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.