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.
