the naked gaze 肉眼

Her Name is Butterfly

In an intriguing hypothesis sketched out in Plagues and Peoples (1976), William McNeill speculates that Europe’s 14th century Black Death plague may have had its origins in the Eurasian Steppes, where the virus may have been endemic among the region’s burrowing rodents for centuries before finally being transmitted to China, then the middle East and Europe by horse-riding Mongols as they established the Mongol Empire (1206-1368).

Although many scholars (including Graham Twigg, Susan Scott, and Christopher Duncan) now question whether the Black Death was actually a case of bubonic plague, or any bacterial disease, or was even necessarily any single disease at all, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the last world-wide pandemic of bubonic plague (known as the “third pandemic”) did in fact have its origins in central China before eventually spreading to Hong Kong in 1894, and then (like the SARS outbreak threatened to do a century later) on to trading ports around the world. While the worst of the 1894 Hong Kong epidemic was controlled relatively quickly, the global pandemic which it precipitated dragged on for decades, and was not officially conquered (according to the WHO) until 1959.

It is this outbreak of the plague in 1894 Hong Kong which provides the backdrop for Shih Shuqing’s (施叔青) 1993 novel, Her Name is Butterfly (她名叫蝴蝶), the first volume of her acclaimed “Hong Kong trilogy” (a very abridged translation of the trilogy, by Sylvia Lin and Howard Goldblatt, has just been published by Columbia University Press under the title City of the Queen). Her Name is Butterfly centers around the figure of Huang Deyun (黄得云), a young woman from rural China who was sold into a Hong Kong brothel in 1892 at the age of 13, and her subsequent lover Adam Smith, a young British colonial administrator who makes his reputation helping to suppress the 1894 epidemic.

Of Commemoration and Anonymity

(Ironically, it was a post on the meme-like quality of a recent Liberty Mutual Commercial from a month ago which appears to have spread, meme-like, furthest from its original home. It was cited, among other places, in an on-line forum  for a modern dance site, and then, several weeks later, in a religion newsletter published by the Dallas Morning News. In the process, it ultimately attracted the interest of a couple of actuaries, who posted some interesting comments).

30 years ago, on July 28 1976, a major earthquake (perhaps as strong as 8.2 on the Richter scale) struck the city of Tangshan in Hebei province a little before 4:00 AM. The official death toll was nearly a quarter of a million lives (though some sources argue the true figure may have been much higher). Even by the government’s official figures, however, the earthquake was the deadliest of the twentieth century, and one of the three deadliest ever.   

The commemoration of the earthquake has become a major source of controversy. As several recent articles report (see, for instance, useful summaries and interesting discussions on ESWN, Danwei and Chinochano), there is as of yet no official, public memorial commemorating the victims of the catastrophe. Recently, however, the private Huaying Group has erected large granite slabs in a city park, on which they have inscribed the names of a small fraction of the victims—though many commentators have been apoplectic to learn that the company charges families a fairly stiff fee of 800-1000 Yuan (roughly $100-125) for the inclusion of each name. The Huangying Group general manager Li Li argues, however, that the fee is simply to cover the labor and supplies required to make the inscriptions. Furthermore, Li suggests, “If we were to simply inscribe all of the names of the deceased, would their relatives necessarily approve? This brings up a question of the rights of naming (姓名权问题).”

Monster House

(Many thanks to Helmut for yet another nod at his excellent blog, Phronesisaical, as well as to to Brian McKey for a couple of nods at Les Faits de la Fiction).

In her book Sex and Real Estate, Marjorie Garber famously argues that our relationship with our houses often mimics or even substitutes for our relationship with actual lovers:

Anyone who doubts the possibility of falling in love with a house—with all that implies of fast-beating heart, sweaty palms, and waiting for the phone to ring—just hasn’t met the right one yet…. In our present-day culture the house often plays the role of lover, partner, significant other—the dream date and the dream mate—the one who will realize our desires and give a purpose to our plans and days.

This idea of domicile as beloved was developed quite literally in Miyazaki’s 2004 animated feature, Howl’s Moving Castle, in which the eponymous castle is animated by a fire demon who has literally stolen the heart of its owner, the wizard Howl (voiced by Takuya Kimura in the Japanese version, and by Christian Bale in the English). The fire demon, Calcifer (Tatsuya Gashuin/Billy Crystal), then functions as the heart and soul of the baroque castle, allowing it to gallop through the countryside as if it were some prehistoric animal. At the same time, however, the castle remains a living space for its inhabitants, and more specifically for the budding romance between the wizard Howl and Sophie (Chieko Baisho/Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons)—a girl who has been transformed into an old lady by a curse.

