereafter the favorite character that has been created and developed accompanies the daydreamer as a companion.22 Fantasy is thus not only inner, private images but also a highly sophisticated transformation of reality. Sometimes the borderlines become blurred. One student told us: I have always had a fantasy that I’m the only human being in the world. Everything else around me is put up; all people are present just for me. It is not me running my life, but others. Scenes are erected everywhere and they are easy to change. Those people I meet already know everything about me and it’s already decided what they are going to say. When I was younger I was absolutely sure that the world was organized in this way, but when I saw this movie (The Truman Show) that was about the same thing, I realized that I wasn’t alone in the world.

Mind Flashes and Polished Stories Daydreams shift among silent self-talk, reveries, mindwandering, and flight of ideas, but some daydreams are easier to catch and understand than others—especially when they have an elaborate narrative that includes a plot and an outcome that can be repeated and improved over time. When asked about their daydreams, people will often recount this elaborate form. Other forms are less easy to grasp, as when experienced as a disorganized flow of rapidly passing thoughts, images, sounds, and colors, all with

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unexpected turns. That’s when people allow their imagination to run away with them. Julien Varendonck (1921: 81) realized how difficult it is to transcribe such streams of consciousness into texts, even though he always had pen and paper with him. He fantasized about technologies, such as “a perfect cinematography and a perfect gramophone,” that would allow more accurate recordings. But even were he to communicate words and images, he realized that it wouldn’t have helped. What about the many swift associations, memory flashbacks, and rapidly changing emotions that accompany the dreams? Varendonck’s thought resembles many researchers’ and novelists’ dream of being able to tap into a brain that is running through a stream of consciousness, as in these two examples: Go to bed Theoduja, the golden sheep brings Theoduja, runs, tap, tap, tap to Lina, strawberries, Grandma, wolf, go to bed, sleep my darling Theoduja, I love you, everything sleeps, so, so, lovely May makes trees green again, I would like to go for a walk, the cat came in here, Mama, cat has black feet, black boots, short coat, with bands, put it on, Papa runs, heavens, over here, Grandma over here, Grandpa calls, Papa must not, Mama came there, so, good, get some smacks, naughty, sleep well good child, run outside, fetch fine things, running, falling, klabautzi! (Groos 1904: 132) His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins, sardines, gaudy lobsters’ claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the French eat, out of sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing in thousand years. If you didn’t know risky putting anything in your mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good. Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit. Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters? (Joyce 1922/2000: 222)

The first example is from the 1870s, when a German psychologist recorded his nearly two-year-old daughter playing with her doll, Theoduja. Like

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other children, she reveals her daydream monologue; she has not yet become self-conscious and begun to hide her thoughts (Singer 1976: 135ff). Most parents have overheard similar running monologues from children engrossed in play. The other example is James Joyce’s account of Leopold Bloom’s mindwanderings as he is passing a shop window on his Dublin walk. Chaotic fragments and associations whirl past. Bloom is experiencing momentary slips of reality through the fabric of everyday life, like flashes and visions. Such streams of consciousness, which can stretch from a split second to longer periods of mindwandering, are probably the most common form of daydreaming but also the hardest to handle. Again, it is the stories that are noted down or narrated that lend themselves more easily to categorization. When John L. Caughey (1984: 83ff.) argues that daydreams are culturally structured by the beliefs and values by which the individual’s world is constituted, it is mainly this genre that comes to mind. The contemporary Western materials collected by Caughey and others are often organized around themes such as disaster, glory, love, escape, and revenge. They also involve sexual fantasies, dangerous adventures, or grandiose achievements. Such genre analysis will, however, only take us so far. Daydreams, constantly changing shape, are good at slipping out of the nets of labeling. In being narrated they also get tidied up and organized. Eric Klinger (1990: 71) tried to capture such transformations by providing people with beepers that signaled randomly to them to stop and write down the fantasy they had just had. One of his experimental informants, Ned, provided an example that contained self-talk, visualization, and sound, as well as a good deal more. Ned has been sitting at his desk at home figuring out his taxes and has come to a place that causes him difficulty. But just then, as the beeper sounds, he realizes that his mind has been elsewhere. He was seeing himself sitting at his harpsichord playing music he had written himself. He could see and feel his movements, and he could hear the music. At the same time he was thinking: “I could maybe expand the ones I did already. My recital is the best to hit Minneapolis! Fuck you all!”

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Klinger gave a psychological interpretation of Ned’s story; he thought it was about pride, self-affirmation, irritation, and angry defiance. However, to us the most interesting aspect is that it shows the possibility of catching such a complex stream of thought. If Ned had been asked ten minutes later what he was doing and what he was thinking of, he would probably have said that he was figuring out his tax return. The daydream would have disappeared from his attention. Another evening Ned was sorting laundry while both the stereo and the television were on. He began to imagine a car speeding down a highway, going out of control, and crashing into a tree. In his daydream the police arrived with an ambulance, but the driver of the car stepped out uninjured. We do not know what was playing on television and the stereo, but most probably the stuff of his fantasy was related to these common media sources.

Going Public In spite of the many predictable genres, private imagination is varied and full of surprises. This struck us when we asked six hundred students, between the ages of twenty and forty, to anonymously write down a daydream, giving only their gender. We allowed anonymity, as many people are reluctant to disclose their most private fantasies. Freud (1908) noticed that adults are ashamed of their daydreams and conceal them from other people. What you dream while asleep is easier to talk about, even if it is totally crazy, because you do not carry personal responsibility for these absurdities. Daydreams are felt to be more willed and therefore more revealing, which explains social taboos about retelling them. Although experienced as intensely personal they are also fashioned by a rather common stock of symbolic material. Some of them may seem to have a soap-opera-like, or cliché-ridden quality, too naive to disclose. When students were asked about fantasies that they believe no one else is having, they mentioned such harmless things as spending the rest of their life at Disneyland, lying in a bathtub filled with popcorn, or starting the first

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tennis school on the moon. One woman told us about sitting at the bus or the subway and hoping that the people running to get on board would not make it. Several individuals reacted defensively to the question and didn’t want to give any examples of solitary daydreams. If I told you, they would not be mine anymore, some of them wrote. “You see,” one man answered, “I really like my daydreams and don’t want to surrender them; they are very private, they belong to me and are an important part of my integrity.” The student study tells us something about how people feel about revealing their “inner life.” There is both hesitation and wonder in the anonymous texts we collected, private experiences transformed into narratives to be shared with others. Once they are made public in a common language, daydreams are no longer seen as an enterprise that cuts one person off from other people. But people worry about how much they can tell before being judged silly, crazy, or perverse. In considering this kind of narrative it is important to remember that the stuff that makes up these stories is selected and organized in accordance with existing cultural norms and expectations. What is possible to put in words and what is seen as normal? Even Joyce’s attempt to catch Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness is nothing but a literary web with wide meshes, through which most of Bloom’s daydreaming disappears.

Wishful Dreaming I daydream about a way of life where I do everything that I’m fond of. I skate on beautiful lakes whenever I want, carry out garden work when I’m in the mood, ski when the track is freshly prepared, sail only in nice weather, and find solitary bays. I do whatever I like. In the kitchen the meals are always wonderfully prepared. When it is time for coffee there is newly baked bread, and besides that you live in a house that is always perfectly clean! The money flows in at a sufficient rate, and the savings account is never depleted at the end of the month.

This is one of many examples of a daydream about the perfect future, constantly polished and repeated in a set pattern.

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Happy persons don’t daydream, Freud (1908) generalized. He considered dissatisfaction to be one of the most important sources of energy for daydreaming. That may be so, but the dreaming woman above does not really seem unhappy; she just wants more of the good life. If Freud was right, fantasizing is a way to revise an unsatisfying reality, mold concealed desires, revive memories of earlier wishes, and project present hopes into the future. For someone with a vague longing to escape an increasingly stiff marriage, daydreaming of falling in love with someone else or of living independently is a way to explore alternative choices. Infidelity, marriage counseling, or divorce are usually preceded by more or less detailed fantasies about a different life. What is felt to be lacking—love, happiness, and novelty—appears plainly by its absence. The hope for a better future where one’s wishes are fulfilled produces distinct conceptions about something that does not yet exist and thus creates platforms for future action. Someone who dislikes everyday life, and is incompetent in coping with it, can go to an imaginary country of his own making whenever he feels the need to be invisible: I want a room, in the house, with a green baize door. It will be a big room, and when we pass into it, through the door, that’s it, that’s Ambrosia. No one else would be allowed in. No one else will have keys. They won’t know where the room is. Only we will know. (Waterhouse 1959/1978: 152)

The man who has this dream, nineteen-year-old Billy Fischer, is bored by his job as a lowly clerk for an undertaker, and he spends his time indulging in fantasies resembling those of Walter Mitty (Thurber 1939), including a life in London as a comedy writer. In the extract above he is confessing some of his secret wishes to his girlfriend, Liz, with whom he wants to share the dream world. By a desire to escape from an unsatisfactory reality he is visualizing possible outcomes of his plan. But when it comes to action he does not do anything to accomplish it; in fact this is only one of many fantasies. He is called Billy Liar—in the novel of the same name, written in 1959 by Keith

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Waterhouse—because of his tendency to invent absurd stories about himself and other people. Colin Campbell (1987: 79), in his interpretation of this novel, suggests that Billy’s apparently congenital inability to tell the truth derives from his chronic imagination, which often interferes with everyday reality where “other people”—all except Liz, his confidante—seem to be a constant threat. We’ll make models of the principal cities, you know, out of cardboard, and we could use toy soldiers, painted, for the people. We could draw maps. It would be a place to go on a rainy afternoon. We could go there. No one would find us. I thought we would have a big sloping shelf running all the way down one wall, you know, like a big desk. And we’d have a lot of blank paper on it and design our own newspapers. We could even make uniforms, if we wanted to. It would be our country.

Like a child acting his or her fantasies out aloud in role play, alone or together with other children—“Now I’m the queen and you are my ladyin-waiting, and we are going to have a grand dinner”—Billy Liar sets the stage for his daydream rather like the Brontës staged Angria. He arranges it with a place (a room in “our country”), objects (a door, keys, models, maps, toy soldiers, uniforms), and a plot with people and action (we and other people who will not be able to find us). As Eric Klinger (1990: 131) and others have repeatedly reminded us, daydreaming is a way to tell ourselves what we wish for, without necessarily ever trying to make it real. You might have daydreams about giving a great speech to loud applause, rescuing a pedestrian from a mugger, and seducing someone reluctant to have sex into becoming wildly excited by you. By imagining ourselves to be baseball players, film stars, symphonic conductors, gods of rock and roll, or great lovers, we, in the manner of Billy Liar, try to glorify a life that is not as perfect as we would wish. Here is an example from a Swedish author remembering his teens in the 1930s: I looked for salvation in daydreams. I was daydreaming almost all the time. By the time I got up in the morning and washed, my thoughts had already started their flights on golden adventures, and my adventures

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continued to fly for the rest of the day—during meals, lessons in school, and in bed at night before I fell asleep. All the dreams were the same: I was a hero who amazed the world with my victories. I succeeded as an athlete, as a commander, as an industry baron, as an author, and as Jesus. When I became a little older the dream of being a superman dominated. A mutation occurred in my brain, and my heart had doubled its power. As a result I was able to solve all the problems that humanity was struggling with. I revealed the riddle of the prime number and cured cancer. (Lagercrantz 1982/ 1990: 31)

This description of the transition between the playful fantasies of a child and the more serious thinking of a young man shows how daydreaming has different meanings and uses during the course of an individual’s life. Fantasies about glory, however, continue to exist among adults, although the nature of the glory fantasies changes. Young children often fantasize about concrete objects such as a new doll, bike, or computer game. As they get older such daydreams may seem naive, and more complex desires come into focus. The older we become the less we dream of the future, Klinger (1990) has argued, but in reading some senior citizens’ diaries we found much daydreaming about the future, albeit only about what’s for dinner tonight, a bingo evening on Thursday, the longing for a phone call from the family, or perhaps a short journey. A study of dreams of future happiness among high school students revealed marked class differences. Working-class youths dream about sudden riches from winning the lottery or gambling. Here the future is a lucky chance that allows them to beat the system or something that happened randomly. By contrast, middle-class dreams contained thoughts about well-planned career advancement (Malmgren 1985). Throughout their lives people test different identities and future scenarios. This in a way makes everyday life look more like a cultural laboratory. I often fantasize about living abroad. I walk down streets and through marketplaces filled with colors and smells, like in India. I’m not

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completely sure of why I’m there, but ever since having left my country I feel calm and free. At last I can earn my living by being an artist—a life that fills me with fervor.

One young woman surprised us by explaining that her favorite daydream was to imagine herself as an old lady. She often returned to that fantasy and saw herself living in a small cottage in the countryside, wearing an old woman’s clothes, having a wrinkled face, and walking slowly with the help of a stick. She continued to make up stories about her daily life, friends, and grandchildren. This daydream calms me, the woman said; she felt experienced and wise, having a restful perspective on life, not having to achieve anything more. When she woke in the mornings she was happy to have this future to look forward to. Daydreaming here becomes a more or less serious playing with ideas of alternative realities. One woman told us that she speculates about developing a successful business, perhaps an ecological restaurant. Totally absorbed by this project she again and again visualizes how it should be furnished and what kind of food will be served. One man imagines different skateboard tricks he would like to master. Other beautiful illusions include those where someone imagines delivering the speech of thanks after having won an Oscar, planning their wedding (before having found someone to marry), or being the king of a particular sport: I’m playing a soccer game and run with the ball in total control. When a guy from the opposing team approaches I back-heel the ball over my head and, to his great astonishment, pass him. I repeat this scene as many times as I please.

Dreams of desire often stand out by being clearly colored by the cultural background. Some classic scenarios of happy futures may give the genre a reputation of being cliché ridden. The folklore researcher Ulf Palmenfelt (2000) has compared such cultural scenarios of success among nineteenthcentury Swedish peasants with those among contemporary women who had been asked to write down their wishful dreams. In the peasant folklore material there are dreams of hidden treasures, pots of boiling porridge that never

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empty, and seductive supernatural spirits who can grant three wishes or become an exciting sexual partner. The contemporary women dreamed about happy family futures, lottery wins, and a house in the country. In the same manner John L. Caughey noted what he called “the Americanness” of many of the fantasies he has collected (1984: 186), for they were framed by values that seemed typical of aspirations in the United States. The dominant themes in these daydreams were material wealth, erotic satisfaction, and occupational achievement. Another common wish was to become a popular media figure (best-selling novelist, famous politician, successful artist, well-known sports star, or sought-after model). Wishful dreams may fulfill many functions. Sometimes they are an expression of a specific longing, as Colin Campbell (1987: 86ff.) suggests in his discussion of modern hedonism. He thinks that one of the joys of daydreaming in modern society is “the happy hiatus between desire and consummation.” Waiting for what you are longing for, rather than having it, is, then, the main focus of seeking pleasure. Delayed gratification produces bittersweet daydreams. When you get what you want, Campbell argues, you start to long for something else.

Worrying Like wishful thinking, daydreams of fears and anxieties tend to be highly culturally contextual, for they mirror dreads that are typical of specific settings, times, and ages. There is a great variety of such “worried daydreams,” as Eric Klinger (1990: 258) has called them. Problems parade past or stand in line, patiently waiting their turn. Some situations are especially fertile for such thoughts. Waiting at the hospital for surgery or at home for the result of a laboratory test may generate fearful ideas about worst-case scenarios. Lying in bed activates a feeling of immobility and helplessness, which accounts for the high frequency of worrying at the Hour of the Wolf. Roz Chast has captured some of the classics in his list of “Insomnia Jeopardy”:23

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Ways in which people have wronged me Strange noises Diseases I probably have Money trouble Why did I say/do that Ideas for a screenplay Worried dreams keep coming back in circles, in endless replays that cause people to get stuck in certain matters. Obsessive thoughts develop into a painful daily endeavor that can totally dominate the worrier’s consciousness. I have a lot of undesired fantasies about all the accidents that could happen to my family. When we cross a street my daughter is just about to be run over by a car, but in the last moment I succeed in pulling her away. My mother crashes her car or is attacked by a madman. My brothers are tempted to use drugs. Dad is injured at his job. But the worst fear is that something will happen to my daughter.

People create favorite worries that involve a recurring setup. The students in our survey told us about many such anxiety scenarios. One student was afraid that if he were hanging in a glacial rift in the Alps he would let go. Another worried about falling in love with a man who is being chased by paparazzi. A third feared losing all her teeth at once or that she might let a child slip from the balcony of a high-rise building. Anxiety is a superb soil for such daymares. Both wishful and worried dreams can turn into repetitive fantasies that get worked over again and again. People create firm mental scenarios that they return to, improve, and polish. Flashing images or passing fancies are transformed into a kind of building, a “castle in the air,” which becomes increasingly solid and can cause the fantasy to become set in a fixed mold. Worrying daydreams that are domesticated in this way illustrate how a daydreamer can cross the boundary between wishing and worrying.

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I often think of snakes—and I suppose that this daydream really is a pure phobia. I’m walking past the houses in my fine suburb and imagine that practically every home contains snakes and other reptiles. I often fantasize about snakes that escape from a neighbor’s house and that later emerge from my kitchen faucet or in the bathroom. When I was sixteen years old I moved out from my parents’ home to a place of my own. Every night I had to rise from the bed and check whether anyone had turned snakes loose through the mail drop. I know very well that my snake fantasies are absurd and what Freud would think about them. But I get on rather well with them; they are like old friends.

This woman classifies her daydream as “a pure phobia,” which means that she is regarding it as something unhealthy. She has a psychological perspective, thinking about Sigmund Freud’s reactions. What is really surprising, though, is her claim to like her snake fantasies. There are in fact other examples of people domesticating scary daydreams. One man remembers that as a child he couldn’t go to sleep because he was imagining a wolf lying under his bed. Then an adult suggested that the wolf was his own to control or bring up. He could make that wolf do anything he wanted. That opened new, less frightening, options to the boy.

