Airports

I love airports, I think I’ve probably mentioned. They’re not really anywhere. They’re not really the place that you’re leaving, and they’re definitely not the place that you’re going. Time even seems to work differently, doesn’t it? You’re on a rigid schedule, but you’re also forced to arrive at some nebulous “early” time, and still be held up by even more nebulous delays. You may come, stay, or go at 3 am. You may sleep in the terminal or find yourself suddenly nocturnal. 

Airports are Nowheres. (I’m borrowing this term from Lonely Planet’s excellent series, Tales From Nowhere, which may collectively be my favorite instance of ink on paper; see also: PhilosophyTube - When Will Security Go Back to Normal?).

But despite this, they do have familiar tropes, right? The overpriced Starbucks, fields of uncomfortable chairs, a strange sort of traffic where everyone is lost, and, of course, guards who are far too intensely armed and armored to exist outside of the walls of the airport. 

Airports operate in a constant state of exception, where the norms and rules are set aside (but whose rules are the ones being sidelined, and whose replace them?). Agamben calls a place in a state of exception ‘a camp’, because surely refugee camps (or internment camps as he was referencing—though who can tell the difference?) operate as states of exception. And sure, yes, fair, I frequently site this, myself. But aren’t holidays also states of exception?

Funny, I’m just now recognizing that ‘holiday’ has the double work of ‘festive day’ and ‘vacation’. 

Back on track, don’t holidays step out of the normal order? Isn’t that what makes them special? And yet, in so doing, don’t they reinforce the norm by their abnormality? 

I’ve forgotten who wrote it, Levi-Strauss probably, but he pointed out how Christmas is a day for the impious to go to church, for children to behave well and recieve gifts. When else would the expected behavior of ‘behaving well’ result in heaps of gifts? It would be very strange for your parents to, on a random Tuesday, appear in the living room with an armful of colorful packages, but we accept it because that is the ceremony of the holiday… but it also serves a social function, which is specifically  to reinforce that behaving well earns rewards.

Halloween, in contrast (still pulling from Levi-Strauss, I think) is the opposite—children get to demand gifts under the threat of mischief. Trick or Treat. Children extorting adults. The entire point of Halloween is inversion of norms. The dead walk, scary is fun, the night is when we roam the streets, not the day… and yet. The mischief informs us just how much we need order. This is particularly interesting to me, as Halloween becoming more popular has matched distrust in authority in the west nearly step for step. So maybe it’s about glimpsing what an alternative might be like, and striving for it in the everyday. 

Back to ‘travel’ holidays, is it any different? Why do we travel? To taste those alternatives, and either strive toward them or shy away from them in our normal order. We dip outside of the order so that we can make a judgement on the nature of the order. 

And airports? What sort of steps outside of the order are here? What can we draw from this state of exception?

For me, I see dreams, fantasies, people excited to experience something, and moving toward it. There’s a potential energy ready to be made kenetic energy. 

But airports are also places of extremes, aren’t they? Extreme excitement, extreme frustration, extreme habitation, extreme boredom, extreme commerce—extreme security (dare I say, extreme militarization?). In so much as one can see hundreds of people from hundreds of places interacting by and with each other, extreme exchange? Of cultures, languages, customs, rules, and in the most literal sense, the temporary exchange of people. 

Food for thought.