surveilling the real state of emergency.

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.’

militaro-capitalism.

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?

a monument to imperialism.

adorning the stairs leading up to the museum of natural history is a monument of theodore roosevelt on a horse. two ‘primitives’ walk alongside with an arm clinging to good ol’ papa teddy for support and security as the three graciously head into the uncertainties of an unknown destination. this myth of international harmony and cooperation obscures the imperial violences of us folded into the monroe doctrine. a museum dedicated to ‘natural history’ becomes an appropriate site for erecting a monument to manifest destiny.

the city, then, must be conceived as a locus in which history itself is created and memorialized in support of particular narratives of domination. consequently, one must attend to the practices of domination within the historicisms of urban material realities and materialities.

ground zero.

noah, brianne, tippy, and i visited ground zero today (capitalization not required) and we (or i) felt a little disappointed. the area was nothing like the memorial space we (or i) had expected; the sky was clear, traffic flowed smoothly, and a few individuals attempted to sell world trade center memorabilia – a genre which, by the way, has nothing to do with memory. it was business as usual.

perhaps the restoration of the everyday may be construed as a political event in itself. insofar as the sanctity of 9/11 has vaporized from the daily new york imaginary, it seems as though 11 september 2001 becomes a date like any other. as noah points out in the paper he will present tomorrow, the translation of “11 september 2001″ into “9/11″ erases from the domain of the sensible all other events that happened on that day as well as on 11 september of other years. perhaps this emergence of an everyday bears witness to 9/11 finally passing into the past.

what political possibilities for critiquing us global hegemony enacted through violences that contradict the promises of democracy and for extending a wider respect to absolute alterity are becoming possible in the birth of a post-9/11 world?

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.

an urban society of control.

one easily notices on any street those signs directing the traffic of cars; the one above conducts the traffic of bodies. part of the initiative to beautify the image of new york for the tourist eye, these signs coerce movement to rid streetscapes of beggars and the homeless. another instrument to ward off otherness in chance encounters.

similarly, the marriott marquis (currently hosting the 50th annual convention of the international studies association) averaging around $200 – 300 a night, makes good on its promise to ‘bring manhattan to your door.’ as kathy ferguson observed while looking for a place to sit, the hotel’s common areas conspicuously lack any seating arrangements. as such, they are not places for extended reflection and socialization, but liminal spaces for transit. the streets of manhattan run through the marriott as so many nodes of this urban society of control forcing the movement of bodies.

[addendum]

on the final day of the conference, noah and i sat on the floor near the conference room in which we would present our panel in about half an hour. a hotel orderly tasked with policing the hotel-order ordered us elsewhere because no one’s allowed to sit on the ground (no reason given).

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!’