the naked gaze 肉眼

An Inconvenient Truth

(Many thanks to Roger Gathman at Limited, Inc, for a very incisive response to my preceding post on the Liberty Mutual commercial. The issues he raises concerning the relationship between personal and public/corporate "responsibility" (together with the cluster of related issues of global warming which Roger discusses in a recent post) are, in turn, very relevant to Guggenheim's and Gore's new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth).

David Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (together with Al Gore’s book and slide show on which it is based) is framed by two photographs of the Earth (both of which appear twice). As Al Gore explains, the first of the two pictures

is the first picture most of us ever saw of the Earth from Space. It was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, the first of the Apollo   missions that left the confines of near-Earth orbit and circled the moon….

One of the astronauts aboard, a rookie named Bill Anders, snapped this picture, and it became known as Earth Rise. The image exploded into the consciousness of humankind. In fact, within two years of this picture being taken, the modern environmental movement was born. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, The Natural Environmental Policy Act, and the first Earth Day all came about within a few years of this picture being seen for the first time (here and throughout, quote is taken from the book, but is identical or nearly identical to corresponding passage in the film).

This relationship between the initial appearance of this photograph and the subsequent development environmental movement is an extremely interesting one, suggesting the inherent power of visual images to radically transform our understanding of the world, and of our position in it.

The ideological and philosophical significance of this act of picture-taking is developed more abstractly in Heidegger’s influential essay, “The Age of the World Picture,” in which he argues that it is precisely this ability to conceptually the world (as a picture) which is one of the defining qualities of the “modern age”:

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word picture [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets forth.

However, as Heidegger goes on to explain, this act of picturing the world implies not merely a straightforward act of representation, but more importantly a transformation in our understanding of the world as representable: “Hence, world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture.” Finally, Heidegger argues, this process of “modern representing” has equally important implications for the way in which people, as representers and representatives, are themselves situated as subjects:

That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subjectum in the midst of that which is.

What Goes Around

(Many thanks to David Hudson at Greencine for another cite, and to Dan Jardine  for the plug at Cinemarati--both referencing my recent piece on contestations of community and identity in Prairie Home Companion and X-Men: The Last Stand. In the following discussion, I take a current Liberty Mutual commercial as a starting point for pursuing similar considerations of the boundaries of community and identity, and the role of viral memes in consolidating and challenging those same boundaries.)

A current Liberty Mutual television commercial opens with a man on a crowded New York sidewalk stopping to pick up a rag doll and returning it the child in the stroller. In the next scene, the mother of the child is in a coffee shop, and takes a moment to reposition a stranger’s coffee mug that is precariously close to edge of his table. This act is witnessed by a passerby through the window, and in the following scene that same passerby stops to help another man who has tripped on a busy sidewalk slick with rain…. The commercial contains several more iterations of this chain of kindness, wherein an accidental observer of each kind act then turns around and helps another stranger in a similar way.

Hill and Holliday, the marketing firm who produced the ad, describe it in their “blog”  (which also contains a streaming-video of the commercial) as a “kind of a pay-it-forward concept that demonstrates the infectious nature of doing the right thing”—referring, of course, to the 2000 movie Pay it Forward (Mimi Leder), in which a young boy (Haley Joel Osment) comes up with the idea of repaying good deeds by paying them “forward” by helping three new people.

Despite this feel-good veneer of moral idealism implicit in this notion of “paying it forward,” the H&H commercial nevertheless contains several elements which suggest a more complicated, and darker, perspective on morality. Why, for instance, did H&H select a title for the commercial (“What Goes Around”) which is typically used to suggest that specifically bad or evil actions will eventually be repaid in kind?

Untimely Meditations

(Another very nice comment from Matt on untimely conversations, an interesting reflection by Jodi on the temporality of blogging, and various reflections on the recent summer solstice have  inspired the following meditions on time and untimeliness). 

