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Animating Suspension: Waiting forMobilitiesDavid Bissell aa Department of Geography , Durham University , UKPublished online: 05 Jul 2007.

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Animating Suspension: Waiting forMobilities

DAVID BISSELL

Department of Geography, Durham University, UK

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the corporeal experience of the event of waiting during theprocess of journeying. Rather than focusing on differential speed as central to charting thecontingent relationality between mobilities and immobilities as has been the dominant mode ofreasoning in mobility studies, I argue for a renewed focus on the body, specifically through therelationality between activity and inactivity. In this way, the event of waiting is no longerconceptualised as a dead period of stasis or stilling, or even a slower urban rhythm, but is insteadalive with the potential of being other than this. Through an appreciation of the dynamic nature oftemporality, this essay charts a journey through the relative in/activities embodied throughwaiting and concludes that waiting as an event should be conceptualised not solely as an activeachievement or passive acquiescence but as a variegated affective complex where experience foldsthrough and emerges from a multitude of different planes.

KEY WORDS: mobilities, waiting, embodiment, duration, subjectivity

Introduction

The event of waiting seems to be the neglected Achilles heel of modernity. From

airports, to railway stations, from traffic lights, to bus stops, the practice of waiting

through spaces of mobility is an often-inevitable and frequent experience woven

through the fabric of the mobile everyday but is yet strangely absent from the current

and burgeoning mobilities literature. This is not surprising given the current (and

arguably dominant) synthesis between mobility studies and Science, Technology and

Society (STS) where the focus is often the relational contingencies between mobility

and immobility (see Adey, 2006; Law & Mol, 2001; Callon et al., 2004; Dodge &

Kitchen, 2004; Urry, 2004). Such work focusing on the relativity of speed and stasis

(see Bell & Leong, 1998; Crang, 2001; Geißler, 2002; Hubbard & Lilley, 2004;

Leccardi, 2003; Parkins, 2004) has been instrumental in critiquing the pervasive

discourses of global acceleration and perpetual speed-up (see Harvey, 1989).

Correspondence Address: David Bissell, Department of Geography, Durham University, Science

Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK. Email: d.j.bissell@durham.ac.uk

Mobilities

Vol. 2, No. 2, 277–298, July 2007

1745-0101 Print/1745-011X Online/07/020277–22 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17450100701381581

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Attention to the complexity of relative mobilities must be met with a similar

sensitivity to the kaleidoscopic nature of subjectivities, the nature of human

experience, folded through and enmeshed within these various mobilities. Much

work focusing on the relative dialectics of mobility and immobility have often and

rather uncritically served to reproduce a productivist and rather inert model of

subjectivity, as something that can somehow be read-off from the relative (andusually physical) speed of the subject. It is such a productivist rendering of

im(mobilities), in the sense that the economic rationale of the event is primatised,

which this paper aims to chart a path away from. Writing from a more

phenomenologist perspective together with recent insights from performativity and

thinking affectively (see Whatmore, 2002; Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000), I want to think

through the event of waiting from the perspective of embodied corporeal experience.

I enact this through a reconsideration of bodily practice so that the event of waiting

is not viewed from the angle of im(mobilities), but instead from the perspective ofactivity/inactivity. This enables a more non-linear consideration of the various

modalities of what it is to wait: from active waiting of an intense pressing and being-

in-the-world, to a more stilled sense of waiting that falls outside of the impulse to

view subjectivity as auto-affective activity. This paper provides a timely and much

needed intervention by considering how waiting-as-event is a specific kind of

relation-to-the-world that transcends and folds through this relational dialecticism

of (im)mobility.

This paper begins by problematising the dominant productivist rendering ofmobilities, focusing on and consequentially questioning the relational contingencies

between mobility and immobility. Such a relational apprehension based on an

incremental conceptual scale is often premised on the primacy of the mobile as the

more desirable relation in the world. As such, the rhetoric of productivity has

imbued much thinking on how travel time is spent and, as a consequence, focus is

often directed towards different modalities of engaged activity. Such thinking has the

effect of quiescing time, in effect to silence it, leaving little or no epistemological

space for animating an alternative model of subjectivity. It is such an epistemologicalspace that this paper aims to open-up. Through a discussion of the event of waiting,

the following section grasps and holds onto these periods of hiatus to consider the

multiple ways in which such events could be considered. Much current work

theorising through (im)mobilities would tend to posit more productivist notions of

waiting and subjectivity as examples of slowed and even deadened rhythms moving

alongside faster events and practices. However, this logic of rhythms obscures and

possibly negates the ways in which bodies have the potential to transcend this

schema. Therefore, instead of focusing on relative velocities as the differentiatorwhen considering im/mobilities, this paper posits that it may be more fruitful to

consider relative embodied activity or inaction. I proceed to open up and animate the

event of waiting by tracing a path through the activities of the active and engaged

body-in-waiting and the various bodily demands and corporeal attentiveness that

waiting entails. However, I want to consider the potential to be other than this: the

passive and acquiescent body where the event of waiting marks a withdrawal from

the world. Waiting-as-acquiescence, or passive assent, is a particular relationship

without context that eludes the traditional definition of the ‘social’. However, it isperhaps through a recognition of this surplus, this remainder, that the scope of the

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‘social’ can be expanded and consequently become enlivened with. The following

section considers the mechanics of how these corporeal experiences of action and

inaction transcend the productivist model of im(mobilities) and fold through the

fabric of quotidian waiting events. The qualitative experiences of patience and

impatience serve to haunt the event of waiting with a residual productivism.

However, I trace a path away from this problematic by considering how patienceand impatience, as a combination of urgency and delay, are instrumental in

considering the subjectivity of active or acquiescent embodied corporeal experiences

as events in-and-of-themselves. This requires a reformulation of a dynamic non-

linear temporality where experiences through the event-of-waiting are necessarily

bound-up and inseparable from each other, which results in the enacting of a

variegated affective complex: a mixture of activity and agitation of the world, and

conversely a deadness-to-the-world. Within every period of stasis, of stilling, is

contained the potential to be otherwise, the possibility of rupture that ‘intimatelythreatens the synchrony of transcendental life or existence’ (Dastur, 2000, p. 182). I

move on to consider and problematise some of the various ways in which such

events-of-waiting could be carved out empirically, and as such narrated, and provide

some possible reasons why such suspensions have been notably absent from the

current mobilities literature. If we are to pay attention to these experiences then we

must develop a grammar that is more sensitive to this gaseous nature of subjectivity,

as ‘sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968 quoted

in Wylie, 2002, p. 446).Put simply, this paper argues that the event of waiting is not the immobile being-

in-the-world that it has perhaps traditionally been characterised as. By reconsidering

subjectivity through these periods of waiting not as slowed rhythms or somehow

opposed to speed, but instead as incipient rich durations, these banal and prosaic

hiatuses through virtuality and imminence weave and fold through multiple

temporalities, allowing us to consider not only their radical relationality but also

their irreducibility.

Quiescing Travel Time

The parallel yet intertwined and arguably cross-disciplinary tropes of mobility, speed

and displacement are now some of the increasingly powerful considerations that

permeate much contemporary social scientific research. As Hannam et al. posit in

the opening editorial of this journal, ‘mobility has become an evocative keyword for

the twenty-first century and a powerful discourse that creates its own effects and

contexts’ (2006, p. 1). Rather than invoking the discourse of mobility as an add-onconsideration or explanatory variable in otherwise sedentary studies of political,

economic and cultural space–time phenomena, or rather simplistically appealing to

an increasingly hyper-mobile world of increased velocity and greater frequency, the

complex detailed minutiae of mobile processes are now being critically interrogated

as important processes in their own right. Such mobile studies range from

considerations of the transformation of nation-states and their relationships within

global restructurings (Brenner, 2004) through to the various power geometries of

mobility implicated in everyday life (Massey, 1994; Wood & Graham, 2006). Acentral feature of the vast majority of these studies is either explicitly or implicitly to

Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities 279

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draw out a path through the relational contingencies between mobility and

immobility (see Adey, 2006) where the mobility of one is inevitably at the expense

of the immobility of another. Uneven differential mobility is at the heart of many

studies ranging from physical cross-border international passage and associated

rights to travel (Verstraete, 2004; Timothy, 2001; Kaplan, 1996; Cresswell, 2003) to

variegated access to the more virtual (in the sense described by Hannam et al., 2006)digital and communication infrastructures (Graham, 2002; Graham & Marvin,

2001), often resulting in social exclusion of some form (Kenyon et al., 2002).

While many such studies are highly sensitive to the differential politics of

movement, access and speed, such a relational investigation is often premised on a

primacy of the mobile as the more desirable relation in the world. In short, it is

somehow ‘better’, culturally, economically or politically, to be mobile than

immobile. From studies of differential speeds through transit terminals (Adey,

2004; Gottdiener, 2000) through to differential connections to connective media(Mackenzie, 2005), faster speeds and unimpeded mobility is often rather uncritically

accepted as the more advantageous relation. This in part may have emerged from

associated economic, business and more generally competitive neo-liberal rationales

of productivity and a concern that time needs to be utilised more productively in

order to be more profitable (Harvey, 2005). Heeding this rationale, chronological

time as a container waiting to be filled with this profitable activity must be used

wisely. Indeed, the burgeoning literature on time management assures that there is

therefore an optimum configuration in which activity and events can be engineeredduring these quantifiable bounded clock-time periods (see Konig & Kleinmann,

2005; van Eerde, 2003; Waterworth, 2003; Purser, 2002; Sabelis, 2001). Increased

mobility and movement together with the neoliberal dictum of flexibility in part

satisfies this demand for maximisation of productivity. Faster speeds will ultimately

reduce journey times and therefore allow greater flexibility in working practices and

more time at work and home (Klein, 2004). Beckman (2001) outlines a similar point,

arguing that systems of automobility have been traditionally viewed with a persistent

economic bias where distance is seen as the ‘tyrannical’ object to be overcome. Thereare notable exceptions, however, to such productivist discourses of speed. Most

recently, Spark (2006) critiques the claim that speed is reserved for the more

privileged kinaesthetic elite, and is also something that is experienced by people

subject to ‘torture by-proxy’ in the case of US anti-immigration controls. In this

case, such people falling foul to immigration controls are transported at extremely

high speeds through the radical expulsion practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ (see

Spark, 2006, p. 170).

Together with the impetus to reduce journey times, there has recently been aparallel consideration of the ways in which the spaces of travel themselves are being

utilised, demonstrated by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s

(EPSRC) commitment to projects on Travel Time Use in the Information Age at

Lancaster University and the University of the West of England, which specifically

focuses on the ways in which these spaces of travel are utilised and engineered

through the increasing prevalence of technological and communication devices. The

reengineering of spaces such as the development of Wi-Fi zones throughout spaces of

travel at airports and railway stations (Mackenzie, 2005) together with on-boardlocations, provision for laptops through plug points and table spaces has responded

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to the prevalence of increasingly locative media such as mobile phones and GPRS

cards, which together are designed to facilitate the more productive use of time on

the move for the business-savvy kinetic elite. Instead of the pervasive economic

imperative that sees travel time as wasted time (see Department for Transport, 2004)

and discrete from the activities that gave rise to travel, Lyons and Urry (2005)

remind us that travel time and activity time are increasingly blurred and therefore‘many people are using travel time to undertake activities’ (p. 263) (see also Laurier,

2003, 2004; O’Hara et al., 2002). Similarly, Jain and Lyons (2005) posit that travel

time should be increasingly viewed in Maussian terms as a ‘gift’ to be utilised.

Despite the increasing acknowledgement of how the journey itself is enmeshed into

complex networks of practice, the travel time itself is still widely conceptualised in a

traditional Cartesian form as the period of linear temporality either on a train, bus

or car waiting to be filled with a form of activity. The central point to take from this

is how the altogether seductive yet elusive notions of engaged activity and action

seem to permeate these spaces of travel (see Crouch, 2000; Johnston, 2001;

Featherstone et al., 2004 for further examples). Whether assisted by locative

technologies to transform travelling spaces into mobile offices or to investing in

furthering social relationships and networks, much of the recent mobilities literature

has privileged these performative embodied dimensions of the ‘body-in-action, of the

body apprehended as practically and constitutively engaged in the disclosure of the

world and in the creation and maintenance of meaning and signification’ (Harrison,

2007a, p. 3).The body does indeed engage with a variety of different corporeally engaging

practices from walking, purchasing and checking to working, reading, talking,

watching, playing, listening, texting and eating, to a cite just a few examples (Lyons

& Urry, 2005; Jain, 2006; Mokhtarian & Salomon, 2001; Watts, 2005a). However,

these networks of communicational and transportational mobilities always already

have within them the potentiality of being other than this. Within these spaces of

travel are a series of complex diverse liminal, peripheral landscapes where the

dominant mode of being in the world may not necessarily be one of sustained

engaged activity. Of course, the idea of a liminal travelling landscape is nothing new

(and oft critiqued); however, the spaces I want to focus on here do not elide with and

are qualitatively different to Auge’s (1995) notion of the non-place. They are not

bounded spatial forms as such, and are intimately weaved through the fabric of

everyday life. Rather than the smooth, streamlined and delineated spaces of

departure and arrival, these multiple, fractured and uneven spaces are folded into

everyday corporeal existence. To think through how the body experiences such

liminal places requires a fundamental shift in the way that ‘activity’ is conceptualisedand enacted when talking about the corporeal experience of mobilities. To think

through exactly what is implied by activity could change the way in which we think

through the processes of subjectivity and sociality through these spaces of travel in

profound ways.

