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Three days after viewing an exhibition of multimedia and installation work at Artspace in Sydney, a show themed around notions of travel and transit, I took a flight to the United States, one of several hundred passengers occupying every available seat on-board the aircraft. For me, the flight was an uncommon, even exciting event, not part of everyday routine, and I assumed the same for many of my fellow passengers. And yet every day, by routine, the same flight conveys several hundred other passengers to the same destination. Every day, someone else occupies the utterly anonymous position of 24F that was mine. Standing in line at LAX waiting to be fingerprinted and photographed, my most individuating features recorded and databased alongside those of thousands of other arrivals that day, my uncommon and exciting experience again merged with everyday routine. My fingerprints became the unnoticed detail of administrative procedure, my face now faceless data filling the immigration officer’s workday.
The activities associated with travel condense one of the central problematics of thinking about everyday life: people engage in ordinary cultural activities partly as a means to define themselves as individuals, and yet mass participation implies a necessary denial of individuality. In a number of very real senses, our experiences of vacation, migration and other journeys can be transformative, even life-changing. Leaving homelands voluntarily or forcibly has tangible and historical effects on those involved and their connection to networks of culture and community. International vacations are often undertaken to refocus one’s life priorities. Even walking the streets of a city, as Michel de Certeau suggests, entails an individual, tactical appropriation of established place.1 At the same time, much of the construction... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline