Will you search me?

What?

I want you to search me.

What?

We were rushing across the platform towards the express, and got on just as the door was closing. It was nearly empty but he remained standing, holding the overhead bar.

Why do you want me to search you?

Because you said you would.

I can’t search you; you’re a woman.

Oh, I didn’t know that. I paused and looked down at my book, then back up at him. Will you train me?

What?

I want you to train me.

Look, I have to get off here.

I repeated my request. He mumbled something, scribbled a number on the last page of my book, and slipped out between the closing doors.

12 SUNDAY

[...]  His friends told him not to trust me. They’ve met Friday nights to play cards ever since they were in high school. One works at a nursing home in the kitchen—it’s hot in there—Kenny works at the post office, and the third one I cannot remember. Two of them date Asian girls. He told them—because he always tells them about work—that a girl came up to him at Jay Street and asked him about searches. She was a really pretty girl and she came up to me. Pretty girls don’t come up to me and ask if they can work a shift with me.

I asked if any girls do at all, or anyone else for that matter.

No, and I’ve never heard of anyone saying that someone did. My friends think you’re setting me up.

For what?

I don’t know, he laughed. I don’t know you very well.

I asked him to bring me something to wear for the shift. He brought me his shirt. Some of the buttons are missing. It’s short-sleeved and has the official patches on the shoulders. It is hanging on a hook against my bedroom wall. I am not supposed to wear it in public.

He prepared our story. You were dizzy. You asked to sit down and rest until you felt better. When the sergeants came to check on him he told them the story, and that he’d bought me a salad and a coffee. They did not believe it, but he did.

At 11pm we were supposed to transfer to Bedford-Nostrand. I don’t know if he was planning to let me come along. He told me he would be in the station’s mezzanine, sitting on a tool-box. It’s filthy and next to the ticket booth. I didn’t like that image—not that it was filthy, but that it wasn’t like the booth. The booth is quiet and the trains come out from nowhere, they suddenly flow past in opposite directions, crisscrossing one another. You wouldn’t believe the breeze. All the gum wrappers and paper cups get in a stir and your hair flies all over. Not his, he shaved it today and it’s very short, with grey sparkles as if it was black and just rained on.

He has never been to an art museum.

What for? What’s there? Pictures on the wall? No, art is not my thing.

How do you know if you’ve never been?

I am not into art and I don’t have time for it.

He was sitting in the booth and I was standing in the doorway. The relieving officer had not come yet and he was on the phone. I stood very close to him. This was just after I had been filming his face. The energy was soft and permissive, as if the relief not turning up had created an in-between off-duty/on-duty space where the rules were calmed. As he spoke I grazed the camera over his hands, his neck, and his face. He let me. It was like touching—we could pretend that it wasn’t physical because he was on the phone and it was only a lens. I kept photographing his hands. His fingers are thicker than you’d expect from the rest of his body. They are clean, without much hair, just enough to make them masculine. His nails are cut short and round, with just the slightest white moons. He wears a thin gold wedding ring that in the light of the subway looks silver. His turtleneck was down low and not folded over twice, so the NYPD logo was inside out and backwards. I said your shirt is on backwards and he said, No, see? The turtleneck just isn’t pulled down right.

You should not stand close to the edge when the trains are coming. The conductors get nervous. He pulls me back each time.

He introduces me to Costella. Costella is the guy who has to ride the cars back and forth through the tunnel. He goes from Brooklyn to Manhattan, Manhattan to Brooklyn, con-tinually through the night.

13 MONDAY 11:53PM

I am in the apartment; he is beneath me. Beneath the whole city. I wonder if he is at the mouth of the tunnel, somewhere on York, or at his favorite station with the green columns. If he won’t go to see art, maybe I can get him a security job at a museum. I should try the Met first. I would like to choose which room he guards. I would like to hold his hand, in front of the paintings, and at the mouth of the tunnel inside the booth. I know he doesn’t trust me. I bet as time has passed since last night he trusts me even less. As for me, I like him even more.

I am going to make tuna sandwiches and bring them to his post.

Imagine being in the museum at night, on guard in front of the paintings.

I’ve been fantasizing about wearing the shirt he gave me—barefoot, bare legs—on the platform. He would be so mad. I would get locked up for impersonation. Melle thinks that is what I want—to be locked up—but I don’t. I want the footage of those trains.

14 TUESDAY 12:04AM

He called me. He was at my corner. 10:16pm, half an hour earlier than planned. I worried he might see where I live when I came outside to meet him. He didn’t. My building is in a blind spot.

You’d be so easy to stalk.

It is nice in the car. He keeps it so warm. Now I have been in both of them, the red one and the white one.

He must log all the offences in black pen. I made sure to bring my own so that I can write them for him.

He has a black book like this one. I wonder what he writes in it. About being underground, about the stations—what they feel like, what they look like. Does he write about what happens—the arrests, the fights, the criminals, his plans? Is he always practical?

I wish I knew what was up here, he points to my head, and what you write about in your black book. See what is going to happen? I will get used to seeing you and then you will go away.

And you will miss seeing me. You will get used to it. Just enjoy it.

It’s hard to.

I will work with him tomorrow night; tonight I am tired. Tonight he has Franklin. He hates Franklin. It’s too busy and the sergeants always check.

15 WEDNESDAY

He calls me at 9pm as promised. I feel the call before the ring. I’ll be parked in the same place as last night. I leave Grand Street at 10:11pm and walk south, then take the C from Canal Street and exit at Hoyt-Schermerhorn. I see the car, but he does not see me. His seat is back, the engine is running, the radio is playing. I open the door and get into the passenger seat. My back is against the window. He opens his eyes, looks at me, and closes them again. He does not sleep; he rests.

When he gets bored he names the presidents in order. He recites them on the platform. The world is the way it is today because of them. I ask if he ever does anything without a reason, just because. No, he says.
He has never done anything because of the sun or the moon.

I study his face with his eyes closed. He has a scar on the eyebrow closest to me. It crosses his brow at an angle. There is another one below his jaw-line, perfectly in line with it. It makes him nervous when he looks at me and I am looking at him. He closes his eyes again.

