“What boredom,” Dani sighed. “And every day is like this.” His friend Razvan nodded slowly in agreement, drawing deeply on his cigarette. “There’s no work. There’s no money. There’s nothing to do but sit here.” We sat atop a shallow flight of stairs overlooking the parking lot of the Gara de Nord railway station in Bucharest, Romania. Dani, Razvan, and Razvan’s partner, Ioana, met at “the Gara” a decade earlier as young teenagers. They had fled deepening poverty and immiseration in the countryside as Romania made its painful transition from socialism toward the global economy. Without formal qualifications (muncitor necalificat), however, the crew did not get very far from the station. Now in their mid-twenties, Dani and Razvan spent their mornings looking for day labor off the books. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, however, there was little demand for it. On the majority of days when they could not land a gig on a construction site in the capital city, or clearing a field just outside of it, they joined Ioana in the parking lot, where the crew hustled pocket change as informal parking lot attendants (parcagii). Considered a nuisance, the city police criminalized their entrepreneurial efforts as begging. “You don’t make much money here,” Ioana explained, “but you get by. And it’s safer than prostitution or picking pockets.” Razvan nodded in agreement. He had, after all, been
Two decades after the fall of communism, and in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, downwardly mobile Romanians are bored. The introduction of market pressures intended to propel this once isolated communist country into a heightened state of market-driven production and consumption had, for many, the opposite effect. Communist-era guarantees to work, housing, and a minimum of food rations gave way amid efforts at neoliberal reform to intensified competition. Those unable to compete successfully found themselves out of work and on the streets. Pressed to the margins of the city, newly homeless Romanians like Dani, Razvan, and Ioana stood around empty-handed. Time appeared to slow, and the road before them extend endlessly into the distance as the crew insisted there was no work to be found, no wage to spend, nowhere else for them to go, and ultimately, nothing to do.
This claim to be “doing nothing” cuts against an ethnographic sensibility. As the craft of participant observation has shown time and again, people cannot help but be engaged in doing something. Sitting, pacing, or staring at a parking lot are, after all, forms of activity. To be truly inactive makes no ethnographic sense. Such mundane activities may very well evoke boredom, but as Bronisław Malinowski attests ([1922] 2003: 4), boring moments nevertheless contain a wide array of documentable people, practices, and relationships. Ethnographers have, furthermore, shown the various ways in which even idle moments add up and contribute to larger processes. Rather than being inert, those claiming to be “doing nothing” are in fact actively doing something, such as generating social networks (Ralph 2008), undertaking entrepreneurial schemes (Simone 2004), or participating in political projects (Schielke 2008). The ethnographic imperative to understand social worlds through the lens of activity lays bare social relationships engaged and ever productive, even if that productivity is not readily apparent on the ground. From such a perspective, boredom and inactivity become thinkable as a form of social production (Dunn 2014). While such etic lines of analysis bend toward optimism by reframing (maybe even rescuing) those claiming to be “doing nothing” as actually active and even creative, the ethnographic move to foreground productive agency has a way of obscuring deeply felt emic concerns about a growing set of practices that are not, or are no longer, happening, particularly among the economically vulnerable. How, this article asks, can the impress of “not doing” and of “absent activity” on social relationships and on inner worlds be brought into ethnographic view?
This article, in response, experiments with a methodological technique for documenting inactivity in an effort to open up new theoretical lines of flight. Rather than taking inactivity as a mode of unrecognized social production, as the ethnographic record is so primed to do, this article instead takes seriously the parking lot attendant’s claim to be doing nothing. My analysis proposes to record an impression of inactivity—understood here as the troubling absences of activity—on individual and collective worldviews through the production of what I call “an ethnographic negative.” Drawing inspiration from photography, this article takes the negative in its ethnographic form to be a kind of inverted record. The ethnographic negative, as it is developed below, captures observable actors and activities so that they might serve as the dark backdrop against which the affect of inactivity may be brought to light. It is a methodological intervention suited for studying capitalism’s undoing of everyday life in Bucharest (O’Neill 2017), but also in similarly precarious societies grappling with the growing problem of what has been described as “wageless life” (Denning 2010), from Africa (Ferguson 2015; Mains 2013) to Asia (Allison 2013; Jeffrey 2010; Li 2014) and to the Americas (Millar 2014; Stewart 1996). People often find themselves doing nothing and for reasons well beyond their control. Again, this article asks: how can inactivity be brought into ethnographic view?