In a famous scene in Charlie Chaplin’s The Pawnshop (1916), a customer brings Chaplin (playing a pawnshop owner’s assistant) an alarm clock to be pawned, and then watches in horror as Chaplin’s character inspects the clock by dismantling it piece by piece. At the end of the lengthy operation, he announces he will not purchase the clock, and returns it (now a pile of completely useless pieces) to the dumbfounded customer.

A pawn shop represents a rather peculiar hybrid of a monetary, barter, and gift economies. Commodities are exchanged for immediate cash, and at the same time constitute an implicit promise of future returns. What is amusing about the scene in Chaplin’s movie is that it is precisely at the moment in which the potential exchange value of the clock as commodity is being evaluated, that its use value is quite literally destroyed. What the customer gets in return for the lengthy inspection is his own alarm clock, returned to him in pieces, no longer able to tell time but itself constituting an indexical marker of the elapsed time of the pawn shop evaluation itself.

In “Commodity Time,” the latest fragment of his “Age of Aesthetics” project, Steven Shaviro argues more generally that “rhythms of consumption” help constitute the temporal fabric of contemporary society, even as the commodity itself represents, he agues, an immediacy (“an eternal now, a perpetual present”) which essentially challenges the integrity of the temporal order itself:

Commodities bring us into a special relationship with time. That is to say, commodities are at the heart of how we relate to ourselves. For time is the privileged medium of our inner lives; it is the very substance of introspection. As Kant puts it, ”time is nothing but the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuiting we do of ourselves and of our inner state.” And in the world of commodities, this “inner sense” is organized around the rhythms of consumption — or, more precisely, of buying. Commodities seem to beckon to us from an eternal now, a perpetual present.

I Mourn, Therefore I Am

(Many thanks to Jeremy at Danwei and Matt at  Pas au-delà for the cites on my preceding "AIDS in China" post, as well as to Angela at Archive: sOmetim3s  for the cite on the "Schmitt and Mao" piece which helped to put in motion the discussion of which both the "AIDS" post and this one are part. This post began as a response to a very helpful comment by Matt to the "Schmitt and Mao" piece on LS, but by the time it had concluded it had grown considerably, so I decided to cross-post it here as well).

"I mourn, therefore I am."

Gillian Rose cites Derrida’s (anti-)Cartesian aphorism in her introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law, and suggests that it emblematizes her contention that what Derrida (and “post-modernists” in general) mistakes for mourning actually “cannot work; it remains melancholia; it remains aberrated not inaugurated ” (64).  To illustrate her contention, Rose then develops an extended discussion of Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” suggesting that Derrida argues that

the ghost of Communism will finally be laid to rest if this spirit—dare one say this essence?—of Marxism is retrieved from the rubble of old Europe, before the fresh rubble, accruing daily in a new Europe that is dying not to be born, submerges us all (65).

It appears to me that Rose’s insinuation here represents a significant misreading of Derrida’s argument (Rose was relying only on Derrida’s original 1993 lecture and not the final version published as Specters of Marx, and consequently includes no direct quotes from this text to substantiate her claims). In fact, Derrida’s entire argument is explicitly premised on using this concept of spirit as a way of avoiding the need to attribute any concrete and unitary “essence” to Marxism (and, if anything, it is Rose herself who implies that Marxism should remain inextricably linked to such essential components as “[c]lass structure, class consciousness and class struggle, the party, the laws of capitalist accumulation, the theory of value, human practical activity”). In the passage cited by Matt, furthermore, Rose criticizes “post-modernists” for failing to recognize that

the other is never simply other, but an implicated self-relation. This applies to oneself as other and, equally, to any opposing self-consciousness: my relation to myself is mediated by what I recognize or refuse to recognize in your relation to yourself; while your self-relation depends on what you recognize of my relation to myself (74; emphases added).

AIDS in China

(Many thanks to Matt for a very helpful comment to the LS cross-posting of my Schmitt and Mao piece. Matt cites some issues which Rose raises in her 1996 posthumous study, Mourning Becomes the Law, and specifically her critique of Derrida and others for idealizing a kind of “baroque melancholia” and “avoiding the work of mourning.” While I am still pondering these issues, a preliminary response may be found in the following discussion of a deeply melancholic novel which is framed by two burials—the first, when the 12 year old narrator is buried behind the village school with textbooks and storybooks in his coffin, and the second, when the narrator is subsequently reburied in the family plot, in a coffin extravagantly inscribed with images of cityscapes, global landmarks, and Chinese financial institutions. The body of the novel, therefore, is situated in the indeterminate space [a space of mourning? or of melancholia?] between these two burials.)

This year, on the 25th anniversary of the first published report of AIDS, the 20th anniversary of China’s recognition of its own emerging AIDS crisis (i.e., China’s Heath Ministry’s announcement of the creation of China’s first AIDS prevention team ), the 10th anniversary of China’s implementation of new regulations governing its blood supply (reflecting the growing awareness of the role played by blood donations in HIV transmission), and the 5th anniversary of the Chinese government’s first official acknowledgement that tainted blood collection made up a “significant percentage of infections” (estimated at the time to be more than half a million)—native Henan author Yan Lianke 阎连科 has published Ding Village Dream 丁庄梦, billed as “China’s first full-length novel describing matters related to AIDS.” (It was preceded by Gao Yaojie’s 高耀洁 1994 nonfictional work, Ten Thousand Letters 一万封信).

Unlike America and Europe, where the early AIDS epidemic was initially driven primarily by homosexual contact, in China the primary conduit of contamination was initially blood donations and blood transfusions. While contaminated needles were a significant problem, of even greater consequence was the practice, in some rural areas (particularly rural Henan province, where Yan Lianke himself was born), of collecting and pooling the blood from multiple donors, separating out the plasma, and then returning the blood back to the original donors. Consequently, whereas Western works about AIDS often tend to foreground tropes of sexual contact and sexual transgression, there appears to be an emerging tendency for Chinese works about AIDS to use the theme of blood donation as a starting point for exploring the dissolution and restructuring of social connections and networks. Ah Nian’s 阿年 2001 movie Call Me 呼我, for instance, features a dislocated migrant worker in Beijing who discovers that he is HIV positive, and then proceeds to attempt to track down the strangers who may have purchased his blood. Yan Lianke’s novel, meanwhile, similarly centers around a  dissolution and restructuring of kinship and social bonds within Ding village, including an instance of virtual incest, a post-mortem marriage, and two cases of filicide (one indirect, and the other quite direct).

X-Men and the Axeman

(Many thanks to David at GreenCine for the nod  to my earlier reflections on questions of control and loss of control in the up-coming Sandler vehicle Click and other works. In the following discussion, I explore related questions of power, difference, and annhiliation in two current movies).

Released a fortnight after An Inconvenient Truth, David Guggenheim’s apocalyptic documentary about global warming and melting ice-caps, Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion contains, at a crucial juncture, a joke about two penguins:

Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin says, you look like you're wearing a tuxedo. The second penguin says, what makes you think I'm not?

Garrison Keillor (playing a version of himself, “G.K.”) (re)tells this joke to a mysterious woman in a white trench coat (Virginia Madsen), explaining that every person who hears the joke inevitably bursts into laughter. Madsen’s character listens with utmost seriousness, and replies that she is not a person, but an angel.

One of the funny things about jokes (as Stephen Colbert has vividly reminded us with his riotously unfunny speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner a month ago) is that they presume, reinforce, and sometimes challenge certain assumptions about the identities of communities and their implicit boundaries. This question of the relationship between community identity and a dialectics of  recognition and alienation, in turn, is a central concern in two otherwise rather dissimilar recent movies: Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion and Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (both released in the past two weeks).

Cecilia, You’re Breaking My Heart

(Many thanks to Danwei for the gracious reposting of my discussion of Yu Hua's Brothers and Beijing's Olympics preparations. Building on the questions of sexual purity and and defilement eplored in that earlier post, I turn now to a cluster of related issues in Dung Kai Chueng's "virginal work" 处女作, "Cecilia."）

“Cecilia,” croon Simon and Garfunkel in their famous 1970 ballad, “you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily. Oh Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to come home.” The second stanza of the chorus, meanwhile, specifies the cause of the singer’s anxiety:

Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
Up in my bedroom,
I got up to wash my face
When I come back to bed,
Someone's taken my place.

