The outraged passenger - Complaint letters as sources for a sociology of emotions

 The outraged Passenger - Complaint letters as sources for a sociology of emotions.

For this session I am proposing a presentation that will focus on one of the main sources of my current research project on subjectivities in urban infrastructures of transit:  letters of complaint by passengers of the New York City subway from the period between 1956 and 1992.

Having only recently been discovered in the archive of the New York City Transit Museum, they provide a unique and valuable source that allows to address the dynamics of subjectivation and emotion in the context of urban transit.

 These letters draw an image of the New York City subway as a highly tension-laden and emotional charged territory, with most emotions and conflicts played out along lines of race, class and gender. Moreover, the complaints allow insights into the heterogeneous experiences and structures of feeling of the passengers. In the administrative responses and framings of outrage, self-disclosure, anxiety, pleas and threats, the complex and multilayered forms of passenger emotions become visible and negotiable. As such, these complaints can also be read as testimonies of overstraining and anxiety that highlight the fragile emotional conditions of actors  in urban spaces.

As rich as these ego documents may seem, the question how to analyze them opens up a wide set of problems and methodological issues. As such, they not only touch the broader conception of how we can analyze structures of feeling and subjectivities via this type of data, but also address the relations between individual subjects and broader social structures and dynamics.

 In my presentation, I will discuss the methodological complexity of this source and propose strategies of analysis, also drawing from  methods from the disciplines of history and historical anthropology.

Stefan Höhne