Space for Alienation: Seriality (or Being Alone Together) in the Swimming Hall

Abstract

This article investigates the sociality of Scandinavian public swimming halls through Jean-Paul Sartre’s reworking of Marxist alienation as seriality. Drawing on fifty-nine personal narratives, it explores how behaviors of mutual semi-unawareness in settings involving multiple activities and (partial) nudity among strangers intersect with fundamentally diverse and ambiguous experiences. Combining Iris Marion Young’s feminist reading of “seriality” with Sartre’s concept of “the look,” the article conceptualizes three forms of seriality: serial behavior, serial space, and serial being. Against the understanding of spatial alienation as exclusively the property of socially marginalized consciousness, seriality offers a deeper understanding of alienation as a general yet historical-geographical social structure. Although seriality is traditionally conceived as something normatively negative, this study demonstrates how social alienation can also foster individual relief and senses of community. Furthermore, the theory of seriality is developed by asking what it feels like to partake in a sociospatial series from different perspectives, and it is argued that in these kind of series, the notion of the Other’s look is unsurmountable. Contributing to critical phenomenology in geography, the article offers a spatially grounded account of diverse experiences within a single kind of public space, highlighting how serial spaces mediate difference, vulnerability, and coexistence.