About the Project
Description
“Rêver, c’est le bonheur, attendre, c’est la vie” – a truth already realized by Victor Hugo. Waiting is a consequence of the human condition and, at the same time, ubiquitous part of our everyday life. We wait at supermarket checkouts and counters, in railway stations and agencies; we wait for waiters and mailmen, for vacation and for Santa Claus. In spite of all our efforts to avoid waiting time, we are continually compelled to wait, and we have to find ways and means of handling it.
Existentialism associates waiting with the awareness of one's own mortality. „Waiting is always waiting for death“, as Franz Werfel puts it, while for Martin Heidegger human existence, as „Being-toward-death“, is in principle determined by anxiety, forcing the individual to conduct its life. Both thinkers point to a general anthropological issue which is also intended by Helmuth Plessner in his „Law of the Utopian Standpoint“, stating that, to a certain extent, man lives in the future. For such a being, plans and expectations play an outstanding role, but often their fulfillment is beyond the power of the individual: „both my organism and my society impose upon me, and upon my inner time, certain sequences of events that involve waiting,” write Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967: 27) and thus generally define waiting as a consequence of missing synchronization of different modes of time.
Sociology comes into play when humans wait together, and when waiting depends on other human’s actions. As an empirical discipline, sociology regards waiting within the context of concrete socio-historical situations: How are these situations “furnished” and “decorated”, what “entrances” and “exits” are there? Who are their “residents” and which kinds of relationships do exist between them? Correspondent answers are, as Rainer Paris has recognized, by no means of particular nature, they rather concern time, space and social relationships – topoi that are as much general as they are fundamental. A consideration of waiting sheds light on moral concepts, on principles of organization as well as on hierarchies of power and it therefore matters for numerous sociological fields of research.
The project “Waiting. Exploring a Social Phenomenon of Everyday Life”, funded by the German Research Foundation, is responding to the relative lack of pertinent research literature on the one hand, and on the one-sidedness of the existing literature on the other. Although sociology has on some occasions glanced at the phenomenon, waiting has rarely been moved into the focus of interest. In these seldom cases, research has mostly adopted a one-sided, western perspective which considers time as a scarce resource, and views waiting consequently as a waste of resources. Moreover, it is often more strongly interested in the adherence to social order (in waiting lines for instance) than in its emergence. Given this lack, the project is aiming at a cross-cultural comparison in order to capture different strategies and interpretations of waiting, emphasizing the dynamic aspect of waiting arrangements. The aim is to contribute to the establishment of a general sociology of waiting as it was envisaged by the US-sociologist Barry Schwartz about 40 years ago.
Literature
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann (1967): The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.
Heidegger, Martin (1999 [1927]): Being and Time. London: Blackwell.
Hugo, Victor (1909): “À mes amis L. B. et S.-B. - Les Feuilles d'automne.” In: Œuvres complètes: Les Feuilles d'automne. Les Chants du crépuscule. Les Voix intérieures. Les Rayons et les Ombres. Paris: Ollendorf, 76-79.
Paris, Rainer (2001): „Warten auf Amtsfluren.“ KZfSS 54 (4), 705-733.
Plessner, Helmuth (1981 [1928]): Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Schwartz, Barry (1975): Queuing and Waiting. Studies in the Social Organization of Access and Delay. Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Werfel, Franz (1975 [1946]): „Theologumena“. In: Zwischen Oben und Unten. Prosa, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Literarische Nachträge. München: Langen – Müller.