Ghost Images and Gorgeous Mistakes

Following from the argument made in the previous chapter, this final chapter opens with a consideration of ghost images. In a first sense, ghost images entail the problem of photographing ghosts and drifters and, with this, capturing the presence of absence and the visibility of invisibility. Here the photodocumentary tradition is recalled and reimagined and issues of photographic absence, intentionality, and surrealism are explored. In a second sense, the chapter argues, ghost images include those images that have become dislocated from their original contexts of production. Such images—a number of which the author has salvaged from trash cans and trash piles—again raise issues of lost intentionality, residual meaning, and subsequent alteration. The chapter ends by considering and advocating for gorgeous mistakes—for the magic of the accidental and the unexpected—and for mistakes as a kind of method adrift.

Drift Contexts

This chapter develops a sociology of drift from the classic works of Robert Park, Georg Simmel, David Matza, Gresham Sykes, and others. It reconsiders Sykes and Matza’s “techniques of neutralization” model, arguing that it embodies a deeper sociological and cultural critique than that which is commonly attributed to it. The chapter then constructs a political economy and spatial economy of drift which locates drift within contemporary urban dynamics of “consumption-driven urban development,” spatial displacement, anti-homeless initiatives, risk-based and place-based policing, broken-windows policing, and CPTED. The chapter concludes by considering these dynamics in the context of spatial alienation and transgression.

Freedom in the Form of a Boxcar

This chapter recounts the trip that the author and his gutter punk traveling companion, Zeke, took aboard a series of freight trains that carried them far into west Texas. The chapter documents the trip’s many drifting experiences: waiting in railyards, hiding from railroad workers, sleeping in the rain, moving from one train or one rail car to another (hotshots, units, boxcars), ultimately arriving in Pecos, Texas—and along the way getting lost in what gutter punks call “the drift.” Interwoven with this narrative are similar accounts from the long history of hoboing and the more recent history of gutter punk train hopping, along with considerations of particular aspects of such travel: dirt, filth, visibility, and “dirty kid” identity; bandana symbolism; beer drinking; and Railroad Workers United. The chapter ends with the author’s discovery of a bit of graffiti that Zeke has written inside the boxcar in which they are travelling, which says “Freedom in the form of a boxcar.”

Beneath the Slab

This chapter addresses method in a broad sense: as a way of orienting ourselves to the world around us. In this context, the chapter argues that the methods needed to make sense of a world adrift must embody uncertainty, ambiguity, and fragmentation if we are to avoid making drift into something it is not. Developing this sort of method, however, will require abandoning existing methods that are conceptualized as the solid, foundational slabs on which research is built. As fetishized exemplars of this slab-like approach, survey research and statistical analysis are particularly inappropriate for understanding a contemporary world of drift and drifters. Instead, the chapter suggests that we revisit early ethnographic research in sociology and related fields, and the long tradition of documentary photography and photodocumentary work, both of which embraced more fluid and less formalized methodological approaches.

Drift Method

This chapter argues that to chase after drifters is to chase after ghosts. As victims of social death—as people degraded by the forced withdrawal of mutuality and shared respect from their lives—drifters are caught in spirals of spectral visibility and social invisibility that constitute them as desaparecidos (the disappeared). Consequently, the study of drifters requires what the author calls ghost method. Ghost method is attuned to the presence of absence and to excavating various forms of absence: not there, no longer there, and soon to be gone. It focuses on the residues of social and cultural life and on the ways in which drifters haunt ruins and inhabit spaces in between (interstitial spaces).

Catching Out

This chapter investigates a contemporary drifter subculture—that of train hoppers and “gutter punks”—by way of the author’s own adventures with members of this subculture and with one gutter punk, Zeke, in particular. The narrative considers a constellation of essential gutter punk activities like “flying a sign” (panhandling), dumpster diving (trash picking), and hopping (boarding) freight trains as components of this drifter subculture. The chapter also explores the spatial organization of gutter punks through such practices as “sign- ins” (graffiti), and the temporal organization enforced by waiting. By the chapter’s end, Zeke and the author have made their way to the railroad yards and are in the process of “catching out”—hopping an outbound freight train.

Hobo History

This chapter begins by exploring the concept and practice of vagrancy, tracing the historical evolution of vagrancy laws, their twined illegalities of poverty and mobility, and their relevance in the social construction of hobos and drifters. The chapter then turns to the historical, political economic, and spatial production of the North American hobo. The progressive politics and collective organization of the hobo are next explored, with special emphasis on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the American West. Here the organizational role of song and music, as embodied in the “Little Red Song Book,” is also documented. The chapter concludes with an examination of the IWW “free speech fights” and the role of hobos and drifters in their success.

Drift Politics

The chapter begins by exploring the experiential politics of drift. Considering concepts and practices like the flâneur and the Situationist dérive, the chapter argues that drift can produce an expanding realm of experiential politics that incorporates a critical, comparative exteriority. Given this, drifters are able—or are forced—to see beyond the certainty of any one situation. The chapter then outlines a collective politics of drift by considering such groups as Critical Mass, Food Not Bombs, and PublicAdCampaign, noting their success in creating a culture and cultural politics of drift. Next, the collective experience of “precarity” and the work of those who organize around this concept are explored, along with the politics of squatters, freelancers, and Occupy activists. The chapter concludes with a consideration of swarming as a form of collective drift politics.

Drift Dialectics

This chapter documents the pervasive presence of drift and drifting populations throughout the contemporary world, arguing that drift may well be the defining global trajectory of our time. It then explores four dialectics of drift: drift as a historical and contemporary phenomenon; drift as dependency and autonomy; drift as individual and collective behavior; and drift as hope and despair. The chapter concludes that the distance that drift puts between the drifter and the social order is often a place of deprivation and despair, but also a hard-earned space for critique and imagination.