We all remember the moment COVID lockdown began in the spring 2020, and the feelings of isolation and grief that followed when we were confronted by a new virus pandemic that claimed many lives. But, in Feral CityJeremiah Moss documents another. He witnessed a rewilding in New York City during the lockdown. People were reengaging with public space. This encouraged the cross-pollination that was stifled by decades of surveillance, gentrification and homogenization.
With “no stores, no shoppers, no restaurant reviews or fashion trends to incite consumption and competition, no office workers rushing around, no eyes staring at iPhones, no outward signs of bourgeois acquisition and productivity,” there was more freedom to roam, Moss writes, and the city pulsated with a kind of street life that Moss, who has lived in New York for almost 30 years, hadn’t experienced at this scale in decades.
After the police shooting death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, mass protests broke out and cities across the country took action. The streets of New York became more politicized. “Pandemic time bends and lags, expanding as it falls back on itself in a churn that coughs up debris from the past and casts it forth into the present,” Moss writes. And it’s in this time of trauma and restlessness that public space in New York once again became populated by poor people and protesters, people of color and queers, outcasts and artists and dreamers. It was “a return of the lost that was not lost,” Moss writes, as people pushed to the margins reemerged in a raucous spectacle of resistance.
In this interview, Moss discusses “what can happen when capitalism is put on just the slightest hold” — the possibilities for intimacy, transgression, collaboration and transformation that emerge — and the policing of public space and public behavior that diminishes the options for self-determination.
Mattilda B. Sicamore: One of the things which makes Feral CityIts focus on embodiment is so immediate. Reading the book felt like an adrenaline rush. It was as if I was going through it all with you. How did it feel to write?
Jeremiah Moss:I was writing everything down immediately after it happened. So I’d come home from a bike ride or an action, after being in the intensity of it all, and I’d stay up late to get it down in raw form, when it was still fresh in memory. The writing came out quickly, much like the adrenaline rush you described. After that, I did all the reworking which is slow writing, reflecting back on my experiences, and trying to figure out how I felt. I wrote. Feral City with a good deal of anxiety about getting it “right,” because I was writing about this massive shared experience, that was yet not shared equally, and also writing about other people, so I wanted to be careful, full of care. When I write, I have to deal with my inner critics a lot. It is not an easy process. Except in moments of poetry where everything’s flying. Those moments are rare and far between.
In writing about activism, I think there’s a tendency to talk about the politics and the protests, the strategies and struggles, the enemies and heroes, but not so much the day-to-day experience of living, of feeling everything. All the contradictions. You do a wonderful job of this throughout the book. How did this keep you focused?
I kept returning to memoir, reminding my self that I was writing my personal story. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of trying to represent “the movement” or “the pandemic,” because I can’t do that. No one can. It would be foolish to try. I can make it big if I keep it small. As a writer, my first job was as a poet. I believe in William Carlos Williams’s idea of reaching the universal through the particular. I love everyday particularity. I love affect. I learn things by feeling.
In talking about gentrification in New York City, you write about the “New People” who flocked to New York when it became a whitewashed symbol of post-9/11 patriotism. You say, “Their newness is not the problem,” since new people have always flocked to New York. What’s the difference?
It has been a struggle for many years to come up with a name that would describe these people. When I started my blog, Vanishing New York, in 2007, I called them “yunnies,” a riff on yuppies that stood for Young Urban Narcissists. But that was too restricting and too cutesy so I dropped it. For the book, I wanted to coin some great term, but ended up with New People, which I’m not satisfied with either. These people are a new personality type in the city. They’re not New because they’re newcomers; they’re New because they’re not like the sort of people who’ve historically flocked to the city and, specifically, to countercultural neighborhoods like the East Village. They often don’t feel quite human. They feel android-like, manufactured, and this is because — I believe — their personalities have been engineered by the culture of neoliberal capitalism, especially in the 2000s when social media spreads neoliberalism like a virus. In The New YorkerJia Tolentino has just published an essay about “Instagram face,” what she calls a “single, cyborgian” look, and this is part of what I’m talking about. The New People are perfect neoliberal subjects, engineered to conform, perform and succeed, and this makes them quite violent in the way they enter and commandeer urban space — and in the way they approach people who are unlike them, who they see as beneath them. They also resort to violence against themselves by de-subjectification, a process of hollowing out themselves. It is difficult for me to empathize. I keep trying, but I feel so assaulted by them, I just can’t.
I love the way you can listen in on your influencer neighbours to get the unfiltered details of their lives. Surveillance has stifled so many of the possibilities of urban life, and yet here you’re flipping the gaze to examine the gawkers and their “contemptuous disregard.” What do you find?
“Flattened” is a good word and it describes well what happens when someone de-subjectifies themself; they smooth out all the bumps that make them human and particular. They are the cyborgian Instagram face. The flatness and uniformity of the glossy catalog image is what they lack in personality. And — here’s their violence — they aim to de-subjectify everything and everyone around them. This goes beyond gentrification. This is about making the entire urban landscape a seamless, frictionless, endlessly repeating Instagrammable scene that lacks risk, surprise, and affect. To create this nightmarish hollow city, many of us will have to be removed, and if we refuse to go, we will be controlled — by the police, by systems of surveillance, and by the contemptuous disregard that the New People throw like poison darts from their eyes. They are trying to wipe us out. To make us non-existent.
At the beginning of COVID lockdown in New York, so many of these “New People” left the city.
They fled in large numbers the day lockdown was implemented in March 2020. The New Yorkers I used too to know were those who stayed behind, and wandered the streets. I’m talking about the ordinary people who aren’t cyborgian, along with the poor and working class, the nonwhite, the queer, the weird, the unhoused, the old, the artists, basically everyone who’s not a New Person. So, the city was refilled with all this beautiful subjectivity! It was like a cloud lifted, and we could see one another again. We could feel one another and look at each others. We were unalienated.
So, you are struck by the “poetry of the streets” at the same time as the pandemic is claiming so many lives in New York. You ask, “How is it that tragedy would make me fall in love with the city again?”
It was the most joyful time of my life — and I know how that sounds. People were dying, and suffering. I was able to work from home, making my living, and being relatively safe. I was able to feel joy, which is not something that I often experience. I also spoke with others who did not have my privilege, and they too felt joy and released from lockdown. The pandemic came with a tremendous freedom, especially for those of us who’ve been constrained. We became close friends. I fell in love again with the city because it felt like a very loving and supportive place in 2020.
You describe the scene in Times Square after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis cops. This is before the mass protests, and there’s just one Black man engaged in a theatrical protest of his own. Your description feels so intimate that it’s almost shocking. And you do this throughout the book — painting pictures of activists and wanderers as individual weirdos engaged in daily struggles of survival and resistance. I wonder if you could talk more about this method — it feels journalistic in approach, but without the unnecessary distance.
Is that what you do? You’re telling me something I didn’t know I did, so I don’t know how to answer this question. It’s not something I try to do. Like I don’t sit down and say, “I want this to feel intimate.” I wonder if what’s coming across is the intimacy I feel when I encounter certain people in the city, the weirdos who are strangers to me and yet I feel this connection with them. I think I’ve always felt this — and it’s an urban feeling for me — the way New York gives you this shocking intimacy at a distance.
It brings to mind the phenomenon that happens when you’re sitting on the subway, on a local train going through the tunnel, when the Express passes by and you look into the windows of that other train and you feel deeply connected to the humanity of the strangers over there, so much that it can make you cry. I think it’s the distance between the two trains that allows this to happen. I don’t feel it for the people sharing my train car. They’re too close. So there is distance, but it’s the kind of distance that permits an exquisite closeness with others.
There’s a lot of vulnerability in this book, and part of this is in revealing your own limitations. You write that as a white person you were aware of white supremacy and racist police tyranny for years, but that 2020 was the first time that you joined a Black Lives Matter protest, “Because it’s the end of the world and I’m tired of feeling powerless.” How does this moment change you, and what does it make possible collectively?
This line was born out of my editor asking me why I joined the protests at that time. I had to think about it. I’m not sure my answer is quite right, but it’s the best I could come up with. I wonder now, as you’re asking me essentially the same question my editor did, if the experience of being in a re-New Yorked city, a de-alienated city, allowed me to plug into the intersectionality of that moment. Most people fight for the stuff that matters to them personally, so queer and trans fights are my fights, and having lived as female, women’s fights are my fights. These are easy for me. As a white person in the U.S., I’ve been trained by white supremacy and capitalism to disidentify with Black people. Perhaps it was because we were all left alone together in the city, when capitalism receded slightly, that we felt more connected across races. I’m not sure. This is something I want keep in mind.
“We’re all outside because of the virus,” someone says to you. “Everyone together. It hasn’t been like this in 25 years.” There’s a danger of nostalgia here, but at the same time your book feels phenomenally in the present. You write about how, during the pandemic, the “master-planned phantom zone” of Times Square and the corporate NYU-colonized Washington Square Park reemerge as wild spaces for autonomous cross-pollination centering around people of color, queers, social misfits, party people and dreamers. You ask, “Why is there so much 1970s feeling in the air?” And I wonder if part of this is because the 1970s were the last time we had a more viable welfare state in the United States, and in 2020 some of these policies briefly reemerged.
Exactly. I write about this in the book. hauntology, the way Mark Fisher used it when he wrote, “What is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but the resumption of the Proces of democratization and pluralism,” the processes cut short in the 1970s when neoliberalism took the wheel. So it’s not nostalgia — although, as a proud nostalgist, I take issue with the demonization of nostalgia and the way the right has co-opted it for their “Make America Great Again” Archie Bunkerist “those were the days” rallying cry. I do think, though, that what many people, across the political spectrum, are feeling when they feel “those were the days” is the loss of human connection that comes with accelerated, unfettered capitalism, which feeds on and reproduces alienation. Are we becoming more alienated as a society? Most definitely.
That quote — “We’re all outside because of the virus. Everyone together. It hasn’t been like this in 25 years” — was said by a middle-aged Black man in Washington Square Park during one of our weekly pandemic dance parties. I think he was expressing nostalgia, a word that literally means “homesickness,” and what is home? Ideally, it’s a place where we don’t feel alien, where we feel part of a family, whether that is by birth or choice. We feel belonging. This is what many of you felt during lockdown. Capitalism was just seized up like an engine without gas. This created a wonderful gap in which many people could feel free and connected. It also made it possible to love one another. Because when you’re not swept up in the scarcity mindset of competition and production, you have much more capacity to give and receive love.
There’s so much camaraderie in the collective impulses toward pageantry and protest in this book, and yet you also know that “All the beautiful parts of this time will be taken away from us.” Tell us about this loss.
I’m still reeling from that loss as it continues at this very moment. The engine of capitalism started turning again when the city “reopened” in the spring of 2021 and it’s only gotten worse. I watched people change all around me — quite simply, they closed up, turning away from collective life on the streets. It was something I felt in my own body, just as much as it is something I fight. It’s contagious. We were re-alienated.
As the New People and others returned to the city, the police became more aggressive, locking the city back into a tightening grip. They’ve been harassing Black and Brown people, queer and trans people, unhoused people and artists, pushing them out of the public spaces they had migrated into during lockdown. They do this in order to make the city feel safe and comfortable for tourists, wealthy people, and New People who want a safe, easy, and Instagrammable urban experience. This city must be as normal as possible: white, straight and cisgender. It should also be bourgeois. It’s an emotionally dead space.
But it’s not just the police in blue uniforms who do the controlling, it’s also the hyper-normative people who radiate social control as they dictate norms. They returned to the city with a fury, so mad that those left behind had covered it up in graffiti and trash. Many of us found the reopening New York incredibly depressing. It’s been bewildering to go from so much freedom and connection, so much shared subjectivity, back to everyday violence and alienation. It is extremely painful.
I am, however, grateful to the experience, because it revealed what can happen when capitalism is put on just the slightest hold — and what happens when it comes roaring back. Lockdown was an accidental experiment. It showed us what could be.
You are a trauma therapist, and this undergirds many of your experiences in the book, but none more clearly than when you end up holding a woman while she’s having a panic attack at a protest because she’s remembering when she was recently assaulted by the cops at another protest. You think about the risks of COVID but you can’t let go. This was the first time I had ever read it. Because it’s everything at once, right? Trauma, panic and risk, as well as alienation, trauma, panic, fear, vulnerability, intimacy, and a rare sudden beauty. “Have I ever held a stranger like this?” you ask. And I wonder: How is it possible to hold each other like that all the time?
That is the question, isn’t it? We all are susceptible to internalized capitalism, which spreads like a virus from one host to another and carries a heavy burden of white supremacy. As much as I tried to resist it, I felt it again when the city reopened. This is powerful stuff. I felt myself become distant from people and suspicious. I felt busy, self-interested, and envious. Holding each other — which means holding each other in mind, being mindful of one another — this is profoundly difficult to do in our current social system because that system is a massive machine hell-bent on breaking us apart from one another. I can only share my methods or attempt to.
I am a participant in a weekly mutual assistance event and I join protests when I have the opportunity, which is becoming less and less frequently. I believe in the power and potential of individual, idiosyncratic demonstration. This means carrying one’s body as a place of resistance. I try to do a little deviant thing here and there — this can be as simple as talking out loud to yourself in public, or walking in an odd nonlinear way, or singing on the street. This is a way of holding on to a little bit of space for other deviants.
I slow down. This is vital. I slow down when I feel myself getting carried away by the control and capitalism of others. I take my time and examine things carefully. I also put on music, but not in headphones — I put my music on a speaker that I carry, boombox music, publicly shared, and this both repels some people and attracts others. It helps me to fall into the substream, or the other city, which is where people aren’t alienated from each others. So when I’m walking with my music, some people will groove with me — these are usually people outside the supreme norm of white, straight, cis, bourgeois, etc. So, a Black man, or a trans woman, or an unhoused person will dance or give me a nod and a smile and this is like — bam! I’m being held again and I’m holding again, and we’re together.
Copyright, Truthout, and Mattilda Sycamore. You may not reprint this article without permission.
