Abstract
Airports are sites that appear to refuse what Whitehead has termed ‘simple location’. They are events in code/space (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011); conduits in a space of flows (Castells, 1996); non-places which exist solely in anticipation of other places (Augé, 1995). Airports also exist in our cultural practices and literary imagings. In a play on the double meaning of ‘airport-reading’ – both as the undemanding reading that helps pass time in airports and as the reading of airports themselves – The textual life of airports sets out to explore its subject in terms of the co-shapings, enfoldings and complicities of site and text. Schaberg sees such airport readings as constituents of a common process, the process through which the cultural legibility of airports is established. More specifically, he is interested in the ways in which literature and its reading practices shape how we imagine, and how we come to inhabit, airports. His focus therefore is on the airport as a site in its own right rather than merely as a terrestial prelude to take-off. He sets out to track ‘how stories are spun around airports’ and to ‘follow the interpretive threads that unravel in these sites’ (p. 1). Schaberg tracks airports in American fiction such as the works of Don DeLillo and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and non-fiction such as the 9/11 Commission Report – but also on the ground working as a ‘cross-utilized agent’ at an airport in Bozeman, Montana. His approach is set out in chapter 1 (What is airport reading?) and chapter 2 (Work in the culture of flight). One might expect that chapter 1 introduces the airport literature and chapter 2 his own ethnographic work, but this is not the style of the book. Rather, Schaberg moves continually between literature and personal observation as each is used to reflect upon, and to reveal its influence on, the other. Thus, in chapter 3 the Hardy Boys airport mysteries (novels that I regret to say are unknown to me) lead on in chapter 4 to the real mysteries that the 9/11 Commission Report set out to unravel, and on to a discussion of the 9/11 literary genre – to which this Report undoubtedly belongs. (For example, there is even a comic book version of the Report: Jacobson & Colon, 2006.) This, in turn, leads on to a consideration of ‘The airport screening complex’ (chapter 5): a discussion of the role of screens and of the practices of ‘screening’ that constitute the post-9/11 airport. It is characteristic of the book’s approach that in the course of this chapter the term ‘complex’ begins to take on connotations that go beyond that of merely ‘consisting of many interconnected parts’: connotations of disturbance and neurosis.
Inevitably, Schaberg’s approach works better in some chapters than in others. It works well, for instance, in ‘Ecology in waiting’ (chapter 7) – a ‘reading’ of the airport, and of airport literature, in terms of scenes, situations and sensations of waiting. It works less well, in my view, in ‘Bird citing’ (chapter 8), an exploration of avian imagery in airports and also of the uneasy cohabitation of birds and planes in these arenas of human flight. While there are a number of such minor issues (for instance chapter 6, ‘Airport studies’, reads more as an introduction instead of a chapter three-quarters through the book), we can see Schaberg’s approach at its best in ‘Claiming baggage’ (the concluding chapter), in which he tracks baggage, and representations of baggage, both as a scholar and as a ‘cross-utilized’ agent trying to reunite owners with their delayed baggage as the latter moves between the material and the semiotic realms.
The overall effect of the book is reminiscent of Escher’s pictures – such as Drawing Hands (1946) – in which figure and ground are always redrawing each other: airport writing and writing the airport. The textual life of airports should, I suggest, be of interest not only to students of cultural studies (Schaberg’s main target audience), but to all those interested in the day-to-day accomplishment of ‘grammatocentric’ (Hoskin & Macve, 1994) organization. In terms of the concerns of this special issue, it shows how early 21st-century ‘white spaces’ – quite unlike the white spaces of early 19th-century maps – are largely constituted through writing. Writing which, whether in the form of the airport novel or, more commonly, on the screens of a multitude of mobile devices (what we might call the airport screening-out complex) both screens out and reproduces the airport’s status as a ‘non-place’.