counts infinitely

The quote I would like to draw your attention to in this post is the geekiest, densest, most academic prose anyone could possibly ever choose to quote. In some instances in this very passage, I have to read the sentence twice — and hey! I am more often than not the sort of person who is the one writing ridiculous sentences like this (before someone inevitably points it out and goes, “WTF was that?!?! An 8-line sentence?!?!”).

And yet, I find it absolutely beautiful. The many, many words with which the author, David Bissell, has chosen to describe what he is saying, perfectly convey why the small things matter in a big way. In this case, the small thing is being nice to each other on transit. And the big thing is, that these small things make or break our collective experience of community.

Quote (citations removed for your reading pleasure, it’s already challenging enough; and emphasis mine):

Coexistence; being-with others is an integral aspect of railway travel. Yet dwelling within the transient community that characterises spaces of public transport is arguably something that we need to understand better. Whilst it might be easy to suggest that, since passengers are united in their motivation to travel from A to B, travelling on public transport constitutes a common experience, such an instrumental characterisation obscures the diversity that is shot through the passenger body criss-crossed with multiple expectancy, use of travel time, rationale, thresholds, and so on. As such, aspirations of positive belonging motivated by assumptions of unity, agreement, and common-being are inherently unsatisfactory.

[…] But this invokes the illusion of an individual, reflexive passenger with a capacity for responsibility; to “act autonomously according to conscience”. Yet, as this paper has described, a greater attention to affective modulations and their force that transcend the individual takes the onus of responsibility and primary ethical agency away from individual passengers towards a more collective rendering of responsibility that envelops humans and non-humans within the emergence of affective atmospheres. Here, the sociality of the railway carriage is tangled up as much with the agentive force of music players, signage, paper tickets, and seat backs, as with ‘individual’ bodies. In this respect, the spaces of public transport present an arena for an ethics in process to emerge, rather than hostage to a prescriptive, circumscribed ‘morality’. Such “a caring for belonging” is visible in the light-touch gestures of generosity that flicker between passengers and objects. These events of kindness, which Brennan (2004, page 124) describes as “the refusal to pass on or transmit negative affects and the attempt to prevent the pain they cause to others”, illustrate a collective sense of conviviality, but one that operates through affective registers.

Bissell, D. (2010). Passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(2), 270-289. doi:10.1068/d3909

The entire paper is frickin’ fantastic, once you can get over the shock of reading many, many fancy words to describe something you’ve already known and felt every time you take a bus or train.