Stalled out
A sense of troublingly absent activity has framed the rhythm of everyday life in Bucharest since the waning years of Romanian communism. Brutal communist austerity left ordinary Romanians with a difficult-to-shake feeling of having “nothing to do” (stau degeaba). This emergent politics of inactivity crystalized in the early 1980s, when then communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu undertook an aggressive plan to pay off Romania’s $11 billion foreign debt within a decade (Petrescu 2002). Ceaușescu believed this aggressive fiscal policy was necessary to limit foreign interference in the development of socialism in Romania. To drum up the necessary cash reserve, central planners heightened the exportation of food and durable goods while severely limiting imports. These planning and policy decisions led to the development of what liberal economists call a “shortage economy,” which left ordinary Romanians with little to do but idle around work, the store, and at home (Kornai 1986). Workers, for example, reported to factories where production stalled because of a systematic lack of the necessary raw materials (Verdery 1996). Stalled output resulted in a scarcity of everyday consumables. As store shelves ran bare, Romanians spent hours each day waiting in breadlines in order to carry out their household provisioning (Kligman 1998). Once home, shortages of electricity and light bulbs further impinged on daily practices, leaving people to spend their nights sitting in the dark (Chelcea 2002).2
Shortages not only foreclosed activities at work, home, and the store, but also troubled movement between these spaces. Insufficient automobile production rendered private car ownership rare in communist Romania (Gătejel 2013). To move about the city, Romanians at that time relied almost exclusively on public transportation. Energy conservation policies, however, caused Bucharest’s extensive constellation of trams, trolley buses, and the Metro to run irregularly (Banister 1981: 261). Severe overcrowding ensued. Rather than sending passengers into motion, would-be riders waited in long lines to board public transit, and instead of reading or working through the commute, passengers stood cheek by jowl inside buses and trams if not left to cling precariously onto the outside of them (Verdery 1996: 47).
Communist austerity took its toll. In December 1989, angry crowds gathered in the central square of Bucharest and other major Romanian cities to protest widespread deprivation (Tismaneanu 2006). The movement culminated with the execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, on Christmas Day. The abrupt end to communism raised hopes among Romanians that daily life might no longer be chronically stalled by pervasive shortages, instead propelled by market-driven production and consumption. In pursuit of a materially richer life, Romanians turned in the 1990s toward the global marketplace. Under the guidance of Western economists (Demekas and Khan 1991), the new Romanian government made an aggressive push toward privatization. Between 1990 and 1995, the Romanian state sold roughly 4.3 million housing units to private individuals (Stan 1995: 429–430). The state also sold majority shareholder status in all of its nonessential industries, generating $964 million in foreign investment (431–435). Agricultural land was also completely liberalized (Verdery 2003).
With foreign investment and privatization came new invitations to consume. Neon billboards took over cityscapes while advertising extended into now-private homes by fueling the rapid proliferation of media (Berry 2004; Ghinea and Mungiu-Pippidi 2010). The explosive growth of newspaper and television helped to introduce new objects and lifestyles around which postcommunist peoples could imagine their future (Berdahl 2005; Patico and Caldwell 2002). While Romania’s transition toward the global marketplace was both brutal and slow,3 pending accession into the European Union in 2007 opened up a rising quality of life. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, Romania’s economy grew 6.5 percent annually, providing the country with the kind of sustained development necessary to pull 30 percent of its population out of absolute poverty (World Bank 2009: 6).
Consumption drove much of this economic growth, with foreign banks providing Romanian households with cheap credit serviced on the euro (Yesin 2013). Romanian households used this credit to voraciously consume imported goods inside newly constructed shopping malls (Brown and Haas 2012), and rather than rely on public transportation to shuttle between work, home, and the store, Romanians instead bought personal cars, increasing the rate of car ownership since 1990 by three and a half times (Nicolae 2013). Where once Romanians waited for overcrowded and underserviced trams, they now sat in slow-moving traffic (Nae and Turnock 2011: 218). With a hint of pride, Romanians compared their congested roadways to those of global cities (Realitatea TV 2010). While life in Romania had been marked by shortages for as long as anyone could remember, acceptance into the European Union—and the flow of trade, aid, and infrastructure that came with it—gave Romanians tangible cause to believe that the abundance of market-driven production and consumption was within their reach.
The economic surge did not last. The onset of the 2008 global financial crisis undid much of the gains in individual consumption brought about by EU accession. By 2009, the World Bank (2009: 9) reported that the Romanian stock market had lost 65 percent of its value, while the currency, the Romanian leu (plural lei), depreciated 15 percent against the euro. Lines of credit that Romanians had inexpensively purchased from foreign banks grew unmanageable overnight. Across the city, the once hot job market froze just as the state instituted a radical series of austerity measures in an effort to stabilize the economy (BBC 2010). Disposable income dried up. Personal cars that evidenced Romania’s attainment of a European quality of life the year before became too expensive to run and maintain, prompting the mass abandonment of two hundred thousand automobiles in public parking spaces across Bucharest (Iancu 2014). The mass abandonment of unwanted cars clogged parking lots and sidewalks and sent those drivers still in gear circling the block for an available parking space. The parking crunch, created in part by the financial crisis, provided an opportunity for low-skilled workers, such as Razvan, Dani, and Ioana, who were otherwise displaced from the contracting job market. No longer able to find day labor in the city’s stalled construction sites, they worked instead as parcagii, occupying and allocating available public parking spaces to those drivers willing to pay a small fee (see Chelcea and Iancu 2015). Working as parcagii, Razvan, Dani, and Ioana adamantly maintained, was profoundly boring, and it left them “doing nothing” day in and day out.4
The ethnographic negative
The ethnographic record presumes an active subject. The recording of everyday actions, however mundane, allows the anthropologist to form a picture of the usual repertoire of life (Clifford 1995: 98). Visibility as much as meaning is tied up in the ethnographic record of the things that people do (Geertz 1977: 5), so ethnography is predisposed to reveal a world in constant motion. It is a methodological disposition that extends agency to the most vulnerable population segments and reveals the creative energy of life at the margins. The ethnographer’s tendency to see productive agency everywhere, however, is not without its slippages. Such an ethnographic gaze struggles to account for the worldviews of those claiming, at times quite insistently, to be inactive, inert, and “doing nothing.” Rather than confronting the absence of activity in a social world like that of Bucharest’s parking lot attendants, the ethnographic inclination is to override emic interpretations, shaping, to borrow the words of Michael Taussig (2004: 60), all manner of narrative, paradox, and so-called data of the ethnographic record so as to “jolt the emptiness with meaning.” While such efforts are often profoundly revealing, and at times even empowering, what gets lost amid such efforts is the now growing distance between people’s long-held expectations about the social and material orders that make up ordinary life and their undoing under wrenched historical circumstances (see Berlant 2011: 9). As Razvan, Dani, and Ioana’s sense of the ordinary became undone by the global financial crisis, they claimed to be inactive not because they failed to appreciate how they were in fact active and the important consequences of their activity, but because of their overwhelming concern about the many practices they believed they should be engaged in but were not. To bring into ethnographic view how this troubling absence of activity impresses upon vulnerable actors such as the parcagii requires, in the spirit of Michel Foucault, methodological experimentation, “decid[ing] which taps need turning, which bolts need to be loosened here or there” ([1988] 2013: 165). Rather than framing a picture of “the usual repertoire” of life, an ethnographic treatment of inactivity requires, to my mind, a different approach to the image, one that works to make visible the impress of processes with no visible presence (Hoffman 2007: 112). It requires an analysis of the negative.
When taking a snapshot, Walter Benjamin observed, one “manages only to register the negative of that essence on photographic plates” (2006: 227). The snapping of a photograph and the production of its negative are inextricably linked. Just as every photograph is said to be a certificate of presence, so too is its negative (Barthes [1980] 2010: 87). They are both documentary spaces; however, the photograph and its negative diverge in one critical aspect. While the photograph mirrors its referent, the negative inverts it (80–81). The negative renders as dark what appears in the photograph as light and renders as light what is dark. This documentary inversion is what makes a negative so evocative for ethnographic thought, especially about inactivity. The negative creates critical distance to the photograph and its referent that defamiliarizes one’s gaze and in the process, opens up a space that invites new ways of seeing (Kendig 1993: 197). The negative does not simply bring into view the basic spatial elements of the photograph and their relationships, but through its inversion of light and dark, the negative also puts forward a kind of nonphotograph, one that brings into view all the other presences that hover in a sort of penumbra around the image (Sassen 2011: 438). What in a photograph appears as dark, impenetrable, and without characteristics is made light, textured, and visible in unexpected ways through the space of the negative, rendering palpable the essence of what otherwise cannot be seen.
As in photography, the negative in its ethnographic form is also entangled with the production of the ethnographic record.5 They are flip sides of the same process. Both the record and the negative draw on familiar practices of carrying out participant observation, conducting interviews, drafting field notes, and snapping photographs, for example, to generate thick descriptions of everyday routines and their underlying moods and emotions (see Bourgois and Schonberg 2009: 11). To be sure, the ethnographic negative is a documentary space, but like a photographic plate, the ethnographic negative inverts. It takes the present actors and activities that make up the ethnographic record and treats them as a kind of dark background against which the deeply felt absences that lead people to identify as bored, doing nothing, and being nowhere can be brought to light. The negative’s aim is to shift ethnographic attention away from the unfolding practices and their potentially productive effects that are, from an emic perspective, widely taken to be insignificant. Instead, the negative refocuses analytical attention on the people and activities that are expected to be present but are troublingly absent, suspended, or foreclosed. The ethnographic negative ultimately foregrounds that meaning is forged not only through the presence of people, things, and activities but also by their absence. This is a technique for creating a kind of nonimage, one that defamiliarizes the ethnographic gaze so that the deeply felt forms of inactivity—of activity’s troubling absence—hovering around the penumbra of daily life can be brought into view. Continuing in the spirit of Benjamin (2006: 227), the negative in its ethnographic form tries not to index the world so much as to provide an essence from which a presentiment can be extracted, one that provides a window into understanding when certain moments qualify as active and how and to what effect others do not. It is a method that begins with a snapshot.
The picture
“The state gave my parents an apartment. It gave them a job in a factory, but it shut down in the early ’90s. I don’t have that kind of opportunity,” Dani explained as he got to work. He lifted himself up and off his stretch of curb and stepped into a newly vacated space in the Gara de Nord’s free public parking lot. Ioana did the same moments later when another car pulled out at the far end of the parking lot. “Instead, I have this,” Dani added.
The two waited for the light to change at the intersection down the road, which sent a wave of cars in their direction. The two then stepped forward into the road to meet them while Razvan continued to keep watch from his perch. “You can’t just hold the space and demand money,” Ioana explained. “People get pissed and complain to the police, and then they shut us down for the day. That’s not good for anyone.” Instead, Ioana and Dani stood just clear of the turn-in, and with one outstretched arm pointing to the curb and the other waving encouragingly toward drivers, the two signaled what
While Ioana and Dani monetized the coming and going of cars, Razvan attempted to do the same with their packing and unpacking. Seated on the escalator steps, he scanned the lot for travelers with cumbersome luggage. At the site of a woman and an elderly traveler struggling to pull overstuffed suitcases from car trunks, Razvan jogged over and offered to carry the baggage onto their train platform. As with the vast majority of instances, these travelers firmly declined Razvan’s earnest proposition and waited, visibly anxious, for him to leave. The Gara de Nord held a reputation for attracting pickpockets and scammers. “When you find someone in need, you can make a quick five lei,” Razvan attested as he rejoined Dani and me on the stairwell.
In between his solicitations, Razvan smoked cigarettes and chewed sunflower seeds while Ioana and Dani continued to direct traffic. “We can’t all work in the lot at once,” Razvan explained. “It creates too much of a commotion,
After soliciting testimonies, the officers did not ultimately hold the parcagii accountable for the vandalism. The officers nevertheless issued Ioana and Dani fines and ordered the crew to stay away from the lot for the rest of the day. It was, however, only the late afternoon. If the crew followed the officers’ request, they would lose half of their workday. Instead of foreclosing the opportunity to continue earning, the group went about their efforts with heightened caution. Ioana continued to direct traffic as before while Razvan and Dani kept watch over the entryways of the station for officers making their rounds. When an officer appeared in view, Dani gave a short, shrill whistle. Without turning around, Ioana promptly walked out of the lot and toward a park bench located opposite the station, where she sat and waited for the officers to complete their loop. About five minutes later, after the officers had left, she resumed her duties.
“You saw what I did?” Ioana asked me later that night. “We need to be defensive around the police. They give us fines, but they also beat us and confiscate our money. We can’t afford for that to happen. Because of this crisis, no one gives money like before.” Razvan concurred. “Back in ’92 you made three times what you make now at the Gara. … Now you struggle like hell for five or ten lei in the parking lot. There weren’t as many police back then as there are now. And people had more money back then, too. But this is how the world today works. I work longer, and I get paid less.”
To be sure, Razvan, Dani, and Ioana were not the only ones working the parking lot. A half dozen other homeless men and women also hustled for small change by directing traffic. Younger “street children” also ran errands for a small fee, buying bottles of soda or a candy bar from one of the kiosks inside the train station for those standing in parking spaces or otherwise keeping watch. There was, however, little coordination or competition between these workers. “There isn’t enough money changing hands here to attract anything like a mafia,” explained Dani, “and nobody wants trouble. We all get shut down when there’s trouble.” On the best of days, the three collectively earn around a hundred lei (approximately $8 each) in the parking lot. Typically, however, the group earned about half of that.
The income from the parking lot enabled the group to squat in one of the many abandoned properties not far from the station. They received free heat and electricity by tapping into a nearby street lamp as their power source. They also hacked into their neighbor’s cable television wire, providing them with access to several hundred channels. “The conditions aren’t good like in a ‘real apartment.’ There’s no running water so it’s hard to keep clean,” Ioana explained while giving me a tour. While appreciating the building’s shortcomings, I noted that these conditions were not all that different from other unrenovated properties on the lowest end of Bucharest’s real estate market.
Razvan crushed his can of beer and then tossed it into the corner of the room.Anything—if we don’t know, we adapt. And I’m a good worker. I have legs, I have hands—put me to work and you will see how I do! But, man, pay me. Before the crisis, I cleared construction pretty regularly. I made 70 lei a day. Now, when I can find it, I’m only offered a bottle of booze and 20 lei. I can’t make a future with that. What am I supposed to do? Raise children in the sewer canals? Let them grow up and work the parking lot with me? No, there is nothing for me here…
Reading the negative
The picture that emerges from this snapshot of the parcagii’s usual repertoire of life is decidedly active and clearly productive. Ioana, Dani, and Razvan, for example, monetized a public amenity in order to generate a cash flow. As a part of their scheme, each member of the crew constantly evaluated travelers in order to identify their potential needs, whether a parking space, assistance with luggage, or information about the coming and going of trains, for example. At the same time, they negotiated the temper of both the traveling public and the police. The crew also cultivated a strategic relationship with the latter in an effort to curb fines, harassment, and at times beatings. They even networked with other crews of parcagii, taking turns working the lots to prevent crowding and to manage the affect of ticketed patrons so they would not raise a complaint to the police of having been harassed. The hustle demanded constant improvisation and an industrious eye for how the hustle could be expanded in ever more lucrative ways. At the end of the day, their earnings, low as they may be, nevertheless enabled the group to participate as consumers in global chains of commodities, from beer and cigarettes to sugary snacks and cable television programming.
Over and above the crew’s insistence that they had nothing to do, the ethnographic record reports an entrepreneurial subject, one whose inventiveness and craft might even draw into question their claim to being homeless. While the crew is without question precariously housed, they nevertheless occupy a building with a secure roof that, through their ingenuity, comes with free utilities and a comprehensive media package. One would be justified in concluding from the picture formed in the ethnographic record that the parcagii’s usual repertoire of life is organized around a consistent rhythm of shuttling between home and their creative hustle at the Gara de Nord.
Such an etic analysis, however, stands completely at odds with the everyday affect under which these activities unfold.6 Rather than being engaged, the parcagii claimed emphatically that they were bored, and instead of seeing a life organized around all of the creative energy of their earning and what could be interpreted as homemaking, the crew insisted they had neither a job nor a home, much less a routine organized around the two. Instead of being caught up in the hustle, time slowed and boredom abounded for the crew as they claimed they were left with nothing to do (stau degeaba).
This emic sense of inactivity—of a troubling absence of activity—only begins to make sense ethnographically when the picture of the usual repertoire of life is viewed as a negative. As an inverted documentary space, the ethnographic negative reveals a set of what Lauren Berlant calls “attachments” to reasonably expected, but absent and foreclosed, activities that inform “the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on” (2011: 24). In the case of the parcagii, these attachments pertain to a particular kind of work and home life, as well as to a certain level of participation in consumerism. When work, home, and consumption do not conform to the crew’s most modest expectations, the remaining realm of possibilities before them empties of positive meaning. The crew interpret their efforts at keeping on living on not as adapting to an alternative order so much as collapsing entirely.
The crew, for example, may spend their day working the parking lot, but these efforts at getting by on the occasional tip, when viewed from the negative, only foreground their detachment from regular work in the formal economy. As Dani noted, his parents’ generation had enjoyed not just stable but guaranteed employment during communism. To be insecurely employed was unthinkable, while being unemployed was outright illegal. The Romanian government, during the communist era, actively and publicly celebrated the daily grind of manual labor, cementing the daily trip to work as an integral part of Romanians’ sense of masculinity (Kideckel 2008). While Razvan and Dani’s gigs as day laborers did not exactly conform to this model of a working life, it at least resonated within it. While underpaid and offering no guarantees about tomorrow, day labor at a construction site offered clear and familiar indicators of accomplishment: debris dissipated, equipment moved, and bags of cement turned into foundations and walls. They left the site physically tired and with enough money to drink a beer that they felt in their bodily aches and muscular pains that they had earned. When the 2008 financial crisis foreclosed day labor as a dependable source of income, Razvan and Dani did not understand themselves as switching careers from construction to parking lot attendants. With their sense of masculinity tied up with the expectation of steady manual labor, keeping watch over the parking lot failed to register as activity of any kind, much less working.
To be sure, in the heat of the summer, the position of parcagii is not without a sense of sweat. However, unlike the construction site, where Dani and Razvan spent their days lifting, pushing, and pulling, work as a parcagii asked little more than sitting on stairs or standing in vacant spaces. This sitting and standing, furthermore, did not appear to Razvan and Dani to add up to something bigger. Travelers ebbed and flowed with the train schedule independent of the crew’s efforts. Clocking in an additional hour in the lot did not add value or efficiency to the processing of ticketed passengers. Nor did an extra hour in the lot ensure a rise in income, as clocking an hour of overtime would on a construction site. As the crew glibly acknowledged, some people pay, but most do not. Days can pass without accumulating much more than the public’s ire. These acts of sitting, standing, and waiting, furthermore, do not link the crew to a historically celebrated tradition of hard work as does routinized construction; instead, the crew’s efforts were criminalized and subjected to police fines. When caught by the police in the wrong moment, the extra hour on the job resulted in the confiscation of the day’s earnings. When viewed from the negative, Razvan, Dani, and Ioana are not active entrepreneurs. They are inactive construction workers. Displacement from the formal economy prevented them from carrying out the manual labor they expected to do.
The negative reveals a similar detachment from home life. While the crew benefited from a sound roof overhead, one that was heated and serviced by utilities, they insisted they were homeless. This makes sense given the precarious claim the crew had to occupying that space. They neither owned nor rented their room but were squatting in an abandoned property. Much like their time in the parking lots, their efforts at homemaking had been coded illicit. Subsequently, they were subject to eviction at any moment. While their renting neighbors were aware of the crew’s general presence, the crew was invested in their presence not being interpreted by these neighbors as burdensome. To that end, home life for Razvan, Dani, and Ioana turned into a project of living in such a way as to give the impression that no one lived there at all. They avoided the property during daylight hours, and they minimized their coming and going at night. Music and conversations were relegated to the basement, where subterranean walls absorbed what sound they did make. The crew also limited interactions in and around the other parts of the property to the barely audible. Rather than a safe place to relax, the crew’s housing was a precarious space of hyper self-regulation, one in which the crew constantly sought to curtail activity in the present for the sake of avoiding future eviction.
The precariousness of the crew’s housing also foreclosed plans of developing a home life that would unfold along longer time horizons. Although Razvan and Ioana wanted to have children, raising them under the constant threat of eviction was unthinkable to them. Razvan’s inability to start a family only further dented his sense of masculinity and heightened his sense of inactivity. Razvan was neither productive at work nor reproductive at home. As the view from the negative illustrates, the crew interpreted their living space through its gaps, absences, and foreclosures rather than its presence, leading them to conclude it was “not a real home.”
In between work and home life, the limited money earned in the parking lot prepared the crew to participate in only the most marginal dimensions of consumption. While the crew earned enough to split bottles of Coca-Cola and packs of Marlboros at the end of the day, these purchases did not leave the group feeling incorporated in global consumerism. Instead, these moments called to mind the extent to which they were excluded from a city organized around routine consumption. They shopped at the station’s corner store rather than Carrefour, and they split the odd item rather than filling up a shopping cart (and ultimately a cupboard). Their consumerism, acts they may be, call to Razvan, Dani, and Ioana’s attention the extent of their detachment from the pleasures and possibilities taking shape around them.
Detached from steady work, stable housing, and the consistent consumption a regular income makes possible, the rhythm of everyday life failed to register with significance. Inactivity abounded as troublingly absent attachments to reasonably expected acts of labor, homemaking, and consumption overshadowed the remaining repertoire that animated the parcagii’s days. “The future is black—we have nothing,” Dani insisted on another night spent drinking in their basement. Razvan nodded in agreement, adding,
Yeah, life here is incredibly boring. Like when you have a job, you wake up in the morning, and you know everything you need to do and you do it. Afterward you can go home and say, “This is what I did.” But when I wake up and ask, “What can I do today?” I don’t know—I arrive at the station and ask people if I can carry their baggage?
Razvan shook his head and sat silently for a moment before continuing. “We spend all of our time at the Gara trying to get by. We drink a beer, a soda, whatever we can afford when we can, because we have to live,” Razvan explained, connecting consumer stimulation with the living of life. “But here in Romania, we can’t live much of a life at all. No, without a job and a home, we just sit around all day doing nothing.”
Conclusion
This article proposed a methodological shift in the ethnographic study of inactivity away from the picture of the usual repertoire of life captured by the ethnographic record to instead refocus attention on its negative. It is a methodological shift with consequences for how ethnographers theorize inactivity. Whereas the ethnographic record is primed to capture a world in constant motion in ways that interpret inactivity by recasting it as a quiet mode of production, the negative opens up a space to think ethnographically about inactivity as the actual absence of activity. To that end, the negative takes the present people, things, and actions that make up the ethnographic record and views them as a dark backdrop in order to bring to light the absences, gaps, and foreclosures that hover around the penumbra of social settings. When viewed from the negative, the problem of inactivity gets posed anew. Rather than prompting inquiries into how idle moments add up to something productive, if only unintentionally, the ethnographic negative draws attention to the powerful social affects derived from what is not, cannot, and likely will not happen. It is a methodological intervention that seeks to clarify when certain moments register as active as well as how, why, and to what affect others do not. As a method, the negative’s intent is to better attune ethnographic theorization to engagements with a moment of globalism that, for many, is marked materially, socially, and affectively by displacement and loss.
The negative, Walter Benjamin noted (2006: 27), allows the viewer “to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture.” When directed on the parcagii at the Gara de Nord, the negative in its ethnographic form brought into clear relief the impress of being detached from socialist-era expectations of regular work and a steady home, but also cast aside in the present by a city organized around consumer practices. There was also little cause for hope that better times were awaiting on a distant horizon. The negative, in this instance, foregrounded a set of historical and ethnographically observable circumstances that allowed for boredom and a sense of “doing nothing” to predominate the everyday life of a group of parking attendants over and above their observable hustle.
The negative, ultimately, draws attention to the social, affective, and material mechanics that shape global capitalism’s undoing of ordinary life. As a complement to an ethnographic record primed to reveal what continues to endure at the margins of global capitalism, if only as collateral damage, the negative provides a parallel invitation to think creatively about what more might be done to incorporate and enrich the economically vulnerable.
Notes
Ethnographic fieldwork with these parking attendants occurred from the winter of 2010 through 2011 and continued during shorter research trips in the summers of 2012, 2014, and 2015. Pseudonyms are used throughout the article. The accompanying images are by the author and serve two purposes, the first of which is illustrative. The photographs were shot, edited, and published in black and white in an effort to capture the material conditions, embodiment, and mood of the field. Second, while taken in a documentary style, the photograph is as much an interpretation of the field as is the accompanying text (see Sontag [1973] 2011: 6–7). The included black-and-white images serve to complement and extend the meaning of the ethnographic negative developed in this article’s text.
As Krisztina Fehérváry importantly argues, “scarcity” is a comparative term. Socialist-era perceptions of scarcity make sense only in comparison to the enormous waste of Western capitalism (2009: 434–435).
Just four years into Romania’s transition to capitalism, real gross domestic product fell by 15.4 percent and industrial output fell by 23.3 percent; around one million workers—a quarter of the industrial workforce—exited the labor market (Harris 1994: 2861). Romania’s inflation rate hovered around 300 percent, and real income had dropped 40 percent against 1989 levels (Verdery 1995: 631). By 1999, the share of the population living below the national poverty line doubled from 20 percent to 41 percent (Petrescu 2002).
The discussion of postcommunist Romania in this section is a revised and updated version of a more extended discussion (O’Neill 2014).
Others have noted a formal similarity between the production of a photograph and of the ethnographic record. As Christopher Pinney observed, “The anthropologist’s exposure to data occurs during a period of inversion from his normal reality, a stage that is formally identical to the production of the photographic negative” (1990: 53).
This research takes a phenomenological approach to affect and is situated most clearly within the approaches of Kathleen Stewart (2007), Lauren Berlant (2011), and Sara Ahmed (2010), rather than the ontological line of affect theory, which begins with Gilles Deleuze (1988). From this phenomenological perspective, affect promises a way of theorizing how individual bodies and historical processes come into contact, revealing how the body mediates between what is sensed and what is known (Schaefer 2013).
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