the naked gaze 肉眼

mystic writing pad

If memory serves, there is a character in one of Robert Graves’ “Claudius” novels who is imprisoned with only a single wax tablet. Day in and day out, he fills the tablet with writing, then wipes it clean and begins anew. Written text, for him, exists only in the virtual instant of inscription itself, with inscription becoming not an act of preservation, but rather an anticipation of imminent erasure.

I was reminded of Graves’ wax tablet recently  when my hard drive died on the last day of a month-long interview trip, and a data recovery company last week pronounced the drive unsalvageable. While all most of my completed projects were saved in other formats, I did lose several months (and hundreds of single-spaced pages) of daily notes, together with countless other odds and ends.

Rather than Graves’ wax tablet, however, I prefer to compare this unhappy situation to Freud’s model of the mystic writing pad—in which he compares human consciousness to a children’s toy in which one writes with a stylus on a plastic sheet placed on a wax tablet. Each time the plastic sheet is lifted up, the text written on it is wiped clean, though traces of the writing nevertheless remain, nearly invisible, on the wax tablet itself.  The nearly invisible palimpsest that is left behind on the wax tablet, Freud suggests, is represents the way in which the unconscious preserves and assimilates sensory impressions that do not leave a discernible trace at the level of conscious memory.

Last week was also Yuanxiao jie, the end of the Lunar New Year period. Traditionally a time for cleansing and renewal, the yuanxiao jie  lantern festival is celebrated with paper lanterns decorated with illustrations that, traditionally, are made visible by the very candle flame that constantly threatens to consume them.  (Now these traditional lanterns increasingly take the form of garish battery-driven plastic devices that whir and screech and blink on and off, but no matter).

It is, then, with these twin images of wax tablets and candle-illuminated lanterns, that I begin again my daily notes, and also resurrect this long-dormant virtual writing pad. 

Bitchin'

Massachusetts voted a couple of day ago to allow a proposed (state) constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage to proceed, thereby setting in motion a legal process which might eventually (after several legal hurdles) make it illegal in MA (currently the only state to permit same-sex marriage) for two individuals of the same sex to marry each other. The only way around such amendment, should it succeed, would be the fairly drastic measure of having one of the individuals legally have his or her sex changed. Of course, a proposal two months ago by New York City’s Board of Health would have made that latter process significantly easier (at least for New Yorkers). The proposal, which was withdrawn a month later, would have “created a new standard for certifying a change of gender,” effectively allowing transgendered individuals to alter the sex specified on their birth certificates even without necessarily having undergone surgery and/or hormone therapy (though applicants would still have needed “reliable documented evidence from a licensed physician and a mental health professional that they had completed the transition from one gender to the other and intended to permanently remain in their acquired gender.”) Meanwhile, a reminder of the traction which various forms of sexual determinancy continues to carry in the contemporary world, together with the potential divergences of gender and a slippery notion of biological “sex,” is provided by the announcement a couple of weeks ago that Santhi Soundararajan, a top Indian woman athlete, might be stripped of her silver medal at the recent Asian Games in Doha on account of having failed a “gender test” (given that “gender,” in contemporary usage, is usually understood as referring to a socio-cultural construct, presumably what the Asian Olympics officials meant was a “sex test,” though Judith Butler, among others, has argued persuasively that the notion of a rigid boundary between socio-cultural “gender” and biological “sex” is, itself, a socio-cultural construct).

These issues of the social and biological “realities” of sex and gender, meanwhile, also carry over in interesting ways into the virtual world. Although one sometimes gets the impression that the web constitutes a fluid space in which it is possible to adopt a range of alternate identities (for instance, the image of gay men adopting the personas of teenage girl in order  to flirt with horny heterosexual boys/men), in practice, though, it seems that in some respects on-line identities are not as fluid as they might be. For instance, the influential and intelligent pseudonymous female blogger Bitch Ph.D.  suggested on the last day of last week’s MLA convention (according to a summary provided by another blogger) that, based on her informal polls, "most pseudonymous bloggers are who they say they are; if they say they are women, they are." Coincidentally, the very next day another influential and intelligent pseudonymous female blogger, Bitch|Lab  (no relation), appeared to come out of the virtual closet as being actually a “queer dewd.”

Art and Surveillance

In Chicago last week a minor ruckus developed around Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain in the city’s Millennium Park. Plensa’s public monument consists of a pair large towers facing each other across a reflecting pool, each of which contains a rotating array of oversized faces of Chicago residents—disembodied heads which always appear to be staring down at the pedestrians below. As part of a Department of Homeland Security initiative, however, this past November the city installed security cameras to the top of each tower. The cameras were noticed several weeks later by bloggers Devyn Caldwell and Mike Doyle, who then tipped off the Chicago Tribune. The city then quickly removed the cameras and offered its apologies.

What is interesting about this controversy is that it did not revolve around concerns with surveillance per se (none of the major participants in the debate appears to question the city’s basic right to position security cameras in public places), but rather concerned issues of artistic integrity—namely, the fact that the cameras had been added to a public monument apparently without the artist’s permission or consent (though the Chicago Tribune  does note that “Millennium Park cleared the cameras' addition with the architects who worked with Plensa on installing the fountain.”) Furthermore, the fact that the monument itself revolved around the recording and display of the faces of Chicago citizens was seen as further exacerbating the symbolic impact of the cameras themselves. As Alan Labb, a professor at Chicago’s Art Institute and one of the designers of the Crown Fountain, told the NY Times  “To add surveillance to a piece all about faces transforms it into an Orwellian nightmare,” said Alan Labb, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who helped design and build the fountain. James Yood, Labb’s colleague at the Art Institute, concurs:

This changes the whole idea of the sculpture, which is that these are our brethren. Now instead of looking at us, they're surveilling us, which I think is not exactly the artist's intention.

(On a side note, it might be noted that both Labb and Yood appear to be appealing to a notion of artistic or authorial intentionality which is perhaps somewhat archaic in speaking of an art-work which is not only the product of multiple hands but furthermore is positioned solidly within the public sphere).

Children of [Wo]men

Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopic thriller Children of Men is set in a world in the near future (2027) in which the entire human race has become sterile. The film begins with a report of the murder of an 18 year old, nicknamed Baby Diego, whose claim to fame is that he was the world’s youngest human—the last human to be born before the infertility pandemic inexplicably brought a halt to all human births. The main plot of the film itself, meanwhile revolves around a young refugee (a “fugee”) named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) who is found to be pregnant, and the efforts of the film’s protagonist, Theo (Clive Owen), a former activist cum bureaucrat who has been recruited to escort Kee to ship called the Tomorrow run by a group called the Human Project devoted to preserving humanity.

At one point near the beginning of the film, Theo visits his cousin Nigel (Danny Huston), a powerful government official who also collects art works to prevent them from being destroyed by the rampaging masses. Nigel’s collection includes such priceless and eclectic works as Picasso’s Guernica and a giant floating pig inspired by Pink Floyd. The most memorable image from his collection, however, is  that of Michelangelo’s David— which been damaged in some of the recent violence, resulting in the statue’s left leg being broken off below the knee (this is probably inspired by a well-known incident in 1991, in which a vandal attacked the statue's left foot with a hammer). Nigel has restored the priceless work with a steel bar connecting the statue’s lower leg to the foot—suggesting the sort of prosthetic a soldier might receive after losing a limb in battle. While a prosthetic lower leg made out a light-weight metallic bar might offer considerable functional advantages for an actual person, in the case of a famous statue it serves as an explicit and poignant reminder of the violence that the work has undergone in the recent past.

The The Children of Men's use of David’s metallic prosthesis as an indexical trace of the past, however, stands in stark contrast with the film’s parallel fascination with the symbolic erasure of the recent past in favor of preserving (or recuperating) some sort of ideal origin. For instance, this amnesic erasure of the recent past can be seen in the figure of Baby  Diego. Although, by the time of this death, “Baby” Diego is already an 18 year old adult, he is nevertheless symbolically frozen in time as a result of  being consistently identified as the last human baby to be born. Not only is this identity responsible for his ultimate death (as a result of a fight with an over-enthusiastic autograph seeker), but furthermore the blanket media coverage of his death focuses almost exclusively on images of Diego’s infancy and early childhood—thereby eliding the significance of the adult individual which Diego had subsequently become.

Of Dolphins and Mermaids

On December 13th, a multinational search expedition for a rare freshwater dolphin—small, albino and nearly blind—which lived exclusively in the middle to lower ranges of the Yangtze River. The Baji dolphin (白鱀豚), also known as the “Goddess of the Yangtze (長江女神),” has been around for about 20 million years, and has been identified as “one of the world's oldest species.” After an intensive, six week search, the Baiji Expedition failed to find any trace of the dolphin in its only known habitat, and therefore concluded  that the cetacean was now “functionally extinct”—thus making it the first large aquatic mammal to become extinct since the Caribbean monk seal was exterminated in the 1950s, as well as “the first large mammal brought to extinction as a result of human destruction to their natural habitat and resources.”

The search for the elusive Baji dolphin is reminiscent of the search, in Lou Ye’s (娄烨) 2000 film Suzhou River (苏州河), for a similarly mysterious aquatic mammal in another river which, like the Yangtze, also passes through Shanghai. This latter fictional search revolves around, not a dolphin, but rather a mermaid—or a mermaid functioning as a stand-in for two women who may or may not have shared the same identity, and who may or may not have drowned in the movie’s eponymous river.

Cell Phone and Surveillance

In one scene in Jia Zhangke’s (贾樟柯) The World (世界) (2004), the jealous Niu (Jiang Zhongwei) considers giving his girlfriend Wei (Jing Jue) a new Motorola cell phone with a GPS chip so that he can keep track of her whereabouts when he isn’t around (he is increasingly annoyed because he keeps finding her cell phone turned off whenever he tries to call her). In another subplot, the protagonist Tao (Zhao Tao) inadvertently  discovers her own boyfriend Taisheng’s infidelity via a text message sent to his cell phone by his lover (this latter plot twist mirrors the well-known premise of Feng Xiaogang’s (冯小刚) movie Cell Phone (手机) from the previous year, in which the protagonist’s infidelity is discovered by his wife as a result of an ill-timed text message from his lover).

We live in an increasingly wired world, and one consequence of that connectivity is that our own location within this digital matrix is increasingly visible to outside observers. For instance, it was recently announced that a graduate student at the University of Washington has discovered a way to transform the new Nike/iPod workout package into a tracking device, which anyone in theory could use to monitor a user’s location. A somewhat more surreal version of the same phenomenon can be found in a recent Wired article on Bo Stefan Eriksson, the driver of the Ferrari Enzo which crashed spectacularly at nearly 200 mph near Malibu this past February. As Randall Sullivan explains, one of the proposed signature projects of Gizmondo Europe, the failed company Erriksson was affiliated with, consisted of a handheld gaming device called a Gizmondo with a surreptitious, built-in tracking device, thereby allowing parents to track their children’s whereabouts. (The device was released in the US in October 2005, with little or no advertising, and by early 2006 had been withdrawn. How the company proposed to market the surreptitious tracking function to parents without their tech- and media-savy teenagers being aware of it, however, was never explained.)

Blind Justice

As The House Next Door  noted a couple of days ago, Texas Republican State Senator Edmund Kuempel introduced to a bill to allow blind hunters to hunt using “laser sight, or lighted pointing instrument, which is forbidden for sighted hunters.” “This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that’s great,” says Kuempel.

One can hardly dispute that it is “great” to expand the opportunities available to the blind and sight-impaired, though hunting seems like a rather odd place to take a stand (particularly in the state in which the fully-sighted vice president shot his friend in the face earlier this year). But, given that fifteen other states already have similar laws on the books, that this topic is treated sympathetically in the movie “Home Front” currently showing on Showtime, perhaps we might give Kuempel the benefit of the doubt that this is something worth fighting for.

It does seem somewhat ironic, however, that Kuempel’s bill coincides almost precisely with the announcement that Kuempel’s compatriots in the White House have asked a federal judge to overturn a lower-court ruling that the government must redesign the U.S. currency in order to help the visually-impaired to distinguish between bills of different denominations. Government lawyers are claiming that this court-mandated change is unnecessary (blind people can always carry around mechanical bill readers, or use credit cards) and too expensive: Cost estimates  “ranged from $75 million in equipment upgrades and $9 million annual expenses for punching holes in bills to $178 million in one-time charges and $50 million annual expenses for printing bills of varying sizes.”

Along the Riverrun (1)

In their short 2005 film Amphibious (Login-Logout), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla follow six turtles sunbathing on a log as it floats down China’s Pearl River. The six minute film features a sequence of overhead shots of the turtles themselves, alternating with a series of point of view shots of the banks of the river. The early, day-time scenes feature mainly fishermen and small boats, but as evening falls and the turtles drift further and further downstream, the river banks become increasingly populated by warehouses, apartment complexes, and huge cargo ships.

The film, therefore, creates the impression that the turtles are not only moving through space, but also through time, providing us with a capsule vision of China’s precipitous industrialization. The film creates the conceit that we are viewing this industrialization through the eyes of the (presumably) oblivious turtles, though we cannot help but project onto these scenes our own understanding of the environmental impact of this precipitous process of industrialization.

It is precisely this question of the environmental impact of China’s industrialization, meanwhile, which is the explicit focus of a more recent river tour: Jim Yardley’s interesting article on the Yellow River in the NY Times a few weeks ago.

Frankenstein and Wikipedia

James Whale, famed director of Frankenstein, is the subject of Bill Condon’s fictionalized 1998 film, Gods and Monsters. Whale, at the end his life, has suffered a stroke, and now finds his memories of the past “flood[ing] all over,” with randomly sparking flashbacks like a short-circuiting appliance.

Jimmy Wales, meanwhile, is one of the co-creators (with Larry Sanger) of a more contemporary monster: the collaborative on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, a five year old patchwork assemblage which, by borrowing bits and pieces from untold numbers of contributors, has come to assume a life of its own. At its best, Wikipedia represents a sort of Borgesian ideal: a figurative “aleph,” the tiny iridescent sphere which contains within itself all worldly knowledge:

The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained within it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I'd seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house on Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand....

At its worst, though, the on-line encyclopedia can be perhaps better compared to the fictional James Whale’s late-life dementia: a random aggregate of memories and images, of otherwise unrelated facts and details coming together to form a monstrous new life.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, moreover, Wikipedia is regarded with viewed with dismay and even, occasionally, horror by the communities of humans which it encounters. In academia, for instance, Wikipedia has often been criticized for its inaccuracies, its biases, its structural privileging of trivia over systematic analysis, its anonymity, and its inherent mutability.

Missing Persons Reports

The city, as Lyn Lofland observes, is “a world of strangers, a world populated by persons who are personally unknown to each other.”   It is, therefore, easy to become lost: to lose a loved one, or to lose oneself. Surrounded by strangers, one risks becoming an anonymous stranger oneself, seen but not recognized within a faceless sea of humanity.

Several recent Chinese-language movies underscore this fear/fantasy of losing oneself within the anonymous space of a major city, together with the quixotic searches for insignificant individuals which follow. In Ah Nian’s (阿年)Call Me (呼我) (2000), for instance, an itinerant worker (民工) in Beijing uses hand-written posters in an attempt to track down those who might have inadvertently purchased his HIV-tainted blood, while the teenage substitute teacher in Zhang Yimou’s (張藝謀) Not One Less (一個不能少) ultimately appeals to a local television studio in her quest to recover one of her students who has been sent to the city to find work. In Stanley Kwan’s (關錦鵬) 1987 romantic ghost story, Rouge 胭脂扣, meanwhile, the missing person search revolves around a pair of newspaper announcements. First, the ghostly courtesan Fleur (如花) visits a 1980s Hong Kong newspaper office trying to place a classified ad in a contemporary newspaper for her lover, Chen Zhenbang (陈振邦), who ostensibly had committed suicide with her fifty years earlier. The resulting ad, which she is assured will “run in all of Hong Kong’s major newspapers,” reads:

Seeking [missing] Person
Master 12, 3811; I’ll wait for you at the old site
Fleur

尋人   
十二少，三八一一老地方等你，
如花

In the end, however, it is not this contemporary classified ad which helps Fleur locate her former lover, but rather a short article that her new friends, two contemporary Hong Kong journalists, serendipitously find in a 50-year old issue of a Hong Kong gossip paper (小報) entitled The Bone (骨子). The article reports the attempted suicide, but notes that Fleur’s lover ultimately survived the attempt. It is a direct result of the accidental discovery of this latter article, therefore, that Fleur ultimately succeeds in tracking down Chen Zhenbang, only to discover that what she was actually seeking was a better understanding of herself.