Bus Stop: an image-essay

The bus stop is a partial reality. As structure, it projects an invisibility field, with curtains parted by stratified cords. When depopulated, walkers, bikers, and light-crossed autos see nothing at all. With waiters benched, the space becomes an expanse of anonymity. Even thus engaged, however, the mechanism remains largely beyond passing perception, as an exclusive reality, experienced only by those without the means for alternative motivation. Put another way, the arches of the stop bear the architecture of poverty. 

The enfolding structure thus contains contaminated space, requiring a glass boundary and concrete plaza to ensure purification at the threshold. In this sense, the enclosure has a rigid colonial structure that marks its temporary inhabitants with totemic leprosy. For the surrounding community, security lay in the necessity of transit. Any interruption in transparent circularity between stigmatized sites represents sabotage and, consequently, endangers the smooth regularity of the exchange. When transients become too comfortable, when bench becomes bed, state security intervenes, and restores spatial equilibrium. 

As is so often the case with sacred space (and contaminated space is always sacred), the communicant’s identity doubles, producing the self as flayed carcass, visibly divided, and redeployed in functional alterity. Jean-Paul Sartre gets at this doubling when he examines the “seriality” of a group of strangers waiting for a bus. “For each member of the group waiting for the bus, the city is in fact present…as the practico-inert ensemble within which there is a movement towards the interchangeability of men [sic] and of the instrumental ensemble… And, through the medium of the city, there are given millions of people who are the city, and whose completely invisible presence makes everyone both a polyvalent isolation (with millions of facets), and, an integrated member of the city… (p.257).” Thus, the bus stop is a mirror, and in reflection, the initiate perceives an inherent anonymity, imposed as identical non-identity. With the waiting group, paradoxes cluster. The doubling of identity signifies estrangement without synthesis, and the gathered crowd projects individual atomization. “Organic isolation, suffered isolation, lived isolation, isolation as a mode of behavior, isolation as a social statute of the individual, isolation as the exteriority of groups conditioning the exteriority of individuals, isolation as the reciprocity of isolations in a society which creates masses: all these forms, all these oppositions co-exist in the little group... (p.258).”

While Sartre’s acute analysis reveals much about serial waiting, the doubling interactions he proposes need not inhere in the group itself. Rather, the structure of the space, with its stigmatizing architecture of anonymity, structures the group. And, necessarily, this collective imprint marks even the single inhabitant as double, both self and other, inscribed with poverty’s circular interchangeability. This vertiginous self-extension contains multiple terrors, and the insecurity of boundary disruption produces exaggerated armor. Faced with cellular disintegration, the self draws back from the corroding force of alterity, often turning “inward” through an isolating audio-visual apparatus. But even this narcissistic self-protection directs ego towards a false reciprocity that once again reinforces individual interchangeability. Sartre could not have predicted the penetration of such devices into constant and prosaic experience, but he found a similar force in the mid-twentieth century mass media. Mass communication, he argues, produces the self as Other (an interchangeable listener or viewer), in a state of permanent passivity. “In this way, the voice becomes vertiginous for everyone: it is no longer anyone’s voice (even if the broadcaster is named), since reciprocity has been destroyed….it produces me as an inert member of a series and as Other in the midst of Others… (p.274).” Whether broadcast or podcast, the structure of media experience duplicates the phenomenological gestalt imposed by the stop: an ego compressed and, ultimately, effaced, by its inescapable reflection in a mass of interchangeable others.

Thus the bus stop’s ritual segregation does not represent distinction. Rather, its invisibility is iconographic, and this iconography evokes the serial normality of mass annihilation. Invisibility, in this case, emerges from the omnipresence of the forces at work, and from our all too human tendency to disregard the terror we bury in the ordinary. The bus stop is a constant reminder that prosperity is temporary, that the self is always falling into emptiness, and that mass distraction depends upon dismantled identity. Hence, it exists as a repressed, partial reality, unseen even in its anonymous luminosity. 

Reference: 

Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. Verso, 2004. 

Graham Cassano

September 2025