Waiting and Im/mobilities

The particular example of inactivity that this paper seeks to unfold is the event ofwaiting that occurs through the spaces of travel. The experience of being-in-waiting

Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities 281

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seems to be a hard-to-pin-down but arguably integral aspect of being-in-transit. The

corporeal practice of waiting is surprisingly absent from much social science

literature, and even more notably lacking in the burgeoning mobilities literature. So

what, then, is waiting? There are arguably many different and varied configurations

of what it is to wait. The etymology of the verb to wait is from the French meaning to

watch and the German to guard, suggesting a sense of anticipatory preparedness – alying-in-wait-for. This particular sense of what it is to wait is the definition we are

perhaps most familiar with and could be illustrated through various configurations

of waiting over a number of temporal scales. In theological terms, the period of

Advent marks a month-long duration of essentially waiting, actively cultivating a

sense of preparedness. This eschatological sense of waiting, however, does not

immediately implicate a stilled form of corporeal inactivity, although stillness may

necessarily be part of this process at some point. Viewed this way, waiting for an

event is a form of anticipation. A form of contractuality and a temporally displacedform of trusting relationality forged between a subject and the event-to-come. It is a

productivist means-ends form of suspension that maps onto an itinerant and

timetabled modern society. Indeed it is this promise of the event-to-come that

necessitates and brings about this experience of waiting. However, when focusing on

the corporeal engagement with this generic anticipation over larger temporal

periods, the body itself is of course engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of

different everyday practices and forms during the course of this waiting. The

imminence of the event-to-come is only one of the various planes folded through thecorporeal experience. I want to move beyond this means-ends productivist model of

waiting to consider different species of waiting that perhaps erupt from this.

What I want to focus on are the multitude of less productive prosaic, quotidian

corporeal suspensions that occur everyday and as such comprise part of the fabric of

everyday life. These suspensions or practices of waiting are the frequent but often

overlooked part of our everyday corporeal existence. As Schweizer puts it, ‘the very

familiarity of waiting has obscured it’ (2005, p. 778). Many of the spaces of the urban

built form are engineered to facilitate these practices of waiting particularly inrelation to journeying and travel. Indeed, it may be possible to identify various

landscapes of waiting from more durable material forms such as shelters, benches,

platforms, waiting rooms, and traffic lights to perhaps more fleeting or transient

forms such as the queue or traffic jam. These container spaces are designed to hold

the body, where the body is prompted to remain inert in a form of temporary stasis.

Sure, the idea of discrete container spaces has long been critiqued through the

negation of a pointillist sense of space towards one that is more relational (Doel,

1999). But however fleeting, however relational and embedded in complex networkswith other time/spaces, I want to pull back and briefly hold on to these periods of

hiatus in order to problematise the corporeal experience of such durations.

Some commentators following more productivist neo-Marxist convictions argue

that this form of waiting is a hallmark of, and perhaps symptomatic of, rooted

contradictions within modern capitalism. For Lefebvre, ‘waiting is an inevitable

product of the bureaucratic appropriation of everyday life – the development of

large-scale economic systems, the increasing segmentation of time, the rigid

separation of public and private spheres’ (Moran, 2004, p. 219). Furthermore,‘Lefebvre sees waiting as an embodiment of the nameless, indefinable anxieties

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experienced in modern societies’ (Moran, 2004, p. 219). Indeed Moran argues that,

‘for Lefebvre, the seminal modern experience of waiting is neatly encapsulated in the

common piece of street furniture, the traffic light’ (2004, p. 221). There is the

implication that this particular form of embodiment is undesirable, negative,

unproductive, and even wasteful, echoing the economic imperatives of the need for

speed and greater mobility. As Schweizer puts it, ‘by the standards of time’sexactitude, by the economics of its consumption, waiting must be seen as a temporal

aberration’ (2005, p. 779).

While it would not be theoretically sound to generalise the experience of waiting

by somehow reducing it to a set of skills and techniques that somehow define what it

is to wait, there does seem to be a remarkable concurrence in the current social

science literature on the seeming universality of the experience. Possibly since it is an

act that any individual can draw from their own experiences, Bournes and Mitchell

suggest that ‘waiting is a universal experience that everyone can describe in somepersonal way in relation to their own lives’ (2002, p. 58). While acknowledging the

diversity of this practice, Schweizer picks up on the seemingly universal negative

connotations associated with this experience: ‘although waiting is practiced, endured

or suffered in many different ways and contexts, the apparent universal agreement

[is] that nobody likes to wait (2005, p. 777). If the experience of waiting is therefore

such a common everyday prosaic experience, particularly with regard to the travel

experience, it is surprising that it has not received any form of specific sustained

attention. These temporal aberrations are absent and their rich durations subsumedwithin and beneath the general trend to study the active, co-constructed,

negotiations and dialectics that appear to construct the ongoing of what it is to

travel. All the more surprising is that while the experience of ‘waiting has remained

unaesthetic, uninteresting’ (Schweizer, 2005, p. 778) from a phenomenological

perspective, some of the various structures and formations that emerge from the

experience of waiting have been heavily studied. Here I am referring to the

historically sedimented large body of work on queue dynamics that necessarily

follows the above dictum that to wait in a queue is an undesirable experience thatneeds to be diminished (for an early study see Mann, 1969; or for a more recent

example see Pruyn & Smidts, 1999). Alternatively, longitudinal examples exist where

the nature contemporary society can somehow be inferred from the style and

characteristic of particular modes of waiting, such as Moran (2005) who argues that

the changing nature of the queue can act as a useful proxy for studying the

relationship between quotidian routine, politics, and the market in the post-war era.

This piece aims to move away from such social constructivist apprehensions and

instead to carve out an appreciation of the corporeal experience of what it is to wait.Before we proceed to explore the phenomena of corporeal dis/engagement, we

require a pause – a suspension – to consider just where does this form of stasis

somehow fit relationally within the overall ‘mobile’ experience?

