Patients of the State

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

"Shit" is the last word in Gabriel García Márquez's short and moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel (1979). The colonel, awaiting the outcome of an upcoming cockfight, is replying to his wife who impatiently wants to know what they will eat. As the cock's owner, who is also its feeder and trainer, the colonel will be entitled to 20 percent of the winning bet. The colonel refuses to sell the rooster to pay for food. Instead, he asks his wife to wait forty-four more days and to place her trust in the rooster that "can't lose."

The colonel's reply, mierda, can be read as a foul response to an anxious and demanding wife. Yet the meaning of that answer transcends the specific moment in the narrative. The colonel feels "pure, explicit, and invincible" (62), Márquez tells us, because he is articulating his feelings after so many years of suffering, disappointments, frustrations, and fifteen years of waiting for the government pension to which he is entitled "after risking [his] neck in the civil war" (60). Every Friday, after visiting the postmaster, he realizes that "no one writes to the colonel." His expectations for the pension barely sustain him, and he and his wife continue to have difficulty in making ends meet, so he hangs his hopes on the rooster's victory.

Márquez's emotive tale can be read as a realistic and illustrative narrative of many people's experiences in Latin America. The governments that fail to deliver promised protection to their citizens but are swift in delivering terror against dissenters are represented in the story by the pension that never arrives and the loss of a son to state repression. The story also expresses the region's political instability: "Just think about it, [in the last fifteen years] there have been seven Presidents, and each President changes his Cabinet at least ten times, and each Minister changes his staff at least a hundred times" (26). Finally, the book can also be read as a highly perceptive account of the meanings and feelings at work in the experience of waiting. No One Writes to the Colonel chronicles endless waiting from the point of view of the colonel and his wife and masterfully describes the changing import of that waiting time from hopefulness to resignation. The central characters are not given names, which increases the reader's sense of their insignificance in the light of such bureaucratic indifference ("Those documents have passed through thousands and thousands of hands, in thousands and thousands of offices, before they reached God knows which department" [26]). Yet the lack of names also points to the fact that anybody can be the colonel. Never-ending waiting, sometimes hopeful, other times resigned, characterizes the lives of the dispossessed. It defines their identity, much like that of the colonel who becomes "a man with no other occupation than waiting for the mail every Friday" (17). The poor may stubbornly defend their dignity while they retain hope for a better future. But in their daily lives, "it is always the same story" (24); they are forced to wait for powerful others to make good on their promises. "Wait" is a command that, to paraphrase this book's opening quote by Martin Luther King Jr., rings in the ear of every poor person with piercing familiarity. Waiting, in other words, is a recurring, almost modal, experience among the destitute.

Waiting Inscribed in Space

"Early in the morning of October 10, 1970, in the midst of a cold rain," writes the urbanist Janice Perlman in her four-decade-long study of three favelas in Rio de Janeiro, "the military police and several large garbage trucks (note symbolism) arrived in front of Catacumba and proceeded to remove everyone and everything" (2010: 78). What was once a thriving community climbing up the hills facing the Lagoa Rodrigo Freitas is now the place of a "little-used park and million dollar condos" (63). Eviction was swiftly accomplished; not so much relocation of favelados. Fourteen hundred and twenty families were sent to the adjacent conjuntos [government-run apartment complexes] of Guaporé and Quitungo, 350 to Cidade de Deus, 87 to Vila Kennedy, and 350, too poor for apartments, were sent off to triage units in a remote area call Paciencia.... The families sent to the triage units found row upon row of attached one-room wooden houses in the middle of nowhere. There was no access to jobs, schools, clinics, or work. It is only fitting that the name of the place where they were left to rot was Paciencia (Patience).... When I returned to Rio in 1973, for the first time after the [original] study was done [published as The Myth of Marginality (1976)], I went to Paciencia by bus—a trip of over three and a half hours—to see what it was like. I passed hundreds of acres of uncultivated lands and saw neither dwellings nor signs of commerce. What I found when we arrived was a variation on a debtors' prison, a dead end without exit. I will never forget speaking with a woman in her front door, who turned to me and asked, "Where does the end of the world end? ... Where will they throw us, finally?" ... Indeed, it did seem like o fin do mundo. The ranks of those sent to the triage housing from all of the removed favelas were further swelled by those sent there for defaulting on their monthly payments in the conjuntos. Hundreds of additional triage units were under construction when I was there in 1973—red brick boxes with corrugated metal roofs all lined up in the dry dirt, baking in the sun. (78–80; my emphasis)

In this book I offer a sociological sketch of the urban poor's experience of waiting, which is so widespread among them but has rarely been scrutinized in a systematic way. I take the reader into three different social universes in contemporary Argentina in order to dissect the meanings that usually long and sometimes endless waiting has for the underprivileged, and to examine the ways in which "making poor people wait" works as a strategy of domination.

Waiting, writes Pierre Bourdieu in Pascalian Meditations, is one of the privileged ways of experiencing the effects of power. The elements of "making people wait ... delaying without destroying hope ... adjourning without totally disappointing" (2000: 228) are, according to Bourdieu, integral to the workings of domination. Although certain links between power and time have been thoroughly examined in the social sciences, waiting—as both a temporal region and as an activity intricately bound up with the constitution and reproduction of submission—remains, with few exceptions, "hardly mapped and badly documented" (Schweizer 2008: 1; see also Gasparini 1995). This is understandable, given the preferred focus in the social sciences on individual and collective action, or on the event as that "historical fact that leaves a unique and singular trace, one that marks history by its particular and inimitable consequences" (Dumoulins quoted in Tarrow 1996: 587).

In writing about this inattention to waiting, Bourdieu asserts that we need to "catalogue, and analyze, all the behaviors associated with the exercise of power over other people's time both on the side of the powerful (adjourning, deferring, delaying, raising false hopes, or conversely, rushing, taking by surprise) and on the side of the 'patient,' as they say in the medical universe, one of the sites par excellence of anxious, powerless waiting" (2000: 228). In drawing upon extensive multisited ethnographic fieldwork, in this book I make a first step toward the construction of such a catalogue of poor people's waiting experiences.

TIME, POWER, AND THE (SCANT) SOCIOLOGY OF WAITING

The ways in which human beings in their lifeworlds think, feel about, and act on time have been the subject of much scholarly work in the social sciences. There have been more general treatments (Sorokin and Merton 1937; Hall 1959; Schutz 1964; Durkheim 1965; Giddens 1986; Munn 1992; Levine 1997; Flaherty 1999) as well as more empirically informed ones, many of them based on ethnographic work (Roth 1963; Mann 1969; Geertz 1973; Zerubavel 1979; Young 2004; Flaherty, Freiding, and Sautu 2005; Flaherty 2010). The relationship between the workings of power (Lukes 2004) and the experiences of time has been well studied. To name some examples, time has been examined as a crucial dimension in the workings of gift exchanges (Bourdieu 1977) and in the operation of patronage networks (Scott and Kerkvliet 1977). In both these cases, the objective truth of these usually unequal exchanges needs to be misrecognized so that the exchanges can function smoothly, and time is responsible for the veiling (Bourdieu 1998; Ortner 2006).

Historical and ethnographic works also illustrate that temporality is malleable. It can be the object of a "continual process of bargaining," such as when patients and doctors jointly structure the passage of time in a tuberculosis hospital (Roth 1963); or it can be the object of frantic "marking," such as occurs in the security wing of an English prison (Cohen and Taylor 1972). Time can also be the target of a constant onslaught, as Paul Willis (1977) illustrates in his dissection of the rejection by the students at one school of the school's arduously constructed timetable; or it can be the medium through which discipline is imposed and negotiated, as E. P. Thompson (1994) demonstrates in his classic analysis of the changes in the inward notations of time during the early stages of industrial capitalism. Collective time senses are deeply intertwined with both the workings of and resistance to social domination. Time is an important locus of both conflict and acquiescence (see also Hochschild 2001; Thompson and Bunderson 2001; Jacobs and Gerson 2005; Purser 2006).

Despite this ample literature, waiting has not received the same scholarly attention. In highlighting the ubiquity of this experience, the essayist Edna O'Brien writes: "Everyone I know is waiting." Hinting at the sense of powerlessness that comes with waiting, she continues by noting, "and almost everyone I know would like to rebut it, since it is slightly demeaning, reeks of helplessness, and shows we are not fully in command of ourselves" (1995: 177). With all due respect to O'Brien, waiting does not affect everybody in the same way, nor is it experienced in a similar fashion. Rather, waiting is stratified, and there are variations in waiting time that are socially patterned and responsive to power differentials (Schwartz 1974; 1975). In Queuing and Waiting, Barry Schwartz's now classic study of queues as social systems, the author writes: "Typical relationships obtain between the individuals' position within a social system and the extent to which he waits for and is waited for by other members of the system. In general, the more powerful and important a person is, the more others' access to him must be regulated" (1975: 847). To be kept waiting, he continues, "especially to be kept waiting an unusually long time, is to be the subject of an assertion that one's own time (and therefore, one's social worth) is less valuable than the time and worth of the one who imposes the wait" (856; see also Comfort 2008). Schwartz's book established the basic contours for a sociological analysis of waiting. Since then, however, the unequal distribution of waiting time and the activities that go with it have received scant empirical treatment.

The research that does exist shows that extensive waiting periods "weary people" (Piven and Cloward 1971: 160) and act as obstacles to accessing particular programs (Redko, Rapp, and Carlson 2006). If frequent contact with long queues truly molds people's subjectivities (Comfort 2008; Bourdieu 2000), how exactly does it happen that such efforts toward some specified end result in modifying the behaviors of those who wait? If delays are not only suffered but also interpreted (Schwartz 1975), what meanings do those who are routinely forced to wait attribute to the waiting? And, if waiting makes the waiter feel "dependent and subordinate" (Schwartz 1975: 856), how does waiting produce these subjective effects of dependency and subordination? In other words, how does objective waiting become subjective submission?

TWO CLASSICS ON WAITING

In stark contrast with the paucity of examinations by social scientists of the experience of waiting (on how and why people "put up" with it, and on what sorts of effects this tolerance has on their being in the world), literary renditions of waiting as a lived reality, as that "bitter, cosmic task" (Gilman 1987: 78), abound. Waiting has been the implicit or explicit subject of classic romance novels as well as of several contemporary narratives (Jin 2000; Arango 1995; Sorokin 2008). However, as I ventured into my field sites and began to think systematically about how the dominated make sense of their waiting time, two literary masterpieces became particularly inspiring to me: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka's The Trial. These two works provided what Herbert Blumer would call "sensitizing devices," which first made me aware of how much goes on when people "just wait" although seemingly nothing happens; and, second, helped me realize that the experience of waiting has a processual and relational character.

According to Hugh Kenner, there is a good reason that there was never a play about waiting before Beckett's Waiting for Godot. "No dramatist before Beckett," Kenner writes, "ever thought of attempting such a thing. It seems contrary to the grain of the theater, where the normal unit is the event, and where intervals between events are cleverly filled so as to persuade us that the cables are weaving and tightening that shall produce the next event" (1987: 61). Dozens of essays have been written about Waiting for Godot, but I won't attempt to summarize their many interesting insights on the play's substance, message, impact, reception, and the like (see the essays in Bloom 1987). Rather, I want to highlight just one main element that will serve as a guide for the ethnographic inquiries that follow.

In Waiting for Godot we could find a paradigmatic example of waiting as a lack of activity ... but with a twist. Richard Gilman puts it this way: Beckett's is "a play of absence, a drama whose binding element is what does not take place" (1987: 70; emphasis in original). In the play, Hugh Kenner states, there is "nothing to be done" (1987: 55), and the identities of the two main characters are defined by what they do: they are "men who must wait" (Gilman 1987: 72). Harold Schweizer emphasizes this latter dimension by pointing out that this focus on the identity of those who wait is the novelty of the play. He asserts that it centers on "how we are" in the waiting and on the "quality of waiting as such":

When we say that in Godot we just wait, we mean that waiting has been emptied of all practical, philosophical, or theological resonance. ... What Vladimir and Estragon wait for is perhaps only to get to—and to get us to—this literalism of waiting, to experience their waiting first and foremost, and perhaps ultimately, as nothing other than the endurance of time. For this is not waiting for something that would validate, cancel, or fulfill waiting. This is the kind of waiting we fear that waiting—or living—might amount to: just waiting. (2008: 12)

But there would be no play if Vladimir and Estragon had not "devise[d]—it is the exact word—a provisional, tactical liberty, one of speech and small gestures. They are like prisoners free to amuse one another or to take advantage of the penitentiary's game room, the crucial difference being that for them the prison walls are as wide as the earth" (Gilman 1987: 72). And therein lies the beauty, and some would claim the success, of Beckett's play: a lot goes on (between the main characters, between them and others) when nothing apparently happens. That is, after all, why we have a play. This seemingly simple message ultimately became my starting point. What happens while people hang out and hang on an expected decision in the welfare office, in the outside of the RENAPER, or in the shantytown with apparently nothing else to do other than waiting for their "Godot," such as access to a welfare program, a much-needed id, a lawyer that will bring good news? In contrast to my previous work on popular politics (Auyero 2003, 2007), in which I paid attention to "moments of madness" (Zolberg 1972) and other grand episodes of mass contention in which people break with their daily routines and make collective, public claims, here I analyze such unimportant happenings that never make it to the news.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Patients of the Stateby Javier Auyero Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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