Forbidden Dreams What do you daydream about? “Sex, most of my waking time,” was the laconic one-liner from a male student. One woman answered: “When I meet other people I am always thinking about how they might look when they have an orgasm.” Another woman wrote that whenever one of her female friends started a new love relationship, she always imagined herself in bed with that man. On the whole, however, sexual fantasies were not common in the study of student daydreams. Among the seven daydreaming writers we first discussed the only one who was explicit about sexual fantasies was Anaïs Nin, who became known as a writer of female erotica later in her life in such books as Delta of Venus

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and Little Birds. She is said to be one of the first women publicly to explore the realm of sexual fantasies. One result of Eric Klinger’s research was rather unexpected. Although most men and women devote themselves to sexual fantasies of various kinds, both alone and in company with a partner, U.S. college students in the 1970s did not mention them as frequently as they did other types of daydreams. Possibly the students were too shy or ashamed to talk about them, even in an anonymous inquiry. Such evidence notwithstanding, few categories of daydreaming have been documented as profusely as the sexual daydream.24 Brett Kahr (2007) collected such data from more than 24,000 British and American men and women by means of extended, anonymous questionnaires and interviews, as well as from his work with patients in his clinical consulting room. Most of the people he documented had never before shared their sexual fantasies with anyone. Kahr’s investigation shows that a vast majority of British and American adults fantasize quite frequently, and that many of their daydreams contain strong images of sadism, masochism, and other forms of pain. Contrary to common expectations, a surprisingly small percentage concern celebrities such as entertainers, movie stars, politicians, or sports personalities. Instead, the fantasies tend to be about people one knows, including neighbors and colleagues. Brett Kahr’s book and other collections of sexual fantasies show an enormous variation in form and content. As with other daydreams there is a mix, ranging from a fleeting thought (for example that of undressing a passer-by) to elaborate narratives that come to be used over and over again in lovemaking or masturbation. As with other kinds of daydreams, sexual fantasies may take place anywhere, anytime. This special genre also mirrors general tensions. Reading Kahr’s material feels like looking at other kinds of daydreams through a magnifying glass. Many of the problems discussed earlier—among them the distinction between public and private—are aggrandized or distorted. Kahr also documents daydreams that provoke emotional reactions of repulsion or attraction.

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Like pregnancy fantasies, sexual daydreams involve an activity where the private sphere is colonized by collective ideas. Because of its huge presence in Western media, sexual images have invaded even this ostensibly intimate part of life. Pornography in magazines, movies, and on the Internet plays an ambiguous role, however; its aim is to stimulate fantasy, but it is also said to replace imagination. A frequent complaint, that we have touched on earlier, is that this does not leave space for individual creativity. On the other hand, it would be interesting to know more about the way various kinds of prefabricated fantasies can be reworked for personal use. Every epoch or cultural setting offers its own ways of sexualizing the everyday. Think about the Victorian era, where the tabooing of anything sexual was strong enough for the slightest hint or association to arouse the mind—the legs of a table, a movement of the hand, or the glimpse of an ankle. People registered sexual innuendos everywhere. In following sexual fantasies through history one is struck by both the timeless and the timebound elements. In 1672 the English civil servant Samuel Pepy is in church, listening with half an ear to the droning clergyman. In his imagination he is busy seducing the queen herself, one of the many erotic fantasies he describes in his diaries. It is not very different from contemporary fantasies of making it with a Hollywood star. In the private diaries of sexually obsessed men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we are introduced into male fantasy worlds of different epochs.25 The history of erotic fantasies also encourages us to consider different kinds of media. How do eighteenth-century engravings work, compared to Victorian “dirty books,” nudist magazines of the 1950s, pornographic films from the 1970s, or today’s Internet sex? One student in our study delivered an example of how new media create special stages for sexual fantasies. She also shows how close daydream and reality can come: Almost every day I chat with this guy on the Internet. I have a boyfriend and a child, and he too has a girlfriend and a child. Until recently our interaction was rather innocent. But then we both discovered that we have the same messed-up sexuality. Now we are obsessed with the thought of having sex with each other, since we can accomplish things

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together that we probably will not be able to do with anyone else. I would risk almost anything to be with him, if only just once.

The publicity of sexual fantasies also functions as a sounding board for more general cultural themes such as control, guilt, and normality.

Am I Normal? Many people find their own fantasies lewd and bizarre—as if they had not made them up themselves. In Kahr’s survey they are analyzed as staging a broad range of complex emotional undertakings. There is an ambivalence of pleasure and shame that Kahr (2007: 22) labels “the masturbatory paradox.” Here, again, the boundary between wishes and worries is blurred. The same is true of many other kinds of fantasies. Linotte worries in her diaries what other people would think of her incessant daydreaming: “Perhaps these are foolish ideas, but they are true and perhaps I am mad” (Nin 1966: 30). One student in our study said that she fears to disappear too far into her fantasies because she might lose contact with reality and the ability to communicate with other people. She is afraid of ending up totally alone and eventually going crazy. Eric Klinger (1990: 272) quotes a psychotherapist who was worried by his obsessive thoughts: I used to walk down the street thinking of choking women I saw or grabbing at men’s dicks. I don’t know how often I’d have these thoughts, probably hundreds of times a day. These thoughts sometimes terrified me. I was afraid I’d do it. Yet I knew I didn’t want to. I had no control over the thoughts, had no idea of where they came from or why I couldn’t get rid of them.

As a daydreamer you may be confused by being both the producer of such fantasies and feeling persecuted by them, as if they came from somewhere else. In one study (Ehn 2006: 133ff.) of such dilemmas of self-mystification, a well-known experience in everyday life, people look at themselves in astonishment, as if they were somebody else. Who the hell am I? Why do I think and fantasize in this way? A stranger is daydreaming in my head.

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Questions of control may become a central issue in some kinds of sexual fantasies. Two Swedish sex counselors, Maj-Briht Bergström-Walan and Malena Ivarsson (1992), following in the footsteps of Nancy Friday (1973), wrote a book about “forbidden dreams” that contain violence. They stress how taboo this type of daydreaming is—or has been—among women, and they give several examples of masochistic fantasies that women find difficult to handle because they evoke feelings of guilt. Why am I having these dreams? One answer is of course that this genre of fantasies is constantly exploited in pornography where women are cast as passive or submissive subjects, but the situation is more complex than that. Female sexual fantasies of violence, dominance, and even rape are a reminder that one of the most important resources of imagination is that of giving people a sense of control over what will happen. The woman (this can apply to men, too, of course) may fantasize about being in a vulnerable situation where she plays with danger, exposes herself to strangers, and voluntarily takes the role of the helpless party. At the same time she knows that while daydreaming she is the one who decides what to do and when to stop. Imaginary subordination is created by an active ego, which explores possible paths of excitement, well knowing that this does not necessarily have anything to do with ordinary reality. The question of control and normality also surface in other types of daydreaming. Many of the students we asked were obviously disturbed by annoying thoughts, as was this woman: Sometimes I am affected by undesired thoughts about food. About the word food. When we eat, how, the swallowing. I have had this intimate and recurring idea throughout my life. The concept of food has always had great significance for me. Why doesn’t the word disappear? I am always thinking of swallowing, what if something gets stuck in the throat. It’s not about anorexia, but it’s difficult every time I eat. Why do I think this way? Am I alone? Is it normal? What is normal?

Other students wrestle with the feeling of imagining hidden cameras at public lavatories, feeling forced to count all the letters in the subtitles of

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foreign movies, or having suicide daydreams, even though they are convinced that they won’t carry them out. Sometimes I think how easy it would be to jump in front of the subway train. Not that I am unhappy, only just like that.

There are probably few people who have never been haunted by similar relentless ideas that make them feel freakish or mentally disordered. But not everybody is prepared to confess them to others. One man told Kahr that he would never disclose his masturbatory fantasies because they were just too awful to share. Our study also brought up the questions of secrecy and guilt. One woman at first denied having any solitary daydreams: I don’t think I have any daydreams that I’m the only one to have. Often when you are talking with people, after some beers, you become sincere and confidential. And then it becomes clear that they have been thinking in the same way as you. But when I was younger I used to fantasize that I was attacked in school by a guy who punched me so badly that I became lame. And when I sat in my wheelchair he came and asked for forgiveness, but at that point I smashed a big plate on his head. I don’t know what this means.

It is easy to interpret this revelation as a mix of self-pity and revenge fantasy. By visualizing herself in a wheelchair smashing a plate on the head of the bad guy this woman allows herself to be as aggressive as he had been, in a way that she probably does not like to be in real life. But because it’s a daydream she cannot blame her subconscious, as would be possible if it were a mysterious night dream. By dreaming while wide awake she is actively telling herself something about her personality that she would otherwise rather try to hide. Some daydreams become obsessive: I keep thinking about a rather terrible thing. What if I went out into the city with a knife, walked around and feigned bumping into others while

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giving them a light stab with the knife. How many people would I be able to hurt before the police got me?

Some people when told about this dream laughed. The first time this happened we were surprised, but such a reaction is perhaps not uncommon; people may simply feel relieved. Anyone who has similar kinds of morbid daydreams—involving secretly hurting others and getting away with it— must feel good to know that they are not the only ones. When one’s own nasty fantasies are confronted by those of others, one realizes that normality is indeed a very diffuse concept. Nowhere is this more evident than in sexual fantasies. At the mental stage when daydreams are enacted the ego is confronted with its own inconsistency, forced to see itself as both a culturally molded entity in constant relation to the surrounding world, and as an unreliable creature that is at any moment—at least in fantasy—able to break moral obligations. Daydreams also have the power to allow people to explore the seemingly abnormal, sacred taboos, and crazy ideas. Reading about the fantasies of others may offer relief, reassuring people that they are part of a larger collective of people who, like them, think they aren’t sufficiently normal. Daydreaming turns out to be an activity where the questions of what is good or bad, normal or abnormal, constantly produce micropolitical debates about values and morals.

POLITICS OF DAYDREAMING “What are you thinking about?” she asks. At this point I lie. I see Limpar running at Gillespie, swaying to his right, going down: PENALTY! DIXON SCORES! 2–0! Merson’s back-heel flick and Smith’s right-foot shot into the far corner in the same match. I remember, I fantasize, I try to visualize every one of Alan Smith’s goals, I tick off the number of the First Division grounds I have visited; once or twice, when I have been unable to sleep, I have tried to count every single Arsenal player I have ever seen.

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In his book Fever Pitch Nick Hornby (1992: 1ff.) tells the story of an English soccer fan who devotes much of his waking time not only to watching games but also to daydreaming about them in great detail. And since he thinks, or rather, knows very well, that such fantasies are not quite proper for a grownup man, at least not among the educated middle class he has become a part of, he lies about them to his wife—moreover, he writes a best seller to defend them. But why should daydreaming of this or any other kind be questioned? What harm could anyone’s fantasizing bring about? We opened the chapter by quoting Jonathan Crary on daydreaming as a crucial part of the politics of everyday life (1999: 77). After that we briefly touched on how this activity may be seen as an ideological battlefield, where the merits and dangers of daydreaming are hotly debated. Is daydreaming a dangerous escape into the unreal, a futile pastime that prevents people from dealing with their lives? Does it give them a totally unrealistic image of themselves and their surroundings? Or is daydreaming, rather, an energizing force, a skill to be developed to be able to imagine new possibilities?

Too Vivid Fantasy Nordisk familjebok, the standard Swedish encyclopedia of the 1940s, expressed no doubt as to the value of daydreaming: Daydreaming—inhibited fantasizing about wishes and wish fulfillment in wakeful dream; a form of escape from reality that characterizes introverted personalities. Among writers and artists daydreams are sometimes cultivated as an art form, removing their private nature. But usually daydreams remain purely private fantasies of desire and are regarded by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts as a manifestation of deficient reality adaptation and insufficient willpower.

Fantasy and daydream are emotionally charged concepts that possess significations with changing status. When defined as “escape from reality” or “manifestation of deficient reality adaptation and insufficient willpower,” their ambivalent standing is evident. How many children have not been

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accused of having a “too vivid fantasy”? Being known to be imaginative, the Irish journalist Nuala O’Faolain (1996: 25) remembers from her own childhood, made you feel marginalized, because imagination was considered to resemble “making a show,” drawing attention to oneself, exaggerating, and telling lies. But what would it mean to be unimaginative? For thinkers from Plato to Freud daydreaming has been seen as a destructive obsession; attitudes toward daydreaming have ranged from disdain to outright condemnation. In his Confessions the church father Augustine battled with the dangers of his fantasies, and the theme of good or bad imagination came to be central to the Catholic Church during the medieval era. Some dreams and visions were signs from God, others were the work of Satan and needed to be fought with all means. Some virtuous men even expressed fear of going to bed; what improper thoughts were lurking there in the dark? As Jacques Le Goff (1988) has pointed out in his discussion of the medieval imagination, holy men and sometimes kings were good dreamers, whereas the fantasies of ordinary people were dangerous. The historian Thomas Laqueur (2003: 247ff.), who has followed the public debate on sexual fantasies from antiquity until today, noticed that the expansion of the new novel and the habit of private reading started a discussion in the eighteenth century about the dangers of daydreaming. It was thought that the new media and interest in reading would unleash powers of imagination among ordinary folks. What would happen to public virtues and work ethic if people were to start escaping into worlds of fantasy? Discussions of daydreaming can also take the form of laments over this pastime’s being continually threatened in the modern Western world. One such complaint is that back in the “good old times” people knew how to “keep dusk.” Others lament that the art of daydreaming seems better developed in other cultures. On his nineteenth-century travels in Arabia, Sir Richard Burton (1964) mused about the meaning of the elusive concept of keif, a dreamlike stillness and meditative mood that fascinated him. Later travelers admired the contemplative atmospheres they encountered in other Asian settings.

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Such debates always have a social dimension of hierarchization and marginalization, and there are many, as in the encyclopedia quote above, who argue that it is necessary for artists to daydream and enter the world of fantasy but dangerous for weaker spirits to do so. This view echoes the critical ideas of Sigmund Freud (1908), who thought there was no reason for the mature person to fantasize. After Freud the debate became intense (see Klinger 1990: 81ff.).26 Women, in particular, have often been accused of becoming trapped in romantic fantasies, and idle daydreaming is often declared to be a noncreative force in their lives. At the time the four Brontë children created their imaginary world of Angria, habitual daydreaming was seen among the upper and middle classes to be a result of the dangerous conditions of idleness among young women. Barred from an active career life, with servants available to accomplish daily household tasks, these women could escape into mindless dreams and lose contact with real life (Spacks 1995: 164ff.). We met a similar argument in the debates about the danger that ordinary people might fall into the habit of “doing nothing” and living without tasks, routines, and work ethic. Idleness has been thought to allow reveries to enter life as a subversive force. One of the dangers facing women in the nineteenth century was the liberating potential of such pastimes, for they enabled exploration of alternative life roads and offered a chance to imagine different gender roles and another kind of society. Fantasies of romantic love, which were so common during the nineteenth century, in fact undermined the power of both parents and suitors to make decisions about marriage.27 Dead End or Escape Route I do nothing but daydream. I can’t stop. Every second I can, it’s what I do. It’s been like this since I was very small. I’m in my thirties now and I haven’t done anything with my life. I daydreamed my youth away. I do the bare minimum I need to get by in life, and the rest of the time I just daydream. I don’t know why I can’t seem to bring myself to be a part of the world. What is wrong with me? Is there anyone else out there who can relate?28

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This cry of despair on the Internet from an obsessive daydreamer is not unusual. Many other people have admitted that they too are “wasting their time” and doing nothing constructive with their lives. Someone complains that she will talk out loud or laugh when she imagines that the person she is talking to in her daydream is standing in front of her. She describes her life as boring and says that she has no close friends and never had a boyfriend. How can I stop daydreaming, she asks. One man writes that his problem is that he constantly allows his thoughts to drift off so that he will escape reality. In the short term it gives him satisfaction, but in the long term it makes his life a living hell. He finds it hard to accept people for what they are because in his dreams he visualizes them as perfect, but when he finds that they are really not he is disappointed. Such confessions are met with understanding by those who admit that they too are incurable daydreamers. These people say that if fantasies keep you company, that is fine. Imagining a life you truly desire to have is OK, as long as you are not unhappy about the daydreaming. Others offer practical advice on “how to get back to reality.” Get out and do something, is a common proposition, don’t just sit there! You need people to talk to, and you need to get all the things out of your head. Don’t be a hermit. The recurring question is whether daydreaming should be regarded as indolence or as inspiration. Do fantasies open doors, or are they just part of an endless tail-chasing loop that prevents people from having a real life? In Ha Jin’s novel Waiting, daydreaming plays an important part in Lin’s and Manna’s attempts to keep alive the hope of a life together. The author follows Lin’s inner life in the form of endless dialogues he has with himself. When at last he marries the woman he has been waiting for, it doesn’t take long before his new family life makes him unhappy. It was not as he had imagined it. Lin then tries to comfort himself by daydreaming about yet another life. He couldn’t help forming imaginary plans—withdrawing all the 900 yuan from his savings account, sneaking away at night to the train station, using an alias from now on, restarting his life in a remote town

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where no one knew him. Ideally he’d like to work as a librarian. (Jin 2000: 299)

Millions of people around the world occasionally make similar imaginary plans. Some even try to make them happen. But not Lin. He felt imprisoned by his responsibilty to Manna and the children. Perhaps the many years of waiting for the marriage also made it impossible to allow himself to hope for further change. In the next second his fantasy of being a librarian in a remote town turns in a completely different direction. In the depths of his heart he knew he would have been weighed down with remorse if he had abandoned his family to seek his own happiness. Wherever he had gone, the hound of his conscience would have hunted him down.

Lin was dreaming of an escape from everyday responsiblities. The idea of fantasy as escape is recurrent in the moral condemnation of this activity. In societies where one is under constant pressure to achieve, daydreaming is seen as a maladapted version of “doing nothing” that replaces human interaction and interferes with ordinary functioning (Somer 2002: 197). From this perspective, daydreaming is a lazy person’s preoccupation. Nothing constructive can be expected to come of it. Not long ago, children’s psychological well-being was thought to be in jeopardy if they were allowed to daydream. The activity was labeled as infantile and neurotic—and as a state of constant fantasy that blocked reality. In the 1960s, American textbooks for training teachers provided strategies for combating daydreaming written in language that resembles descriptions of combating drug use (Gall 1996).29 Ostensibly inspired by Freud (1908), these authors claimed that only unfulfilled individuals created fantasies and that daydreaming was an early sign of mental disturbance. They also believed that if one fantasizes too much one runs the risk of isolating oneself from others. A woman in her thirties told us that in her teenage years most of her time was spent with daydreams. The dreams allowed her to ignore her hard life, for example with grandiose fantasies about surprising the world by becoming

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a star. But her parents, teachers, and friends thought that she was disappearing from them and tried to get her back. Today she is an academic, and she still daydreams actively, but she does so about more mundane things, such as buying a new house plant or refurnishing the living room. Earlier we mentioned that daydreaming may be a way to endure a monotonous, boring job. The same goes for prison life. Many novels, documentaries, and movies illustrate how prisoners in jails all over the world create ingenious techniques of mental escape from captivity. The message to the prison guards is: “I’m not here any more!” In Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1980) the homosexual window dresser, Molina, has been convicted to eight years in an Argentinean jail for “corruption of a minor”; Valentin is a political prisoner and a member of a revolutionary group. They are locked up in the same prison cell and, despite being so different, become friends. Molina tries to find a way to survive and enjoy himself by telling Valentin in detail about glamorous Hollywood movies he has seen, and Valentin participates by asking eager questions and giving his opinions. They are in constant dialogue and enact a cinematic dream world of divas, heroes, and heroines that stands in stark contrast to the brutal conditions of the prison. While waiting years to be released, enduring the routines of prison life, they practice daydreaming together as a survival technique. The negative reputation of daydreaming as an unsociable escape from reality has a long history. In the book Escape Attempts the sociologists Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor discuss different ways to escape from the gloominess of everyday life in the search for meaning, change, and one’s true self. Daydreaming is one of those ways. The authors’ starting point is rather discouraging, however: Is this what our life is really about? Why is each day’s journey marked by feelings of boredom, habit, and routine? We feel dissatisfied by our marriage, our job and our children. The route we take to work, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, are visible reminders of an awful sense of monotony. (Cohen and Taylor 1976/1992: 46)

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Being researchers of prison life, where fantasizing about freedom is a way to neutralize the confinement, the authors use the prison as a metaphor for unsatisfactory everyday life. They describe how people—“we”—take the opportunity to escape by pretending they are someone else, rehearsing new roles and lifestyles and identifying with what other people think are unrealistic fantasies. Cohen and Taylor think that the imagination works as the last and only domain of personal freedom, an internal space quite safe from the intrusion of the mundane world (Cohen and Taylor 1976/92: 89). They claim, on the other hand, that fantasy is not as radical or subversive an escape route as it might first appear. It rather helps people to endure their dull everyday reality. Daydreaming, then, is not a way to change life but to carry on by generating the sense that one is not totally imprisoned by routines and duties. When confined to a restricted space, as Anne Frank, Xavier de Maistre, Molina, and Valentin were, fantasies about life outside may work as a mental escape for awhile. In Leo Tolstoy’s early autobiographical novel Boyhood from 1854, Nicolai’s teacher punishes him for ill-mannered behavior in school by imprisoning him in a dark storeroom, where he dwells in a stream of consciousness. Thoughts and visions flashed before my disturbed imagination; yet the memory of the misfortune which had overtaken me incessantly broke their fanciful chain, and again plunged me into an endless labyrinth of uncertainty as to the fate which awaited me, of terror and despair. (Tolstoy 1963: 181)

Nicolai imagines that he is despised by the whole world and an unfortunate orphan. He finds some pleasures in his sufferings, but then he transforms himself into a heroic general: Then I imagined myself already at liberty, far away from home. I enter the Hussars, and go to war. Enemies bear down upon me from all sides; I brandish my sword, and kill one, then another, and then a third.

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Finally, exhausted by wounds and fatigue, I fall to the ground and shout “Victory!” (Tolstoy 1963: 183)

The story, much like Julien Varendoncks’ daydreams during World War I, occurs in the head of the schoolboy imprisoned in the dark storeroom. He cannot resist the opportunity to take revenge on his teacher, St. Jerome, by imagining that he forces him to his knees. This glorious fantasy produces, however, an unexpected outcome, which also reveals the limitation of daydreams as an escape tool: But suddenly the thought occurs to me that the real St. Jerome may enter at any moment with the birch; and again I see myself, not a general delivering his country, but a very pitiful, weeping creature. (Tolstoy 1963: 183)

Crystallized Fantasies When one’s imagination runs wild, “you got to start choosing right from wrong instead of daydreaming all day long,” Pet Shop Boys sing in “You’ve Gotta Wake Up.” Nor does John L. Caughey (1984: 186) believe that daydreaming can be a complete escape, since it is partly determined by the particular cultural norms it attempts to transcend. Even anticultural fantasies are structured by cultural norms for breaking rules, and as such they indirectly contribute to the social order. Discussions such as these show that “escape” is a problematic concept. Is it even correct to talk about imagination as an escape? If so, what are people running away from and to? Coming back from “an escape attempt” certainly does something to your experience of ordinary life—like leaving the cinema after seeing a movie that has caused you to forget everything else. But after that? The tricky question of separating the fantasy world from “the real one” has been controversial for a long time, not least among psychiatrists who define mental health as an ability to distinguish between facts and fantasies. One of those who claimed that this borderline is itself a product of imagination was the Soviet psychologist Lev S. Vygotskij (1930). He went so far

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as to regard even physical things as “crystallized fantasies,” in other words as a result of human thinking. Most of what is regarded as unreal and having no practical consequences is, Vygotskij suggested, the foundation of every creative activity in culture, art, and science. Seen from this point of view, the power of imagination is one of humanity’s most important adaptive tools. You cannot accomplish anything without imagining it in advance, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1940/2004: 125ff.) argued. The ability to depict absent objects and abandon the present for the temptations of what exists beyond the here and now is a drifting away from everyday reality to clarify your wishes (Crapanzano 2004: 19). Afterward you may return with new ideas about what you can do. In the debate about the value of daydreaming, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1959/1995: 95ff.) presented a surprisingly positive point of view. Instead of denigrating fantasy as “an opium for the masses,” he regarded it as an example of the utopian thinking that has had such great influence in human history. Since fantasies reveal something about what people are longing for, daydreams may in fact be seen as a necessary part of utopias and revolutions. In a desire for a better world “the anticipatory consciousness” projects images of a future that is a mixture of everyday experiences and unreal fantasies. In daydreaming, all that is apprehended as real is merged with an existence that so far is not. No human being has ever survived without daydreaming, Bloch reminds us. The essence of this activity is that one is not satisfied with how things are but, rather, hopes for change. In dreams the opportunities for better conditions are visualized. In spite of being a mostly solitary activity, fantasizing may also create bonds between people who are longing for the same things. A similar perspective on the creative potential of daydreaming can be found among cultural researchers. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996: 7) distinguishes private fantasies as escape attempts from collective imaginations that may constitute a basis of social change. He talks about this activity as “an imagination at work” with potential political consequences. Like Ernst Bloch, he asserts that revolutions begin as collective fantasies

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about a radically different society. It is the imagination, in its collective form, he argues, that creates ideas of nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is a staging ground for action. In fact, all social change may grow out of people’s imagining having something other than what they actually have, or doing something other than what they have actually done. In an anthropological study of young middle-class Indian men in Delhi, Paolo Favero (2005) has described how their daydreams about a better life are contributing to an imaginary world of collective expectations and aspirations. Supported by media, popular culture, and commercial advertisements, the young men constantly fantasize about future careers. Favero uses the concept of phantasm as an analytic metaphor for the instrument with which the young men approach the images that surround them. The idealized versions of India and the West, as historically constructed collective representations, are thus phantasms that reveal Indian men’s understanding of the contemporary world and their own personal positions within it. Their pride in Indian culture is confronted with Western success stories. This shows how collective representations can be interpreted and used for personal purposes and form “a community of imagination.”

Training Your Fantasy Muscles Earlier negative attitudes toward daydreaming no longer dominate the discourse. Instead it is common today to talk about the human capacity for distraction as being essential to survival. Daydreaming, Eric Klinger (1990: 96) claims, while piggybacking on our other activities, keeps us working on our most compelling concerns. Klinger’s book has the telling subtitle Using Waking Fantasy and Imagery for Self-Knowledge and Creativity. What characterizes psychologists such as Klinger and Jerome Singer is their quest to reappraise daydreaming as a creative activity, a resource for coping with life that makes use of all human senses and human abilities to act, think, and speak. The counterargument from Freud and others contin-

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ues, however, to be present, and it is in opposition to this that a focus on the benefits of daydreaming has developed since the 1960s.30 The turn toward a positive stance also means that this style of “doing nothing” has entered the market. Self-help books and manuals give concrete advice on turning daydreaming into a personal resource. Examples of inventors and business entrepreneurs illustrate how flights of fantasy have resulted in important innovations. Athletes of all kinds are told to improve their performance by developing visualization techniques and envisioning themselves successfully performing their tasks. “Say yes to your daydreams!” has become a common battle cry in many books. “Train your fantasy muscles,” Diane Barth (1997: 17) writes, looking for “the key to open up our sleeping capabilities.” She and other psychologists and therapists31 think that every time we daydream we are communicating ideas to ourself about what we believe in. In that way daydreams become extensions of our personalities. Daily life is seen as a series of awake dream episodes produced to make clear the otherwise nonverbal emotional life. Half-consciously, people experience events that are almost as enigmatic as the adventures of night sleep. In the 1990s daydreaming came into focus as a creative resource in activities often labeled “the new economy” or “the experience economy.”32 Consultants and courses began to offer help on entering the innovative world of fantasy. Daydreams began to be used to address business challenges. Several corporations, such as AT&T and the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, used guided imagery to create new products, investigate consumer attitudes, and suggest answers to tricky problems (Henricks 1999). This method allowed the mind to wander and come up with new connections. By providing visualizations of until then unthinkable solutions, businessmen, according to this philosophy, could see new possibilities. Another, albeit rather peculiar, attempt in this field was Eric T. Mueller’s (1990) experiment to create a computer program for daydreaming. The purpose of the program, Daydreamer, was to test a computational theory of daydreaming as well as to argue for the value of including daydreaming in real life.

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The project was both an investigation of the meaning of daydreaming and an effort to produce fantasies that could be used for practical purposes. For example, Mueller described how Daydreamer imagines ways to avoid failure and achieve success. The program could also be used to show how various imaginative sequences of events are generated. Mueller especially wanted to know how people learn in daydreaming to keep alive the memory of certain episodes so that those episodes would be available at an appropriate future time. Mueller planned to extend the program to demonstrate the use of planning strategies and future plans. However, he never fully developed the idea, and the problems he encountered illustrate the fickleness of daydreaming, an activity that turned out to be very difficult to emulate. For example it was almost impossible to program emotions—one of the most important aspects of human imagination.

Where Are You? So much for the intellectual and academic debate on the role of daydreams. But how does this phenomenon become part of daily conflicts or power plays? As a form of everyday mental travel, away from the here and now into some other time or place (and back again), daydreaming also concerns presence and attention. When our minds simply drift away from what is going on, what are the effects of this absentmindedness? First, you can never be sure where other people are. They, too, may have been transported elsewhere by their minds. The person next to you—your spouse, child, or colleague—is she or he really present right now? Underlying the playful question of Pamuk’s father, “Twenty-five kurus¸ for your thoughts?” can be irritation, a feeling of having been abandoned in favor of daydreams. In a close relationship this can also become a question of control or power struggle. “Why are you cutting me out of your secret world?” The tendency of people in classrooms, workplaces, and marriages to drift away every so often can lead to complaints.

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In social situations the daydreaming of others may thus be experienced as threatening. This is the case when people are afraid of not being sufficiently interesting or important compared to what the other person is fantasizing about. One of Brett Kahr’s goals was to note the extent to which people fantasize about cheating on their partner in sexual fantasies. The phenomenon of mental cheating may have a wider application to all social relations that involve someone’s seeking the attention of others. If one of its most important sources is dissatisfaction, then daydreaming clearly functions as a silent critique of the here and now. Dreams may harbor hidden desires, old memories, or projections of a better future. World literature abounds with stories about men and women who are more or less explicitly unhappy with their partner, work, or themselves and therefore dream of another life. Absentmindedly they go on as usual, with the underlying strong or faint hope that their dreams will come true. In Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003) the young Bangladesh woman, Nazneen, who is married to a much older man who was chosen by her parents, has moved to East London with him. There she devotes her life to her family and to fighting the demons of discontent by daydreaming most of the time. Her days consist of regular prayer, regular housework, and regular visits with her only friend, but her mind overflows with indistinct thoughts, like a room full of people all shouting at once. She tells her mind to be still. She tells her heart, do not beat with fear, do not beat with desire. Ali describes her heroine’s daydreaming as a shapeless, nameless thing that crawls across her shoulders and nests in her hair and poisons her lungs. It makes her both restless and listless. What evil jinni is playing tricks with her mind? Nazneen dreams about her childhood in Bangladesh, about her mother and sister, but also about people in the Brick Lane neighborhood. She experiences herself as a collection of hopes, random thoughts, petty anxieties, and selfish wants. How did I come to be so foolish, Nazneen is thinking. What is wrong with my mind when I go around talking of silly things? Her mind does not seem to belong to her; it takes off and thumbs its nose at her like a practical joker.

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Nazneen is not sure whether she has the right to her dreams, since they are not in accordance with what her husband, Chanu, would like, especially not when they come true, as when she falls in love with another man. But even before that she has suspected herself of cheating on her husband— simply by having become conscious of her own wishes. She opened her eyes and saw Chanu’s puffy face on the pillow next to her, his lips parted indignantly even as he slept. She saw the pink dressing table with the curly-sided mirror, and the monstrous black wardrobe that claimed most of the room. Was it cheating? To think, I know what I would wish? Was it not the same as making the wish? If she knew what the wish would be, then somewhere in her heart she had already made it. (Ali 2003: 18)

Nazneen’s hesitation clearly shows why daydreaming may be perceived as a threat by, for example, a spouse in a marriage. When we asked a man in his seventies whether he daydreams, he answered, in the presence of his wife of fifty years, that he did, as a matter of fact, very often. Being retired and without any special hobbies, he had plenty of time to do nothing. He told us that he used to get many funny ideas and strange images in his head, and that he did not know where they came from or what they meant. Otherwise he was known as a rather sensible and conventional man. At that moment his wife angrily cried out: “Well, I don’t daydream anymore. I have no reason to waste my time on such meaningless things. It has been a long time since I stopped having fantasies about this or that!” We were rather surprised by her outraged reaction; it seemed as if she were accusing her husband of letting her down. Perhaps she was afraid of losing him in a haze of dreams that she would not be able to share, control, or know anything about. The couple spent all their days together, but his daydreaming revealed that he, like Nazneen, was often somewhere other than his wife thought him to be, and that discovery obviously made her feel abandoned. This couple is certainly not unique. “What are you thinking about right now?” partners ask each other tenderly, curiously, or demandingly. They want to know what the other is daydreaming about so as not to disappear from his or her attention. By fantasizing together, they would be creating a

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separate world of their own where they again and again would be telling each other what is going on. But neither of them could be absolutely sure of the other’s mental fidelity. Suddenly he or she, eyes wide open, takes the opportunity to get away and leaves the other alone in what a second earlier had been their shared realm. It is not only in love relationships that the micropolitics of attention control occur. The question as to what other people are thinking and feeling is important whenever human beings spend time together to work, play, or socialize, if one has the slightest interest in others. The glassy daydreamer look gives them away. When disturbed by not knowing what a friend or work colleague is thinking, and too shy to ask, one has to guess. All human interaction is built on projections about the inner life of others. Without these projections the necessary skills of social empathy would be lacking. That makes society an intense laboratory for fantasizing about the inner worlds of others.

A WILD CARD

Daydreaming constitutes a significant and creative counterworld to ordinary life. While seemingly “doing nothing”—for example, while waiting for something or performing daily routines—people live a rich fantasy life where they perform important tasks such as creating new kingdoms, sailing to distant continents, or revenging themselves on an evil teacher. This is however, as we have seen, an elusive activity, full of paradoxes. It can be an adventure, but also a safe routine. It may be a moment of playfulness or a recurrent theme that haunts one. It brings pleasant as well as frightening images into people’s life and shows them sides of themselves that they may find hard to accept or understand. It works as a creative testing of alternatives, rehearsing the future and reinterpreting the past. It can turn into a prison or a dead end. Above all, daydreaming is the art of turning “doing nothing” into interesting everyday microdramas. Even though fantasies seem to be almost independent of physical reality and provide strong feelings of freedom from its constraints, the influence of

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technology and material surroundings is apparent in fantasy content. As both an ephemeral and a material phenomenon, daydreaming always takes place and claims space. It is culturally created in interaction with concrete conditions and social situations. You may be daydreaming in almost any situation, without breaking the front of normality, while at the same time making the present more fantastical. Now everything is possible, and in this fact lies its subversive and emancipatory power. In everyday life, where so much is planned and ruled by routines, the daydream operates as a wild card, slipping into cracks and forgotten corners, disappearing in all directions, and then returning to bring the present into new light. The paradoxical nature of this “non-event” stems first from the combination of being an intensely personal as well as a markedly social and cultural practice, a shared universe. Our focus has been on this linkage. Culturalization occurs on several levels. The most striking one is of course the creative interaction with mass media, popular culture, and other public sources of inspiration. But daydreaming is also a skill that is developed differently in different contexts. By focusing on it as a skill, we wish to emphasize that this is something human beings develop during the course of their lives. The skill includes learning to find and use props and settings that are productive for the imagination. Thus looking at daydreaming as a cultural practice may help us understand the polarities between internal and external life, play and seriousness, reality and unreality. Fantasies as a private pastime certainly split individuals from each other into separate realities, but they also unite them in common expressions of hope, longing, or fear. Individual fantasizing is narratively communicated, and our imaginations turn public social life into a personal matter. Without daydreams it would be difficult to see anything but the most obvious things.

chapter four

In the Backyards of Modernity?

