It Wasn't Me

I like to take the Metro in São Paulo, but the congestion makes often makes it a very frustrating experience.  São Paulo has some of the most crowded subways in the world....

 I often find that I go on a sort of automatic pilot when I am on a particularly crowded subway car. I try to think of something else, but I also make sure that I know where my wallet is and that I will make my stop, which usually involves inching towards the door at least once stop prior. 

Theories of the crowd emphasize the depersonalizing (Le Bon), imitative (Tarde) and tactile (Canetti) character of urban crowds. In other words, in a crowd one loses oneself to the sheer sensory overload (also called synaesthesia), and enters into collective behavior.  My experience on these packed subways cars is that, yes, crowd sociality takes over, but that people often resist it like a young child fighting sleepiness. The packed subway car is a particularly dystopic kind of crowd, connected as it is to regimes of urban planning and wage labor that make crowded mass transit unpleasurable.  Being on a packed subway car at noon is a very different experience than being packed in at a late night music venue (although some crumudgeons might beg to differ). 

Read more about my adventures on the subway below the fold. 


In the physically and mentally exhausting situations of being on such crowded subway cars, I find that people exhibit peculiar but unsurprising responses to the personal space conflicts that arise.  First, it's hard to socially determine bodily agency in crowded situations.  One time, I was trying to get out of a subway car at a transfer station, and I purposefully placed my body in the wave of people that I detected were also trying to exit.  When someone behind me was pressed to hard (did they I wasn't actually getting out, or was I not getting out fast enough?), I felt myself pushed forward into the woman in front of me.  "Cuidado, meu filho!"[be careful, son!] the elderly lady snapped at me and raised her arm in a cast and sling.  Her shaming worked.  Though I wanted to politely tell her that I was also pushed, I just tried to shuffle out of the car behind her with my head down and then made sure I was in a different car when we both transferred.  Did I push her?  Did the crowd push her?  Or were both of us semi-reacting against, semi-absorbed in the crowd's movements?

Even if the eldery woman and I were both haplessly in the crowd, she managed to use a sense of guilt and victimhood that discursively cordoned off our interaction from the larger context.  Today I witnessed another such scene.  On my way back from the airport, I was aggressively zoning out and pretty contemptuous that the subway car was packed, since I had planned my arrival in São Paulo to coincide with an off-peak transit hour.  But my desperate attempt at a daydream was interrupted when a woman with an infant in her arms yelled, "ay caralho!" [hey, you son of a bitch!], as she half tripped almost into my neglently unexpecting arms.  The people around me suspiciously looked to the subway door to see who had committed the transit indelicacy (it was never quite clear to me). Someone quickly offered a seat to the woman and infant, and she sat down with an audible huff.  Two other women started talking behind me, evaluating the situation.  

"tem que abrir espaço."  (you have to make way), said one.  "ay, algumas pessoas estão sem noção" (some people just don't know any better), offered the other.  The train reached a transfer station, and the seated woman with the child made motions to get up.  "Licensa" said one of the women standing behind me, and pulled my arm from the overhead rail I had been holding in order to give the seated woman more room as she exited.  "Licensa" [lit. permission] is usually used as a first-person request, meaning "excuse me."  When you want someone to get out of the way of a third person, you usually say "dá licensa." [give permission.].  Although in less you say this in a very engratiating tone, it is usually considered rude.  The woman behind me, was thus politely telling me to get the hell out of the way of the woman with the child.  Although (imho) the seated woman had substantial room, and I thought it was quite rude to tug my arm (I was after all holding the rail so as not to fall over when the car was in motion), I had been shamed by listening to the previous moral discourse of the two standing women into complying.  After all, I didn't wanted to be one of those people who don't know better. 


The tragicomic ending to this story is that the standing women and I were also all getting off at this stop.  And once the woman with the child was up and walking out, one of the women behind me started pushing me really hard to get off the train.  I kind of dug in my heals so as to not move too quickly, and she brushed me aside and pushed her way around me and out the door.  I guess some people really don't know any better.  


So, to recap.  A crowded subway car shows the semi-agentive, semi-automatic characteristics of social interaction, and it also shows how people create explanatory discourses about individual and social action.  What has really struck me is how a lot of the anxiety  (did I actually push her?), the social conflict ("ay caralho!"), and the moral economy ("sem noção") of this semi-agentive, semi-automatic flux is affectively powered by fatigue and frustration.  That is, when we are subjected to the oppressive conditions of the packed subway car, we lose a lot of our capacity to be proactive and reflective in our social interactions.  Sure, no one rioted (today), but i doubt anyone felt ennobled by their mass transit experience either.