experiencing that area of the city presents a strange blend of times past and times present. architecture and store signs evoke a feeling of the olde, of history. nonetheless, this past is forced to share its space with signs of today. not even historic america is immune from invasions by modern capitalism.

after our brief tour of north end and the so-called freedom trail, we went to boston commons where we stumbled upon a tour group. i loathe tour groups. i found it absolutely hilarious that ones in new york and now in boston would have to stop in the cold whilst a guide explained the historical significance of the area. but what particularly struck me about this group in the commons was that the guide, dressed in stereotypically colonial regalia, was phenotypically black.

i wonder if anyone within the group, or anyone more generally, noticed this profound irony – the narration of a particular(ly dominant) history of euro-america by a person who would have been excluded from that history had he been alive at that time.

capitalism smooths space in the sense of reproducing certain experiences in entirely different contexts; a 7-11 in cambridge offers the same aromatic sensations as that of a 7-11 in hawai`i. two starkly different spatial locales reproduce a certain smell-space.

but that is not all. enter any department store (macy’s, nordstrom, whatever). the absence of windows except at the entrance attempts to entirely partition off department-store space from the rest of the world. ridding of the outside becomes readily apparent when one simply notices that in a department store, one could be in the same department store in any other city without being able to tell much difference. step inside capitalist space and you’re in another world where one’s only worry is “spend!”

the walls are also incredibly thin. noise easily passes from one room to another. in the absence of stronger inhibitions to the traveling of sound, sonorous publics emerge across the material partitions demarcating ‘private’ spaces. life becomes intimate even as it is separated.

the spectacle held my attention as the level of trust astounded me – i can only think of a few places where one could abandon items to be sold and expect the cash to be available upon return. other spectators also gathered around the display for short periods of time, briefly browsed, and left. falling victim to the city’s opportunities of distraction, the traffic in bodies was momentarily arrested by this scene invested with so much trust. so much for the street as a space of passage.

surveillance cameras cast their watchful eye upon the streets and subways of new york, weaving together the so-called emergency situation with everyday life. yet it seems that returning the recording gaze is prohibited, if not regulated. the nypd qua ‘petty sovereigns’ (a term dubbed by judith butler) suspends law through its discretionary (mis)interpretation. perhaps this securitization of the visual, in its differentiation of technologies of the gaze, implies that 9/11 and its state of emergency has not been left so far behind. rather, 9/11 is an event manifest in a variety of what m. m. bakhtin calls ‘chronotopes’, or materialized spatiotemporal dynamics; it organizes our experience in and of space and time through unpredictable and singular (because arbitrary) ways.

nonetheless, it would do good to ponder who may provisionally act as a petty sovereign. security counterintuitively reveals the weaknesses in the system it attempts to protect. recall ranciere’s description of the police message: ‘move along, there is nothing to be seen here.’ it is in that very nothing that everything is to be seen – the very shimmers of possibility illuminated within the cracks of the fragile policed order. putting surveillance itself within our focus, then, may provoke critical scrutiny of the supposed need for heightened security.

so when our gaze is centered on technologies of the gaze, we secure the opportunity to become petty sovereigns. in doing so, we may alter the trajectory of 9/11 and its organization of in/security chronotopes by heeding a lesson delivered by walter benjamin in the context of struggles against fascism: ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. we must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.’

what does the location of this military recruitment station, set in the heart of times square, say about possible interrelations between militarism and spectacular capitalism?

the room of ‘action!’ was illuminated with a dark blue. tiny television screens adorned a wall in the room’s center and the surface of raised blocks functioned as screens for other video clips. the visibility and audibility of films with adult content and porn queered this curatorial space by rendering indistinguishable the public and private. brianne and i navigated this perverse space by viewing close-ups of blowjobs, anal sex, and the like with complete strangers. we strangely felt discomfort and allure at the same time and as the same sensation, in the time and space we shared with others. this queer intimacy in which not a word circulated amongst strangers while erotic sensations did brought together normally and normatively private matters into public spaces while leaving each experience irreducibly singular. a heterotopia to the dominant society of sexual control, ‘action!’ thus enacts a politics of sexual aesthetics reconfiguring the proper place of sex and the curatorial to queer the traffic of bodies walking through and stopping still in a proximity too close for comfort yet too far for commonality.