Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Technics of Comfort

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.