These uncharacteristically ribald lyrics (what sort of “love-making” would lead the man to abruptly leave the bed to wash his face…?) mark a crisis of substitution and betrayal, wherein it is precisely at the moment of greatest intimacy that the singer finds himself abruptly displaced, substituted by another.

“Cecilia” 西西利亚 also happens to be the title of a short story by Hong Kong author Dung Kai Cheung 董启章 (his first, written when he was 24), which similarly revolves around a (presumably) male protagonist’s obsession with a “Cecilia,” whom he perceives to be slipping away from him, betraying him, at precisely what should be their moment of greatest intimacy. The story begins at that moment of alienated encounter with the ostensible object of desire:

Regarding Cecilia, what more is there for me to say? Now, Cecilia is finally in front of me, but she has become so silent, and her body has become so cold, making me almost not recognize her.

Being cold and silent, furthermore, are not the only qualities about Cecilia which now inspire in the narrator an uncanny sense of “strange familiarity” 奇怪地熟悉—it turns out that she is also bald, naked, and armless....

Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), derived his initial wealth from collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. These tainted origins are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

Inside Man

Repeatedly throughout Spike Lee’s strikingly scatological Inside Man, the bank robbers are observed digging a hole in the bank’s concrete floor. When the hole reaches a foot or two deep, the robbers find a sewer pipe (inevitably reminding viewers of the escape route in The Shawshank Redemption, although this bank pipe is much too small to serve as a means of egress for an actual person), spurring one robber to remark, “that’s a good-looking shit hole.” The purpose of this hole was, I think, made quite clear at the end of the movie, though it apparently left some viewers rather confused, wondering whether the hole was actually an instance of an inadvertent “plot hole” (see, for instance, the very animated discussion on Cinemarati of this and related issues).

This “shit hole” resonates with a pattern of references in the movie to anality and defecation, many of which revolve around the protagonist, Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). For instance, when Frazier introduces himself to a bank employee who happens to be a Sikh (Waris Ahluwalia), the employee exclaims indignantly, “Detective Frazier my ass, where's my fucking turban?” (he had lost the turban in the tumult when police apprehended him when he was released from the bank). At another point, when Jodie Foster’s character (an eminently well-connected professional who discretely solves problems for the rich and powerful) tells Frazier, “Don't take this personally, but I don't think you can afford me,” to which he replies, “Don't take this personally, Miss White, but you can kiss my black ass.”

Will Fuck for Validation

[Update: A serendipitous encounter with a tattered billboard leads to a similarly serendipitous reencounter with a former student (not to mention a very interesting blog). Emily, good to hear from you! Also, thanks s0metim3s  for the friendly nod.]

In Untitled: Will Fuck for Validation (2004), Alex McQuilkin poses in a blond wig, with teary cheeks and arms extended over her head. She is wearing a white “wife-beater” tank top, with green glittery lettering that reads “will fuck for validation.” The quiet pathos of the image appears simultaneously to reaffirm and subvert the self-denigrating message on the tank top. The irony of this quasi “self-portrait” (featuring McQuilkin using her own image to present a persona who, presumably, both is and is not herself) is reinforced by the fact that, as Ana Honigman observes, McQuilkin is deliberately troping here one of the quasi-self portraitive images from Cindy Sherman’s 1981 Artforum series of posed centerfold images (in which she uses her own body to act out the ways in which women are typically perceived by others, particularly men). (See, also, LeisureArts’ fascinating post on this and related topics).

Alex McQuilkin is a 26 year-old Brooklyn-based video and performance artist whose work comments on the pervasive commoditization of imagery of the female body in contemporary American culture. In Untitled, McQuilkin is not only referencing Cindy Sherman’s 1981 image, but also McQuilkin’s own debut work—a three minute DVD entitled Fucked (2000), in which she appears with her head and shoulders crowded close to the camera, valiantly attempting to apply makeup while (appearing to be) "fucked" violently from behind.