Abstract
Since the 1990s, public outcries over the “return” of human cargo commonly point to the physical horrors of travel as a key sign of the inhuman and the unfree in contemporary social life. Whether in debates over migrant shipwrecks across the Mediterranean or over air rage battles on budget American flights, the moving vehicle and its uncomfortably tight quarters often serve as the space par excellence for grappling with questions of proper stranger sociality and the limits of “fellow feeling” or moral sympathy in a globalizing world. This paper examines how a relatively novel problem of “comfort” came to inform and shape the politics of mobility starting in the late eigteenth century when abolitionists first successfully argued for distinguishing the human/izing rights of passengers from the movement of nonhuman goods through sensory invocations of the techno-rational and embodied terrors of the slave ship. Through both the historical and contemporary cases discussed, this paper suggests that the problem of comfort was never just a technical one of cramped transport resolvable through mere material and instrumentalist means. Rather, comfort is better described as a form of technics in so far as its technical-material dimensions are always already entangled with an existing social repertoire of ideas, habits, and aspirations, that is, it has aesthetic and affective capacities as part of moral imaginaries of how to deal with Others and, in turn, how to live the good life.
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For a cogent example of technics as more than technology, see Mumford’s discussion of the clock and the emergence of a clockwork world (2010, pp. 16–17).
For instance, in public statements about the current Mediterranean crisis, the Italian Prime Minister has described the migrant flows as “the slavery of the 21st century” (BBC News 2015) while the French rightwing party, the National Front, denounced the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for her migrant-friendly policies by arguing that “Germany needs market slaves to supply its industry” (Vinocur 2015). Also see Kingsley 2015, O’Connell Davidson 2015, and OpenDemocracy 2015 for scholarly critiques of the slavery rhetoric in the European debates about migration.
For instance, see Crowley (1999, p. 777).
See Hayot 2009 and Eng et al. (2012) for more detailed historical discussions of the association of Chinese insensibility with Western moral imaginations of the human, strangerhood, and sympathy.
For instance, see the American Federation of Labor (AFL) 1901 pamphlet, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion, which argued that the problem of bad air in Chinese residences was not a structural one of poor ventilation or lax enforcement but rather a racial puzzle about insensible bodies accustomed to “the dense and poisonous atmosphere” of cramped spaces (American Federal of Labor 1901, p. 22).
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Acknowledgments
This paper benefitted greatly from input from Hussein Agrama, Summerson Carr, Jennifer Cole, JanaHäberlein, Barbara Lüthi, Constantine Nakassis, and William Walters. The author would also like to thank Amahl Bishara, Michael Fisch and Brian Larkin for showing how Mumford is good to think with for this paper. Finally, thanks to Robert Ariail for granting permission to reprint his editorial cartoon.
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Chu, J.Y. Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Technics of Comfort. Int J Polit Cult Soc 29, 403–421 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-016-9239-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-016-9239-1