Following Urry (2000) it is increasingly accepted that mobilities are contingently

relational. In short, and drawing on Urry’s ‘mobilities/moorings’ dialectic, faster

mobilities in the dynamic sense are only faster in relation to slower forms of

mobility. Similarly, Adey (2006) charts out a relational politics of (im)mobilities,

demonstrating the ambivalence between mobilities and immobilities through theairport that can be comprehended through ‘shifting combinations of immutable

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mobiles and mutable mobiles’ (p. 90), to use Law and Mol’s (2001) terms. While it

would be very easy to equate waiting in the form of bodily stasis to an immobility to

be sustained, endured and overcome and contingently related to the mobility of

other agents within a dynamic complex adaptive system (such as those waiting to be

checked in while the high-flying kinetic elite speed past them, unimpeded), I want

perhaps most contentiously to move against this trend by reconsidering theexperience of waiting as something radically different. Similarly, following Crang

(2001) and Hubbard and Lilley (2004) among others, the experience of corporeal

stillness could be understood through the schema of urban rhythms, where the

experience of waiting is just one of the slowing rhythms that constitutes places of

travel. However, to ossify waiting as a slower rhythm that must be endured, speeded-

up and ultimately overcome negates some of the crucial dimensions of this particular

kind of suspense such as corporeal withdrawal from this relational dialectic in its

entirety: of waiting as a specific kind of relation-to-the-world that transcends and folds

through this relational dialecticism of (im)mobility. To think through the implications

of bodies-in-waiting through the logic of rhythms obscures and possibly negates the

ways in which bodies have the potential to acquiesce, to bow out of this schema.

Instead of focusing on relative velocities as the differentiator when considering im/

mobilities, it may be more fruitful to consider relative embodied activity or action.

In order to interrogate this form of corporeal suspension from the perspective of

activity, we must first consider more closely the lived nature of duration and

qualitative temporality contra forms of chronological linearity – of time as rich

duration. This is important since it allows us to think through how temporality is

experienced qualitatively through corporeal existence. Thinking through the various

agents and subjects implicated in the enacting of mobilities as a relation of being

more or less mobile draws on a particular rendering of temporality and duration. It

is common to think through the bodily experience of various types of mobility in

relation to linear clock time since it is this itinerancy that impresses itself upon the

system most visibly through the technologies of control such as watches, clocks,

timetables and ticket details to name but a few. However, to take seriously theexperience of waiting through these spaces as a form of dis/engagement must take

seriously a non-linear apprehension of qualitative temporality – of time as perceived,

felt and experienced through the body; where ‘time is precisely not identical to being,

[but] a process which is always in becoming’ (Dastur, 2000, p. 179). This is the

distinction between Bergson’s intellectual time as chronologically conceived,

spatialised time, for practical and organisational purposes and intuitive duration,

which is woven through psychological perception and creative spirit. It is through

the process of intuition where duration – the temporal quality of waiting – isexperienced. In this Bergsonian duree as continuous duration, ‘each moment flows

with our memory of the past and appears to us as new and unrepeatable’ (Vannini,

2002, p. 194): duration as real succession, the past as coexisting with present. With

this temporal schema in mind, I want to consider what bodies in waiting actually do

in order to rethink through and reconfigure what is implied by activity, agency and

engagement through the event of waiting. Firstly I want to trace a path through the

activities of the active and engaged body-in-waiting by considering an enlivened

corporeal sensibility where bodies are highly attuned to their immediate environmentand themselves. However, I want to then move beyond this to consider the potential

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to be other than this. Perhaps through the stillness of waiting, there is a tendency to

be quite unaware of one’s body, where the body remains passive and acquiescent.

Corporeal Dis/engagement

Contrary to thinking through the event of waiting as a slowed rhythm, perhaps itdoes take effort and therefore some form of intentional action to wait. In other

words, for the body to be immobile, it is still primarily pursuing an active purposive

role of making-of-the-world and maintenance of meaning. In many ways, an active

doing of waiting and how a subject comes to wait could be seen as an achievement of

a specific set of ongoing embodied tasks. These might include the agentive capacity

of making decisions of where to wait and what to do while waiting. In this respect the

idea of waiting reveals itself as a chasm, a temporal void of ‘dead time’ (Moran,

2004, p. 218), or ‘empty intervals between instants’ (Schweizer, 2005, p. 789) to besomehow filled with activity. This could be demonstrated by the myriad forms of

mundane activity that people may enact while waiting, from drinking and eating to

reading, talking and listening to music. Various mobile technologies are also

frequently enlisted during the period of waiting perhaps through the action of texting

or WAP-ping, or even gaming through mobile phones for example (Jain, 2006).

Indeed there are lucrative industries that rely on manufacturing products specifically

for utilisation during these periods of waiting. These are perhaps some of the ‘denials

of waiting by which it can be forgotten [which could extend to] the magazines inwaiting rooms, the entertainment on television, the snacks, the cigarettes’

(Schweizer, 2005, p. 789). While the body is stilled in the sense of being physically

relatively stationary, the activities that the subject undertakes still entails a sense of

demanding active engagement alongside, perhaps, a ‘diligent watchfulness’ to use

Bournes and Michell’s (2002) term. Diski recently commented in a similar sense how

‘waiting is a full-time activity. It is an act that takes up all my energy and being’

(2006, p. 143). Perhaps it is the issue of relative scale that has rendered waiting to be

typically conceptualised as an inert and immobile experience. For example, at atransport terminus the body in waiting is relatively still when compared with the

faster mobilities of trains or aircraft. However, when viewed on the corporeal scale,

more subtle micro-bodily actions are more evident, flinches, glances and gestures (for

a similar argument on the implications of scale see Massey, 1994).

Even if subjects are not engaged in specific extra-corporeal activities, perhaps the

very act of stasis, of stillness actually entails and brings to bear considerable physical

demands on the body: of waiting as a wholly performative social event. Brown

(2005), in thinking through the act of stillness and waiting as a collective encounterwith regard to memorialism, argues how there are a multitude of different ways in

which the body is actively and intentionally configured from how to hold one’s body

to how and where to look. Through this stillness, the strategies involved in averting

the gaze so as not to engage in interaction effectively intensifies corporeal relations,

producing a wholly active and co-managed interaction, an act that has become

almost cliche when thinking through collective waiting situations on the

Underground, for example.

It is this bodily stillness precipitated through the performance of waiting that formany commentators heralds a heightened sensual attentiveness to the immediate

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spatiality. For Brown (2005), this act of stillness through the rendering of the visual

field to be stable produces a sense of spectacle, arguing that ‘the result is not so much

in an ‘‘overmastering’’ of self as a state of unusual attentiveness of both seeing and

hearing’ (p. 5). Hutchinson similarly echoes this heightened sensual responsiveness as

she waits for the bus to approach: ‘sometimes you could smell it. A block, an

intersection away’ (2000, p. 107). In this way, objects in waiting spaces change, ‘theyacquire an uncanny particularity … all are stranded objects which resist

reintegration’ (Schweizer, 2005, pp. 783–784). On the experience of being contained

in a waiting room, Vannini describes the pressing corporeality, commenting on how

through the act of waiting, the ‘world feels intensely present. I feel a sense of

engagement-with-my-world, a long-forgotten sense of presence’ (2002, p. 195; my

italics).