Gil Kenan’s Monster House, which opened this past weekend, meanwhile, also features an animated house as one of its central protagonists. No gothic castle, the house in Kenan’s film (his first full-length feature) appears at first as an innocuous, suburban home, inhabited by a curmudgeonly old man named Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) with a proclivity for stealing young children’s toys. After Nebbercracker collapses in a heap one day and is taken away in an ambulance (“no sirens,” one of the kids in the film observes, “never a good thing”), however, the house appears to take on a life of its own, growing increasingly menacing as the film progresses (Kathleen Turner’s face was motion-captured to provide the basis for the house’s animated features).

Monster House features many unexpected plot twists (several of which will be revealed below), but the basic plot follows the “monster house’s” increasingly unrestrained monstrosity, and the way in which it comes to function as a backdrop and a catalyst for a budding love triangle between the twelve year old protagonist, DJ (Mitchel Musso), his chubby friend Chowder (Sam Lerner), and the precocious honor student, Jenny (Spencer Locke), who accidentally gets wrapped up in the adventure after the monster house tries to eat her (‘ordinarily I wouldn’t hang out with boys with you,’ she informs them haughtily, ‘but since you saved my life I’ll give you an hour’ [quoted from memory]).

The Inoperative Community

As the internet becomes an increasingly potent force in China, the government has responded both by restricting access to specific web-spaces, strong-arming internet sites such as Google and Yahoo to both censor themselves and also, allegedly, hand over to the government information on potential dissidents, as well as by imprisoning numerous prominent cyber-dissidents. Examples include Huang Qi (arrested in 2001 and sentenced to five years imprisonment for posting human rights material on his web-site), Luo Yongzhong and Huang Qunwei in 2003 (arrested in 2003 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for posting “rumors” about SARS on the web); New York Times researchers Zhao Yan and Zhao Jing; and blogger and documentary filmmaker Hao Wu (who was released this past July 11, after spending 5 months in prison). Just last week, furthermore, reporter Li Yuanlong was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for disseminating controversial essays via e-mail.

This past July 4 (Independence Day in the US), meanwhile, another Chinese dissident was imprisoned on charges of inappropriate internet-related political expression and unlawful association. What makes this Independence Day prisoner somewhat unusual, however, is that not only was he imprisoned for instigating an on-line protest attended by more than 10,000, but furthermore his own identity is entirely an on-line creation. This is because the prisoner, is actually the on-line avatar of a long-time player on the Chinese massively-multiplayer on-line role-playing game (MMORPG), 梦幻西游 (The Fantasy of the Journey West) operated by Netease. The un-named player was being punished for refusing to change his alias, 干死4小日本 ["Kill the little Japs"], and also on account of the name, 抗日同盟会 [The Alliance to Resist Japan], of the 700 person guild he had formed (one of the game’s largest). As a result of these transgressions, he was locked in the game’s “Great Tang Permanent Incarceration Prison” (大唐永禁监 ) (see screen capture above). 

As Roland Soong reports in a widely-cited post from a couple of weeks ago, it turns out that around the same time that Mr. “Kill the little Japs” was imprisoned, “someone” noticed that a government office within the on-line game was decorated with a painting of a rising sun that resembled the Japanese Imperial Navy flag adopted in 1889. Word quickly spread, and within a day or two more than 10,000 avatars had allegedly gathered to protest the painting (see screen capture below).

Twilight of the Idols

In 2001-2002, Great Britain, the birthplace of modern democracy, gave the world another institution grounded on the popular vote: the television show “Pop Idol,” which allowed audience members to vote on their favorite amateur singer. Although “Pop Idol” was suspended after its second season, it nevertheless spawned wildly successful imitations throughout the globe, including the US (2002), Australia (2003), Canada (2003), and China (2005), among many others.

Where ever they go, “Pop Idol” spin-offs inevitably inspire comparisons with the democratic process—a phenomenon frequently referred to as “Idol Democracy.” For instance, the press quickly noted that more votes were in “American Idol’s” season finale this past March than have been cast for any single candidate in any US presidential election (Ronald Reagan came closest, in 1984, with 54.4 million). Similarly, when 400 million viewers watched (and 8 million text message votes were cast in) the August 27th finale of the second season of China’s spin-off, “Super Girl” (超级女声), both Chinese and foreign pundits were quick to ask whether this might herald the beginning of a true democratic reform. (For instance, the Economist reported that “A front-page headline last week in the state-run [English-language] Beijing Today put the question with astonishing frankness: “Is Super Girl a Force for Democracy?” [see also here and here). Finally, one of the most intriguing examples of a marriage of “Idol” voting and democracy can perhaps be found in the 2004 British ITV show “Vote for Me,” which used a “Pop Idol” approach to select 10 potential parliamentary candidates.

