The birth of the urban passenger: Infrastructural subjectivity and the opening of the New York City subway

Abstract

This paper argues that modern urban infrastructures are not only constitutive for shaping and maintaining the socioeconomic structure of the city, but also aim to structure and homogenize the practices and perceptions of their users. Whenever new infrastructures are installed in the social realm, they bring about new forms of governance, interaction, experience and habits, sometimes even resulting in new and powerful modes of collective and individual subjectivity. To illustrate this, I will discuss the central processes that were constitutive to the emergence of the subway passenger in New York City by reconstructing the events at the opening day of the subway on 27 October 1904. As these events show, one central strategy was the discursive linking of this new machine to the promises of progress and a better life. Furthermore, the success of the subway required that passengers address their fears and safety concerns and to control their practices while using the system. However, these strategies of controlling and rationalizing individuals’ behavior in these new environments were again and again undermined by people's strong emotions and deviant practices in reaction to the new experience of speed and the oddity of underground travel. It is not without irony that, while the subway passenger was anticipated as a kind of heroic figure heralding a new age of circulation, this fantasy would already prove illusionary on the subway's opening night.