I brought him a picture of me in his shirt and two tuna fish sandwiches. He called me the next morning; he’d eaten them both.

You’re wearing something under this, right?

Yes, you can see the shirt.

It mixes in with your skin.

I cropped the picture, but left a small part of my thigh showing. If he studies the picture he might notice. And he might see that his pictures cover the wall behind me.

I will go to sleep now and he will be awake beneath me. I feel safer.

16 THURSDAY 11:23PM

I meet him at Nostrand Station. I get off the subway on the south side; he is on the north side. He waves and gestures for me to stay. He runs up the stairs into the city, over the street, and comes down the other side. He is outside the turnstile and motions for me to come to him. I do. We go up to street level and into a deli. He knows everyone. He gets tea; coffee gives him heartburn.

17 FRIDAY 9:49AM

He just called me from Nostrand, same place I left him last night. He will be off at 10:30am. In forty minutes I will go down, get us coffee, and sit inside his car. I am going to ask him to get me the practice book so I can take the officer exam.

The Secret Service hires people like him or people from the military. They hire other people too, but you have to have had some experience with that stuff. When he first got the job they did in-depth security checks on him. It’s not so important for his particular job, but very important for those in the Secret Services. They found out that he had punched his boss fifteen years ago. He pulls his arm back and makes the thrust of a punch. Right in the face, I clocked him. They went and got depositions from all the employees who worked there. They wrote, and he makes his body like he is writing and looking closely at the paper, that the boss was an asshole and that they hated him. His face becomes red and his eyes get smaller, his white straight teeth all visible, including the one that is grey. I did what everyone else wanted to do. Apparently, this makes sense to those checking because he got the job anyway.

I’m an even-tempered person, not like my wife, man she can yell! But when I get really mad I can definitely show it. Now that he is so severely sleep-deprived his patience is getting shorter. He hopes he doesn’t snap one day. He has less and less patience for the black people getting off the trains. And the stupid stuff. He has become more racist on the job. They are animals…animals. They give him a real hard time. He’s been hit with a cane, harassed, called names and gibed at. It makes me hate them.

Right away he knew I was one of those liberals. I could tell, you’re an artist, you have ideas, you read the New York Times—that liberal rag—so of course you’re against the war in Iraq. Maybe it’s nice to see art when you are retired, but it’s leisure and in this time in the world, there just isn’t time for that. Clinton took all the money from the military, he appeased everyone, and now Bush has to beef it back up. As for Iraq, they should level the whole place. They should have done it years ago. Maybe go in and take the children, then take the whole place down.
I wanted to hate him when he spoke about black people, and about Iraq, and about the death penalty.
Why should we waste a dime of America’s tax money to pay for the guy who brutally mutilated his girlfriend—you know about that, right?
I saw it on the cover of the newspaper you read, but I did not read the whole article. I don’t know exactly what he did to her—
Well I do, I can tell you all about it.
Please don’t.

An eye for an eye. Touch someone wrongly and get your hand cut off. I would love it if life were like that.
Yeah, but you punched your boss.
I never punched anyone for the wrong reason.
He watches me closely and examines my reaction.

We are on the express platform. He is standing. I am sitting on the bench beside him. It’s way past 11pm; the train’s stopped running on this track. The local continues below us. See, look at the people coming up those stairs.

A black man in an orange knit Rasta hat, a bright pea-green sweatshirt, and lots of gold necklaces comes up from the local. He stops at the top of the stairs and watches us.
Can I help you?
‘You tryin’ to get your groove on?’ he asks it in a wave, like a song. It’s hard to understand.
What?
The man asks it again. ‘You tryin’ to get your groove on?’
I look up at him beside me. He keeps a small tight grin. I can see the wrinkles around his eyes. The man on the steps continues, ‘Is that your wife?’
Yes, he says, this is my wife.
I have never heard anyone say that about me.
‘That ain’t your wife.’ He shakes his head, turns his back on us and begins to walk away. He continues to call back to us as he walks towards the exit. ‘That ain’t your wife, you tryin’ to get your groove on. your wife is home in bed.’

Train duty is when you stand in the front car with the train conductor and watch the tracks. You make sure anyone who is on the tracks is supposed to be there, and arrest anyone who shouldn’t be. You ride back and forth and stare at the tracks. You go from the last station in Brooklyn to the first station in Manhattan and then the last station in Manhattan to the first station in Brooklyn, all night for ten hours. You can get out on the platform and check the exits. Walk up to the street, check the exits, and get back onto the train—like a whale comes up for air.

Tell me about the kind of train duty when you ride in the cars with the people, not when you stare at the tracks.
It’s nice.
That doesn’t mean anything. What is nice about it? Do you look at the people? Do you stare into space? Do you get bored? Tell me the details.
Come on, it’s nice.
I am going to read you something.
He looks at me, confused. I pull out the book in my camera case and begin a passage by Alain Robbe-Grillet: “On the polished wood of the table, the dust has marked the places occupied for awhile—for a few hours, several days, minutes, weeks—by small objects subsequently removed whose outlines are still distinct for some time, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple shapes, some partly overlapping, already blurred or half obliterated by a rag.”
I look up at him.
He can’t follow.
OK, I will read it again.
I followed but I don’t get it. It’s boring.
That is the kind of detail I want to know. That much detail.

We’re so different.

There are birds in Nostrand Station. Lots of them. They sing loudly and their song fills the station. I can’t work out where they come from. They glide along the ceiling and swoop down onto the platform. The station smells like piss and is full of birdsong.

My itinerary, mundane as it must seem, wasn’t incidental. A few hours before I had been on the phone with an artist who lives in Newark and with whom I had a studio visit scheduled for that afternoon. The artist has a day job as an urban planner and his art often involves taking complex infrastructural systems and translating them into plain language, so that the average city dweller can better understand—and respond to—legislation that has a direct effect on his or her life. We spent an unusual amount of time planning the route I would take to reach his studio. I proposed taking the ‘E’ train to Penn Station, where one can catch the New Jersey Transit, but this entailed a complicated transfer in Jersey City: no good. There was also an entrance at Christopher Street, duly dismissed as inconvenient. Finally, we settled on the World Trade Center as my point of embarkation. “Go that way,” he told me with confidence, “it’s more beautiful.”

Aesthetic appraisals would have to wait. As soon as I exited the subway, I felt that panicky disorientation that often hits me when I’m walking in Lower Manhattan. Always, I end up lost. The streets are narrow and unfamiliar, and no other place in the city encroaches on your personal space to such an insane degree: the buildings almost seem threatening as they tower above wandering, confused souls who buffet mindlessly from Century 21 to the World Trade Center site and beyond, toward the Statue of Liberty. Determined not to look like a tourist, I plowed forward, glancing quickly at unhelpful arrows claiming to point me toward the Path station. I was late. My panic increased.

In front of me, then, I saw several men wearing lime-green fluorescent colored vests: Pedestrian Safety. Some sort of patrol engaged to help the tourists navigate the area, I realized. And behind them, a modest chain-link fence, and behind that, the sixteen-acre site that once contained the World Trade Center.

As I walked past the WTC site, once so evocative of tragedy, now only depressing farce as year after year passes with no clear plan for what will become of the vacant land, the memory came to me, as it always does when I’m in this part of the city. A few days after the 9/11 blast, I was sitting in the one-bedroom apartment I was sharing with my then-boyfriend. It was a railroad apartment in a four-story old tenement building on 9th Street between Avenues B and C. A window across from the abbreviated kitchen overlooked a tiny vacant lot to the East of our building that usually served as storage for the super’s junk. The apartment was unusually quiet for New York: it was across from La Plaza Cultural Community Garden, with its crazy geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller helped design and a charming amphitheater that Gordon Matta-Clark helped build. Most impressive was an immense willow tree that shaded our living room. It was a warm autumn night and the windows were open. I was home by myself when I heard the opening strains of Roberta Flack singing “Ballad of The Sad Young Men” coming through the side window. Someone was playing a record; I could tell because the needle added a layer of susurration as it dragged through its groove. Roberta Flack’s voice was gentle and sweet despite the gravely quality of the recording. It floated through the night air like an aromatic, soothing breeze.

Sing a song of sad young men, glasses full of rye

All the news is bad again, kiss your dreams goodbye

I stood by the window and listened, aware that I was not alone, but that there was an audience of hundreds of other silent, anonymous listeners hungry for the exact sense of communal sympathy the song offered up. The East Village proved an apt cathedral. The sense of collective empathy was powerful, providing a cathartic grace unlike anything I have ever felt.

Misbegotten moon shine for sad young men

Let your gentle light guide them home again

All the sad, sad, sad, young men

When the song ended, the record player went quiet. No more was required.

That experience, ephemeral as it was, remains monumental to me. As Baudelaire and Guy DeBord and so many others have said before, our personal, private interactions with the city streets are what shape the urban landscape for us. Memories are our geographical markers, linking one block to another more concretely than signposts and sidewalks.

In real time, though, I was still late for my studio visit, and I still needed directions to the Path train. A “Pedestrian Safety” patrolman kindly pointed it out; it was basically staring me in the face. I boarded the train and, as it began its journey past basalt rock walls and industrial plants and on into Newark, New Jersey, the “Gateway to the World,” the memory receded along with the city behind me.

1. Photo of the foreskin of my jchu jchul (a slang term signifying penis for children in Armenian). Just the kind of grand gesture one could expect from a male performance artist, from the early 70s.

2. Photo of my fingers from my right hand with single fungus nail.

3. Photo of toes from my right foot with two fungus nails and possible third.

4. A police description of my face.

5. Black and white photo of my mother as a child, the one in which she is dressed like a doll, looking through the camera with piercing green eyes.

5a. How can a memory of an event, not my own, be a part of [Fragment left unfinished]

5b. What did Guy Debord mean in his film Critique of Separation when he wrote, “It is necessary to destroy memory in art”? Especially when so many of his films retain traces of memories, recollections, photos of friends, of drunken evenings spent together plotting the liberation—not of art, but of everyday life.

5c. I agree with him: I am not interested in using art as a place to express servile sentiments, but where to place the work of memory, of recollections that could, in their most intense heights, even undo our image, our understanding of our “selves.”

6. Image of a burnt American flag.

6. Image of a folded and wrinkled white piece of paper with the following text: “Let’s destroy our privacy before they do.”

6. Image of a sheet of paper with the number 6.

6, Image of a sheet with the number 6 followed by a comma.

7. Overwhelming you and me, there are words that remain abstract and words that fall close to home. Can one say the home is an intimate place? Can one say the home will always be unhomely? Can one say that we are never at home, even when at home? And to think that even when we offer our home to an Other, it is not our home to offer. Our home is not our home. Simply, our homeland, not our home-land. [It didn't work]

7a. Do the dead have a home? Is a resting place a home?

7b. My body, which is not mine at all, exposed to forces opening up to an outside, infinite, bursting, dispersing, potent, unexpected, and, thus, fragile.

8. Wait a moment, I need a rest.

9. Language is interminable, but how to be intimate with language? How to be intimate in language?

9a. Can we be intimate in language? Can we be intimate in any way other than in language? And I ask you, sincerely (with all the ambiguities of sincerity), in whose language?

10. [Withdrawn]

11. There is nothing one can say without saying the saying of what one can say. And yet, to say “no” or to say “yes” is already to draw closed the gates or open to an exterior of say-ability, which calls into question the initial point of departure.

11a. I wanted to write something related to the notion of intimacy. But before thinking about intimacy, I would have to think about wanting. What in fact is “wanting”? What does it mean to say: “I want”? To say: “I want to say”? To say: “I want to write”?

11b. Is want desire? And if so, where does desire reside? (Possibly inside the word itself –or would this just be wordplay?)

11c. Volition, will, wish, need, necessity, material, immaterial, conscious, unconscious, unquenchable fiction.

11d. What, who wants in the wanting of, wanting to say, and from where does the want come from? And where does the want go in the saying (instead of saying, should it be question) “I want”? And when is this want satisfied? Is a want satisfiable?

11e.  The time of a want is a time of searching for the right word, the right touch, for the right light, the right taste, the right warmth…

12. This has my signature all over it, and yet, it is not signed by me. My signature, a daily fiction, a performance of my most intimate distance from what I call “myself.”

13. How many marks or traces of an impending suicide can be discovered looking back into a past that forgets itself as often as it recalls the numbers, the days of the week, the years stacked upon one another.

13a. Ten is the kind of round number that events of the utmost intimacy can be marked. Usually, there is a song sung, but on some occasions, the loneliest loneliness is called upon (and of which, we should not be afraid)

14. There is nothing more intimate —even if you told me there is nothing more intimate.

15. Saying “I love you” is a political act. Saying “I love you” is a political act.

16. But when we say (anything), how do we say, how many things do we say, how many ways do we say, how can we say a thing worthy of saying?

17. His circle of intimates, a group of inmates, mating, constantly, and frequently, usually behind closed closet doors close to the cold coffin resting places.

18. In the 1961 film by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, Chronique de un ete, one of the participants, Jacques Gabillon, attempts to describe his struggle at holding on to and nurturing his “marginal life.” This marginal life is the site of his sincere interests, his friendships, his passions, his desires and wants. He desires to be a writer, to work with language and fights for this time, after his days of hard work. This marginal life is a time of leisure, love, sex, a possibly non-functional time and thought. Today, it stands to be interrogated. Whose are you? Where do you seek refuge? Who do you work for? Where are our intimate spaces, times, when they are increasingly mobilized and territorialized into a rationality only concerned with buying and selling?

18a. This voice. Which voice? Whose voice?

18b. Walter Benjamin, in his essay on the Storyteller, Nikolai Leskov, writes that we have lost the capacity to tell stories, because experience itself has lost its value: the truth of wisdom had been replaced by the truth of facts. Intimacy, which is connected to experience, our sensation of the world, our thought, our non-functional time, even our boredom, and possibly, a poetic existence, rhythm, is not something one can take for granted. It is connected to a time and space, or a relation to time and space, that needs to be fought for, re-asserted, re-constructed.

18c. To whom it may concern,

It has been brought to my attention that you have invented a “revolutionary” program, which allows me to share my most intimate moments with friends throughout the world, from various devices, instantly. Is it possible to take my intimate experiences, make them work for you, and then sell them back to me, or anyone willing to pay?

18d. Expropriate, dispossess, exploit, instrumentalize, package, sell. The most repetitive algorithm masquerading as the new.

19. The coordinates of the personal and the political—in the personal is political—have to be opened up and reconsidered in light of their economization.

20. I handed him this note, he saw it, the space was left empty, the papers were recycled, nothing else was done, I withdrew, so did she. They left. A world remained waiting for the next step.

The foreclosure crisis seems to manifest itself through various forms and various degrees of violation of intimacy, of which the actual act of repossession is just one. It’s quite fascinating how this is possible the first crisis of our times that has a distinctive architectural aesthetic – empty, detached suburban mansions connected by deserted streets, or slum-like frame houses in varying states of dilapidation.

From a visual point of view, the way the foreclosure crisis was collectively experienced was actually through a series of visits (both on TV and in the papers) to domestic, supposedly intimate, architectural spaces.

There was a whole other layer to the crisis that involved a performative, ritualistic violation of intimacy.  I recently attended a foreclosure tour, which are realtor-arranged bus rides for prospective buyers to visit foreclosed homes in rapid succession, and bid on them at knock-off prices.”

One of the things I find most fascinating is the way in which these dwellings have been very carefully divested of all traces of the intimacy of the family that lived there, so as to not rouse feelings of guilt in the prospective buyers; on the other hand, details continue to emerge – doors that someone has punched a fist through, children’s stickers on the roof of the bedroom, etc.

When we are home, we don’t need to talk about it. “To be at home”—byt’ doma—is a slightly a-grammatical expression in many languages [1].  It is as if it can’t be learned; we just know how to say it in our native tongue. To feel at home is to be comfortably unaware of things, to know that things are in their places and so are you. It is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual place. The object of longing, then  is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world,  it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia. “Intimate” means “innermost,” “pertaining to a deep nature,” “very personal,” “sexual.” Yet, “to intimate” also means “to communicate” with a hint or other indirect sign; to imply subtly [2]. I will speak about something that might seem paradoxical–a “diasporic intimacy” that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but is constituted by it. So much has been made of the happy home-coming that it is time to do justice to the stories of non-return or return to the place one has never been. They allow one to explore intimate ways of reflective nostalgia. In the late twentieth century millions of people find themselves displaced from their place of birth, living in voluntary or involuntary exile. Their intimate experiences occur against a foreign background. They are aware of the foreign stage set whether they like it or not. Moreover, immigrants to the United States bring with them different traditions of social interaction, often less individualistic; as for the writers, they carry the memory of oppression but also of their social significance that they could hardly match in the more “developed” West. In contemporary American pop-psychology one is encouraged “not to be afraid of intimacy.” This presumes that intimate communication can and should be made in a plain language and consists in saying “what you mean” without irony and double speak. Immigrants—and many alienated natives as well—cannot help but dread it. Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets. It is spoken of in a foreign language that reveals the inadequacies of translation. Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection–no less deep, while aware of its transience. In contrast to the utopian images of intimacy as transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging, diasporic intimacy is distopic by definition; it is rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging. It thrives on the hope of the possibilities of human understanding and survival, of unpredictable chance encounters, but this hope is not utopian. Diasporic intimacy is haunted by the images of home and homeland, yet it also discloses some of the furtive pleasures of exile.
Intimacy has its own historical topography. In the Western tradition it reflects the colonization of the world by a private individual. Intimacy is not connected to life in the traditional community but to the discovery of privacy and solitude in the late medieval and early Renaissance culture. Privacy is no longer perceived as a “deprivation “ of public and religious significance (as the original Roman etymology of the word suggests); it became a value in itself. Privacy acquires particular cultural significance in the seventeenth-century Holland and eighteenth-century England where a non-transcendental conception of home emerged just around the time of the first diagnoses of nostalgia. The maps of intimacy expand through centuries, from precarious medieval retreats—a corner by the window or in the hallway, a secluded spot behind the orchard, a forest clearing—to the ostentatious bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century with their innumerable curio cabinets and chests of drawers, to the end-of-the-twentieth-century transitory locations: the back seat of a car, a train compartment, an airport bar, an electronic homepage. It might appear that intimacy is on the outskirts of the social; it is local and particular, socially superfluous and non-instrumental. Yet, for better or for worse, each romance with intimacy is adulterated by a specific culture and society [3]. Intimacy is not solely a private matter; intimacy can be protected, manipulated or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory or estranged by a critique.
The twentieth century embraced intimacy as an ideal and also rendered it deeply suspicious. Hannah Arendt criticizes intimacy as a retreat from worldliness. It doesn’t matter whether it is a middle-class cult of intimacy or a special relationship cherished by a pariah group, a form of brotherhood that allows one to survive in a hostile world. Intimacy, as Arendt sees it, is the shrinking of experience, something that binds us to national or ethnic community (even if it is a pariah community), to home and homeland, rather than to the world [4]. Similarly, Richard Sennett argues that in contemporary American society the cult of intimacy turned into a form of seductive tyranny that promised warmth, authentic disclosure and boundless closeness and effectively led to the detriment of the public sphere and sociability [5]. Sennett’s critique is directed against the late twentieth-century commercialized version of the Protestant cult of authenticity that could make everyday life inartistic, humorless, divested of worldliness and public significance. It is also connected to the American dream and the cult of “family home.” In this case intimacy is no longer a retreat from but a fulfillment of the dominant cultural ideology. This ideology of intimacy—not so much as actual experience but as a promise and even an entitlement—pervades all spheres of American life, from slick fresh breath advertisement of family values to informal support groups and minority communities.
The diasporic intimacy that interests me is neither the touchy-feely imperative of the breath-freshener commercial nor the fraternal/sororial warmth of a minority group. Diasporic intimacy does not promise a comforting recovery of identity through shared nostalgia for the lost home and homeland. In fact, it’s the opposite. It could be seen as the mutual enchantment of two immigrants from different parts of the world or the sense of a precarious coziness of a foreign home. Just as one learns to live with alienation and reconciles oneself to the uncanniness of the world around one and to the strangeness of the human touch, there comes a surprise, a pang of intimate recognition, a hope that sneaks in through the back door. It punctuates the habitual estrangement of everyday life abroad.
A cultural genealogy of diasporic intimacy leads us away from the “history of private life.” We have to look for its modern beginnings in the alienating and illuminating experiences of the metropolis, in the double bind of modernity and nostalgia reflected in the consciousness of the urban wanderers at once estranged from and engaged with the life around them. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire discover a “love at last sight” that produces a sexual shudder with a simultaneous shock of recognition and loss [6]. Rather than a melancholic sorrow, “love at last sight” reveals itself as a miracle of possibilities. “Love at last sight” strikes the urban stranger when he or she realizes they are on stage, at once an actor and a spectator” [7].
What might appear as an aesthetization of social existence to the “natives,” strikes an immigrant as an accurate depiction of the condition of exile. That is, of course, when the first hardships are over and the immigrant can afford the luxury of leisurely reflection. Immigrants always perceive themselves on stage, their lives resembling some mediocre fiction with occasional romantic outbursts and gray dailiness. Sometimes they see themselves as heroes of a novel, but such ironic realizations do not stop them from suffering through each and every novelistic collision of their own life. As for the sexual shock, it becomes a commonplace. What is much more uncommon is a recognition of a certain kind of tenderness which could be more striking than a sexual fantasy. Love at last sight is the spasm of loss after the revelation; the tenderness of exiles is about a revelation of possibility after the loss. It is when the loss had been taken for granted that one can be surprised that not everything has been lost. Tenderness is not about complete disclosure, saying what one really means, getting closer and closer. It excludes absolute possession and fusion. It defies symbols of fulfillment and is not very goal-oriented. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Tenderness…is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy” and a “miraculous crystallization of the presence” [8]. In tenderness need and desire are joined. Tenderness is always polygamous, non-exclusive. “Where you are tender you speak your plural” [9]. The reciprocal enchantment of exiles has a touch of lightness about it. As Italo Calvino points out, “lightness does not mean being detached from reality but cleansing it from its gravity, looking at it obliquely but not necessarily less profoundly” [10].
Diasporic intimacy is belated and never final; objects and places were lost in the past and one knows that they can be lost again. The illusion of complete belonging has been shattered. Yet, one discovers that there is still a lot to share. The foreign backdrop, the memory of past losses and recognition of transience do not obscure the shock of intimacy, but rather heighten the pleasure and intensity of surprise.
In the age of globalism, often perceived as a domination of an American-style free market and popular culture, there is a rebirth of nationalism and new emphasis upon “cultural intimacy.” Cultural intimacy is new concept; it is defined as a social poetics that characterizes existence in a small nation and transposes upon the national community what was historically the realm of a private individual and familial relationships [11].  It defines itself in opposition to global culture, not to “worldliness” or the public sphere. Sometimes the immigrants themselves, particularly those who came to the developed countries not for political but for economic reasons and were not subjects of persecution, reconstitute a mini-nation-state on foreign soil, failing to see the diasporic dimension that feeds their narrowly defined cultural intimacy.
There is a problem, in my view, in making a direct connection between home and homeland and in projecting personal longing onto historical and collective history. Benedict Anderson compares national recreation of the past with individual autobiography. Both are seen as narratives of identity and personhood that sprang from oblivion, estrangement and loss of the memory of home. Homecoming, return to the imagined community is a way of patching up the gap of alienation, turning intimate longing into belonging. In a lyrical passage the critic draws on a developmental metaphor of the adolescent who wishes to forget childhood and the adult who desires to reinvent it by looking at an old photo of a child that supposedly resembles him or her [12].  However, not all biographical narratives qualify for the national imaginary, only the pure ones, rooted in local soil that begin “with the circumstances of parents and grandparents” and follow nineteenth-century realistic conventions. What is left out of Anderson’s account are the stories of internal and external exiles, misfits and mixed bloods who offer digressions and detours from the mythical biography of a nation. The development of their consciousness does not begin at home, but at the moment of leaving home. After all, every teenager dreams of leaving home, and often that first escape determines the map of one’s dreams as much as the architecture of home. These internal and external exiles from the imagined communities also long for home but with fewer illusions and might develop solidarity with strangers like themselves. An imagined community of reflective strangers? As utopias go, this might be a less risky one.

