Drift

Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

Jeff Ferrell

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780520295544
• eBook ISBN: 9780520968271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This book was written late in the North American night, with the rumbling thuds and booming train horns of the nearby rail yard echoing through my windows, reminding me of the train hoppers and gutter punks out there rolling through the darkness." In Drift, Jeff Ferrell shows how dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Examining the history of drifting, he situates contemporary drift within today's economic, legal, and cultural dynamics. He also highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping hobo—by tracing the hobo's legal and political history and by detailing his own immersion in the world of contemporary train-hoppers. Along the way, Ferrell sheds light on the ephemeral intensity of drifting communities and explores the contested politics of drift: the strategies that legal authorities employ to control drifters in the interest of economic development, the social and spatial dislocations that these strategies ironically exacerbate, and the ways in which drifters create their own slippery forms of resistance. Ferrell concludes that drift constitutes a necessary subject of social inquiry and a way of revitalizing social inquiry itself, offering as it does new models for knowing and engaging with the contemporary world.

PART ONE

Illicit Mobility

1

Drift Dialectics

This is a book about drift and drifters in their many forms—a book about the ways in which dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. In it I sketch at least something of drift’s long history, while also situating contemporary drift within the particular economic, social, and cultural dynamics of the present day. In this I also try to show that drift is today a global phenomenon—perhaps even the defining trajectory of a globalized world. Throughout, I explore the contested politics of drift—both the ways in which legal and political authorities work to control drift and drifters and the ways in which drifters and those who embrace drift create their own slippery strategies of resistance. I also trace the use of drift as a conceptual orientation within sociology, criminology, and other disciplines, and I propose that we can bring these and other disciplines into closer engagement with the contemporary world by learning the theoretical and methodological lessons offered by those adrift.

For all that, though, there’s something I must admit; you’ll see it soon enough in this first chapter anyway. This is the fact that, despite my best efforts to maintain a broad, global perspective on drift, I’m drawn to one particular sort of drift: that undertaken historically by the North American hobo, and in contemporary times by the hobo’s bastard descendant, the train-hopping gutter punk. There are a number of reasons for this. First, as has been my habit in other research projects (Ferrell 1996, 2001, 2006), I prefer to do research as independently and immersively as possible and with as few resources as I can manage—and, based as I am in the United States, it was certainly more feasible to undertake research with North American drifters than it was with, say, Syrian war refugees in Turkey or North Africans crossing the Mediterranean to southern Europe. As will become clear throughout the book, drifting also tends to be highly uncertain and distinctly episodic, so this too necessitated a lengthy, loose research strategy more readily undertaken from my home turf. But really, as long as I’m being honest, it’s more than that. It’s that the music and culture of hobos, High Plains drifters, blues travelers, and gutter punks are part of who I am and were so long before I began to understand the shadowy links between them. It’s the fact that this book was written late in the North American night, with the rumbling thuds and booming train horns of the nearby rail yard echoing through my windows, reminding me of the train hoppers and gutter punks out there rolling through the darkness. Most of all, as I’ll explain in chapters 5 and 6, it’s because I stumbled into my research with gutter punks and contemporary hobos right in the middle of writing this more general book on drift and drifters. Unintended and unplanned, this accidental association led me to all sorts of historical and contemporary insights regarding drift; it took me beyond my own expectations, to places I otherwise couldn’t have found or imagined.

And if that’s not drift, I don’t know what is.

