The importance of waiting

Most of the time, sociologists pay attention to striking social phenomena and philosophers do so as well in their way. Or they study problems that need to be solved. Usually they study problems that catch the eye. However, some sociologists and philosophers study less striking if not inconspicuous phenomena of everyday life, or phenomena that just happen, because they just happen, like those who use an ethnomethodological approach often do (mainly in the Anglo-Saxon countries; for example Erving Goffman), or (mainly in the francophone area) those who apply and develop the ideas of the French scholar Michel de Certeau, who studied society from philosophical, sociological and other perspectives, and the ethnologist Marc Augé. They and their students investigated or still investigate such everyday practices like living in a house, cooking, or making a ride on the metro. Indeed, some sociologists and philosophers do pay attention to themes of everyday of life in their studies. However, as Kalekin-Fishman has shown “From the diversity of theoretical approaches to everyday life it is clear that this area of study has no single empirical orientation.” (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013, p. 718) Moreover, “[d]espite the fact that everyday life has been important to social theory since the initiation of sociology as a science, the interest in investigating it as a phenomenon in its own right is relatively recent”. (id. p. 724) In fact, till today the study of everyday life has been a casual approach and not an independent field of interest, as it should be for such an important aspect of life. Even more, everyday life is not just an aspect of life, but it is life. Be it is it may, and whatever the approach is and whether it is embedded in other studies or whether it isn’t, studies of daily life are very interesting and important, if not significant, since they touch real life as it is lived most of the time. Nevertheless, the present investigations of everyday life still ignore or overlook some of the most basic but also frequent human activities. Take waiting. A closer look at it makes clear that waiting is one of the most common “activities” we perform. Moreover, it is an “activity” we spend much time on, maybe more than on anything else we do, with the exception of sleeping (which should be investigated, however). Nonetheless, when searching the internet, I haven’t found any study that pays attention to waiting. It is, as if from the perspective of the social sciences and from the philosophical perspective the phenomenon doesn’t exist or at least that it doesn’t deserve attention. But can an activity we spend so much time on be so trivial that we can ignore it? To ask the question is already to answer it. I think that it is weird to ignore waiting in sociology and philosophy, since it is an essential activity in life. It is not without reason that so much money is spent on making waiting spaces, like at bus stops, in railway stations, in airports, etc. Why spending this money if waiting is a ghost idea. Why spending this money if nobody would be waiting, not only now and then but often and sometimes for quite a long time? It’s true, planners think about where to make waiting areas; what is the best place for them; how many people probably will use a certain waiting space; and so on. I don’t doubt the value of their capacities and their work, but on a general social scientific and philosophical level the idea of waiting doesn’t exist. The most common is often the least perceived, and just this makes that it deserves attention.

Some literature
- Augé, Marc, Non-Lieux, Paris: Seuil, 1992.
- Augé, Marc, Un ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013.
- Certeau, Michel de, The practice of everyday life. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1984.
- Certeau, Michel de; L. Giard; P. Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and
Cooking. Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972.
- Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.
- Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, “Sociology of everyday life”, in Current Sociology Review, vol. 61 (5-6), 2013, pp. 714–732.