Together with corporeal attentiveness to the immediate environment, it has also

been argued that the act of bodily stillness through waiting is instrumental inheightening an auto-reflexive self-awareness: of attention to the physicality of

perception of the body itself. This heightened sense of corporeal awareness has been

narrated at length by those exploring corporeal engagements with highly active

practices such as extreme sports (Thrift, 2000) where highly immersive kinaesthetic

activities are offered to enliven all the senses. However, considerably less attention

has been devoted to how bodies are perhaps more highly attuned through stillness.

To support this claim, it may be useful to firstly draw on the large body of literature

that exists on the experience of patients waiting in critical care waiting rooms (seeBournes & Mitchell, 2002; Brekke, 2004; Pruyn & Smidts, 1999). Buetow (2004), for

example, draws out a number different activities that can act as distraction strategies

through which subjects can manipulate the experience of time in waiting rooms to

speed up the perceived duration of their wait. Indeed ‘perceived duration is

postulated to be highest through time passing slowly, when individuals are highly

conscious of themselves and their situation’ (Buetow, 2004, p. 22). It is this corporeal

self-awareness that ‘creates an intrinsic sense of time, including duration’ (Buetow,

2004, p. 22).Moments of waiting in this respect may be considered to be intensely corporeal

events: an awareness of one’s own body in space. Referring to John Cage’s silent

concert 493399, and drawing on her own performance-based work, Petra Kuppers

demonstrates how through ‘not-quite-stillness’ and concentration on the mode of

perception, ‘attention is focused on the manifestations of encounters and intensities

that create coherences across, inside, and within bodies’ (Kuppers, 2000, p. 134).

Through this meditative bodily stillness, attention is subjected to the body itself. ‘For

instance, when we are engaged in visualizations of breath filling our bodies, we focuson the body’s extension backward and forward’ (Kuppers, 2000, p. 136).

Alternatively McCormack’s (2002, 2005) performance-based work on rhythms

apprehends the creative possibilities and affective, kinaesthetic openings that enlist

the slowed and stilled body. Such theorising of the body in action in this way follows

the emerging interest of Neo-Bergsonian thinking on action, performance and lived

temporality. Some of the few commentators who have begun to think through the

relations of bodily stasis to the process of waiting following Bergsonian concept of

lived time view the experience of waiting as active dynamic process rather than astatic giving-in to the world. For Bergson, waiting means bearing witness to the

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possibility of change. Vannini addresses the idea of waiting dynamics and traces

through some of the ways in which waiting is a creative process as providing a

continuous possibility for change. Following Bergson and Deleuze he comments ‘if

life is made of between-moments that offer nothing to become, then waiting can be

understood as a dynamic activity’ (Vannini, 2002, p. 205).

Similarly, the act of stillness and waiting are the subject of a recent exchangebetween Callon and Law (2005), who demonstrate how the ongoing effect of stillness

through the example of silent Quaker worship actually requires a great deal of effort,

specifically that ‘disentanglement requires entanglement’ (p. 722). To be passionate is

‘to be both active and to be used’ (Callon & Law, 2005, p. 721). Parallel sentiments

are expressed by Schweizer noting that ‘in the experience of waiting … we awaken to

the repressed rhythms of duration and thus also to the deeper dimensions of our

being’ (2005, p. 778). Echoing this sentiment Kuppers similarly notes the requirement

of an active sensibility towards ‘activation of and engagement with an ‘‘other’’perception, a perception trained onto the minute, the silent, the still – a perception

that is a movement itself, a movement between the visible and invisible’ (Kuppers,

2000, p. 140). Far from the body remaining inert and passive while waiting, these

examples suggest how through this specific lens of performance and becoming in the

world, waiting or the body-in-action is part of an ongoing active achievement of

subjectification.

It would be all too seductive to retain this notion of waiting and corporeal stillness

as a dimension of purposive and intentional animate life: as a style of waiting wheresubjects are actively performing the event-of-waiting, an event of pressing and

intense relational corporeality. However, following Harrison’s call to ‘reflect upon

corporeal existence in its susceptibility and its passivity’ (2007a, p. 3), I want to

consider here the event of waiting through these travelling spaces where people are

disengaged from activity: where the body is inert and not involved in the ongoing of

performance. The moments of waiting as suspension, as corporeal phenomena

‘which trace a passage of withdrawal from engagement’ (Harrison, 2007a, p. 5). Such

a theoretical standpoint emerges from and echoes other phenomenological work ofthe slowed body. For some, the event of waiting as ‘non-being’ has often been

described as dead time, where time passes slowly and remains a tedious boring

experience (Schweizer, 2005). This act of being bored has the effect of slowing and

stilling time where the experience is one of meaningless and indifference, where the

affective energies and vitalities of life are suppressed (Anderson, 2004). Indeed

‘boredom discloses a malady in the circulation of intensity’ (Anderson, 2004, p. 744)

which ‘stills our proprioceptive sense of movement to momentary suspension’

(p. 750). I want to move beyond this world to consider how waiting could beotherwise: as an event of the unwilled, the time of waiting as an example of when

‘synthetic activity does not happen, when the everyday flow and exchange of

meaning stutters and abates and goes awry’ (Harrison, 2007a, p. 6). Harrison’s thesis

on passionate desubjectification drawing on Levinas argues how a subject

predisposed towards meaning-forming and intentional action dominates our current

thinking through of cognition and embodiment particularly through the resurgence

of the performative within contemporary social science. It is perhaps through the

event of bodily stasis and waiting in this sense that forms a very different kind ofrelationality from relation-in-the-world towards a relation-to-the-world. Indeed

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following Levinas ‘Existence is not synonymous with the relationship with a world’

(Levinas in Harrison, 2006a, p. 23; my emphasis). Rich durations of waiting removed

from a means-ends conceptualisation may induce phenomena through the cessation

of auto-intentional activity or ‘corporeal release’, to use Williams and Boden’s (2004)

term. Diski recognises this particular disengagement with the world, of the body held

in suspense while waiting according it to be a form of desirable acquiescence andviewing any form of physical corporeal activity opposed to this as mere distraction.

The act of prefabricating activity or tasks to engage with is ‘pure nonsense to me.

Nothing must get in the way of hiatus. So great vacuums exist in time before

something occurs’ (Diski, 2006, pp. 143–144). It seems that the event of waiting,

initiated particularly through some of the various pauses of travel experience, may

precipitate some of these phenomena to which I am referring. These could include

fatigue, indolence, lassitude, hunger and exhaustion but could be extended to a

whole myriad of other forms of corporeal susceptibilities such as lethargy andphysical weakness. Bournes and Mitchell, for example, writing about waiting room

experiences comment on how, during the period of waiting, the body is ‘paralyzed,

zombie-like, non-functioning’ (2002, p. 62). It is perhaps these events of corporeal

existence outside the capacities and powers of the body that is perhaps one of the

central hallmarks of the experience of waiting or being held in suspense. Such a thesis

therefore cuts against the grain of other sociological engagements with sleep and

weariness (Williams, 2002, 2005). It is this form of corporeal lethargy that could be

precisely what Thrift (2006) is alluding to through his application of the term‘mesmorism’ referring to the a form of semi-conscious being or suspension of

disbelief. While I would concur with Williams and Boden regarding the importance

of ‘critically rethinking a series of deep-seated assumptions about relations between

wakefulness, consciousness, sociality and temporality’ (2004, paragraph 1.4), I want

to move away from their reduction of the importance of the ‘doing’ of sleep to an

embodied social activity.

Far from equating a simplistic causal relationality between these phenomena and

the durations of waiting involved through the experience of travel, these are justsome of the ways in which the periods of waiting during the journey is felt through

the body. Indeed, it is increasingly recognised how such corporeal susceptibilities are

a desirable and sometimes necessary part of the experience of travel (Taylor, 1993).

As a response to the longevity of the journey or lack of immediate activity, corporeal

acquiescence could be enlisted as a strategy to respond to the nature of duration. The

re-engineering of certain transient environments may promote this type of

acquiescence such as the Quiet Coaches on trains. Furthermore the affective

capacity of television advertising to circulate a certain affectivity of acquiescence isevident in recent campaigns of transport companies such as GNER, Eurostar and

British Airways. While this type of corporeal lassitude can indeed be engineered into

the built form and effectively catered for, perhaps this experience of giving-in-to-the-

world is an intrinsic part of the travelling experience. Smith certainly concurs with

this assertion, arguing that long distance travel is ‘intrinsically fatiguing’ (1995,

p. 1441). Indeed Smith (and elsewhere Cao & Mokhtarian, 2005) reinforces

Harrison’s thesis in that this is a phenomena that is at the horizon of intentionality,

in that ‘the fatiguing effect of travel [more generally] seems to apply even underapparently ideal conditions: traveling for pleasure, first class, by rail, no driving

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either end, good companionship, no anxiety about possible delays. Still it is tiring’

(Smith, 1995, p. 1441).

Even through the most public, peopled and traditionally ‘social’ spaces of

everyday life, from the waiting room to the platform, to the train itself, are the

‘asocial’ implications of a tendency towards withdrawal, disengagement, and

acquiescence of a ‘sphere … apart from the social’ (Harrison, 2007a, p. 33). Thisasociality of waiting through acquiescence is a particular relationship without

context that eludes the traditional definition of the ‘social’. But perhaps it is through

a recognition of this surplus, this remainder, that the scope of the ‘social’ can be

expanded and consequently become enlivened with. It is these surpluses, these modes

of existence and how they transcend and fold through the fabric of waiting that I

now want to consider.

Duration and Dis/continuity

So how, then, to relate these corporeal experiences of activity and inactivity through

the fabric of familiar everyday quotidian waiting events? The problematic here seems

to be the difficulty in letting go of the productivist rendering of the (singular) event-

to-come. Here I want to think through how notions of patience and impatience

arguably contribute to our familiarity with this model of waiting. I want to then

move forward and disrupt this familiarity by considering how, through a more

dynamic non-linear sense of temporality, the experiences of activity and inactivity arefolded through and characterise the event of waiting.

The persistence of a productivist means-ends schema still seems to haunt the event

of waiting. This in part may be forged through the different qualitative sensibilities

of anticipation. Surely such senses of patience and impatience are folded through

and in part mediated by character of the event-to-come that follows the period of

waiting. To think through the relationality between patience and impatience it may

also be necessary to consider the nature of discontinuities and thresholds. By this I

am referring to the changes, slides, sparks, the movements between, which bringabout a change in the nature of being-in-the-world. As Dastur asserts, ‘the event is

what descends upon us … a new world opens up through its happening. The event

constitutes the critical moment of temporality – a critical moment which nevertheless

allows the continuity of time’ (2000, p. 182). The corporeal experience of waiting

should clearly not be conceptualised as a discrete bounded phenomena. However, if

waiting is the embodiment of qualitatively distinctive rhythms, however interweaved

with other rhythms, then during any phase of waiting there must exist semi-

discernable beginnings and ends. It is a different experience of temporality andembodiment of time to the event that preceded it and the event-to-come. At the

railway station, the waiting period, the period of temporal slowing, could be

considered the period between arriving at the platform and the train pulling in. It is

these events that perhaps mediate the nature of the experience.

The experience of patience and impatience may be related to the expectation and

anticipation of the threshold, calculations of temporality of the event-to-come and

the jarring sense of being unable to reconcile the two temporalities as Schweizer

(2005) insists. While it might be possible to embody a form of patient waiting untilthe time that the train is due to arrive, if the train is late and the period of waiting

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must continue beyond that which was previously anticipated, the style of waiting

may slide into one that is characterised through impatience. Patience or impatience

may be mediated by the degree of certainty or uncertainty about the length of the

wait (Brekke, 2004). Such thresholds that frame the experience of waiting may

therefore be revealed and marked by transformations in bodily activity such as

walking–sitting–walking, sleep–slumber–wake, stasis–activity.Thresholds and discontinuities are seductive models. However, rather than

thinking through such anticipatory notions of patience and impatience from the

productivist perspective of the event-to-come, such notions are helpful in considering

waiting as active or acquiescent embodied corporeal experience in-and-of-itself. Both

hypothetical styles of waiting – of being active or acquiescent to the world – seem to

imply a certain contractuality rooted in the notion of patience as a combination of

urgency and delay. Does the type of corporeal passivity as described imply a form of

patience, and, if so, is patience therefore a form of radical relationality to the worldthat is enacted or even managed most effectively through the process of

acquiescence? Levinas seems to think so and argues how patience is a particular

type of consciousness through an enduring mode of being in time that brings about

the decentring of the self. As Fullagar expands, by considering how patience

necessarily involves disengagement within engagement: ‘Levinas describes patience

as a mode of being detached from the self, but at the same time it involves a

particular temporal quality of being with self’ (2004, p. 16). Echoing Harrison’s

(2006a) thesis of disengagement and of relative stillness with the world, Fullagarrecognises the different temporal qualities of understanding subjectivity in this sense

and asserts that patience should be understood as a corporeal mode of knowing

‘involves a specific kind of affective relation with the world that enables the letting go

of one’s self, in order to experience the present moment’ (2004, p. 17). In a sense,

patience could be seen as the apotheosis of waiting, or how to competently

experience duration in a positive sense. In a similar vein, Fullagar (2004, p. 17)

acknowledges Irigaray (2004) in arguing how this mode of relating to duration

involves a ‘becoming aware of the embodied, affective quality of time’.If the event of waiting is enacted through a succumbing to different temporal

rhythms, then Schweizer argues that impatience ‘stems from [an] inability to reconcile

the two temporalities … the two temporalities grate and jar’ (2005, p. 781).

Impatience could be elided with bodily activity during periods of temporal stasis.

The various affects of impatience being played out and enacted through various

corporeal placings and configurations. Indeed Fullagar also concedes that

impatience could be considered as the ‘restless inhabitance of time, a mode of

distraction’ (2004, p. 17). In this respect we could think through how some of thevarious activities that are enacted during periods of waiting are in fact a method of

harmonising these two temporalities. Tufariello points to the dampening of affective

intensity during periods of waiting such that there are ‘never tears or curses.

Sorrow’s violence is dampened to a dull anxiety’ (2002, p. 265). However, others

argue that certain affects circulated through bodies during periods of waiting, such

as frustration, anger or rage due to extensions of temporality, may be heightened and

emerge through corporeal display. Katz (2002) brilliantly illustrates passionate

fleeting periods of being held-in-suspense through some examples of road rage. Inthis case the driver in a hurry held at a traffic light, far from acquiescing through

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some form of passionate desubjectification, allows this temporary hiatus to serve to

heighten feelings of aggression and anger; an intensely worldly experience. This

display of affective intensity demonstrates well how waiting could be considered in a

more transhuman form. Far from a personal nexus of feelings and emotions, by

drawing on a more affective lens allows us to consider how resonances of anger, rage

or impatience transcend the personal and are implicated in the experiences of others(for example see Brennan, 2003). This demonstrates the capacity of affect to be

transmitted between bodies and objects. For example, the impatient practices of

some may serve to heighten the experience of impatience, anger, and so forth of

others. In this sense, waiting becomes a social event, rather than a collection

of feeling individuals; the affectivity of waiting becomes transpersonal.

In order to transcend the problematics of productivism, such experiences of

waiting as outlined in this piece must be apprehended through a more non-linear

sense of temporality. It would be easy to describe these hypothetically discreetdifferent modes of what it could be to wait as outlined in this piece as proceeding in

some form of linear fashion, as one configuration sequentially following or

proceeding from another. However, and particularly when describing these

experiences in a narrative form, such experiences are necessarily bound-up and

inseparable from each other, which results in the enacting of a variegated affective

complex: a mixture of activity and agitation of the world and conversely a deadness-

to-the-world. Each of the hypothetical styles – and that is essentially what they are –

of waiting described throughout this paper are irreducible-to and thoroughly woveninto each other. To take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the haeccity, they are

events that cannot be separated. As Semetsky describes such haeccities, ‘or thisness

which cannot be confined within the rigid limits of fixed beginnings and ends. It has

always been and will have been. It is in the middle, made of rhizomatic lines going in

multiple directions’ (2004, p. 230). To illustrate this further we could draw on

Bachelard’s notion of reverie as a way of characterising and thus appreciating this

experience of moving between planes, of sliding between activity and inactivity; of

different corporeal experiences folded through one another. Bachelard, himselfheavily influenced by Bergson, would contest that such disparate hypothetical styles

of waiting such as activity or passivity as described in this essay are necessarily over

delimited, and in fact they are events that cannot be separated out. Bachelard’s

immanent materialism holds reverie, as a form of creative daydream, as occupying a

central position of the corporeal experience. Central to this is the primacy of the

imagination and with it the experience of opening and newness. As Bachelard

comments: ‘through imagination, we forsake the ordinary course of things. To

perceive and to imagine are as antithetic as presence and absence. To imagine is toabsent oneself, it is a leap to a new life’ (1987, p. 21). Connectedness is key and

therefore waiting as an ongoing event is the immanence of the imaginary folding

through the real, the ‘continuous passage from the real to the imaginary’ (Bachelard,

1987, p. 22). Crucially from the aspect of temporality, reverie does not work in a

linear pattern. Instead it ‘works in a star pattern. It returns to its center to shoot out

new beams’ (Bachelard, 1987, p. 14). In this way, the way that waiting is experienced

through the body is therefore not a discrete set of definable experiences in linear time

since the experience of reverie ‘transcends the surface categories of immediatecommon-sense experience’ (Picart, 1997, p. 69).

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Within every period of stasis, of stilling, is contained the potential to be otherwise,

the possibility of rupture that ‘intimately threatens the synchrony of transcendental

life or existence’ (Dastur, 2000, p. 182). In order to think through such imminence

within temporality, it is necessity to reconfigure the definition of materiality that is

required for thinking through such anticipatory states (Anderson, 2006). In this

respect and appealing to an excessive materialism, it is possible think through the

event of waiting as a state of unfinishedness not bound up with some end point as an

anticipatory consciousness that is inherently intertwined with the present but with

the excessive pressing immanence of the ‘not yet’. The event of waiting could be

described as ‘emptiful’, ‘kept open by the presence of futuristic possibilities within it’

(Hudson, 1983 quoted in Anderson, 2004, p. 750).

Narrating Waiting?

If these periods of suspension are so intertwined into the tapestry of everyday life,

then why have they not received any form of sustained empirical intervention? It

would be useful at this point to summarise what are perhaps some of the major

limitations of ‘traditional’ methodologies when attempting to research these events.

There seems to be a substantial problem with investigating this relation in the world

through empiricism. This is indicated through the majority of works that discuss the

experience of corporeal engagement or disengagement that have been drawn on in

this piece are heavily hypothetical relying on scant or no empirical investigation to

illustrate, sediment or rupture claims. Where experiences of waiting and time-stilling

have been empirically investigated, these have tended to either be heavily

quantitative studies where experience is somehow read-off from duration (Buetow,

2004), or be inferred from speech during traditional interview methods such as in-

depth interviewing (Anderson, 2004) and focus groups (Brekke, 2004). However,

these methods tend to privilege only those aspects of the experience that are

recollected then translated into verbal speech patterns. Crucially such methods

accentuate the active dimensions of experience: ‘I watched’, ‘I moved’, ‘I talked’, ‘I

paced’, and so on. Similarly, and in order to investigate more fully the practical

minutiae of lived experience, ethnomethodologists have tended to rely on

videotaping participants in the process of event unfolding; however, again, such

methods when invoked in discussion tend to similarly privilege the doing of speech,

together with active bodily gestures, movements and placings (for example Laurier,

2004). Such an appreciation of gestures and expression may indeed be instrumental

in inferring various affective states, particularly the face as such as eyes rolling but

also hands on neck and fidgeting as indicative of frustration and anxiety. However,

such methods still only capture a restricted, narrow presentation of intentionality.

Put simply, it is easier to talk about activity rather than passivity and it is precisely

this point why so much of the recent surge in interest in the performative has tended

to privilege the body-in-action. For example, in a recent presentation on train travel,

Watts (2005b) demonstrates this impotence when action slides into passivity: ‘16:22

… Nothing seems to happen. I want to write that something happens, but nothing

happens. A man reads a book, reads a newspaper. A woman fidgets and sniffs. A

man sleeps. A woman stares.’

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More novel diagrammatic styles of empiricism through an investigation of creative

corporeal kinaesthetics of rhythmic bodily movement similarly fall foul to over-

animating the body (see McCormack, 2004, 2005). Attention here is still focused on

the ‘energetics of life’ (Kuppers, 2000, p. 135), of movement as an active, ongoing

achievement.

Such work demonstrates a sustained commitment to logocentrism and is arguablybound up with western models of individualism – of self as active rather than

responsive thing. So what methods can, if any, get at this corporeal experience of

waiting? While the body is in stasis, any number of affective relations might be

precipitated or acquiesced that cannot be translated and read-off from participant

observation or other more traditional social-scientific methods such as interviews. As

Harrison has quite rightly pointed out, ‘it is such interruptions of comprehension

which lead to the suggestion that there are modalities and aspects of affective

experience that cannot be brought into the systemisation, thematisation andconceptualisation that defines the work of social analysis’ (2007b, p. 591). More

dialogical or poetic methodologies, such as go-alongs (Kusenbach, 2003) and

autoethnographic accounts (Diski, 2006), have demonstrated strengths for

interrogating such corporeal experiences; however, it is critical to recognise that

our grammar and how we talk about selves will always fall short of understanding

the experience of the another. In light of such limitations that a traditional social-

science empirical engagement offers, there are a number of interlinked implications

that further empirical research on the event of waiting and corporeal suspense shouldconsider. We must develop methodologies that recognise and attend to the shifting

nature of subjectivity, as ‘sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled’

(Merleau-Ponty, 1968 quoted in Wylie, 2002, p. 446). Space here does not permit

an extensive evaluation of empiricisms that are more responsive to such phenomena.

However, presentational strategies could possible include experimenting with a

mixture of different media such as visual and text, or the production of a series of

fragmented vignettes. A more lengthy discussion of methodological engagements will

be the subject of a separate article.Nevertheless rather than inventing an always-active, agentive subject, these

methods should appreciate the gaseous nature of subjectivity, as shifting in and

shifting out of focus. Of course this problematisation of narrative is nothing new.

Indeed one only has to turn to the writings of Kafka and Proust to appreciate the

long lineage of narrative experimentation. However, I would argue that our current

presentational grammar is not sensitive enough to these shifts. Although in a

different context, I would echo a recent call by Hinchcliffe and Whatmore — who

assert that in order to appreciate the unfinished complexity of matter unfolding, weneed to work towards a style of research practice that is ‘less hasty in terms of

condemning, judging or looking for the real motivations of people and others’ (2006,

p. 136). So maybe within the after-ANT literature, there are the flickerings of work

that are more sensitive to this more kaleidoscopic rendering of subjectivity.

Empirical researchers, which aim to ‘get at’ the more-than-representational nature of

lived experience, must therefore be modest in their goals. These events of waiting

clearly do not lend themselves easily to re-narration. Waiting is not an outcome of a

sequence of causally linked events. It must be appreciated that ‘in the telling werecognise that there is nothing there for us to recognise … when what is

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communicated is the failure of communication (Harrison, 2007b, p. 591). A research

practice that appreciates and the minutiae of mundane waiting experiences must

therefore be slower-paced and non-judgemental.

Conclusion

Such a relational thesis that appeals to virtuality and the imminence of the to-come

clearly has far-reaching implications for how we think through the experiences of

being mobile or immobile through spaces of travel. Indeed, while space does not

permit a lengthy discussion of policy, this thesis clearly has implications for those

outside the academy, for example in the transport sector in rethinking the experience

of travel. The itinerant nature of journeys, as commonly being dictated to through

the pervasive logic of the chronos, of linear temporality, has frequently prompted

mobilities and their relationally contingent immobilities to be conceptualisedthrough the Cartesian logic of discrete units of linear time. This ontologically

realist logic of temporal duration waiting to be filled with some form of useful,

productive action traces a path of waiting through economic idealism. The

generalised corporeal experiences of these units of time are then rather uncritically

inferred from the particular and often generic descriptions of activities that may take

place at some point during these durations. I have attempted to destabilise this

dominant narrative of active mobilities to consider some of the ways in which all

forms of transportational mobilities are constituted as much through the inactivity,the pauses and various suspensions experienced as part of the journey through time/

space through the necessarily hybrid event of waiting. To consider how one comes to

wait, endures waiting and experiences waiting as a corporeal phenomena, illuminates

a conduit to explore and critique the notion of purposeful activity.

As Adey has recently commented ‘if we are to take the ‘‘mobility turn’’ seriously,

academic scholarship should not fail to realise the relations and differences between

them’ (2006, p. 91). I would similarly echo such a call to ‘resist mobilising the world

into a transient yet featureless homogeneity’ (Adey, 2006, p. 91). However, incontrast to Adey’s more after-ANT orientation, this paper focuses principally on the

corporeal phenomenological nature of the transient experience, which arguably

entertains a substantially different rendering of the term relationality. Rather than

using velocity as a differentiator for such mobile/immobile relations, I have

demonstrated how the differential embodiment of action/inactivity as a problematic

may serve as a more useful way to think through the corporeal experience of what it

is to experience these ‘mobile’ spaces. Instead of thinking through how bodies relate

to various speeds and movements, through the event of waiting – an event that, fromthe after-ANT/STS perspective together with the current literature on urban rhythms

(see for example Hubbard & Lilley, 2004; Crang, 2001), would have assumed a state

of relative immobility – I have considered how through the lens of embodied action

this event produces a variegated affective complex. This more lively approach that

apprehends the animate potentiality of bodily capabilities considers the experience

and implications of both corporeal engagement and withdrawal in these places.

Through some of the affective resonances brought about through the event of

waiting as both active and intentional, such as impatience, anger, aggression, andcessation, such as tiredness, fatigue and hunger, it turns out that the event of waiting

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is not the immobile being-in-the-world that it first appeared. By considering these

periods of waiting as incipient rich duration, these banal and prosaic hiatuses

through virtuality and imminence weave and fold through multiple temporalities,

allowing us to consider not only their radical relationality but also their

irreducibility.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks two anonymous referees for helpful and insightful comments.

Particular thanks to Mike Crang and Paul Harrison for valuable and supportive

comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Peter Thomas for help and

encouragement. The Ph.D. thesis on which this paper is based is supported by the

Economic and Social Research Council (Award No. PTA-030-2003-00391). All

remaining errors and omissions are the author’s own.

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