UNCERTAIN TRAJECTORIES

For those caught up in them, particular historical moments trace distinctly different trajectories across the arc of prospects and perception. Among certain adherents to the mythology of Western modernity, one moment after another has often seemed connected along a straight and ascending line to a better future—a future fulfilled by the insights of science, the convenience of technology, and the satisfactions of material prosperity. Within and against this modernist ascension, fundamentalists have often sought to reverse its trajectory, to return the social order to the past principles of founding fathers and founding documents. Reactionaries all, they push back against what they see as prevailing myths of progress, afraid that, if left unchecked, the social order will move only toward accumulating moral decay. Political revolutionaries often see, or long for, a trajectory that resembles that of a rocket launch—a new social order, blasting free from the old, taking flight, roaring upward toward a firmament of previously unimagined possibility. When, on the other hand, a social order fails of its own accord, from inside its own rotting contradictions, some find themselves caught in an opposite trajectory, descending quickly and deeply into economic ruin and existential despair; others ride a sad social spiral, a process of circling back time and again on recurring problems, each time a bit farther from their solution; and some, Durkheimians especially, sense a dispersal out from the middle, a centrifugal failure of social bonds and cultural cohesion. From the view of certain non-Western religious and cultural traditions, of course, it might be added that all these trajectories are soundly inconsequential, if not entirely illusory, subsumed as they are within an endless, circling trajectory of time and space reincarnated.

In any case, all such trajectories remain entangled in the messy course of human history and likewise remain contested and compromised in the practice of everyday social life. Because of this, the notion of a historical moment’s trajectory is probably most useful when thought of not as some sort of teleological determinism but as a narrative device by which certain stories can be told, or perhaps an analytic metaphor by which certain historical tendencies can be understood. Adopting this more modest sense, I argue here that the present historical moment is tracing a trajectory that is, oddly enough, defined largely by its insistent lack of definition. This is the trajectory of drift. Drift follows neither the straight-line, forward motion of progress nor the stern reversals of fundamentalism. It neither ascends nor descends, and it remains too uncertain a motion to maintain even the circling arc of a spiral. Sometimes drift comes close to the unraveling trajectory of a failed Durkheimian social order—but even here it is uncertain in its uncertainty, since as we shall see, drifters sometimes consider their unsettled circumstances a new sort of social and moral map. Likewise, drift is often the trajectory of the disengaged and the dispossessed—but disengaged from what, dispossessed of what, and on whose terms? Certainly drift suggests some sort of disruption, some degree of spatial and temporal dislocation—yet this in turn implies some degree of certainty, some coordinates of time and space, against which to measure drift’s disruptions.

“Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps,” C. Wright Mills (1959, 3) said a half century ago, catching as he did something of modern society’s overwhelming intrusion into the everyday spheres of lived experience. Today we might say that more and more women and men feel that their lives are an accumulation of radical uncertainties, sensing as they do that they are left to negotiate a world that seems less a series of traps than a series of slippages (Cooper 2014; J. Young 2007). If for Mills and others the defining critical metaphor was the trap, and with it personal trajectories that were stalled out, stuck in the stasis of unexamined assumptions and social inequality, the more useful metaphor today is drift, and with it a scattershot trajectory through assumptions that seem always in the process of fading away, with or without examination. Sometimes the streets are too dead for dreaming; other times there are no sure streets on which to dream, no signposts and no destination, no paths to anywhere. Sometimes you stand still, waiting for your education or your next job or the revolution, but waiting at least for something; sometimes, as Tom Kromer (1935) wrote of his life adrift as an impoverished hobo during the Great Depression, you wander for no reason, on the way to nowhere, while waiting for nothing.

Lives adrift, folks waiting for nothing or on the way to nowhere known—these circumstances circle the world today. A global crisis that interweaves economic inequality and ecological decay with conflicts over immigration, development, and consumption has set these circumstances in motion. Within this crisis drift has come to pervade everyday experience, incorporating both normative and spatial dislocation, resulting from both economic development and economic collapse, and flourishing precisely in those situations meant to contain it. Ongoing civil and transnational warfare continues to spawn swelling refugee populations. Repressive governmental regimes engage in the forced expulsion of dissidents and minority groups—and when these regimes are confronted, even successfully, further dislocation often results. Within China, across Europe, and around the globe, economic migrants wander in search of work, or are simply moved en masse from one work locale to another as economic demands change. In the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, the corporate criminality of the past decade’s mortgage/banking crisis, the ongoing destruction of low-cost housing as part of urban redevelopment schemes, and the proliferation of part-time and low-wage service work all conspire to preclude certainties of home, shelter, or destination. Moving from house to house or country to country, sleeping in cars or temporary encampments, haunting streets and train stations, those cut loose from certainty find little in the way of spatial or social stability.

