prokorenko’s politics.

we met prokorenko, a subway attendant, while perusing a subway map for the route to the world trade center. after directing our way, the gentleman inquired into where we are from. learning that noah, brianne, and i are from hawai`i, prokorenko pulled out and sifted through two stacks of cards. each card listed a few words/sayings in other languages that he’d be learning from passengers over the years; there must have been at least thirty or forty cards.

reminiscent of ranciere’s observation that french laborers in the nineteenth century made of themselves political subjects by using the time they had not to write, prokorenko takes his work-time to accumulate multilingual fragments. his use of work-time as hobby-time deterritorializes the liminal space of subway stations as transitory passages into social places. subway space thus becomes a polyvocal archive braking new york’s hyperaccelerated pacings by effecting a countertemporality of slowness imbedded in conversation. consequently, he became other than the work-subject required of his work position; likewise, we became other than the (always mobile) consumer-subject required of our tourist position.

in short, prokorenko disrupts new york city ’s demand of speedy movement and its corollary regulative productions of time, space, and subjects in this consumer capitalist society of control. a powerful political act.

embodying the city, or the urban corpus.

traveling through the city is an embodied experience that requires a corporeal rather than a merely cognitive knowledge. quick judgment lags behind conditioned reflex and somatic assessments. measuring the length of a road to be crossed, the distance between a crosswalk and a car, the speed of oncoming traffic, and the pace by which one must hurry to successfully jaywalk: precise calculations within microseconds.

the unavailability of a strictly cognitive mapping of city experience becomes readily apparent when taking the subway. hand bars are available for those less accustomed to the sudden jolts of accelerations and decelerations. but those who have literally incorporated the city’s temporal rhythms, its smooth running and short-circuits, are able to make the minor adjustments needed to accommodate the city’s frenetic and unpredictable activity. subways passengers stand without holding hand bars, even while focusing their brain activity within the material they read.

the city, then, can only be ‘understood’ as a sensorium to which the body adapts. but if the body cannot be thought apart from its experience of the urban landscapes. we should thus consider the ways cities form bodies as temporal and sensual subjects recalcitrant to subsumption under a particular explanatory paradigm.

on experiencing moma.

the museum of modern art (moma) may feel like a space of consumption. vast numbers of tourists breeze through the exhibits without extended looks on displays. purchases of memorabilia and miscellaneous trinkets may be made at several different locations throughout the museum. a cafe is located on the second floor. even the queues for bag checks wind through and out of a corridor. this disneyland experience subtracts the spectacular and sensational thrill of amusement park rides; a father answers to his impatient seven year-old son, ‘we’ve only been here for half an hour!’

nonetheless, moma also invites critical reflection across. divided amongst the museum’s six floors, iconic masterpieces and contemporary works offer a variety of styles, temporalities, and genres. accordingly, an/aestheticizing experiences inhere not in the artworks themselves; rather, they function as so many resonances between art and its viewer, thereby shattering any definitive delineation between those terms. here are several works that worked for me due to their carceral thematics.

Whilst navigating curatorial space may direct our attention inward to exhibited pieces, it simultaneously distracts us from one of the greatest exhibits of all: the city itself. this tendency to confine the proper place of aesthetics to the museum may disable a scrutiny of cityscapes themselves and how they re/structure perceptions, sensations, and experience itself.

But not everyone misses out.

entering new york (?)

the realization that i was finally in new york did not hit me until about two hours after arriving there. the very short stroll through jfk airport from the terminal to baggage claim felt too comfortable in its similarity to just about any other airport (how many hudson news stores are there?). i left the airport via a filled shuttle of multilingual personae, making of the journey a heteroglossic (to employ a bit of bakhtin jargon referencing the availability of a multitude of voices in a novel) experience.

but the literary form of my journey quickly turned cinematic when crossing the east river into manhattan. closing in on iconic new york (visually identified by landmarks such as the empire state building) easily filled me with the excitement of finally entering new york. but this hyperreal journey was certainly more into a film than new york itself; as the cityscape increasingly loomed overhead, i thought to myself, ‘this is what movies are made of!’

on rhythmanalysis and the city.

‘everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.’ – henri lefebvre

if rhythm is indeed the resonance between spaces and times and the forces imposing upon them a state of consistency, then it becomes a particularly useful conceptual device with which we may analyze the city. but whilst it may be an important unit for measuring the everydayness of city life, it also reveals the fractures within the urban that resist explanation by a single conceptual paradigm.

the partitioning of spaces segments off populations from each other by a variety of criteria (i.e. race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, age, and so forth). it restricts certain bodies while enabling others to move; it allows bodies to remain still while forcing others into movement. insofar as access is concerned, we may think of the city as coded and coding.

likewise, no single model of time captures the varying rhythms of those experiencing the city differently. coded bodies must navigate the city along different paths, at different times, and by different means. technology may contract space by accelerating time (email travels lightspeeds quicker than snailmail); it may simultaneously expand space (traffic jams stretch out the freeway experience). temporal sequences, paces, speeds, and stills encode bodies and the spaces they traverse and inhabit. differently.

the inhabited experience of urban space differs from person to person, so it would be a mistake to talk about a city’s rhythm in the singular. rather, urban space is multiple; there are as many “cities” as there are people experiencing it.

the city is polyrhythmic.