[1] In Russia “not to have everyone home” ( ne imet’ vsekh doma) does not signify privacy but a form of solitary madness. Somehow there is an assumption that home is to be crowded. “Everyone” has to be there in order for you to be yourself (what a difference from the French “chez soi”!). Yet every language praises the virtues of home, insisting on its singularity and uniqueness.
[2] American Heritage Dictionary  (Boston:Houghton Mifflin: : 1985) p.672.
[3] Philippe Aries, “Introduction” to History of Private Life, Vol 3, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1-7 and Orest Ranum, “The Refuges of Intimacy” in History of Private Life, Vol 3, p. 207.
[4] Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing in Men in Dark Times, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc: 1968), pp. 15-16.
[5] Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, Boston: Faber and Faber: 1977), p.337-340.
[6] Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)
[7] Georg Simmel, “Sociability” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p.130. I am grateful to Gabriella Turnatui for bringing it to my attention.
[8] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang: 1978). p. 224-225.
[9] Ibid. p. 225.
[10] talo Calvino, “Lightness” in Six Memos for the Next Millenium (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp.3-31.
[11] As Michael Herzfeld observed, cultural intimacy plays hide-and-seek with common frameworks of memory and can both be manipulated by state propaganda and provide ways of everyday defiance. (Cultural Intimacy, New York: Routledge, 1996)
[12] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York and London:

“. . . as a receptive function of skin, touch is not solely a prerogative of the hand. It covers the entire body, including the eye itself, and the feet, which establish our contact with the ground. Conceived as such a pervasive enterprise, the haptic sense actually can be understood as a geographic sense in a global way: it “measures”, “interfaces”, and “borders” our relation to the world, and does so habitually.” —Giuiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. [1]

The following New York State Court of Appeals (New York State’s highest court) ruling, the People v. Hall, 2008 NY Slip Op 2676 (2008), ruling concerns an alleged drug dealer who, when apprehended and stripped, was found to have a piece of string hanging from his rectum.  The police declared they had reason to believe that the plaintiff, Azim Hall, had a baggie of crack cocaine inside his rectum.  The police pulled the string and found this to be true.  Hall maintained that his Fourth Amendment right — that the State must maintain a warrant before entering the private property of an individual — was violated.  The police explained they technically never entered the plaintiff’s body cavity; they merely pulled the “plainly visible” string from his anus and the contraband emerged with no difficulty. Hall maintained however that being subjected to a visual inspection was itself a violation of privacy and dignity.

The case that follows, Azim v. The People, raises a number of questions that test the constitutional protection against warrantless searches and seizures of one’s private property, whether dwelling or body: What defines the right to privacy?  Is it the contours of the flesh that envelop a the surface of a body and enclose a cavity or also perhaps the eyes of another that probe from a distance? Ultimately, can the two senses — vision and touch— be separated? At stake in this (epistemological) question about the perception of truth are “the interests of human dignity and privacy when a public official peers insider a person’s body” [2].

Employing language that wavers between restrained embarrassment and sensual descriptions of flesh and sight, the judges decide “eyes are as probing as fingers and tools.” Concluding that sight and touch are inextricably bound, the New York’s Court of Appeals consequently firm up constitutional search and seizure rules, imposing greater regulation of both hands and eyes.

But what still remains constitutionally weak are those exceptions that justify a search and seizure without warrant, those exceptions justified on the grounds of “probable cause” that render live the contingent thresholds of privacy.

_____________________________

Excerpts from, The People v. Azim Hall, 2008 NY Slip Op 2676 (2008)

Defendant was transported to a police station where Spiegel searched his clothing but no drugs were found. Spiegel placed defendant in a private detention cell and asked him to remove his clothing. Burnes entered the cell and defendant was ordered to bend over or squat, at which point Spiegel and Burnes observed a string or piece of plastic hanging out of defendant’s rectum. Believing that the string was attached to a package of drugs hidden inside defendant’s body, Burnes ordered defendant to remove the object. When defendant refused, Spiegel proceeded to hold defendant while Burnes pulled on the string and removed a plastic bag that [*3]  was found to contain crack cocaine. Hall at *2-3

There are three distinct and increasingly intrusive types of bodily examinations undertaken by law enforcement after certain arrests and it is critical to differentiate between these categories of searches. A “strip search” requires the arrestee to disrobe so that a police officer can visually inspect the person’s body. The second type of examination — a “visual body cavity inspection” — occurs when a police officer looks at the arrestee’s anal or genital cavities, usually by asking the arrestee to bend over; however, the officer does not touch the arrestee’s body cavity. In contrast, a “manual body cavity search” includes some degree of touching or probing of a body cavity that causes a physical intrusion beyond the body’s surface [3]. Hall at *4

Our task, then, is to determine whether it is reasonable to draw a constitutional distinction between a visual inspection of an arrestee’s body (which requires no touching of the person’s body whatsoever) and a manual body cavity search (which necessarily results in an intrusion beyond the body’s surface and possibly the removal of an object or the insertion of an instrument into an orifice). Hall at *7