Sometimes it can be mentally exhausting to read again and again about a modern world in constant flux and transformation, where everything solid melts and nothing stays the same. New identities are tried on or discarded like pieces of clothing, and there is no stable order, only constant reordering. Anything is possible. In this way of thinking, the history of modernity—and especially the later stages of modernity, whether called late or postmodernity—is often described in terms of ever-increasing individualism and the constant fragmentation of social life. Old collectives and shared understandings break up, class and other kinds of cultural communities are replaced by an assemblage of lifestyles. People are busy forming their identities and building private worlds by means of consumption, media, and other public resources. To a great extent this view of modern life is the result of focusing on just some arenas and processes—specifically on what is dramatic, eventful, and highly visible. We do not deny that such tendencies exist in Western cultures, but in our opinion the view is unbalanced.

MUTUAL UNDERSTANDINGS

Change is exciting to depict and analyze; the insistent but often muted work of maintaining status quo is less so. As a result, “non-events” are often 207

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relegated to the backyard of modernity. Here they are on the one hand treated as being of minor importance, on the other as a kind of compensatory arena where people can for a while withdraw from the hectic pace and demands of social life—a bohemian flip side of Western modernity. Yet these seemingly private and fragmented worlds are actually based upon common understandings that range from rules of behavior to technologies of daydreaming. Despite their introverted character they are replete with norms and values that are symbolically manifested and communicated. Waiting is permeated by comprehensions that mirror basic ideas about time, hierarchy, and fairness. Routines organize the everyday and connect our lives with those of others. Daydreams mix personal anxieties and longings with all kinds of public raw materials. Even seemingly chaotic situations such as waiting crowds or traffic jams have unwritten rules, which synchronize the activities and ambitions of strangers. Behind the colorful richness of daydreaming scenarios or domestic routines there is also a social patterning based on different forms of cultural sharing that create cohesion, stability, and continuity. One of the cultural dimensions of these activities is the skills that are learned, used, and transformed during the life of individuals as they interact with people, objects, mass media, and other public sources of inspiration. People learn—often unconsciously—to understand how a queue works, how to carry out morning routines, and how to deploy daydreaming tools. From early childhood on people are trained to wait for their turn— whether uncomplainingly or with irritation—and not to jump queues, and the body learns to arrange itself into typical waiting postures. People also absentmindedly acquire the competence to do many different things at the same time. The experienced hand dives for the car keys, sets the table, or locates the soap in the shower, while attention is directed elsewhere, for example into fantasies. Intense cultivation of such skills naturalizes them into something that people take for granted. Routines sink into the body and become reflexes, daydreams drift past unnoticed, and waiting becomes a state of mind.

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In our approach we have shifted the focus away from culture as an explicit narrative of identity and meaning to culture as nonverbal practices—and to the materiality of seemingly mental activities. People seldom reflect consciously on many of the skills and shared understandings that they use in everyday life, and as a result society works by means of implicit knowledge. These skills and understandings rest in the body rather than in the brain. By moving these inconspicuous activities out of the backyards of modernity we want to stress how many of them can be analyzed as a part of transformations often bundled together under the heading of “The Making of Western Modernity” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although such activities are to be found in all cultures and all eras, they take on new forms and emphasis in the modern era. It is difficult to know if we wait more or less patiently than people did in earlier times, but in an era where “time is money” and where we have become accustomed to immediate gratification any wait can feel as if one had been waiting “for an eternity.” The modern landscape of impatience takes on emotional charges—irritation, restlessness, anxiety, boredom, and longing—as well as evokes ideological debates. In the same manner daydreaming may become an intensified reaction to the preachings about order, rationality, and efficiency in modern life.

EMOTIONALITY AND POWER

Many of the mundane activities we have discussed are in fact rather complex. They constitute a strong force in social life, not just as compensatory resting places but as tools needed to keep everyday life going. In fact, they take up a lot of people’s waking time—more so than do eventful and dramatic experiences—and we have examined them as undercurrents in everyday life, hovering between the active and the passive. Defined by a cluster of negative labels—invisible, insignificant, or uninteresting—they have obtained the special power of that which is ignored. In studying the seemingly trivial pursuits of doing nothing, we were struck by the emotionality that surrounds these pursuits. People obviously

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hate to wait, are bored “to death” by routines, and daydream passionately. They use a lot of mental energy for shameful fantasies, nervous travel fever, explosive road rage, or prescribed ways of carrying out morning habits. Such emotions are shaped by the cultural contexts in which they are expressed. They also signal that something more is involved here, linked to the micropolitics of power, moral judgments, or value investments. In contemporary social and political life the importance of affect is often overlooked, as Nigel Thrift (2007) has pointed out, and this is perhaps even more striking in the secret world of the extremely mundane and quotidian. We have chosen the prefix micro because the force of these situations is often contained in the fact that they are seen as not being about politics, values, or power relations. This calls for a need to place them in a social and cultural context. When, where, how, and for whom do such situations turn emotional? That question led us on to another aspect: that of dominance and subordination. In the backyards of modernity you find the people who are said to be stuck in tradition, who repeatedly do the same things, drag their feet, are lost in unrealistic dreams. People who can be classified as elites have often regarded “those people” as a reform project, as obstacles to the modernization of work, family life, social relations, and consumption. People stuck in tradition are often seen as being, either overtly or covertly, inflexible, stubborn, and resistant to change. In the course of our study we met complaints about this kind of person in many situations as being objects for reflection and debate among middle-class reformers and intellectuals. In this discourse they are seen as the underdogs of modernity, and over time they have taken on various shapes and positions in the social landscape, including as peasants, working-class men, housewives, and immigrants. Questions of domination and marginalization slip in through the back door. On the surface the debate may seem to be about the dangers of daydreaming, noncreativity of routines, or time wasted by waiting, but there are also other agendas in action. It is striking how often the debate is gendered, racialized, or couched in metaphors of class. Most strikingly, this is often done indirectly, often even unconsciously.

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HOW CLASS HAPPENS

Class emerged in various ways as we carried out our analysis. How is it produced and reproduced in these seemingly trivial details and pursuits of everyday life? If we are not simply to accept the rhetoric about class as a disappearing or outmoded social phenomenon, we need to look for where it surfaces in unexpected situations. Insignificant routines become an effective tool in the reproduction of class. Watch, for example, an upper-class woman guiding her daughter through the social landscape of Manhattan. Chin up, posture straight, she strides confidently down the street keeping her daughter by her side. As they approach someone who looks like a homeless man, there is not a single halting note in her flowing talk about weekend plans, just a tiny pressure on the daughter’s arm and a slight scrunching of the nose as she gives the man a wide berth. Liza responds to the movements of the mother’s body, its subtle waves, crescendos and decrescendos in voice and posture, the way she is brought closer in or let loose to wander a few feet at various moments. In this way meaning slides (often, but not always, unconsciously) from one generation to another.

This example comes from the anthropologist Adrie Kusserow’s ethnography of class and child rearing in America (2004: x) and it is this sliding, these subtle waves, unconscious hints, and quick glances that we have looked for in our material. In such inconspicuous ways class happens on many different levels. Dealing with what is ignored or devalued also means dealing with hierarchization. Redefining some activities as “doing nothing” could in the nineteenth century be used in accusations of laziness and inertia directed toward common people, and at the other end of the social scale as accusations of indolence among the idle rich. During the next century there was a pervasive naturalization of middleclass thought and worldview into standard psychological models. The generalized argument about private dream worlds in many ways reflects the

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ways in which a changing society is perceived by middle-class intellectuals, scholars, and debaters, as Beverly Skeggs (1997), among others, has pointed out. Who decides which daydreams are productive and which are dangerous, which routines are rational and which merely hamper change and block creativity? For whom is waiting a new and irritating experience, and for whom is it a familiar everyday condition? Let us return to the fantasies about the future among high school students. In comparing future alternatives the middle-class youngsters’ dreams stand out as well-planned, rational, and realistic—career projects. The dreams of working-class kids, on the other hand, seem unrealistic and disorganized. What if the reverse were true? In his discussion of daydreaming among factory workers Gösta Arvastson (1984) has pointed out that the dreams about suddenly becoming a millionaire, or winning on horses or the lottery, are a realistic commentary on a life with few chances of betterment. If you are stuck in a class system with little room for career advancement, wishing for sudden riches is a comment on the fact that society is organized not by fairness or equality but merely like a tombola. Class, as well as gender, is often present when a moral tone creeps into an argument. Moralizing about waiting, routines, or daydreams becomes a way to sort people and behaviors into categories of right and wrong, good and bad. Heated or subdued arguments signal an emotional involvement that may be linked to social position. Waiting for a worker may turn into a humiliating experience for a middle-class person who is accustomed to being in control. Instead of being waited upon that person is now forced into the impassivity of waiting. Social role reversal is infuriating. In the same way we can ask who reacts most strongly to feeling like herded cattle in an airport or in a crowd—probably it is those who are unaccustomed to that kind of experience and strongly resent it. The class dimension is also present in the changing debates about good and bad habits. Rational routines have often been seen as the backbone of modern society. Preindustrial societies are described as being trapped in tradition, marked by static lives where “custom was king.” The introduction of modern routines was a reform project aimed at a more efficient and

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economizing everyday. We encountered this process in discussions about the scientific management of not only people’s work life but also their domestic chores. At a later stage such routines came under fire as blocking creativity and improvisation. To be stuck in routines again became an accusation with a potential class dimension, which could change with the social perspective. “They,” the working class, just cling to old traditions, unlike “we,” who are flexible and forward looking. “Those people,” the elite, cultivate routines that are just empty rituals of snobbishness and exclusion, while “we,” ordinary people, live natural lives.

SUBVERSITY

During modernity certain activities are made inconspicuous and unimportant. They only surface now and then as a problem. Waiting is regarded as dead time, as something that prevents the flow and development of modern life. Daydreams are judged to be unrealistic escapes that keep people from dealing with their lives. Routines need to be reformed or battled. When these phenomena, at certain times, become the object of modern reflection they move temporarily from the backyard into the foreground—only to slip back again. Another aspect of the micropolitics of doing nothing is the potential for subversity. When one examines mundane habits of body and mind that are repeated day after day, one may find that these do in fact produce small and successive changes, which are hardly perceived but sometimes important over time. This means that routines are in a way self-contradictory. What people experience as the “same procedure as usual” is not necessarily that at all. Sometimes a routine hides surprising transformations, just as a trivial argument about domestic habits—missing toothpaste or a kitchen door left open—may really be about something much larger. Inconspicuous acts can suddenly turn into provocations that make them prominent and trigger discussions about what is suitable or normal. The arenas of what we started out by calling “non-events” are thus sites of struggle and domination, but also of resistance. People drag their feet,

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embark on crazy daydreaming projects that challenge an established order, defend old routines, or turn queue jumping into a rebellious activity. One can’t be sure of what is really going on behind the curtain of the mundane. Underneath popular discussions of identity play and personality makeover, inequalities based upon class, gender, and ethnicity are silently reproduced or challenged in everyday situations such as the ones we have explored. Seemingly trivial activities may be gendered in ways that produce patterns of dominance, and issues of class pop up in surprising corners. Domestic work and child care may be described as insignificant routines compared to the world of “real work,” while waiting for someone may arouse questions about whose time is more valuable. Again, it is the subtlety that is important. Demarcations are drawn up in situations that seem totally devoid of class, hierarchy, or marginalization. This is the strong weapon of indirectness at work—the power of micropolitics.

BRIDGING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE

Much of this book has been about different kinds of movements that cause certain endeavors to end up in the backyard of public attention. Occasionally they have been restored to the limelight, before being again forgotten or ignored. We have also discussed the tensions between private and social worlds— and the paths between them where people move back and forth. In this connection we have explored the processes of mental absence. One never knows where other people are mentally, even when they are physically present. They seem to be occupied with something particular—waiting in a queue, for example, or washing dishes—when actually, in their minds, they have moved to a totally different place. Monotonous routines allow one to disappear from the demands of being completely present here and now. You mentally step outside a situation, see it from distance, halt a flow, or create a platform where you can be both there and gone. Microscopic acts that are neither noticed nor named, for example

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during the art of multitasking, oscillate between the freedom from being swallowed up by duties, escapes from the demands of being attentive, and accusations of provocative shallowness. Related to this is the tension between mobility and immobility. Daydreams may be used to escape a problematic reality or a boring situation, but they also serve for remaining there, seeing the “there” in a different light, or making plans for a change. This “stationary mobility”—to stay put in a place at the same time that in the mind one moves elsewhere—raises an important question about presence and availability. Which are the opportunities to control one’s time and situation by withdrawing into fantasies? Mobility may also be arrested by undesired fantasies or obsessions that lock one in an invisible prison. While mindwandering between here and there, and between now and then, people travel between different mental worlds. In the presence of others, people live in parallel realities; remember, for example, Bernardo Soares in his Lisbon office where he manages to exercise his routine duties among his colleagues while at the same time imaginatively sailing to distant and exotic countries. Mental means of transport move him freely in time and space. Bernardo shows how we try to liberate ourselves at interior theaters by pretending to be someone else, inventing a more attractive life history, disappearing in memories, and dreaming about alternative futures. These activities serve as an escape from reality, but they also make it feasible to survive in everyday life. In thinking about the foundations of social life, Georg Simmel (1910) noted the ways in which society is structured by people who are at the same time inside and outside of it. He was fascinated by the ways people experience themselves in opposition to the order they are part of, switching between the positions of insiders and outsiders, between being full members of their groups and distant strangers, hiding in their secret worlds, perhaps physically present, but mentally somewhere else. Much of what happens during the “non-events” we have discussed belongs to the private realm of individuals, in the backyards of modernity,

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rather than to the public culture with its collective rituals and expressive symbols. But, as we have tried to show, these seemingly inconspicuous personal everyday experiences in fact feed on shared understandings, and they become culturally organized when they are verbalized, reflected on, and communicated to others. In this sense they work like bridges between private and collective worlds. They provide the necessary everyday infrastructure that in Simmel’s terms makes society possible.

appendix

DOING AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF “NON-EVENTS”

When we started working on this project some years ago we were certain about only one thing. We wanted to find ways of doing a cultural analysis of the non-eventful and inconspicuous—of transit spaces, in-between times, pauses, and moments of indecision. In particular, we wanted to write about imagination. But where to start? And what kind of methodology should we use? Looking back on the research, we would like to focus not so much on theoretical inspirations but on the everyday life of the project, when we searched for ideas and approaches and experimented with methods and materials.

STUMBLING ALONG?

In the secure world of research handbooks a study proceeds in well-planned steps, driven by clear ideas about aims, materials, and methods. In cultural analysis the process tends to be messier, and this book is no exception. When in the end we asked ourselves how we had carried out the research, we found the process difficult to reconstruct. Although our book may give the impression of intentional research, the fact is that many of the choices and decisions that determined the final text are concealed even from us. 217

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Yet we think it is important to try to clarify our work, not least because for some years now there have been pleas for celebrating such unsystematic dimensions of research as aimless rambling and random reading. This trend is encapsulated in the buzzword serendipity, the art of not knowing what you are looking for, and the celebration of creative wild thinking. Yet such labels conceal the cumulative and systematic dimensions of even seemingly anarchistic analytical work. The research process may be experienced as stumbling along winding paths full of detours, dead ends, and chance encounters. Still, one has to make decisions about when to turn, stop, or go back, and about choosing among questions, materials, and perspectives. Such “messy” research methods therefore need to be described, not to establish recipes for “how to do cultural analysis” but to understand what actually happens in the course of a project. How did we develop the search, what did we do when we got stuck or felt lost, how did we mix materials and ideas, and what did constant rewriting do to the analysis? Compared with much of our earlier ethnological studies, which were based on fieldwork and interviews in specific communities or groups, or historical studies using better-known kinds of source material, this project turned out to be much more disorganized, and the goal kept changing. Thanks to the archaeological remains in our computers of early outlines, drafts, and versions of this book, reconstruction is—to some extent—possible. Moreover, the present book has a forerunner in our Swedish book of 2007, and we found it enlightening to compare the two texts, which are quite different.

CREATING ARENAS

From the beginning we thought about the role of imagination in everyday life. Later we narrowed this down to daydreaming. When we looked for an analytical perspective in the literature, we found it to be mainly psychological, focusing on individuals and on the contents, forms, meanings, and functions of daydreams. Why do people daydream, how can their dreams be interpreted? Our first versions of this text were about different kinds of

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fantasies and their contents, based partly upon the literature available, as well as upon introspection and conversations with others. Normally the next step would have been to go out and conduct interviews, asking people about their fantasies. But something held us back. We felt that it might be difficult and unproductive to head straight for that target. Even if they were, contrary to our expectations, to tell us about their private daydreams, what would we do with these stories other than proceed in the psychological tradition? But we wanted our analysis to focus more on the cultural. One way to accomplish this was to stop thinking about the why’s of daydreaming and instead ask how. In what situations does daydreaming occur, what kinds of props and materials are used in this elusive activity? It was at this stage that we stopped thinking of daydreaming as a mental activity and instead began to look for the situations and material conditions in which it takes place. This led us into the arenas of waiting and routines, two of the platforms for daydreaming. Waiting turned out to be productive territory for the imagination because people often are (or seem to be) mentally absent while waiting. In the same way, mindless routines offer a chance to daydream. Studying these platforms and stages of daydreaming allowed us to approach the intangible reality of imagination in a more down-to-earth way—not something we had grasped or planned when we set off on this project. We also didn’t know exactly how to handle the three different versions of “doing nothing.” It was not initially our intention to discuss waiting through the lens of various dissimilar cases (petrol queues in Nigeria, train stations in England, and prenatal clinics in the United States), routines through the lens of certain times of day at home and work, or daydreaming through the lens of famous daydreamers.

THE ALCHEMY OF MIXING IDEAS AND MATERIALS

To tackle our three fields we had to develop unconventional ethnographic techniques based on a kind of “analytical alchemy.” This means that we

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experimented with mixes of ideas and materials, for example using a combination of facts and fiction that at first glance do not seem to have anything in common. Although we never got round to questioning teaspoons we followed George Perec’s advice and looked for both the obvious—things right in front of us, so familiar that they had become invisible—and the overlooked, stuff that might be hiding in all kinds of nooks and crannies. Besides the usual search for empirical data we found ourselves working as bricoleurs with at least eight such categories of more or less expected materials, including memories and autoethnography interviews and informal surveys spontaneous and focused observations ethnographic snapshots artistic interpretations (from novels to art projects) media (from newspaper clippings to TV programs) Google searches of the Internet readings of cultural history Observations, Surveys, and Interviews In the first stage of research, autoethnography turned out to be crucial. How did we ourselves handle waiting, create routines, and daydream, and how did that reflect our own backgrounds as aging white (Swedish) male academics? What kinds of cultural products were we? We started by comparing our memories of Christmas celebrations, work routines, and morning habits, as well as the times and places we tended to choose for our daydreaming. Sometimes we felt that an entire book could be based upon memories and self-observations, and we were reminded how tempting it is to generalize from one’s own experiences. Autoethnography is a creative tool that always risks turning into autobiographical writing. Later we discussed our personal reflections with others and interviewed people in different situations. Looking for contrasts, we conducted informal

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surveys among students, using a snapshot approach. We asked them questions relating to our three themes, to which they wrote anonymous answers on slips of papers. What do you do when waiting? Tell us about your morning routines. In what situations do you daydream? We hoped to get food for thought, not to make a statistical survey, and in this book we have included only a few of the couple of thousand handwritten answers we collected. Most of the answers are concrete and surprisingly immediate accounts, some laconic, others like short stories on one page. The answers were anonymous, but we wanted to know whether the writer was male or female, and sometimes the texts also revealed something about class, ethnic background, age, and other personal matters. Thus we collected a great many fragments of the private lives of men and women between the ages of twenty and forty; the group did not, of course, represent a cross section of Swedish society. We think that the anonymity and the rather unstructured form of narration made it easier for the students to disclose thoughts and behaviors that might otherwise have seemed ridiculous or too private. Another way of collecting information for this book was that of both spontaneous and focused observations. However, we found ourselves constantly needing to problematize what observations mean and how they are organized. We therefore had to reflect upon how to do ethnographic observations and what happens when they are transformed into descriptions. For example, when one of us tried to make a comparative study of bus queues in Swedish cities and London, it turned out to be difficult to stand and watch people queuing. Nothing seemed to happen. What should one look at—the motionless bodies, or the indifferent faces? It was not until someone tried to jump the queue that it became interesting and worth writing down in the notebook. It was even harder to observe people daydreaming or performing routines. How can one observe invisible or private activities? But we did not give up, because we discovered that it was not in the moment of observation, when nothing seems to be happening, that we “saw” what was going on. It was when we were verbalizing our impressions—using concepts and metaphors, and describing movements, connections, and

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processes—that the observations got meaning for us. Above all, it was in writing about them that we were able to transform inconspicuous activities into culturally comprehensible patterns.

Ethnographic Snapshots While working on this project we became constant collectors, seeing possible material everywhere. Certain situations, texts, and images opened our eyes and redirected our analytical gaze. The invisible adventure at the supermarket with which we opened this book was one such eye-opening observation, as were the wait at the car repair shop and the morning routine putting on makeup. These eye-opening observations did not result entirely by chance; they were to some extent the result of analytical vigilance, for we were more or less unconsciously looking for ideas and materials as we pursued our everyday life. Observations that caught our eye might include an advertisement glimpsed on a bus, an incident at a store, a book on a table, a scene in a movie, a remark by a colleague. Ideas rarely occurred to us while at our desk or watching our computer screen but rather when our bodies were on the move and our minds drifting. The pocket notebook or slip of paper became the organizing medium of such finds. One category of snapshots came from the stream of media stuff in everyday life. We found ourselves functioning like ethnographic flycatchers while reading newspapers, listening to the radio, and watching television. At any moment we were prepared to see or hear something related to what we were writing about. It might strengthen our ideas or guide them into new directions. Surfing the Internet was one of the ways we worked through media materials. Googling, reading blogs, and tracking key words helped us to maneuver in the information jungle. Here new forms of serendipity and chance emerged, and this called for reflection.1 However, we had to know something about what we were looking for and how we should analytically handle material that was publicly communicated for so many different reasons.2

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Art as Analysis A special category of media material on which we drew were artistic projects that writers and filmmakers have created on the theme of doing nothing. Among these projects we discovered inspiring experimentation with things that are difficult to put into words or distinct forms—such things as hunches, dream fragments, worn habits. This category includes James Joyce’s experiments with turning streams of consciousness into prose, as well as the film about Harold Crick and brushing one’s teeth. In our study we have tried to combine the artist’s creative freedom with what Neil Cummings (1993) has called the alienating technique of homeopathic tactics, that is, viewing a certain phenomenon in extreme concentration or dilution. Artists experiment by viewing phenomena from very far away or extremely close up, and by alternating the glance with the concentrated stare. After having spent so much time with texts on waiting and with trying to observe waiting rooms we found it liberating to watch Akram Khan’s ballet Bahok, where eight dancers wait desperately in an airport. The choreographer had dispensed with all distractions: the work consisted entirely of bodies moving in a nondescript gray space. All the microroutines of waiting were exaggerated and dramatized; bodies and bodywork dominated the scene. Suddenly new dimensions emerged. Hatty Lee uses a similar homeopathic technique in her installation The Generic Waiting Room. This work, too, features concentration on a few crucial ingredients, while everything else is stripped away. Standing inside the installation, watching and sensing the bodies moving on the scene, we were able to add yet another dimension of waiting to our analysis.

Searching for Contrasts in Time and Space The snapshot approach yielded a wealth of material, gleaned from all corners of society; the drawback was, of course, that much of the material lacked

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context. Therefore we used a historical and contrasting perspective to contextualize the various ways of doing nothing. Whenever we felt caught in our analysis, lacking distance, we found it helpful to use this tool to back away from the present and get a longer view. Similarly, when we found ourselves stuck in the seeming passivity of waiting, we found it liberating to read about nineteenth-century construction of railway stations and their new waiting rooms. Watching a TV program on the childhood of the Brontë sisters brought back vague memories of their fantasyland project and provided us with a starting point for considering the era of the romantic early nineteenth century, when daydreaming was a constant topic of discussion. Historical examples thus sometimes served as revelations. Going back to a time when queuing was a novelty opened up a richer understanding of the phenomenon. What was a queue, what should it look like? How should people be trained to queue? By looking at the discussion of scientific management in the early twentieth century, when engineers and consultants dreamt about producing “the perfect work routine,” we learned that the history of routines includes aspects we had not anticipated. We found similar contrasts when we studied life outside Western mainstream life, as Kapus´in´ski, for example, showed in his reflections on waiting in Africa, or as we discovered in Swedish rural rituals of keeping dusk.

Navigating the Seas of Earlier Research We spent much time researching the scholarly literature on our three topics. This was not easy, given that we were dealing with topics that cut across established categories. In some ways it felt as if we were trying to clear paths in a jungle of information, knowing that we would not be able to find everything that could be of use. Our searches often created chains of references, and often they started with no more than a tip from a colleague, a Googled paper, or a passing reference in a book. Through such references we sometimes ended up in

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surprising places and above all in unexpected disciplines. We realized that there is a loosely integrated community of scholars who represent a variety of perspectives on doing nothing. Philosophers, geographers, and medical researchers are interested in waiting; psychologists and architects study routines; and historians, sexologists, and even computer researchers discuss dreams. Although they seldom shared our ethnographic take on the topics, they brought interesting new points to light. We had at our disposal a number of techniques for trawling for information, but it was never possible to do a full sweep—which, moreover, would have drowned the project in material. We used a variety of different search engines. While one of us spent hours Googling the Internet and experiencing the boredom of finding that over 90 percent of the hits are usually useless, the other spent time browsing bookshelves in libraries, bookstores, and secondhand stores. We also often tapped into our personal networks of scholars: “I have heard of a guy you might ask, who remembers reading something . . .”

CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF DISPARATE MATERIALS AND PRACTICES

The categories of materials we used, listed above, also reveal something about the different modes of searching and mixing we employed. Doing ethnography and cultural analysis of non-events involved a sequence of practices that combined mind work with physical activity. Working our way through a library section, pulling out books and leafing through pages, was a different kind of hunting and gathering than surfing the Internet or standing in the middle of an art installation. Different senses were sparked and set the mind wandering in diverse ways. There is a fundamental difference between staring at people who look like they’re waiting and glancing at someone who seems to be performing a routine. Touching a daydreaming prop is not like driving a car through a favorite fantasizing landscape. Sensing the nervousness in the air of a waiting room is quite another thing than listening to a room’s telling silence.

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Our miscellaneous materials influenced our analytical process and understanding. We are not at all sure where some of the specific ideas and interpretations in this book actually came from. Many of them—for example, the ideas of waiting as “stationary mobility,” daydreaming as “mental absence,” or routines as “emotional minefields”—seem to have been the result of hunches and sudden associations. In reconstructing the research process we realized, first, that we had made cultural analysis out of texts, impressions, and practices that were not obviously scientific material. This required our circling the evidence and trying different analytical entrances, metaphors, and concepts. Second, to make our investigation a cultural analysis we had had to stress certain aspects of individual cases. How were they permeated by norms, rules, and values? Merely by asking in what ways queuing or morning routines are learned, communicated, and symbolically organized made us see these activities in new ways. By treating daydreaming in relation to external factors and as something people practice in social contexts we were able to replace the psychological perspective with a cultural one. Third, rather than working with “empirical evidence” we searched for “good quotations” and examples that had the potential to open up new understanding. Some of the quotations we found energized us. Fernando Pessoa’s bookkeeper, Bernardo, certainly told us things about daydreaming that suited what we had already thought and written, but he also expressed feelings and reflections that we had not anticipated. Ha Jin’s novel Waiting forced us to think about what happens when an entire lifetime is organized around a cultural theme. The quotations sometimes said more than we had expected, and they spilled over with information that forced us to think harder about their meaning. As a result of this kind of secondhand research we constantly switched between the familiar world of already formulated ideas and a strange, incomprehensible world where vague ideas seemed to be waiting for verbal representation. Fourth, by using theoretical concepts and perspectives we tried to squeeze new understandings out of familiar examples. What did Sartre have to say

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about bus queues, Roland Barthes about waiting, Mary Douglas about home routines, and Ernst Bloch about daydreams? Thinkers such as these helped us to make the familiar strange. Finally, we reflected on our project as teamwork. Our aim was to combine our separate thoughts and writings in a unified, seamless text but also to challenge each other’s favorite ideas. Given the distance separating us (1,200 kilometers between Lund in the south of Sweden and Umeå in the north), most of our discussions were carried out on the telephone and in e-mail messages. We continually sent revised versions of text to each other, and every time we received them back they were radically changed and developed. Occasionally we had heated discussions whether the change was an improvement or not. Yet we were surprised by the fact that older technologies of communication are superior to the newer ones. When we met face to face we realized that a one-hour walk discussing the project could provide far more energy and input than a constant stream of electronic attachments. As any fieldworker knows, the “walk and talk” method opens up a wealth of new insights. We have quite different personalities and research temperaments—one of us more historically oriented, the other more interested in fieldwork, one a bohemian, the other a pedant—so there was never a risk that our cooperation might become too smooth an intellectual confluence. We experienced a good deal of friction while rewriting and deleting, but also a creative blurring of authorship. Even if we can still recognize who was the originator of any one theme, material, or idea, the finished book is a true joint venture in every sentence.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. See Kathleen Stevart (2007: 41ff.) for a description of a similar game involving picking the quickest checkout lane. 2. In Ehn and Löfgren (2006) we discussed the importance of secret competition in everyday life. 3. In his book Queuing for Beginners Joe Moran (2007) writes enthusiastically about queuing, or standing in line, the symbolism of the lunch break, the history of crossing a road, and the politics of sitting on a sofa. His purpose is to show that such microdramas in fact are much more thrilling than one may have expected. See also Homi Bhabha (1994: 243), who has noted that “value must be sought in petits récits, imperceptible events, in signs apparently without meaning and value—empty and eccentric—and in events that are outside the great events of history.” A vibrant arena for this kind of cultural research was the electronic free-access Journal of Mundane Behavior (2000–2004), which called for “analytically interesting studies of the socially uninteresting” (Brekhus 2000). The aim was “to recapture the extraordinary essence of our everyday lives” (Schaffer 2000) in articles about, for example, behavior in Japanese elevators, mobile telephone calls in public places, dusting, wall calendars, and shopping. Even dishwashing has been mentioned as a possible, but so far as yet unrealized, object for cultural research (DeGroot 2001). In his “mundane manifesto” Wayne Brekhus (2000) gives an outline of what a study of “uneventfulness” might mean: 229

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The study of social life often neglects the ordinary in favor of the extraordinary. Historians study “eventful” time periods more than “uneventful” ones, cultural anthropologists are generally drawn to distant and exotic cultures rather than familiar ones, sociologists tend to study important social problems over quotidian reality, and journalists focus more on extraordinary individuals and groups than ordinary ones. The history of mediocrity, the sociology of the boring and the anthropology of the familiar are neglected fields.

4. For discussions of our earlier work, see for example Ehn and Löfgren (1982) and Ehn and Löfgren (2001). 5. Our first attempt resulted in a book in Swedish (Ehn and Löfgren 2007), but in this English text we have entirely reworked and expanded that earlier version. 6. The Spanish photographer Philip-Lorca di Corcia (see Brea and di Corcia 1998) uses the concept of non-events to point to the evident lack of interpersonal activity in his pictures of anonymous people at the streets in big cities. There are no meetings or greetings, no signs of mutual recognition, observation, or seduction. People do not exchange glances; everyone’s eye, trained to seek its own object in the nondescript public space, glides off strangers in a matter of milliseconds, in as much fear of an interpersonal link as if it could lead to a personal collapse. For a more general discussion of events and non-events, see, for example, Fogelson (1989), Handelman (1990), and Moran (2005). 7. Ethnographic in the sense we are using it here has to do with the tradition of detailed description rather than long-term classical fieldwork (see Denzin 1997 and Ehn and Löfgren 2009). 8. In his book Doing Nothing Tom Lutz (2006) tells the cultural history of loafers, loungers, slackers, and bums in America. 9. Al Gini’s The Importance of Being Lazy (2003: 20) discusses how a belief that time is money leads many Americans to make fun of the Mexican tradition of siesta or ridicule Sweden’s mandated five-week minimum vacation policy. 10. See, for example, Steven Harrison (1997), Doing Nothing: Coming to an End of Spiritual Search; Veronique Vienne (1998), The Art of Doing Nothing; Tom Hodgkinson (2005), How to Be Idle; Carl Honoré (2004), In Praise of Slowness; Fred Gratzon (2003), The Lazy Way to Success: How to Do Nothing and Accomplish Everything; and Karen Salmansohn (2003), How to Change Your Entire Life by Doing Absolutely Nothing. 11. For a discussion of the changing scholarly debates on overload and stress in everyday life, see Löfgren (2007). 12. The scholars Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin represent early interest in the analysis of the everyday. Later inspiration come from the classic work of the interactionist Ervin Goffman (1959), the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel

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(1967), and the phenomenological tradition represented by Alfred Schutz (1970) and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman (1967). More recent inspirations are found in the works of Christina Nippert-Eng (1994), Ben Highmore (2002), Jonas Frykman and Nils Gilje (2003), and Elizabeth Shove (2003). 13. Much of our inspiration came from an interdisciplinary workshop in 2004 for which twenty-five scholars had been asked to develop fresh perspectives on analyzing cultural processes. Their suggestions ranged from the study of “cultural backdrafts” and “the cream effect” to “fossilization” and “cultural stealth” (see Löfgren and Wilk 2006).

CHAPTER 1 1. See, for example, a sociological study by Phillip Vannini (2002) and the thesis on waiting as a liminal state by the ethnologist Anita Beckman (2009). 2. www.kadist.org/ Elin Wikström in an interview made by Stephanie Myers (accessed 18 March 2008). 3. The description of the waiting room for royalty is taken from Kantor and Keller (2008: 61); the materialization of class differences in waiting is discussed in Löfgren (2008). Among the many contemporary examples of upgraded waiting spaces, from business travel lounges to medical centers, much effort has gone into stripping away the cold, impersonal feel that so often characterizes waiting areas. Uncomfortable seating and a dismal atmosphere are out; designer décor, luxury-hotel-like service and museum-worthy art displays are in. See www.straightfromthedoc.com/50226711/ luxurious_waiting_rooms.php (accessed 13 March 2008). 4. http://momhood.blogspot.com/2006/10/crabby-moms-guide-to-waitingroom.html (accessed 3 October 2008). 5. Another blogger, David Jack Bell, thinks that the biggest problem with waiting rooms these days is the television. He declares that waiting rooms are “no longer waiting rooms—they have become entertainment rooms. For some reason, doctor’s offices and car dealerships feel the need to provide a t.v. in order to help us wait. . . . To my way of thinking, waiting implies quiet. Waiting is a calm, possibly frustrating activity, but it is not a noisy one. It is time to think, time to contemplate the next step. One may decide something important while waiting: I don’t want to wait for her anymore. Or, She’s the one I’ve been waiting for my whole life. But we can’t think these things with ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and Kenny Chesney screaming in our ears.” http://davidjackbell.blogspot.com/2008/01/waiting-room.html (accessed 15 March 2008).

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6. http://rea05.blogg.se (accessed 10 May 2008). 7. See, for example, Stephen Buetow’s (2004) discussion of how time is perceived during different conditions. 8. See also Elisabeth Shove’s (2007) discussion of time as an outcome of practice. 9. Ad Pruyn and Ale Smidts (1999: 221ff.) have done research among patients waiting together for family doctors. Their conclusion is that when the wait is long, waiting with others becomes less acceptable because the presence of others results in “an enhancement of the individual’s dominant behaviour, feelings or moods.” 10. Harold Schweizer (2008: 8) even thinks that “the person who waits is out of sync with time, outside of the ‘moral’ and economic community of those whose time is productive and synchronized.” 11. The concept was coined by the German economist and sociologist Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism from 1904–1905 (translated into English in 1930). 12. There are, however, other theories that present waiting as a product of the bureaucratization of everyday life. Large-scale economic systems, segmentation of time, and a rigid separation of public and private spheres are said to increase waiting time for most people in such societies (see, for example, Henri Lefebvre 1971: 53). 13. Among American sociologists the study of “deferred gratification” became a theme in the 1950s. How was this virtue of learning to wait linked to middleclass values and what role did it play in upwardly mobility? See Schneider and Lysgaard (1953). 14. Dagens Nyheter, 13 October 2005. 15. See the study of a retirement home in Los Angeles by the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff (1980). 16. For a discussion about the importance of traffic lights as a modern management of waiting see Lefebvre (2002: 13ff.). 17. Taken from the electronic free-access Journal of Mundane Behavior. 18. See also David Bissel’s (2007) discussion about the corporeal experiences of waiting during the process of journeying. Although waiting may mark a “withdrawal from the world,” Bissel does not treat these “banal and prosaic hiatuses” as an immobile being-in-the-world, as slowed rhythms, or as somehow opposed to speed, but instead as incipient and rich durations, as “an ongoing active achievement of subjectification” (Bissel 2007: 287). 19. For a discussion of railway waiting see Löfgren 2008; for a discussion of airports see Löfgren (1999).

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20. Life is one big queue, constantly awaiting the next happening, said the mathematician Joseph A. Panico in his book Queuing Theory (1969), in which he analyzed the significance of waiting lines for business, economics, and science. “Queuing theory” is a mathematical study of waiting lines, applied to a variety of problems ranging from canal and airplane congestion, urban traffic jams, and rotation of hospital beds to the movement of customers through ticket counters and cafeterias. 21. One of the public arenas for these exchanges of views is the Web site http:// standinaqueue.wordpress.com, where people show pictures of queues that they have been standing in lately and tell stories about their varying experiences. 22. On the Internet it is possible to find instructions for how to enjoy the experience and pass the time while waiting in the supermarket queue. One suggestion for livening up the dull waiting time is the game “Checkout Chicken,” www.bbc.co.uk/ dna/h2g2/pda/A506404?s_id=2 (accessed 18 February 2008). 23. The business economist Alf Rehn (2006) has made some observations on the tacit rules of queuing. People use minimal cues to show each other what kind of behavior they expect in queues, among them that one should keep one’s position, not edge the line, and follow the rhythm of the other queuers to avoid disturbing gaps. 24. http://rhodri.biz/the-joy-of-queueing/ (accessed 2 April 2008). 25. The order of arrival is also contradicted in special cases of so-called preemptive priority (Schwartz 1975: 190). Ladies, children, and old persons are given priority in emergency situations and allowed status as authorized queue jumpers, as are those with physical limitations as well as, occasionally, parents with small children. 26. See the article “The Comeback Kids” by Michael Daly in the New York Times Magazine (accessed 22 July 1988), to which Maria Strannegård (2009) refers in her dissertation. 27. http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=41444 (accessed 17 February 2008). 28. http://rhodri.biz/the-joy-of-queueing/ (accessed 2 April 2008). 29. Dagens Nyheter (accessed 29 January 2006). 30. http://standinaqueue.wordpress.com (accessed 12 February 2008). 31. Economists have for years been discussing waiting time as an important determinant of export demand for manufactured goods; see, for example, Margaret Greene (1975). In hospitals, waiting lines are commonplace. Compared with the United States, waiting times are the aspect with which citizens who use British or Swedish health services, for example, have expressed their greatest dissatisfaction (see Yates 1987, Hanning 2005, and Ivarsson 2005).

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Notes to Pages 49–65

32. Dagens Nyheter (accessed 29 January 2007) and http://standinaqueue .wordpress.com (accessed 12 February 2008). 33. These observations were formulated in more exact scientific language: “The lived experience of waiting is a vigilant attentiveness surfacing amid an ambiguous turbulent lull as contentment emerges with uplifting engagements” (Bournes and Mitchell 2002: 58). 34. See Svendsen (2005): 127. 35. The communication of boredom is often used as a protection or avoidance. Teenagers take this defensive pose when in the company of elders as a mode of distancing themselves. The same goes for subordinates in relation to their bosses at workplaces. 36. Raposa (1999: 173) also thinks that a certain capacity for waiting is of inestimable religious value, and that it can be developed through practice. 37. Boredom is thus a matter of relativity; what is boring to one person does not have to be so to another. It is also possible to learn different ways of dealing with it, for example by moving into what Erving Goffman (1967/2005: 133) has called “aways,” just leaving the situation. 38. By that Musharbash (2007: 10) refers to an increased focus on the self, as well as the belief in one’s entitlement to happiness, the work-leisure distinction, overload, and standardizations of time organization. The question is whether boredom can be seen as an indicator of the Westernization of indigenous peoples or whether something else is going on. 39. There is, of course, a large body of literature on the genesis of the car society; see, for example, Featherstone et al. (2005), Virilio (1995), and Miller (2001). For a comparison of the United States and Sweden see O’Dell (2001) and Eyerman and Löfgren (1995). 40. Dagens Nyheter (accessed 10 February 2008). 41. http://bkkguava.com/livet-i-bangkok (accessed 10 February 2008). 42. One of the pioneers in this field was the Swedish anthropologist Brigitte Jordan with her 1978 book Birth in Four Cultures. Subsequently Robbie E. Davis-Floyd (1992, 1997), among others, expanded our knowledge about different aspects of this phenomenon throughout history and in different cultures. 43. The “technocratic model” of pregnancy and birth has made this kind of waiting an object for scientific knowledge about medical birth, although elsewhere in the world there are, of course, other ways to give birth (see Jordan 1993, DavisFloyd and Sargent 1996). 44. http://stramenda.blogspot.com/2007/10/pregnancy-waiting-waitingwaiting.html (accessed 12 May 2008).

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45. According to Davis-Floyd (1992: 21) pregnant women sometimes find that their public symbolic transformation is negative. As their bellies grow, some formerly friendly men begin to avoid them. During conversations people stare at their stomachs instead of their faces, increasing their sense of being made into objects. On the other hand they also meet people who rush to open doors and pick up dropped things, who carry their suitcases at the airport and give up their seats on the bus. In these cases pregnancy has strengthened the stereotype of the weak female. 46. Songs that come to mind include ABBA, “I’ve Been Waiting for You” (1975); Beach Boys, “I’m Waiting for the Day” (1966); Beatles, “Wait” (1965); Depeche Mode, “Waiting for the Night” (1990); Buddy Holly, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” (1959); Kinks, “Tired of Waiting for You” (1965); New Order, “Waiting for the Sirens’ Call” (2005); Stevie Nicks, “I Can’t Wait” (1985); Pretenders, “Wait” (1980); Rolling Stones, “Time Waits for No One” (1974); Diana Ross, “I’m Still Waiting” (1970); Seal, “Waiting for You” (2003); Van Halen, “I’ll Wait” (1984); and Velvet Underground, “I’m Waiting for the Man” (1967). (Thanks to the folklore researcher Sven-Erik Klinkmann of Vasa, Finland, for compiling this list.) 47. Lars-Eric Jönsson is a colleague at the University of Lund. 48. The rule of not “keeping the boss waiting” is sometimes contravened by the powerless servants who delight in keeping their superiors doing just that. 49. There are many fictional waiting women, as described by Bränström Öhman (1995). In Annie Ernaux’s novel Simple Passion (1991/2003), for example, a woman has made waiting for love a full-time occupation. She does not do anything but wait for a man to call or come to her. See also Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1986), which describes waiting women in Indochina during the 1930s. 50. The capacity to make others wait belongs to certain roles, Barry Schwartz (1975: 119) has argued. Petty bureaucrats or bank clerks may possess little that is of value to others, but they guard access to resources that are. As a result, they are able to keep anyone waiting for as long as they want.

CHAPTER 2 1. Routines have received relatively scant attention from scholars in the field of cultural analysis, with the exception of some now classic research traditions such as the phenomenological approaches of Alfred Schutz (1970) and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman (1967), Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) discussions of habitus, Gregory Bateson’s (1973) anthropological perspectives, and Norbert Elias’s (1939/1978) historical analysis.

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Notes to Pages 80–87

Compared to research in other arenas of human behavior there is also a striking vagueness in the terminology surrounding the spaces between choice and ingrained habit. Words such as habit, routine, tradition, manners, and custom circulate between everyday use and scholarly work, in ways that often simultaneously transport more or less hidden and value-laden arguments. The phrase sexual routines sounds dull or mechanistic, sexual manners sounds like the description of tribal life, sexual habits may seem more challenging, whereas sexual rituals sets the imagination moving into a world of symbols and colorful behavior. In what follows we shall use the words routines and habits interchangeably. 2. Murakami did not give her a name; “Okusan” (housewife) is our fabrication, for the purpose of simplicity. 3. The classic discussions of routines and habituation have tended to emphasize routines in terms of stability and steady pattern, as, for example, in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus—the practices, dispositions, and routines of everyday life, a kind of internalized “second nature” people need to survive in society. The secondnature argument, however, risks overstating stability. The focus is very much on the staying power of an acquired habitus but less on the microprocesses of learning and unlearning. See, for example, de Certeau (1984: 45ff.) for a critique of the passive nature of the concept, Probyn (2005: 250ff.) on its tendency to be “resistant to any notion of change,” and Billig (1995: 2) on the need for a stronger focus on “enhabitation.” See also Sarah Pink’s (2004) critique of Anthony Giddens’s tendency to overemphasize the force of habits as a structuring power. Later works of scholarship have developed more dynamic approaches, among them the ethnographies of Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1997, 2002, 2005), the studies of technology by Elizabeth Shove (2003, 2007), and the approaches to everyday life by Colin Campbell (1987, 1996) and Ben Highmore (2002, 2004). 4. “Smoking a cigarette is usually considered doing nothing,” writes Richard Klein (1993: 35). “Smoking belongs to the category of action that falls between the states of activity and passivity—a somewhat embarrassed, embarrassing condition, unclean, unproductive, a mere gesture.” Klein’s book on the rituals and routines of smoking in history shows how wrong this opinion is. Smoking, he argues, is indeed a very powerful way of doing nothing. 5. The scientific management movement was part of the modern movement of replacing old bad habits and customs with new, rational routines. These concepts have a specific Western history (see Jonas Frykman’s discussion in Frykman and Löfgren 1996 and Highmore 2004). The old world was seen as a system where “custom was king,” keeping people in the grip of unchangeable traditions. Routines belonged to the reform project of modernity. Bad habits should be exchanged for

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better ones; new routines should reorganize and discipline the everyday clutter of activities. For a discussion of Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ projects see Cresswell (2006). 6. See Gillis (1997) for a historical analysis of the family and the gendered patterns of homemaking. 7. The extensive ethnographic literature on life in the military includes the Swedish ethnologist Susanne Wollinger’s helpful study of the socialization of new conscripts (2000: 65ff.). 8. Another perspective of the mundane routines surrounding makeup is to treat them as a philosophical problem of transformation, as the researcher in law and ethics Thomas Morawetz (2001) has done in his book Making Faces, Playing God: Identity and the Art of Transformational Makeup. Wearing a mask—putting on another face— embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theater, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become “the other.” 9. Such domestic conflicts are treated in Pink (2004) and Kaufmann (2005). 10. Dagens Nyheter (accessed 20 January 2008). 11. This discussion is based upon questionnaires asking informants to narrate their media life histories, as well as a number of detailed documentations of contemporary family life carried out by Swedish museums in the 1970s and 1980s in the SAMDOK project. See also Löfgren (2007). 12. There is a rich literature on the social and cultural history of reading. Some of this is discussed and summarized in Thomas Laqueur (2003); see also Manguel (1996) and Kittler (1999) for two alternative approaches to the field. 13. For a discussion of this cultural battle see Frykman and Löfgren (1987). Mats Hellspong (1983) has studied the disciplining of audiences, and James Buzard (1993: 177ff.) the cult of concentration in nineteenth-century bourgeois life. 14. This is a theme Norbert Elias (1939/1978) and later Cas Wouters (2002) have developed in their work on the civilizing process. 15. See Löfgren (1982) and Palmsköld (2007) about such divisions of labor. 16. See Kaufmann (1997) on viewing TV, and Parker (1984) on embroidery. 17. For more on burnout and social life see Frykman (2009). CHAPTER 3 1. Sven-Erik Klinkmann (2002) has written a theoretical introduction to the study of popular imagination as a cultural practice.

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Notes to Pages 125–127

2. The psychoanalyst Julia Segal (1985), for example, discusses the distinction between “fantasies,” the stories we make up to entertain ourselves that also go on independently of our conscious awareness or intention, and the “phantasies” that determine our perceptions and make up the background to everything we do, think, and feel. 3. Charlotte Brontë and her sisters are among the many daydreamers in the world of literature; other authors who come to mind are Marcel Proust, Virginia Wolf, and Henry Miller. There are also famous daydreaming heroes and heroines, ranging from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and James Joyce’s Molly Bloom to James Thurber’s downtrodden office slave Walter Mitty and Charlie Brown in the comic strip Peanuts. 4. The sociologist Colin Campbell (1987: 77) has explored the “hedonism” of daydreaming, the ways in which “individuals employ their imaginative and creative powers to construct mental images which they consume for the intrinsic pleasure they provide.” 5. Unlike the study of dreams, which has a long and well-established academic history (see, for example, the overview in Vedfeldt 2002), studies of daydreaming are fewer, and most of them are firmly anchored in a psychological tradition (see Klinger 1971; Klinger 1990; Singer 1976). 6. “In unfocused interaction we can have ‘absentminded’ participants, who by their posture, facial expression, and physical movements suggest that they are momentarily ‘away,’ that they have momentarily let fall the expressive costume that individuals are expected to wear whenever they are in the immediate presence of others. And, of course, boredom, too, can occur during unfocused interaction, as we may observe in almost any queue of individuals waiting to buy a ticket” (Goffman 1967/2005: 133). 7. Some researchers are eager to give precise definitions of the concepts of daydreaming, fantasizing, and so on. Colin Campbell (1987: 82ff.), for example, distinguishes between the daydream as, on the one hand, “a mental activity in which fairly vivid future images are brought to mind,” “an imaginative elaboration, in a pleasurable direction, of a forthcoming or anticipated, real event,” and “an imagery which is allowed to develop because of the pleasure which it yields” and, on the other, the daydream as imaginative construction (anticipation), “the development of imagery which does conform closely to that which experience and understanding leads the individual to believe will occur.” In the discussion here, however, we use the concept as including all these definitions. 8. The social anthropologist Waud Kracke (2003: 228ff.) discusses the degrees of consciousness in daydreams and nightly dreams. Shifting boundaries among

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nightly dreams, individual and collective fantasies, myths, and artistic creativity are also discussed by the anthropologist Marc Augé (1999: 49ff.). 9. For a discussion of cinematic modes as a parallel to daydreaming modes see Sven-Erik Klinkmann (2008), who analyzes several American movies by using the modes “the ride,” “the panorama,” “the labyrinth,” and “the vertigo” (the sensation of falling), concepts that very well could be used in the study of daydreaming. 10. Orhan Pamuk, an urban flaneur, constantly develops new materials, and in his writing he has explored daydreaming as an absolute necessity for his craft (Pamuk 2008). 11. In his book A Nation of Flyers the historian Peter Fritzsche (1992) studies collective dreams of flying in early twentieth-century Germany. See also the discussion in Bauer and Beringer (1997). 12. In her novel Bonjour Tristesse Francoise Sagan (1958) describes the delights of traffic jams in Paris, which allowed her to start daydreaming. 13. When John Steinbeck (1962: 94) drove across America he reflected about this condition. The freeway buries driving in the reflexes of the unconscious and frees the mind for dreaming. Mindwandering is helped by music from the car stereo. 14. The experiences of speed have also been discussed by Jean Baudrillard (see Ross 1995: 21ff.). There is a large literature treating the car as an experiencescape; see, for example, Katz (2000: 32ff.) and Featherstone, Thrift, and Urry (2005). 15. The German example is mentioned in a study of souvenirs by Maria Banck, Andreas Bolz, Eva Eckinger, and Kathrine Höhe (2008: 14); the Austrian couple is from a paper by Burkard Pöttler (2008). See also O’Dell for a discussion of bathrooms as designed sensual landscapes. 16. As a dream machine the hotel is part of what Gösta Arvastson (2006) calls zero-making, the production of a fresh start. The traveler’s play with anonymity may inspire fantasies of starting a new life. The small secrets of traveling are what the sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain (1998) has called the inclination to invite an alternative personality, to pretend to be someone else in places where nobody knows one’s real identity. 17. Quoted in the Swedish magazine Damernas Värld (2008, 2: 120). 18. Christina Jofs and Anna Kågström (1996), “Stäng in dig själv en stund,” Dagens Nyheter, 23 April 1996, B 12. 19. Daydreaming related to consumption and popular culture in a Swedish mall has been studied by Johan Fornäs, Karin Becker, Erling Bjurström, and Hillevi Ganetz (2007).

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20. We have used materials from the Folklife Archive at the University of Lund (especially answers to the 1988 questionnaire “Light and Darkness”) and from the Dialect and Folklore Archives in Uppsala and Umeå. 21. The French literary scholar Hélène Cixous (2006: 4) made a habit of recording her dreams in the darkness of the early morning. She describes herself as living in two countries, the diurnal one and the tempestuous nocturnal one, but points out that the borders between them are blurred. 22. See, for example, the studies of play, identity, and fantasy among the users of World of Warcraft, one of the best-selling games of the early 2000s (Corneliussen and Rettberg 2008). 23. New Yorker cartoon, 8 December 2008: 74. 24. Three examples of such studies are Kochansky (1973) and Friday (1973) and (1980). 25. See, for example, the Victorian diaries of “Walter” (Anonymous 1902/2007) and the discussion in Marcus (1966). 26. In 1922 the sexologist Havelock Ellis concluded that for women not only erotic fantasies but fantasy in general frequently ceased with marriage. At that time admission of daydreaming of any kind was incompatible with the public image of being a respectable married person. 27. Tania Modleski (1982), who has investigated mass-produced romantic fantasies for women, points out that these fantasies are not as straightforward as they may seem at first sight; there are more complex processes at work. When Nancy Friday (1973) published her surveys of female sexual fantasies, the suburban housewife came to symbolize this life of mindless frustration. Here was another hotbed that could make their hardworking husbands nervous. In the Marxist debates of the 1970s daydreaming was usually dismissed as a classic case of “false consciousness”; subsequently several feminists, including Frigga Haug (1984), started to think in other directions. In her book Love, Lust and Adventure Christiane Gohl (1991) challenged many of the stereotypes when she looked at this debate and offered a more nuanced discussion of the role that daydreaming plays for girls and women. 28. http://ask.metafilter.com/78347/I-do-nothing-but-daydream (accessed 19 June 2008). 29. It is possible to get tips on the Internet on how to reduce one’s child’s tendencies to wander off, for example by reducing the amount of television the child watches. “This almost always plays a role in distracting your child from the mundane realities of life, and sets him off on a parallel tangent.” www.indiaparenting.com/ raisingchild/data/raisingchild017.shtml (accessed 10 August 2008).

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30. Daydreaming can make people feel relaxed, keep our lives organized, increase our understanding of ourselves, improve physical skills through mental practice, help us become more effective through exploration and rehearsal, provide a medium for growth and therapy, move us toward making decisions, foster finding creative solutions to problems, help us to empathize better with other people, and perhaps develop desirable personality traits (Morgan and Skovholt 1977: 391). Others maintain that daydreaming boosts productivity and creativity, and that it can be used as a way to achieve one’s goals. Moreover it is said to relieve boredom, for example while peeling potatoes or painting the house, because it offers the opportunity to recall pleasant memories—and even lower blood pressure. The emotional consequences of daydreaming can be positive (Langens 2002: 1725). By constructive thinking and fantasizing about what can be learned from experiences, daydreams may play a moderating role on the fear of failure. Finally, daydreams are said to help us absorb more fully the lessons of the past and plan for the future. 31. Including, for example, Ethel S. Person (1995), Diane Kennedy Pike (1997), and Julia Segal (1985). 32. See the discussion in Löfgren and Willim (2005: 6ff.).

APPENDIX 1. As well as keeping ethical considerations in mind when using the Internet for research purposes, see also the recommendations issued in 2002 by the Association of Internet Researchers, www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf. 2. We found good material at the site http://standinaqueue.wordpress.com, which contains many stories and photographs of people queuing in different places all over the world. No doubt these stories were contributed for the purpose of sharing a boring or frustrating experience and airing opinions about having had to wait. But the stories gave us new insights about how a daily routine such as queuing may express cultural differences and arouse strong emotions, which people evidently felt they needed to communicate and share with strangers.

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REFERENCES

Adcock, Fleur, 2002. Things. In Neill Astley, ed., Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books. Ali, Monica, 2003. Brick Lane. London: Black Swan. Anonymous, 1902/2007. My Secret Life. New York: Signet Classic. Appadurai, Arjun, 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arvastson, Gösta, 1987. Maskinmänniskan: Arbetets förvandlingar i 1900-talets storindustri. Göteborg: Korpen. ———, 1984. Tombola as a Model of Reality. Ethnologia Scandinavica 14. ———, 2006. Zero-Making. In Orvar Löfgren and Richard Wilk, eds., Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press (also in Ethnologia Europaea 35, no. 1–2). Augé, Marc, 1999. The War of Dream: Exercises in Ethno-Fiction. London: Pluto Press. Bachelard, Gaston, 1943/1988. Air and Dream: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Publications. ———, 1948/2002. Earth and the Reveries of Will. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Publications. ———, 1957/1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ———, 1938/1968. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press. ———, 1942/1999. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Publications. Baker, Nicholson, 2003. A Box of Matches. London: Chatto and Windus. 243

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INDEX

actions, and daydreaming: about, 126–27, 168–69, 238n2, 238n4, 238n6; media and, 136, 137; music and, 135, 137; scenes and senses for, 127–29, 238n7; urban environment for, 129–31; wartime environment for, 131–37 Adcock, Fleur, “Things,” 166 aesthetic charm, and queuing, 40–42, 233n23 airplanes, traveling on, 24, 143–45, 146 airports, 24, 39, 60, 61, 67, 212, 223 Ali, Monica, Brick Lane, 203–4 Allen, Woody, 40 ambivalent states of mind, and waiting, 66–68 American landscape, and daydreaming, 142 Annie Hall (film), 40 anonymity, or going public about daydreams, 176–77 Appadurai, Arjun, 199–200 The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 31, 126–27 artistic projects, 12–13, 223. See also specific projects Arvastson, Gösta, 154, 212, 239n16 autoethnography, 220 automobiles, traveling in, 48, 51, 57,

58–59, 60, 145–46, 208, 239n13 automobility, and daydreaming, 145–46, 239n13 Babok (ballet), 38, 223 Bachelard, Gaston, 128–29, 138, 143, 148–50, 154, 159 Baker, Nicholson, 94, 149 Balkan wars, 118–19 Barker, Juliet, 124 Barth, Diane, 147, 201 Barthes, Roland, 73–74, 227 bathrooms, 86, 98–99, 100–101, 110, 112, 127–28, 149–50, 151–52 baths, 86, 149–50 Baudrillard, Jean, 169 Beard, George M., 60 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, 10 Beckman, Anita, 231n1 bedroom setting, and daydreaming, 165–68, 240n21 Bell, David Jack, 231n5 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 35, 127–28, 141 Bergström-Walan, Maj-Briht, 188 Bhabha, Homi, 229–30n3 Bissell, David, 13, 14, 28, 232n18 Bloch, Ernst, 199–200

259

260 /

Bonjour Tristesse (Sagan), 239n12 The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa), 139, 166 boredom, and waiting, 55–58, 234nn35–38 Bourdieu, Pierre, 236n3 Bournes, Debra A., 55, 234n33 Boyhood (Tolstoy), 197–98 breast center, and venues of waiting, 17 Brekhus, Wayne, 229–30n3 Brekke, Jan Paul, 25–26 Brembeck, Helene, 112 Brick Lane (Ali), 203–4 Brissett, Dennis, 28, 56 Brontë, Charlotte: on actions and daydreaming, 132, 135, 136; childhood dream world of, 123–24, 224; daydreaming and, 123, 125; on drawing, 171; materials for daydreams and, 171–72; outdoor daydreaming and, 157, 158–59, 169 Brontë children’s dream world, 123–24, 224 Brown, Roger, 54 bureaucratic standardized work, and routines, 89–91 Burenstam-Linder, Staffan, 109–10 “the burnout syndrome,” and routines, 115–18 Burrell, Kathy, 49–50, 53 Burton, Richard, 192 Butler, Judith, 121 California middle-class families study, 84–86 Calle, Sophie, 153 Campbell, Colin, 83, 137, 179, 182, 238n4, 238n7 car repair shop experience, and sticky time in, 21–23 cars, traveling in, 48, 51, 57, 58–59, 60, 145–46, 208, 239n13 catching and recounting daydreams, 173–76 Caughey, John L., 126–27, 175, 182, 198 Cesara, Manda, 164

Index

chaos, and control through routines, 114–18 Chaplin, Charlie, 89 Chast, Roz, 182–83 childhood: Brontë children’s dream world and, 123–24, 224; daycare center routines and, 102–3; patience learned in, 31, 32, 33 Christmas rituals, 32, 68, 77 cigarette smoking, 13, 83, 236n4 Cixous, Hélène, 240n21 class: cultural practices of couples and, 101–2; daydreams and, 172; discipline and self-discipline of, 32, 77; domestic life of immigrant, 88–89; domestic science movement and, 88–89; future happiness dreams and, 180; marginalization and, 210–13, 214; in modernity, 207; multitasking and, 110; politics of daydreaming and, 191; queuing and, 45–46; ritual activities and, 213; venues of waiting and, 17–18 Cohen, Stanley, 196–97 collective breakdown, and effects on routines, 118–19 communities, temporary, 50–53 conflicts, in daily life, 99–106, 202–5 Conrad, Peter, 56–57 control issues, 53–54, 114–18 Cooley, C. H., 44 the couch, for psychoanalysis, 138–39 couples: cultural practices of, 102; power games, and relationships of, 73–75; relationship breakups and, 112–13; routines, and daily life of, 99, 101–2, 121, 122, 204–5 The Crack-Up (Fitzgerald), 167 Crapanzano, Vincent, 62, 68 Crary, Jonathan, 106–7, 124, 137, 172–73, 191 crashes, during travel, 53, 143–44 creation and cultural paths of, 81–83, 236n4

Index

Crick, Harold (film character), 79–80, 84, 89, 99, 105, 122, 223 crises, and control through, 113–19 crouching in the dusk or keeping dusk, 162–64, 168, 224 crystallized daydreams, 198–200 cultural practices: class marginalization and, 102; of couples, 101–2; cultural analysis of, 225–27; in daily life, 209; ideologies about doing nothing and, 5–6, 230nn8–9; in kitchens, 101–2; patience and, 29–33, 232n13; queuing and, 46–50, 233n31; routines and, 101–3, 120, 121; talent for waiting and, 29–31; venues of waiting and, 19–20, 27–28, 231n5, 232n10, 232n12 cultural research: about, 5, 217–18, 230n6; arenas created for, 218–19; artistic projects and, 223; autoethnography and, 220; context for materials and ideas used in, 223–24; cultural analysis of materials and practices used in, 225–27; on daydreaming, 4, 7, 219; doing nothing concept and, 4, 5–6, 230n6, 230n7, 230nn8–9; ideas and materials mixes for, 219–25; infra-ordinary examination and, 4–5; interviews and, 125, 220; on marginal activities, and influence on social life, 7–8; methodology for, 7, 231n13; micro-dramas and, 4, 210, 229–30n3; observations and, 7, 11, 221–22; on railway stations, 11–12, 224; research process for, 217–18; on routines, 4, 7; scholarship on analysis of daily life and, 6, 224–25, 230–31n12; sources for materials and ideas for, 222, 241nn1–2; surveys and, 7, 220–21; on waiting, 4, 7, 11–14 cultural settings, and waiting, 14–15, 29–31 Cummings, Neil, 223 Cunningham, Michael, The Hours, 152–53 Curtis, Ian, 153–54

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daily life: about, 207; class, and marginalization in, 210–13; conflicts in, 99–106, 202–5; of couples, 99, 101–2, 121, 122, 204–5; cultural practices in, 209; emotionality, and activities in, 209–10; gender, and marginalization in, 210, 212, 214; ideologies, and doing nothing concept in, 5–6, 230nn8–9; juggling routines, 84–86; marginal activities, and influence on, 7–8; marginalization in, 210–13, 214; mutual understandings in, 207–9; power, and activities in, 202–5, 209–10; public and private worlds in, 126, 168, 214–16; scholarship on analysis of, 6, 224–25, 230–31n12; skills for coping with, 5, 61, 208–9; subversity of activities in, 213–14; traditions, and reforms in, 210, 212–13; traditions versus modern, 88, 210, 213, 236–37n5 Darrah, Charles N., 84–86 Davis-Floyd, Robbie E., 65–66, 235n45 dawn, and daydreaming, 162, 164, 166–67, 168–69 daycare center routines, 102–3 Daydreamer (computer program), 201–2 daydreaming: about, 124–26, 205–6, 238n2, 238n7; Brontë children’s world of, 123–24; conflicts caused by, 202–5; cultural research on, 4, 7; dawn and, 162, 164, 166–67, 168–69; desire and, 126, 238n4; history of, 129–37; kitchens and, 149, 163, 164, 169, 171, 177, 184; literature and, 123–24, 125, 238n3; objects, and role in, 136, 150, 179, 180, 199; power games and, 202–5; in railway stations, 141–43; real world and, 126, 129, 198–200; during ritual activities, 128, 149–50, 155; subversity of, 156, 193, 197, 206, 213–14; television viewing and, 137. See also actions, and daydreaming; daydreams; dusk, and daydreaming; movement, and

262 /

daydreaming (continued ): daydreaming; politics of daydreaming; stationary settings, for daydreaming daydreams: about, 169–70; anonymity or going public about, 176–77; choreography of, 146–48; class and, 172; drawing and, 171; future happiness, 177–82; gender and, 172; literature and, 171; media and, 171, 172–73; mutual understandings and, 208; normality of content in, 187–90; recounting and catching, 173–76; sexual fantasies and, 184–87; sources for, 170–73; value of, 191–93, 240n26, 240nn26–27; worries and, 182–84. See also daydreaming dead time, 20, 30, 35, 67, 141, 213 deferred gratification concept, 32, 33, 232n13 Delumeau, Jean, 159–60 de Maistre, Xavier, 148, 197 desire, and daydreaming, 126, 238n4 Desoille, Robert, 137–38 The Dice Man (Rhinehart), 172 diCorcia, Philip-Lorca, 230n6 Didion, Joan, 145 discipline and self-discipline, 15, 31–33, 34–35, 77, 232n13 Diski, Jenny, 112–13, 142 doing nothing concept, 4, 5–6, 230n6, 230n7, 230nn8–9 domestic life setting, 83–84, 88–89, 148–51 domestic routines, 114–15 domestic science movement, 86–89, 121–22, 236–37n5 Douglas, Mary, 83–84, 227 drawing, and daydreams, 171 dusk, and daydreaming: about, 162–64, 168, 224; bedroom setting and, 165–68, 240n21; cultural and social conditions for, 168–69; hour of the wolf and, 166, 167–68; longing about the future and, 164–65 dynamic impatience, 35–37, 232n18

Index

efficiency and monotony balancing act, 91–93 Ehn, Siv, 49 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 59 elderly people, and routines, 113 Ellis, Havelock, 240n16 emotional climates, and waiting: about, 54–55, 234n33; ambivalent states of mind and, 66–68; boredom and, 55–58, 234nn35–38; irritation expressed in car culture and, 58–59; longing about the future and, 61–63; nervousness expressed by travel fever and, 59–61, 67; pregnancy and, 63–66, 234n43, 234n45; Warlpiri aboriginals and, 57–58 emotionality, in daily activities, 209–10 empty nest syndrome, 112 English-Lueck, J. A., 84–86 Ernaux, Annie, 235n49 Escape Attemps (Cohen and Taylor), 196–97 etiquette: queuing, 40–42, 44, 50, 233n23; waiting room, 19 face-to-back relations, 43 Favero, Paolo, 200 fears, and daydreams, 143–45, 182–84 Fever Pitch (Hornby), 191 Fitzgerald, Scott, The Crack-Up, 167 Fjeld, Per Olaf, 160–61 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 170–71 floating in-between experience, 120 flying, and daydreaming, 143–45. See also airplanes; airports force of habit, 119–20, 122 Frank, Anne, 134–36, 148, 172, 197 Fredriksson, Cecilia, 161 Freeman, James M., 84–86 Freud, Sigmund, 138–39, 176, 178, 184, 192, 193, 195, 200–201 Friday, Nancy, 188, 240n27 Fritzsche, Peter, 144 Frykman, Jonas, 14–15

Index

the future, thinking about, 61–63, 164–65, 177–82 Futurelab, 92–93 Gaskell, Elisabeth, 123–24 gender: couples’ daily life and, 99, 101–2, 121, 122, 204–5; daydreams and, 172; discipline of, 77; domestic science movement and, 88, 121–22; marginalization and, 122, 210, 214; morning routines and, 94–98, 99, 237n8; multitasking and, 110–11; power games and, 71–72; song and dancelike morning routines, 94–96 The Generic Waiting Room (art installation), 18, 223 Gilbreth, Frank B., Jr., 86–87, 106, 110, 236–37n5 Gilbreth Carey, Ernestine, 86–88, 106, 236–37n5 Gini, Al, 230n9 Gleick, James, 28 Goffman, Erving, 127, 234n37, 238n6 Gohl, Christiane, 170, 240n27 Gröndahl, Jens Christian, 153 grooming and shaving morning routines, 99 Groos, Karl, 174 habit, force of, 119–20 habits. See routines Hackzell, Lena, 15–16 Hall, E. T., 42–43 Hamid, Mohsin, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 44 Hammar, Filip, 34 hanging out, by teenagers, 33–34 Hanson, Clare, 64–65 The Harried Leisure Class (BurenstamLinder), 109 Haug, Frigga, 240n27 Hemme, Dorothe, 158 Highmore, Ben, 236n3 Hillman, David, 28 Hillman, James, 59

/ 263

Hochschild, Arlie, 93 Höjer, H., 143 Hong Kong International Airport, 36–37 Hornby, Nick, Fever Pitch, 191 hotel rooms, and daydreaming, 151–53, 239n16 hour of the wolf, 166, 167–68, 182, 184 The Hours (Cunningham), 152–53 house moving, and impacts on routines, 117–18 Hunt, Helen, 147 Hussein, Saddam, 9 Husserl, Edmund, 139 ideas and materials, used in cultural research, 219–27, 241nn1–2 ideologies, and doing nothing concept, 5–6, 230nn8–9 The Imaginary (Sartre), 156 impatience, 23, 29, 35–37, 77, 209, 232n18. See also patience indoor landscapes, and daydreaming, 160–62 infra-ordinary examination, 4–5 infrastructure of waiting. See venues of waiting In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki), 162 “Insomnia Jeopardy” (cartoon), 182–83 international refugees, and venues of waiting, 25–26 interviews, 125, 220 irritation expressed in car culture and, 58–59 Ivarsson, Bodil, 188 Ivarsson, Malena, 188 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, 168 Janakananda, Swami, 163 Jin, Ha, Waiting, 11, 76, 194–95, 226 Johansen, Arne, 30, 35 Jönsson, Lars-Eric, 235n47 Journal of Mundane Behavior, 229–30n3 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 3, 140, 174, 175, 177, 223

264 /

juggling routines: bureaucratic standardized work and, 89–91; California middle-class families and, 84–86; daily life and, 84–86; domestic life and, 83–84; domestic science movement and, 86–89, 121–22, 236–37n5; Futurelab, 92–93; in kitchens, 84; monotony and efficiency balancing act and, 91–93, 121 jumping, queue, 44–46, 233n25 Kahr, Brett, 124, 170, 185, 187, 203 Kantor, Jan, 231n3 Kapus´in´ski, Ryszard, 29–30, 57, 77, 224 Katz, Jack, 59 Kaufmann, Jean-Claude, 100 keeping dusk, 162–64, 168, 224 Keller, Awiwa, 231n3 Khan, Akram, 38, 223 Kirkegaard, Søren, 158 Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Puig), 196 kitchens: chaos, and control in, 115; creation of routines in, 82–83; cultural practices, and couples in, 101–2; daydreaming and, 149, 163, 164, 169, 171, 177, 184; domestic science and, 88; juggling routines in, 84; monotony and efficiency balancing act in, 92; multitasking in, 107; rituals in, 94; routines in, 82–83 Kjær, Sarah Holst, 101, 102, 165–66 Klein, Richard, 236n4 Klinger, Eric, 170, 175–76, 179, 180, 182, 185, 187, 200 Koolhaas, Rem, 151 Kusserow, Adrie, 211 Lagercrantz, Olof, 179–80 Lahiri, Jhumpa, The Namesake, 63–64 landscapes, and daydreaming: class and, 172; dawn and, 162, 164, 166–67, 168–69; gender and, 172; indoor, 150, 160–62; outdoor, 141–42, 144–47, 157–59, 168–69, 172. See also dusk, and daydreaming

Index

Laqueur, Thomas W., 192 Lee, Hatty, 18, 223 Le Goff, Jacques, 159–60, 192 Le Guin, Ursula, 104 Lennartsson, Rebecka, 25–26 Lessing, Doris, 115 Lin Kong story, 10–11, 27, 61–62, 75–76 literature, and daydreaming, 123–24, 125, 171, 238n3 Lodge, David, 140 Löfgren, Orvar, 32, 165, 231n3 longing, about the future, 61–63, 164–65, 177–82 Love, Lust and Adventure (Gohl), 240n27 love relationships. See couples Lutz, Tom, 230n8 Lynd, Robert, 58 Lysgaard, Sverre, 33 Macˇek, Ivana, War Within, 118 Maclane, Daisann, 152 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 170–71 Maister, David H., 23–26 makeup morning routine, 96–98, 237n8 Making Faces, Playing God (Morawetz), 237n8 Mann, Leon, 50–51 marginal activities, 7–8 marginalization, 122, 210–13, 214 Marinelli, Lydia, 138 Masley, Kate, 19–20 materials, of daydreams. See daydreams materials and ideas, used in cultural research, 219–27, 241nn1–2 Maugham, W. Somerset, 95–96 Mayle, Peter, 72–73 media, and daydreams, 171, 172–73 Melville, Herman, 158 men: couples’ daily life and, 99, 101–2, 121, 122, 204–5; daydreams, and value for, 193; domestic science movement and, 88, 121–22; morning routines for, 94–96, 99; multitasking and, 110–11

Index

methodology, for cultural research, 7, 231n13 Meyer, Silke, 170 micro-dramas, 1–2, 4, 5, 9–12, 210, 229–30n3, 233n22 microsystems, social, 50–53 Milgram, Stanley, 44–45 mindless routines, 103–6 Mintz, Sidney W., 110 Mitchell, Gail J., 55, 234n33 modernity, daily life in. See daily life Modern Times (film), 89 Modleski, Tania, 240n27 Moby Dick (Melville), 158 monotony and efficiency balancing act, 91–93, 121 Moran, Joe, 4, 47–48, 229–30n3 Morand, Paul, 58 Morawetz, Thomas, 237n8 morning routines, 93–99, 237n8 movement, and daydreaming: about, 137–38; American landscape and, 142; automobility and, 145–46, 239n13; choreography of, 146–48; the couch for psychoanalysis and, 138–39; flying, 143–45; train travel, 141–43; traveling, 140–43; walking, 139–40, 146, 147, 149, 159 moving house, and impacts on routines, 117–18 Mueller, Eric T., 201–2 multitasking, 106–13 Murakami, Haruki, 80, 108, 112, 119–20 Musharbash, Yasmine, 57, 234n38 mutual understandings, in daily life, 207–9 Myhre, Lise, 103–4 The Namesake, (Lahiri), 63–64 national stereotypes, 46–50, 233n31 Nemi (comic strip), 103–4 nervous breakdown, and routines, 115–18 nervousness, expressed by travel fever, 59–61, 67

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Nigerian petrol queues, 51–52 Nin, Anaïs “Linotte,” 131, 132–34, 149, 150, 157, 171, 172, 184–85 Nippert-Eng, Christina, 93–94, 128 non-events concept, 4, 5–6, 230n6, 230n7, 230nn8–9 Nordau, Max, 106–7 Nordisk familjebok, 191 normality of content, in daydreams, 187–90 normative territory, and waiting, 42–44, 233n24 Oates, Joyce Carol, 146 OB-GYN clinic, and venues of waiting, 19–20 objects: daydreaming, and role of, 136, 150, 179, 180, 199; routines, and role of, 83, 105; waiting, and role of, 14, 60 observations, 7, 11, 221–22 O’Dell, Tom, 121 O’Faolain, Nuala, 192 Olsson, Linda, 82–83 One Year in Provence (Mayle), 72–73 “on the road.” See travel Ottoson, Erik, 161 outdoor landscapes, and daydreaming, 157–60 Palmenfelt, Ulf, 181–82 Pamuk, Orhan, 129–31, 137, 157, 171, 202, 239n10 Panico, Joseph A., 233n20 patience: about, 28–29; childhood and, 31, 32, 33; Christmas and, 32, 77; cultural settings and, 29–31; deferred gratification concept and, 32, 33, 232n13; hanging out by teenagers and, 33–34; impatience and, 23, 29, 35–37, 77, 209, 232n18; self-discipline and, 31–33, 232n13; talent for waiting and, 29–31; technologies and, 34–35; traveler behavior and, 37–39 Pepy, Samuel, 186

266 /

Perec, Georges, 4, 7, 149, 220 performance art, 12–13, 223 Person, Ethel S., 140 personal collapse, and routines, 115–18 Pessoa, Fernando, 130–31, 156–57, 166, 226 petrol queues, Nigerian, 51–52 Phillips, Adam, 28 Pinfold, Michael John, 99 The Poetics of Space (Bachelard), 148–49 Poirier, Sylvie, 57–58 politics of daydreaming: about, 190–91; benefits and, 200–202, 241n30; positive or negative effects and, 193–98, 240n29; power games and, 202–5; real world as crystallized daydreams and, 198–200; value of daydreams and, 191–93, 240nn26–27 Ponge, Francis, 159–60 Pörtner, Marlis, 113 Povrzanovic´ , Maja, 119 power, and activities in daily life, 202–5, 209–10 power games, and waiting: about, 68; couples’ relationships and, 73–75; gender relations and, 71–72; keeping someone on the tenterhooks and, 68–70; social relations and, 70–71, 235n48; tactics in, 72–75, 235n50 preemptive priority, and queuing, 45–46, 233n25 pregnancy, and waiting, 63–66, 234n43, 234n45 principles for facilitating waiting, 23–26, 232n9 private, and public worlds, 126, 168, 214–16 Pruyn, Ad, 232n9 psychoanalysis, and the couch, 138–39 public and private worlds, 126, 168, 214–16 Puig, Manuel, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, 196 queuing: about, 40, 233n20, 233n22; aesthetic charm and, 40–42, 233n23;

Index

class and, 45–46; control issues and, 53–54; cultural practices and, 46–50, 233n31; etiquette and, 40–42, 44, 50, 233n23; face-to-back relations and, 43; inattention and, 43–44; Nigerian petrol queues and, 51–52; normative territory and, 42–44, 233n24; preemptive priority and, 45–46, 233n25; queue discipline, 15; queue jumping and, 44–46, 233n25; social relations and, 50–53; supermarket experience and behavior during, 1–2, 5, 233n22; traveler behavior and, 41–42; VIP shortcuts and, 45–46 railway stations: about waiting in, 11–12, 16, 224; choreography of waiting, 13; class and, 17–18; cultural research on, 11–12, 224; daydreaming in, 141–43; handling a wait and, 24; impatience and, 35–37; nervousness expressed by travel fever and, 60, 61, 67; queuing and, 40; traveler behavior and, 37–39 railway travel, 107, 141–43, 146, 147, 169 Raposa, Michael L, 56, 58, 234n36 real world, and daydreaming, 126, 129, 198–200 Rebecka is waiting . . . (Wikström), 12–13 recounting and catching daydreams, 173–76 Rehn, Alf, 233n23 relationships. See couples The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid), 44 restaurants, and principles for facilitating waiting, 23 Rhinehart, Luke, The Dice Man, 172 ritual activities: class and, 213; daydreaming during, 128, 149–50, 155; keeping dusk and, 162–64, 168, 224; in kitchens, 94; morning routines and, 93–99; routines and, 94–95, 96, 99, 104–5, 119, 120, 122; sexual, 235–36n1; smoking, 83, 236n4; waiting and, 32, 68, 77

Index

routines: about, 79–80, 119–22, 235–36n1; “the burnout syndrome” and, 115–18; chaos, and control through, 114–18; collective breakdown, and effects on, 118–19; conflicts, and small, 99–106; conscious and symbolic, 120; couples and, 99, 101–2, 121, 122; creation of, 81–83, 236n4; crises, and control through, 113–19; cultural practices and, 81–83, 101–3, 120, 121, 236n4; cultural research on, 4, 7; daycare centers and, 102–3; domestic, 114–15; elderly people and, 113; empty nest syndrome and, 112; floating inbetween, 120; force of habit and, 119–20, 122; in kitchens, 82–83; makeup morning, 96–98, 237n8; men’s morning, 94–96; mindless, 103–6; morning, 93–99, 237n8; moving house impacts on, 117–18; multitasking and, 106–13; mutual understandings and, 208; objects, and role in, 83, 105; personal collapse, and control through, 115–18; relationship breakups and, 112–13; relationships, and morning, 100–101; ritual activities and, 94–95, 96, 99, 104–5, 119, 120, 122; sensual excesses, and multitasking practices in, 106–9; shaving and grooming morning, 99; smoking, 83, 236n4; song and dance-like morning, 94–96; soulful, 103–6; subversity of, 121; supportive, 80–81, 121, 236n3; television viewing and, 101, 105, 107, 111; trapping, 80–81, 236n3; unconscious processes during multitasking and, 111–13; women’s morning, 96–98, 237n8; workplace and, 82, 89–93, 106. See also juggling routines Rushdie, Salman, 46 Saarikoski, Helena, 172 Sagan, Francoise, 239n12

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Sandberg, Kristina, 115 Sandstrak, Pelle, 105–6 Sante, Luc, 155 Sarajevo siege, 118–19 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 53, 156, 199, 266–67 Schaffer, Scott, 117–18, 229n3 Schneider, Louis, 33 scholarship, on analysis of daily life, 6, 224–25, 230–31n12 Schwartz, Barry, 15, 31, 41, 43, 45, 70–71, 235n50 Schweizer, Harold, 232n10 secret/informal competitions, 2–3 Segal, Julia, 238n2 self-discipline and discipline, 15, 31–33, 34–35, 77, 232n13 Sennett, Richard, 80–81 sensual excesses, and routines, 106–9 sexual daydreams, 184–87 sexual rituals, 235–36n1 shaving and grooming morning routines, 99 shopping, window, 150, 169 shopping experience, 30–39, 161 Shove, Elisabeth, 6 Simmel, Georg, 6, 215–16 Simple Passion (Ernaux), 235n49 Singer, Jerome L., 134–35, 167, 170, 171, 200 Sjögren, Lennart, 163–64 Skeggs, Beverly, 212 skills, for coping with daily life, 5, 61, 208–9 Skugge, Linda, 114 Smidts, Ale, 232n9 smoking cigarettes, 13, 83, 236n4 Snow, Robert P., 28, 56 social relations, 50–53, 70–71, 235n48 Solheim, Jorun, 71–72 Somer, Eli, 195 song and dance-like morning routines, 94–96 Soth, Alec, 154–55 soulful routines, 103–6 states of mind, ambivalent, 66–68

268 /

stationary mobility, 215 stationary settings, for daydreaming: about, 148; domestic life and, 148–51; hotel rooms and, 151–53, 239n16; indoor landscapes and, 160–62; outdoor landscapes and, 157–60; workplace and, 153–57, 160, 164, 202; zero-making settings and, 152, 239n16 Steinbeck, John, 239n13 Stranger than Fiction (film), 79–80, 84, 89, 99, 105, 122, 223 Strannegård, Maria, 152 subversity, of activities, 121, 156, 193, 197, 206, 213–14 The Summer Before the Dark (Lessing), 115 supermarket queue experience and behavior, 1–2, 5, 233n22 supportive routines, 80–81, 121, 236n3 surveys, 7, 220–21 talent, for waiting, 29–31 Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro, In Praise of Shadows, 162 Tanner, Laura E., 17, 18–19, 68 Taylor, Laurie, 196–97 technologies, and discipline, 34–35 teenagers, hanging out by, 33–34 television viewing, 101, 105, 107, 111, 137, 231n5 the tenterhooks, keeping someone on, 68–70 “Things” (Adcock), 166 “thinking ticket machine” and, 15 Thoursie, Ragnar, 89–91, 155–56 Thrift, Nigel, 210 time: car repair shop experience and sticky, 21–23; dead, 20, 30, 35, 67, 141, 213; duration of, waiting and, 10–11; framing the passing of, 16–20, 231n3, 231n19; quality of waiting, 20–28; waste of, 26–28, 232n10, 232n12 Tolstoy, Leo, Boyhood, 197–98

Index

traditions, versus daily life, 88, 210, 212–13, 236–37n5 traffic jams, 58, 59, 60, 208 trains, travel on railway, 107, 141–43, 146, 147, 169 train stations. See railway stations trapping routines, 80–81, 236n3 travel: on airplanes, 24, 143–44, 145, 146; in cars, 48, 51, 57, 58–59, 60, 145–46, 208, 239n13; crashes during, 53, 143–44; daydreaming during, 140–43; transit shelters and, 15–16 traveler behavior, 37–39, 41–42 travel fever, nervousness, expressed by, 59–61, 67 Turnovsky, Carolyn Pinedo, 52 Ulysses (Joyce), 3, 140, 174, 175, 177, 223 Urbain, Jean-Didier, 239n16 Using Waking Fantasy . . . (Klinger), 200 Vannini, Phillip, 36–37 Varendonck, Julien, 132–34, 166, 174, 198 venues of waiting: about, 14–15; breast center and, 17; car repair shop experience and sticky time in, 21–23; class and, 17–18; cultural practices and, 19–20, 27–28, 231n5, 232n10, 232n12; cultural settings and, 14–15; dead time and, 20, 30, 35, 67, 213; ecological supports in, 15–16; experiences in, 18–19, 231n5; framing the passing of time and, 16–20, 231n3, 231n19; handling a wait and, 23–26, 232n9; international refugees and, 25–26; OB-GYN clinic and, 19–20; objects, and role in, 14, 60; official, 9, 17; principles for facilitating waiting and, 23–26, 232n9; quality of waiting time and, 20–28; queue discipline and, 15; restaurants and, 23; televisions in, 18, 231n5; “thinking ticket machine” and, 15; transit shelters and, 15–16; waiting rooms

Index

and, 9, 16–20, 55, 65, 225, 231n3; waste of time and, 26–28, 232n10, 232n12 Victorian era, 31, 77, 88, 109–10, 186 Vidler, Anthony, 38–39, 61 VIP shortcuts, 45–46 Vygotskij, Lev S., 198–99 waiting: about, 9–14, 75–78; choreography of, 13; cultural research on, 4, 7, 11–14; impatience and, 23, 29, 35–37, 77, 209, 232n18; micro-dramas and, 9–12; mutual understandings about, 208; performance art explorations of, 12–13; ritual activities and, 32, 68, 77; as state of mind, 13–14; talent for, 29–31; time duration and, 10–11; in vain, 12–13; workplace and, 17, 234n35. See also emotional climates, and waiting; patience; power games, and waiting; queuing; venues of waiting. Waiting (Jin), 11, 76, 194–95, 226 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 10 waiting rooms, 9, 16–20, 55, 65, 225, 231n3 walking: daydreaming and, 139–40, 146, 147, 149, 159; routines and, 88, 111

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Warlpiri aboriginals, 57–58 War Within (Macˇek), 118 waste of time, 26–28, 232n10, 232n12 Waterhouse, Keith, 178–79 Wikingsson, Fredrik, 34 Wikström, Elin, 12–13, 74 Wilk, Richard, 82 Williams, Raymond, 58 window shopping, 150, 169 Wiseman, John A., 51–52 wolf, hour of the, 166, 167–68, 182, 184 women: couples’ daily life and, 99, 101–2, 121, 122, 204–5; domestic science movement and, 88, 121–22; makeup morning routines for, 96–98, 237n8; multitasking and, 110–11; value of daydreams and, 193, 240nn26–27 Woolf, Virginia, 140 workplace: daydreaming and, 153–57, 160, 164, 202; routines and, 82, 89–93, 106; waiting and, 17, 234n35 worries, and daydreams, 143–45, 182–84 zero-making settings, and daydreaming, 152, 239n16 Zerubavel, Eviator, 28