Drifting with the World: Additional Reflections on Passengerhood

I am jotting these lines down while waiting for an early morning flight at the tiny Santander airport, which was still closed less than two hours before scheduled takeoff.

To be a passenger in today’s world is to step into a condition older than vehicles, older than roads, older even than the idea of destination and of the human. It is to be carried as pollen is transported on butterfly wings or seeds in the stomachs of birds. To be a passenger is also to experience oneself as suspended between worlds, borne along by currents one does not command, despite having some idea about the itinerary taken.

In Philosophy for Passengers I wrote that passengerhood is not a temporary state but a mode of existence, one that reveals how we are all, at every moment, transported. In a driverless car, in an airplane cabin, in the waiting hall of a station, what is most striking is not the technology that surrounds us, but the way in which our lives are continually shaped by being moved rather than moving, or, more precisely, by being moved in moving.

Rather than invent it, new technologies merely amplify this condition. Entering a vehicle that has no driver, no human presence at the helm, I place my trust in invisible codes, networks, datasets, sensors. The very absence of a driver is emblematic of our age: we are conveyed by systems too vast and obscure for us to master, in politics and economy, technology and communication. Our faith is placed in the unseen and our surrender is, for the most part, boundless. There is also a smidgeon of redemption in this: I am relieved of the compulsion to steer, freed from the tyranny of mastery, granted the possibility of reflection, reverie, and thought.

Passengerhood has always entailed waiting. In the corridors of airports, in the delays of trains, in the stillness before boarding, one is subject to a time that belongs to no one. It is not the time of the clock, nor the time of one’s own choosing, but a time stretched and folded by anticipation. Boredom thickens it, excitement thins it; moods tint the minutes with heaviness or lightness. This is passenger time, which envelops us like weather. We do not control it any more than we control the clouds drifting above the terminal roof. Another relief of subjective mastery…

What passes outside the window (|a countryside, a highway, a skyline) does not belong to us, though it imprints itself upon us. We are swept past places we do not inhabit, landscapes reduced to glimpses. They pass like sentences read in haste, half-understood but occasionally unforgettable. And we pass them by.

But there is a sinister side to the desaturation of control, which does not disappear but is the prerogative of impersonal systems and of the state. The modern passenger is closely watched. Biometric scans, surveillance cameras, sensors measuring pulse and posture: I am accompanied not only by fellow travelers but by a shadow archive of my movements. I am carried, but so too are my data, shuttled from device to server, catalogued in databases where they accumulate as silent residues of my passage. The journey is doubled, physical displacement coupled with informational transfer.

Every passage, no matter how light or effortless it feels, is borne by the earth, which absorbs the weight of our travel. The ecological shadow, too, is always there, even in the quiet of an electric tram, even in the seeming innocence of a carbon-neutral shuttle. What appears clean is built on hidden extraction, on the labor of miners, on the depletion of landscapes elsewhere. When we are conscious of everything it implies, passengerhood shows how to admit that our own lightness depends on burdens carried by others, humans and nonhumans alike.

Being a passenger touches on matters existential and elemental; perhaps, it is a gateway to what I am tempted to call elemental existentialism. On the one hand, to sit, to wait, to watch, to be lost in thought or in the world, to be bored or excited, to be carried: this is philosophy in motion, meditation in transit. On the other hand (and at the same time), there is the elemental generosity of the world: the air that lifts the plane, the rails that cradle the train, the road that bears the weight of rubber and steel. Passengerhood discloses a hidden hospitality of matter itself, which provisionally opens itself to our passages all the way to the final passage into the earth or fire.