Summarizing the relevant constitutional precedent, it is clear that a strip search must be founded on a reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is concealing evidence underneath clothing and the search must be conducted in a reasonable manner. To advance to the next level required for a visual cavity inspection, the police must have a specific, articulable factual basis supporting a reasonable suspicion to believe the arrestee secreted evidence inside a body cavity and the visual inspection must be conducted reasonably. If an object is visually detected or other information provides probable cause that an object is hidden inside the arrestee’s body, Schmerber dictates that a warrant be obtained before conducting a body cavity search unless an emergency situation exists [3]. Hall at *11

Because a manual cavity search is more intrusive [than a visual search] and gives rise to heightened privacy and health concerns, when weighed against the legitimate needs of law enforcement, we believe it should be subject to a stricter legal standard. . . A visual body cavity search “do[es] not create a risk of physical pain or injury” and is therefore somehow less intrusive than “a physical search of an arrestee’s body cavity” [however,] it is still true that eyes — as well as fingers and tools — can intrude unreasonably upon constitutionally protected privacy rights (see Kamins, New York Search & Seizure § 4.01 [1], at 4-3 [2007 ed.] Hall (Concurrence of Ciparick) *4

Endnotes
[1] Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2007. 254

[2] The People v. Azim Hall, 2008 NY Slip Op 2676 (2008). p.21

[3] See e.g. Paulino v State, 399 Md 341, 352, 924 A2d 308, 315 (2007), cert denied __ US __, 128 S Ct 709 (2007); Blackburn v Snow, 771 F2d 556, n 3 (1st Cir 1985); McGee v State, 105 SW3d 609, 615 (Tx Ct Crim App 2003); Kamins, New York Search and Seizure § 4.03 (5), at 4-141 (2007).

[3] “Clear indication” means “the necessity for particularized suspicion that the evidence sought might be found within the body of the individual”; it is not “a third Fourth Amendment threshold between ‘reasonable suspicion’ and ‘probable cause’” (United States v Montoya de Hernandez, 473 US 531, 540 [1985]). Because Schmerber mandates a warrant in the absence of exigent circumstances, the clear indication test requires that searches beyond the surface of a person’s body be supported by at least probable cause.

“The interests in human dignity and privacy’ invaded when a public official peers inside a person’s body cavity are at least as great as those invaded by a needle piercing the skin.” – United States v Oyekan, 786 F2d 832, 840 n 13
[8th Cir 1986]

As the options for abuse of those deemed our possible enemies has become ever more visible in the United States, we learned in mid-May that a majority of citizens no longer support a women’s right to terminate a pregnancy.  Or so it seemed during the several day minor media blitz featuring one Gallup Poll. Whether this is a true indicator of public opinion on the sovereignty of the self for women is suspect, given that this was one poll (with a pool of some 1,000 participants) and its prominence was no doubt linked to pro-choice President Obama’s commencement speech at Catholic Notre Dame that same week [2]. A more disturbing assault of women’s bodies was the 2007 Supreme Court decision, Gonzalez v. Carhart, that deemed criminal the use of the late term abortion procedure “Dilation and Extraction,” even if it was diagnosed as necessary for the women’s health or to save her life [3].  Although D&X total only .17% of all abortions in the U.S, this decision marks an alarming precedent in that the Supreme Court places the health and life of the woman as a secondary consideration. As I prepare this essay to go to press, I have just learned that George Tiller—one of the few doctors in the U.S. who provided third term abortions for women whose life or health was at risk—has just been shot dead while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church [4].

These selective and disparate examples of assaults on the limits of our bodies and sense of self may push the boundaries of definitions of “intimacy” and “normalization of body intrusion in public space” that are the themes of this inaugural issue. But they are just several of so many such indicators that comprise what could be described as a generalized consciousness of our selves as physical, physic and emotional beings during what until recently was called the age of the War on Terror.

Given these dramatic, on-going and highly visible incursions into our intimate, personal “space,” a visit to the Museum of Modern Art offers a dramatically different experience of our bodies and our selves, one that is perhaps best described as delusional.

In 2004 the Museum opened its redesigned building, which was directed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi [5]. As a counter to what was seen by some as Frank Gehry’s hyperbolic Bilbao and a trend for “intrusive” museum buildings, Taniguchi reportedly summarized his vision with this line:

“If you raise a lot of money, I will give you great, great architecture. But if you raise really a lot of money, I will make the architecture disappear” [6].

And for most reviewers of the New MoMA, the architecture did seem to disappear, as the title of John Updike’s much read New Yorker article, “Invisible Cathedral,” attests. But despite of the glass façade facing the garden, and the glimpses of the city seen through apertures and windows, the most overpowering vista—seen in enhanced scale—throughout the building were brilliantly white walls.  The dominance of this feature secured the sense of separation of the museum interior from anything exterior to it. These massive white walls also provided a seemingly neutral decontextualized terrain for everything installed within them. This was exemplified by the predicament of Monet’s Water Lillies.  Previously installed in a domestic scale, semi-circular interior, this installation was one of the treasures of the “Old MoMA.” For the inaugural show, Monet’s masterwork was hung in MoMA’s massive atrium, and was singled out by even those who wrote glowingly about the new museum design as an aesthetic disaster–one of the more oft-quoted descriptions was that the majestic mural looked like a “big, soiled Band-Aid” [7]

What was made to disappear was not the museum building with its aggressive walls of whiteness, but all that would counter such a sanitized realm, which was matched by the museum programming. It is a generalization, but nonetheless true: the works exhibited were dominated by preference for abstraction and neutral tones. This was particularly the case with the painting and sculpture galleries, with those devoted to design offering one of the few oases of color, emotion and diversity within this desert of the monochrome. Despite the fact the United States had been obsessed by what was being called the War on Terror, there was no reference to the existence of such conflicts, except for one José Clemente Orozco’s 1940 mural, Dive Bomber and Tank installed in a hall.  The New MoMA’s inaugural installation was representative of major Manhattan museums inability to present almost any programming dealing with war for most of the past six years that we have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan [8]. At MoMA, programming has been dominated by exhibitions with innocuous themes, and one-person shows, which until recently were almost all only given to artists who are men.  The lack of diversity that marked the New MoMA’s canon was seen in the seven works squeezed into the multimedia galleries, which were to represent all the video, digital, film, and media works of the past half century.  But this lack was even more disturbing in terms of gender. Too many of the galleries had no, or few, works by women.  The famous sculpture garden included not one entry by a woman artist.

