It is now yesterday. Struggling to stay awake despite it being only 2 pm, but staying awake for the sake of it. Went for a walk to the mall. The familiar yet strange sights of a McDonalds and a Costco. An over-sized car park. The ambient fumes of a ceaseless flow of traffic inhospitable to pedestrians. To walk parrallel to this metallic stream of vehicles is to be strangely exposed yet anonymised, rendered invisible within privatised public space. The distant hum overhead of an aircraft on approach into LAX. Ended up buying a Starbucks. Walked back.
At this point, I would like to offer some early notes towards an account of the deterritorialized subjectivitiy of the flight attendant layover. As I alluded to in my initial post, the surreal affects of cabin crew time reside, in part, in a convergence of hypermobility and alienated wage labour discipline. This dislocation of time extends beyond working hours, into crews’ periods of rest at outstations. What relationships to urban space - or psychogeographies, to borrow Guy Debord’s term - might be forged here? Contrary to the image of flight attendants as professional travellers, I would like to suggest that the distinguishing feature of the flight attendant subjectivity is not travel per se, if travel is marked by a search for the exceptional, but a particular rhythm of the quotidian produced within and marked by adaptation to temporal disjointedness.
In our transitory relationship to the metropolitan spaces through which we momentarily pass, cabin crew on layover move about as occasional strangers. We have, in this sense, an affinity with what Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves, terms the ‘foreigner’. This is often simply a tourist subjectivity, woven into the circuits of commodified consumption, gentrification and the image. But it is also structured by the social reproduction of labour power, which as Tithi Bhattacharya notes, can take place in a host of “capiliaries of social relations” beyond the private home. Where it differs from most other forms of travel, whether plebian or elite, is principally, in the overwhelming physiological and psychical effects of fatigue.
The flight attendant layover is a form of transient mobility characterised by the (dis)orientation of fatigued bodies walking aimlessly through unfamiliar cities. To say that layovers, which can last from anything between an overnight stay to a few days, are primarily periods of recovery from fatigue is to assert that they are part of our conditions of labour alongside duty limitations, mandatory rest periods and breaks. As such, they form a site of struggle between labour and capital - hard-won conditions structured by collective agreements that, in my airline, were fought for over decades.
This is an orientation to the neoliberal city that produces its own particular ways of seeing and walking, an accelerated and compressed version of the shore leave. As a chance for urban wandering, layovers can be aleatory encounters with the unexpected. Such encounters can be more subdued than any exoticising search for cultural otherness. The mundane activity of walking may, in this estrangement from one’s surroundings, become an opening towards surrealist drifting (dérive), a form of what literary historian Matthew Beaumont, in The Walker, terms ‘ambulatory automatism’. As an escape from work, the aimlessness of walking through a city without an object or destination can be a refusal of the clock-time of capitalist labour - the antithesis, as Beaumont writes, of commuting.
Comparisons with overused archetypes may be unhelpful here. Needless to say, cabin crew, often on minimum wage, are well removed in our social position from that of the leisured, middle-class figure of the flâneur - or the rich we serve onboard. At the same time, crew are also not quite as fully itinerant to warrant comparisons with the flâneur’s subaltern counterpart, the hobo. Could the disjointedness of flight attendant time, in its movement in and out of disconnected dream-like states of fatigue, in and out of scripted social roles, but also back forth across time(zones), be closer to that of what Iain Sinclair, quoted by Beaumont, terms the fugeur - one who walks in a fugue state?
The bodily effects of fatigue accentuate the unreality of the layover, a sonambulistic state of altered consciousness on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness. Fatigue, with its effects on balance and motor skills resembling that of inebriation, anaesthesizes the senses, allowing one to forget that last flight, the current state of the world, and one’s self. The layover is fugue-like, insofar as the role of 'crew' is only ever a disposable mask, worn at altitude. Amnesia is sometimes necessary and desirable: out of uniform, everything that happened onboard can - and should - be forgotten.
The act of disappearing anonymously into a city here is one of subjective dissolution. As another theorist of walking, Frédéric Gros, writes in A Philosophy of Walking, the activity of walking is one that entails a loss of self, in which “you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history.”
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Beyond the spontaneity of ambulatory automatism, the (non)place of the layover is, at the same time, characterized by an uncanny familiarity produced within partial repetitions and strange revisitings. For most crew, the initial novelty of ‘travel’ wears off quickly. What emerges in its place is something approximating a habitual routine of the everyday, a dispersal across time and space of the quotidian. Pedestrian in both senses.
Without in any sense belonging to their temporary urban surroundings, crew will inevitably find themselves returning to, and becoming familiar with, certain layover ports over time. Eventually, one will have worked certain routes enough times to have established specific routines of social reproduction, rest and leisure for different cities. This sensation of ‘return’ should not be conflated with ‘place’, if place is supposed to be accompanied by thick narratives of memory, identity and history. Rather, this ‘return’ to transitory, locations of abstract non-place on layover mirrors Marc Augé’s account of drivers speeding past, but never entering, the service stations that mark motorways, an experience that can in its own way become “strangely familiar over time”. It is, in other words, a sensation of Freud’s unheimlich, in the sense of a ‘return’ of that which was once-familiar.
