SPATIAL ANALYSIS: The Airport as Chronotope

This episode will be devoted to illustrating spatial analysis through the concept of chronotope using the airport as an example. The term chronotope combines two words in Greek and simply means “space-time” and was adopted by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to explain the ways in which spatial and temporal indices came together in an expressive spatial unity as a key aspect in the history of the European novel. He deployed the concept as a way to demarcate certain generic conventions in narrative fiction. Thus, he argued for example that the chronotope of the road raises distinctive implications that are quite different from those for the parlor, castle, or threshold. Even though the chronotope is typically used as a device in literary criticism, I want here to explore its implications for both literary and real-world spatial analyses. And I also want to augment Bakhtin’s list of chronotopes by adding some further definitional nuance and also some examples from our own contemporary every day experience. To start with, I want to add that a chronotope must be imagined as having an entrance and an exit along with the spatial and temporal markers that help define it. Thus, a sports stadium is a chronotope while the Queen of England is not. She is simply a person that also acts as a symbol of other things within certain discourses. I shall explain this definitionally augmented concept of chronotope specifically with respect to the airport, which, I hope to show, is a chronotope of disaggregation. A chronotope of disaggregation is a space in which people are not encouraged to remain but is designed for them to pass through and be re-distributed elsewhere. This contrasts the airport chronotope to that of say the café or the marketplace, which are both chronotopes of aggregation. Given that space is not a container but rather a symptom and producer of social relations, we will explore how chronotopes such as those of the airport also allow us to understand different aspects of spatiality.

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Suggested Readings

Christopher Schaberg, The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight, (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

Gillian Fuller, “Welcome to Windows 2.1: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport,” Politics at the Airport, ed. Mark Salter, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008)

Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley, Aviopolis: A Book About Airports, (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004).

Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, (New York: Vintage Departures, 2000).

Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, (New York: Verso, 1995)