In this world, impoverished Central Americans—many of them unaccompanied minors—risk assault, extortion, and police apprehension to hitch rides through Mexico atop a US-bound freight train, variously known as La Bestia—the Beast—or El Tren de la Muerte—the Death Train (see Nazario 2006). Sometimes they make it to within sight of the US border but no farther, holing up indefinitely in drainage canals or river beds; other times they drown in the Rio Grande or end up in emergency shelters or US migrant detention centers that mostly resemble jails, waiting to be sent back. Cubans traverse eight Central American countries in their attempts to get to the United States, “in an exodus that some officials have likened to a stampede”; a group of Haitians, part of “an extraordinary wave of Haitian migrants streaming to the U.S.,” crosses nine countries, only to find the final border closed (Robles 2016, 8; Semple 2016 A1). Trafficked children and migratory sex workers around the world subsist as perpetual “new arrivals,” dislocated both from home communities and new areas of residence; in Italy, nuns intercede on their behalf. Migrants from rural areas pour into sprawling encampments outside Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Ulan Bator or find themselves shuttled between one country and the next by political and economic upheaval. Young Arabs find a failure of opportunity and dream of moving abroad. Millions of battered Syrian refugees, remnants of Syria’s “lost generation,” flood across Europe, some by way of a Norwegian border outpost 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. African refugees in search of work or safety brave the lawlessness of Libya to crowd rickety boats across the Mediterranean, only to find themselves bounced back and forth between southern European borders—if they are lucky enough to survive the sea crossing in the first place. Other African refugees—a half million, mostly Somalis—languish in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, said to be the world’s largest.

In southern Europe, a native-born generation finds that today, even advanced degrees leave them lost between dead-end jobs and unemployment—and so they sleep in their cars, when they are not considering driving them into a wall. Young Portuguese professionals look to relocate to Brazil or Mozambique. In Spain, home evictions leave people on the streets and hungry, so they dig in urban trash bins for food; in the countryside battles erupt over the gleaning of harvest leftovers. Migrants meanwhile storm Spain’s North African city of Melilla, desperate to reach a migration center. Italian authorities try to intercept migrant ships that were on a course for Italy and then abandoned by traffickers. Sicilian towns care for arriving migrants and bury those who don’t survive—though the Identification and Expulsion Center outside Rome is described as an inhumane prison. In Greece young migrants camp in an abandoned furniture factory, looking to move on toward Northern Europe.

But Northern Europe harbors instabilities of its own. In Germany, a “shadow labor market” of poorly paid temporary workers is now seen as essential to the country’s global standing. And as regards refugees, the country confronts an ongoing problem after a recent terrorist attack—“a vexing problem, common in Europe: how to handle hundreds of thousands of virtually stateless wanderers who are either unwilling or unable to return home” (Smale, Gall, and Pianigiani 2016, A1). France puts its own citizens on trial for assisting refugees, and eventually razes the sprawling migrant camp at Calais, from which migrants sought entry into the United Kingdom; evicted Calais migrants now relocate to camps in Paris instead. Meanwhile, even well-educated young people find themselves jobless: French undercover journalist Florence Aubenas (2011) writes The Night Cleaner, a bestseller about the existential and social costs of pervasive part-time work. Also in this context the eclectic, unstructured Nuit Debout (Night, Standing Up) movement emerges against labor market inequities, and inequities in general.