Although there have been a few shows devoted to women artists since the museum’s re-opening, and there have been some interesting departures from MoMA’s monochromatic/monographic standard by the design and architecture department [9], a visit to the museum in mid-May affirmed that little has changed since 2004.  The thematic exhibitions included such pressing concerns as:  Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded; The Printed Picture; Compass in Hand [10]; and Into the Sunset: Photographs of the American West. Certainly, exhibitions with formalist, vague, lacking-a-great-idea themes, such as Staged Pictures: Drawings for Performance can have a fantastic single image, as did this show, which also included several fascinating videos of  original theater performances to illuminate the drawings.  But the featured—literally “top tier”—temporary exhibitions in the large scale sixth floor galleries were devoted to a Martin Kippenberger’s show (that had just closed) and one called Tangled Alphabets, an exhibition of the work of Leon Ferrari and Mira Shendel. Given the Museum’s history and the pairing of these two artists’ work, I and another critic, who had just seen the show, could not help but wonder that if Schendel had not been a woman, and if these were not Latin American artists, perhaps they would have been assigned a one person retrospective. Finally, there was a change in the sculpture garden installation.  They added another artists work, Franz West. So there continues to be no works by women in the MoMA sculpture garden.

Despite the fact that artists have always addressed key issues of their time, with some exceptions, the Museum continues to fail to present a range of programming that is more than one person shows and innocuous thematic exhibitions. This failure to represent a diversity of art and culture is manifest in the entire gesamptkunstwerk that is MoMA.  Mirroring the bland programming and ahistorical themes that constitute the selections and exhibitions, the installations and architecture present an exaggerated version of the standard “white box” interior. The new building and installations perpetuate the modern art museum’s convention of installing artworks isolated on neutral-toned walls. But what is particularly important to this discussion is that such spaces create a de-contextualized environment not only for the works of art, but for the viewers. These displays enhance viewers’ sense of ahistorical autonomy, and metaphorically foster an experience of independence, and even “free will.” As is the case with Taneguchi’s design, since the development of these types of installations  earlier in the twentieth century, what were originally beige neutral colors have become bright white, and the scale of the walls have increased in sized.  In keeping with these developments, the New MoMA, with its immense, self-referential, ultra white interiors, and matching neutral, apolitical, non-diverse, decontextualized programming offers an isolationist, escapist, and delusionally empowering experience for viewers.

Endnotes
[1] The enactment of this law will not take effect until a special facility is built, with the latest date for enactment is July 1, 2011. For an explanation of these details see: see DOCS Today: New York State Department of Correctional Services, vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 2008, http://www.docs.state.ny.us/PressRel/DOCSToday/ Spring2008edition.pdfA (June 1, 2009). A compilation of fact sheets and articles related to what is called the SHU Bill can be found at the  Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement (MHASC) website, http://www.boottheshu.org/ (June 1, 2009).

[2] The exact figure was 1,015, see Linda Saad, “More Americans Pro-life Than Pro-choice,” for First Time,” GALLUP, http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx (May 27, 2009).
What was important here was the prominence of this information within the mainstream media, and the fact that related information, like the fact that one third of women in the United States have had an abortion by the age of 45 is rarely mentioned in such discussions in the mainstream press, see “Overview of Abortion in the U.S.,” Guttmacher Institute, http://www.guttmacher.org/media/presskits/2005/06/28/abortionoverview.html (June 1, 2009).

[3] Judge Ruth Bader Ginzburg wrote the dissenting opinion, which she read from the bench. This is unusual for Supreme Court justices to do so and emphasizes the strength of her dissent.  As is well known, Ginzburg is the only woman on the Supreme Court. For a discussion that references the unusualness of Ginzburg’s reading out loud, see “After Gonzales v. Carhart: The Future of Abortion Jurisprudence” (event transcript) The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, June 14, 2007, http://supreme.justia.com/us/550/05-380/ (May 31, 2009).
For case see, Gonzalez v. Carhart 550 U.S. 124 (2007), Findlaw,
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=05-380

[4] To cite just one example, see “Monica Davey and Joe Stumpe, “Doctor Who Performed Abortions Is Shot Dead, The New York Times,  May 31, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html?ref=global-home (May 31, 2009).

[5] I have written more extensive analyses of MoMA’s new design and the history of museum practices.  Several texts that related especially to this essay are: “What’s so new about MoMA?” Sunday Opinion Section: Newsday, January 23, 2005, A. 41; “Grand Illusions: The “New” Museum of Modern Art,” Curating Subjects, editor, Paul O’Neil, Amsterdam and London: de Appel and Open Editions, 2007; and “Preface”, The Power of Display:  A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, designLocus of Seoul, Korea, Spring 2007, originally published by the MIT Press in English in 1998.

[6] This was a often quoted line in the press, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli repeated it in a New York Magazine article, Alexandra Lange, “This New House,”  October 11, 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/10057/index4.html (May 26, 2009).

[7] Peter Schjeldahl, “Easy to Look At,” The New Yorker, December 6, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206craw_artworld (May 26, 2009).

[8] Exceptions were the Whitney Museum’s 2003 The American Effect (which looked at international attitudes toward the U.S.) and a small 2004 permanent collection show Memorials of War.  More recently in 2009, MoMA held an exhibition in the mezzaine reading room, The Museum and the War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for “The Cause,” presenting archival materials (correspondence, press clippings, and photographs) related to MoMA’s WW II exhibitions.

[9] One such exception was Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, Paola Antonelli, with Curatorial Assistant, Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini 2005 exhibition
Safe: Design Takes On Risk.

[10] The full title is for Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection.