the naked gaze 肉眼

The Shock of the New

Mao Dun’s 茅盾 1929 novel Rainbow 虹 contains a famous scene in which the teenage protagonist Mei Xingsu is walking home from school shortly after the May Fourth protests of 1918, and catches “a glimpse of several eye-catching magazines arranged in the window of a bookseller’s shop. Each and every one had the word ‘new’ in the title.”

The “feeling of rapture, of exhilaration” which Mei experiences which exposed to these publications and their contents is both the result of a “shock of the new” (to paraphrase Robert Hughes), but also a shock of recognition, as this eighteen year-old “new youth” sees publications which directly mirror her own sensibilities. The definitive "new" publication of this period was the journal New Youth (新青年; La jeunesse), but when, shortly afterwards, Mei’s cousin and new husband attempts to cheer her up by buying some of these same publications, he ends up buying willy-nilly “any book with ‘new’ in the title, which is why books such as A New Introduction to Hygiene, New Methods for Playing Baseball, and even A New Approach to Sexual Intercourse were mixed in with the pile of New Youth and New Tide.” Though it never fails to “bring a smile to her lips,” Liu Yuchun’s erroneous purchase of “new” publications such as New Methods for Playing Baseball is arguably not entirely misguided, insofar as the term “new,” for Mei, has shifted from being a mere adjectival modifier, to being an object of fixation in its own right.

Wherein lie the origins of this May Fourth period fascination with newness and children or youth? Of course, the attention to youth as a site of potential social transformation is itself nothing new. Prominent precedents include Huang Yuanyong 黃遠庸, Lan Gongwu 藍公武 and Zhang Junmai 張君勱 ‘s 1912 founding of the Journal of the Young China Association《少 年中國周刊》, Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 1899 essay “Ode to Young China” (Shaonian Zhongguo shuo 少年中国说), or four centuries earlier, Li Zhi’s 李贽 1590 essay “Ode to the Child-like Mind” (tongxin shuo童心说) (which itself harkens back to Mencius). Nevertheless, this May Fourth “youth” discourse represents the intersection of these earlier Chinese precedents, on the one hand, and a body of medico-political knowledge which was being introduced into China during precisely that same period, on the other.

Eyes Wide Shut

During a briefing near the end of President Hu Jintao’s recent visit to the US (his first), Cheney was caught napping (though the vice president himself insists that he was simply studying his notes at the time ). Whether or not he was actually asleep is, of course, not as important as the appearance he projected, especially given that this sort of diplomatic trip is frequently all about ritual and symbolism (a fact which General Macartney, for instance, understood all too well more than two centuries ago when he lead the first official British embassy to China in 1793…and adamantly refused to accede to accepted protocol by kowtowing to the Qianlong Emperor [see James Hevia’s discussion of this incident in Cherishing Men From Afar]).

To the extent that ritual and protocol were crucial components of President Hu’s trip, it is safe to say that the visit was hardly an unqualified success, given that it was “plagued by gaffes that upended months of painstaking diplomacy over protocol and staging.” In addition to Cheney’s surreptitious powernap, President Hu also had to deal with pro-Falungong hecklers, a prominent reference to China as the ROC (the official name of Taiwan), the omission of an official State dinner, together with an unceremonious grab of his sleeve by his chummy US counterpart.

"Still Free"

Late last week, Marc Ecko, the organizer of the “Still Free” Air Force One hoax (consisting of the anonymous circulation of a grainy, two minute video which appeared to depict several hooded figures spray painting the words “still free” onto the side of the president’s plane [on the fusilage in the center of the image reproduced here]) came forward to claim ownership over his creation, and to explain how he had accomplished it. Rather than relying on trick photography or computer simulation, he instead rented an actual 747 and painted it to look like the real Air Force One, and then proceeded to film the surreptitious defacement of his new creation with black spray paint.. As the Associated Press reported on Saturday, the resulting video was so convincing that even the Air Force itself was initially confused, and had to double-check and make sure the plane was unscathed:

"We're looking at it, too," said Lt. Col. Bruce Alexander, a spokesman for the Air Mobility Command's 89th Airlift Wing, which operates Air Force One. "It looks very real."

Col. Alexander’s confusion over the reality of the video, in turn, resonates with the Ecko’s own claim that, “I wanted to do something culturally significant, wanted to create a real pop-culture moment." The irony here is, of course, that the “reality” of the resulting “pop-cultural moment” is very directly grounded in the blurring and breakdown of boundaries between reality and representation. Air Force One was not “really” defaced, but the simulation of that defacement (together with the cultural stir which it produced) was, nevertheless, quite “real.”

Writing at Speed

“I am writing [this piece] at speed,” Spivak writes (at speed?) at the beginning of Ghostwriting, her 1996 rejoinder to Derrida’s long-awaited Specters of Marx (1995).

Writing at speed...In his subsequent “anachronis[tic]” (both “premature and belated”) response, Derrida would implicitly toss this phrase back at her, suggesting in “Marx & Sons” (1999) that his most celebrated translator had, perhaps, read him too speedily, not attentively enough, identifying a “misreadings,” including “errors [which] stem from an outright inability to read…” (223) (e.g., he notes that she quotes him critically [immediately after a somewhat bizarre interlude about watching a retrospective on Marx on the Today show while “doing my exercises”] for claiming that “We won’t repoliticize,” when Derrida, in the passage in question, actually wrote the exact opposite: “There will be no repoliticization, there will be no politics otherwise.”)

Say My Name

Google announced last week that, after several years of ubiquitous anonymity, it had finally decided on an official name for its Chinese site Google.cn: 谷歌 [guge], or literally, “song of the grain” or "song of the [silicon] valley." An article in the on-line technology journal Donews (summarized in English on Virtual China a few days later) reports Google has been working on the name since at least 2002, and that one employee compared the process to “trying to come up with a name for a child.” In the interim, a 2005 survey reveals that nearly half of all Chinese users simply use the English term “Google,” while the rest use an impressive array of unofficial homophonic monikers, with 狗狗 (gougou—“dog dog”) leading the pack with 25% (followed closely behind by 古狗 [gugou—“ancient dog”]).

There is a popular belief in China that children should be given “milk-names” or “little names” (奶名，乳名，小名, etc.) when they are growing up in order to prevent Yanwang 阎王, the king of hell, from claiming their souls. This practice is referred to aphoristically as 歪名好养活 --or using a “crooked” milk-name to insure the child will survive infancy--with 狗狗 (dog dog) frequently cited as a prime example of such a “crooked” name (see, for instance, the following discussion of Shanxi folk customs).

Cooked Books

Last Wednesday, the A.C.L.U filed a motion for dismissal in U.S. v. Patel (Operation Meth Merchant), claiming law enforcement officials had discriminatorily targeted South Asian grocers in their methamphetamine drug sting in Rome Georgia, northwest of Atlanta. As evidence, the motion cited the testimony of an undercover agent, identified as “John Doe 2,” who described how he was directed by the officers he worked for to make targeted purchases, during which he was instructed to say specific things, including

statements such as “I need it to go cook” or “Hurry up, I’ve got to get home and finish a cook.” When John Doe 2 expressed concern that people who manufacture meth would neveroffer such unsolicited and incriminating statements, the officers (a) ordered him/her to make the statements subsequent to the paying for and receiving the products and (b) explained “that the Indians’ English wasn’t good, and they wouldn’t say a lot so it was important for [him/her] to make th[ose] kinds of statements” to support the arrests.

When the grocers sold the agents otherwise innocent products (cold medicine, aluminum foil, etc.), the State then used the agent’s vernacular “unsolicited and incriminating statements” as evidence that the grocers had been informed of what the agents intended to do with said products.

Know Thyself

With America’s first idol, Kelly Clarkson, having just won two awards at the Grammy’s back in February; and with Hunan Satellite TV having just announced that the second season of their own Chinese spin-off, “Supergirl” [or "Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Voice Girl Contest," as English-language news articles invariably note in delight] last year attracted more than 400M viewers for its finale, and made more than $12M (US) in overall profits (and will be coming under increased regulation in subsequent seasons), it would therefore perhaps be appropriate to revisit the debut album of Wang Ti 王媞, the runner-up in China’s first Supergirl competition in August of 2004 (before it became the mass phenomenon that it is today). Before proceeding to the finals, Wang Ti had won the Chengdu regional finals amidst a couple of controversies.

Double Vision

This past Wednesday, 19 year old Ryan McFadyen became the first (and, to-date, only) member of Duke’s lacrosse team to be disciplined, following revelations that he had written an e-mail expressing an intention to invite strippers to his drm room, then kill and skin them:

[…] all are welcome.. however there will be no nudity. I plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off [….]

Even as McFadyen was being suspended, however, large crowds were attending the “Bodies the Exhibition” exhibits in New York, London, Atlanta, and Tampa Bay. Combining pedagogy with prurience, these exhibits consist of actual human cadavers which have been skinned, partially dissected, and then mounted in a variety of athletic poses. In a short editorial in today’s NY Times, Francis Clines describes one what might imagine to be a typical reaction:

“Guy was alive, a whole person,” said a wary teenager as classmates checked out the thinker. “It’s not my place to stare.” But the lad did. The cadavers—22 of them—pretty much stared back.

Juxtaposed together, as if on a split screen, the parallels between these two scenes of flayed flesh are rather startling. Just as Cline’s New York teenager is split between a pedagogical imperative to watch, and a socialized proscription against gazing at that which is deemed improper or obscene (at least in proper company), he struggles not to stare (“It’s not my place to stare”), but at the same time cannot tear his eyes away. Similarly, the Duke teenager explicitly disavows an explicitly erotic scopophilia (“there will be no nudity”), precisely in order to replace it with a more ob-scene scopophilia—of skinning, or making visible that which should be hidden from sight.

"The Shocker"

Last week Antonin Scalia made a controversial hand gesture when asked, inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, about those who might question his impartiality on matters relating to the separation of church and state. During the ensuring controversy, Scalia defended himself by suggesting that anyone who thought the gesture obscene must have been watching “too many episodes of The Sopranos,” whereupon the Boston Herald responded by interviewing  several of the Sopranos actors themselves for their views:

It’s not like grabbing your crotch, not that bad an obscenity. But it’s an obscenity. It’s something you would do after paying a bookie, to your bookie, but not something you would do in church.

said one;

It’s not that bad, but I wouldn’t do it to my mother. No way. Would I do it in church? These days, maybe. It depends if the priest was giving me the hairy eyeball.

said another (and, in the process, adding to the existing confusion the additional question of what, precisely, it means to give “the hairy eyeball"). An animated debate ensued over the hermeneutics of chin flips, during the course of which the original photographer, Peter Smith, was “fired” by the Catholic weekly for which he occasionally worked (but nevertheless retained his "second" job as a professor at Boston University).

The Last Man

In the final chapter of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, the male narrator—fearing that he may be the last person left alive after most of Europe has been devastated by a late 21st century plague—enters an abandoned dwelling and experiences a shock of misrecognition:

I entered one of the palaces, and opened the door of a magnificent saloon. I started--I looked again with renewed wonder. What wild-looking, unkempt, half-naked savage was that before me? The surprise was momentary.

I perceived that it was I myself whom I beheld in a large mirror at the end of the hall. No wonder that the lover of the princely Idris should fail to recognize himself in the miserable object there pourtrayed. My tattered dress was that in which I had crawled half alive from the tempestuous sea. My long and tangled hair hung in elf locks on my brow--my dark eyes, now hollow and wild, gleamed from under them--my cheeks were discoloured by the jaundice, which (the effect of misery and neglect) suffused my skin, and were half hid by a beard of many days' growth.

Shortly after this moment of misrecognition, then narrator then decides to leave Fiorli for Rome, from which he would then continue on East, ultimately reaching “forgotten Carthage and deserted Lybia, I should reach the pillars of Hercules,” hoping that there, “I may find what I seek--a companion."