In Japan—even before the 2011 tsunami and nuclear crisis—almost half of the country’s young workers are consigned to temporary, “irregular” jobs amidst a collapsing career structure. Chinese officials announce a plan to move 250 million rural residents into Chinese cities and smaller, newly built towns; some 330,000 “ecological migrants,” victims of global warming and other environmental problems, have been moved to fabricated “villages.” Already, rural migrant workers make up a third of Beijing’s population, and with no place to live, occupy abandoned air-defense tunnels underneath the city. In Beijing and other East Asian cities, other homeless people shelter inside McDonald’s restaurants, in the process earning the nickname “McRefugees”; elsewhere in China, gangs of grifters lure isolated, impoverished men into mining work, then murder them so as to collect compensation from mining companies. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group, are confined to governmental camps in Myanmar. Those who manage to leave find themselves abandoned at sea, held for ransom, often unable to find a country that will accept them as refugees. When 3,000 do make it to Malaysia, they find themselves “lost in time”—“our lives are just waiting,” says one (quoted in Buckley and Ramzy 2015, A1). Waiting also afflicts the thousands of refugees Australia holds in off-shore island detention centers—as does sexual abuse, ill health, and pervasive despair. Onshore, homeless “gypsy kids” camp illegally near the resort town of Byron Bay, dodging police and hoping to avoid fines for public drinking.

In the Philippines “informal settlers” make up a quarter of Manila’s population, with thousands of them living and sleeping among the dead in Manila’s North Cemetery; as part of a beautification plan ahead of a regional forum, officials round up and detain the homeless by the hundreds. In post-Soviet, free-market Russia, “the bomzh—a homeless person in dirty clothes, begging in the metro underpasses, at churches, lying on park benches or scavenging near train stations—has become omnipresent in Russian cities and towns” (Stephenson 2006, 113). Two hundred thousand civilians flee a Pakistani military campaign in North Waziristan; tens of thousands of Afghans are forced out of Pakistan a year later after a terrorist attack. Israel expels thousands of Sudanese and Eritrean migrants. By 2014, Lebanon has taken in over one million registered Syrian war refugees. A ship filled with five hundred migrants from Gaza sinks off the coast of Malta, after being rammed by another human trafficker’s boat. Hundreds of thousands flee the economic collapse in Venezuela, some of them aboard smugglers’ boats bound for Curaçao.

Meanwhile, in the United States, migrant farmworkers continue to face family disruption, limited educational opportunities, and deportation (Holmes 2013). Graduate students, part-time instructors, and non-tenure-track instructors, some of them so poor they receive food stamps, now make up three quarters of college faculty The newly homeless and unemployed drift from city to city, sleeping in flood drains beneath the streets of Las Vegas or squatting in the countless Las Vegas houses lost to foreclosure. Others sleep in New York City’s Penn Station or become semipermanent residents of cheap mid-American motels (Dum 2016). US national parks fill not with recreational campers but with the down-and-out and the displaced—“Tensions Soar as Drifters Call National Parks Home,” headlines the New York Times (Healy 2016: A9)—and retirement-age “workcampers” travel in mobile homes and old campers from seasonal job to seasonal job, looking to make late-life money. Amidst all of them drift the shell-shocked, sometimes suicidal veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

Unsurprisingly, then, Zygmunt Bauman (2002, 343) described refugees, even fifteen years ago, as “perhaps the most rapidly swelling of all the categories of world population,” and Saunders (2010, 1, 21) more recently estimated current worldwide rural-to-urban migration as involving “two or three billion humans, perhaps a third of the world’s population,” with China alone already producing some “150 to 200 million . . . peasants ‘floating’ between village and city.” The United Nations in turn estimates that some sixty million people, the majority of them children, have now been made refugees by war and other upheavals; in this context it warns of a “lost generation” of children deprived of schooling. With ongoing global warming, other reports suggest, those cast adrift will only increase in number (Chan 2015; Sengupta 2016).

FOUR DIALECTICS OF DRIFT

As suggested by this brief tour of the contemporary world, being cast adrift is no simple matter; it invokes a tangle of switchbacks and uncertainties, a sort of sideways skittering across the surfaces of social life. My attempts to make sense of drift, and to explore its underlying dynamics, have followed a similar course; appropriately enough, they’ve unfolded as a series of mistakes, hesitations, and reconsiderations, leading me down one wrong road and then another. Through all this intellectual wandering, my sense of drift has taken shape not in a straightforward manner but in terms of contradi...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part One. Illicit Mobility
• Part Two. American Drift
• Part Three. Uncertain Knowledge
• Notes
• References
• Index