The movement to and from outstations, here, increasingly becomes less a matter of encountering the new than of extending one’s everyday routines across time and space. As such, crew layovers entail a reinvention of what Henri Lefebvre termed the ‘rhythms’ of everyday life. These rhythms might be more aptly understood, in their discontinuity, as arrhythmic. Arrhythmias emerge, as Lefebvre writes, when “rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronisation".
In large part, and because none of us exist outside the relations of globalised consumer capitalism, what is termed ‘everyday life’ here comprises a consumer subjectivity constructed within a world of yet more non-places. This uncanny ordinariness can take various, mundane forms, from specific routines of quotidian consumption on layover - including grocery shopping at particular convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets - to eating takeaway and binge-watching American reality TV or news-entertainment (there is little difference between the two).
You have been here before. This is less a rendering of the banal strange than a rendering of the strange - the unheimlich - banal. More, from Augé, whose description of this affect could have been written about any flight attendant layover:
a ‘passing stranger’… can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains. For him, an oil company logo is a reassuring landmark; among the supermarket shelves he fells with relief on sanitary, household or food products validated by multinational brand names.
As is to be expected, rest and recovery often take priority on layover. In its most unapologetic form, this manifests as ‘slam-clicking’, whereby crew may spend entire layovers in their hotel rooms without any inclination towards traveling or meeting other crew. Like the politics of walking in (privatised) ‘public’ space, slam-clicking in ‘private space’ can be seen here as a subtle form of workers’ autonomy, an assertion of what Paul LaFargue termed the ‘right to be lazy' against further encroachments by company time upon one’s ‘free’ time; the right to disconnect. Here, the layover provides a refuge from the demands of everyday life, whereby - and particularly for those with gendered domestic labour responsibilities - the non-place of the hotel forms an end in and of itself.
To what extent, on the other hand, can novel forms of deterritorialized ‘belonging’ emerge in this fragmenting of selves across space? It is not uncommon to encounter crew with ties to multiple locales, produced in their course of their everyday working lives. Many may maintain transnational friendships at layover ports, sometimes within serendipitous, chance encounters. In the last month alone, I caught up with a socialist friend from Ireland who I hadn’t seen in years, but who happened to be in the same city at the same time, as well as a union educator based in Los Angeles who earlier visited airport workers at our home base in the South Pacific.
Other crew may strategically construct a decentered conception of place in their everyday working lives. I have, for instance, worked with numerous crew who regularly visit friends and relatives on layover in Korea and Japan. A form of this diasporic hybridity within flight attendant labour can be found in Christine Yano’s history of Pan Am’s ‘Nisei’ stewardesses, (mostly) Japanese-American flight attendants based in Honolulu as language speakers, exoticised by the airline as symbols of cosmopolitan worldliness in the post-war period.
Such quotidian routes may constitute a form of ‘diasporic return’ insofar as they involve the imagining of ‘homelands’. Here, a performance of ‘diasporic’ connectedness in real-time mobilises an accelerated metaphysics of presence that renders the ties of imagined transnational community more ‘tangible’ and immediate than, say, Zoom calls. This is not more or less "real" than other, more mediated, practices of diaspora identification, only a different form of it.
Equally, such routes may call into doubt the necessity of any single ‘home’, evading cultural nationalist reductions. There are just as many Japanese and Korean-identifying crew who do not bid for trips to Narita or Incheon. Could a crew returning to Singapore out of an unspecified sense of ‘Asianness’ tied to food, for instance, also be considered ‘diasporic’, if ‘diaspora’ is offered here - in Rogers Brubaker’s sense - to denote a condition of cultural in-betweeness rather than a substantial identity?
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Whether in dislocating, extending or reproducing the rhythms of the everyday, the arrhythmias of time-space compression structure the subjectivities of flight attendants in ways that extend into quotidian working life. At the end of the day, there ought to be nothing unique about this ordinariness of movement per se.
Rather than being exceptional, the multiple configurations of ‘place’ improvised on the move by crew might be understood as adjacent to the commonplace migrancy inherent in the contemporary working-class. Previously, I discussed Sivamohan Valluvan’s argument about the possibilities for the emergence of vernacular anti-nationalisms within urban working-class multiculture. This working class is always-already multi-racial. It is diasporic. It is migrant and Indigenous but also produced within settler-colonial violence. Mobility, including Indigenous mobility, is not an anomaly, but a default terrain of class composition in this part of the world.
For those already accustomed to being marked as perpetual ‘foreigners’ and ‘aliens’, there is nothing new about this sense of being out of place. In this respect, there may be little that fundamentally distinguishes the alienness of the layover from the ordinary affects of sedentary life. The ‘home base’ itself may, within this deconstruction of the home/away distinction, eventually come to be felt as yet another layover of sorts.
Can this everydayness of movement form the basis for an anti-nationalist sensibility that cuts against the libidinal desire for borders? Might an indifference towards, if not a refusal of, the necessity of fixed (settler) ‘belonging’ be elaborated into a queer political identification with the abjected nomadic figures of modernity - the vagrant and the non-arrivant? This by no means automatic, and nor are the struggles from which such conclusions might emerge. For airline workers at least, it may proceed from a recognition that we have more in common with other precarious subjects on the move than with the forces of reaction that today threaten to violently reimpose the prison-house of ‘home’ upon us all.