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.

a note on the politics of aesthetics.

a conception of politics which contents itself with those subjects eligible for participation necessarily ignores the exclusions afforded by those qualifications framing eligibility.  such ‘politics’ is not politics; it is a practice of policing. jacques ranciere describes the police as ‘an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task.’ as generally conceived, ‘politics’ concerns itself with already-formed subjects who merely participate within an already-formed world accordingly, it is a matter of policing an established order, preventing it from becoming anew and more accommodating to those who have no place.

politics is always adverse to the police order. it is what exists after the police attempts to assign everything and everyone a proper place. politics not only opposes what is sensible within the order of police, it seeks to reconfigure sensibility itself. ranciere: ‘political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. it makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise.’  politics thus never takes place within a world; rather, it is the very process by which the world emerges.

art has the capacity to birth a new world. it captures our attention where nothing should be seen and enables us to perceive anew; it lends to us new ears with which to understand what was once mere noise. ranciere argues ‘artistic practices take part in the partition of the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.’ art confounds what appears as and through our so-called ‘common sense’, a sensibility imposed by the police order; its primary aim, therefore, is the enactment of politics.

this is the politics of aesthetics.