Although the implications of this sort of Idol-inspired “dial-in democracy” are not without interest, I will focus here instead on the way in which the “Pop Idol” shows underscore two other, somewhat more troubling, facets of modern democracies. 

Surfing a Tide of Weirdness

[Many thanks to Bitch | Lab and Ink and Incapability for including my posts on sexual validation and abortion debates in two recent carnivals. In the following discussion, I consider two recent debates over sexuality and sexual difference, together with their implications for our understanding of sex and normativity.]

“A desire to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it’s certainly a big part of sex,” observes Charlotte Rampling in this week’s New Yorker, “To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”

Rampling is speaking here of her new movie Heading South (Vers le Sud; Laurent Cantet, dir.), in which she plays the part of Ellen, a 55 year old Wellesley French professor who spends her summers in Haiti, where she pays a young man for sex. Rampling’s comments on the nature of normality, therefore, are framed by her strong feelings of personal distaste for the character she plays in the film:

None of the deeply disturbing characters I’ve played were as unnatural to me as this one. I find it infuriating that a beautiful, smart woman like Ellen is—at any age—so invisible to the men of her own world that she has to pay.

Although Rampling’s remarks on “discover[ing] what normal means” are made in the context of her critique of the “unnatural” sexual attitudes and practices of her fictional character in the movie, they are also relevant to our understanding of the status of normality and normativity within discourses of sexual difference.

More specifically, this summer’s US release of Heading South (the film entered the international film circuit last September, but was not officially released in the US until last week) coincides with two controversies over the use of statistics to specify (and challenge) the normative position of women in our society. These two controversies, moreover, resonate quite directly with Ellen’s status in the film as an unmarried woman of a certain age, on the one hand, and as a professor at a women’s college, on the other.

Dead Man's Chest

Based on a song from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the subtitle of Gore Verbinski's newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “Dead Man’s Chest,” is actually a pun. Taken literally, it refers to the chest cavity of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the (un)dead captain of the Flying Dutchman. Jones’ torso is of interest here because it is actually empty—Jones having carved out his own heart due to loneliness (or heartbreak), locked it in an elaborate wooden chest, and then buried on a remote island. In this way, Jones was attempting to rid himself of a potential weakness, but in practice he succeeds only in displacing and externalizing that vulnerability. The heart, together with the (wooden) chest now containing it, therefore, become Jones’ Achilles heel, insofar as the destruction of the heart will cause Jones to lose his powers, and all of those (dead or undead) who have previously sold their souls to him would thereby be released from their debts.

Among those who had sold their souls to Davy Jones is the movie’s protagonist, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who previously made a Mephistophelean pact with Jones in order to acquire his ship, the Black Pearl. Now that his debt has come due (condemning Sparrow to spend a century working on Jones’ ghost ship), Sparrow’s only hope lies in finding the buried chest (and the heart it contains), and destroying it.

Although ostensibly a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003), Dead Man’s Chest can perhaps be more profitably viewed as an unorthodox sequel to Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 animated feature, Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro). In particular, Castle, like Chest, revolves around a displaced heart—in this case, that of the sorcerer Howl (voiced by Takuya Kimura in the Japanese version, and by Christian Bale in the English), who dreams longingly of a fantastic moving castle. In an exquisite moment of wish-fulfillment, Howl’s own heart is then transferred to a falling star, which then becomes animated as the fire demon Calcifer—the soul and furnace of the gothic “moving castle” which Howl had dreamed of possessing. This displaced heart then comes to assume an unanticipated significance when Howl is joined by Sophie (Chieko Baisho/Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons)—a girl who has been transformed into an old lady by a curse, but who subsequently travels with Howl in the castle and effectively "steals his heart."

In both movies, therefore, disembodied hearts function to distance their former owners from their own feelings and desires (and, arguably, moral centers), and in return help them to achieve an unprecedented mobility and autonomy (viz., Jones’ Flying Dutchman, Howl’s moving castle and, at one remove, Sparrow’s ship, the Black Pearl, which he will lose if he does not succeed in finding Jones’ heart). Equally importantly, just as these disembodied hearts are located at the periphery of the embodied subject, similarly the vehicles which they help to secure circulate at the margins of the national/imperial body politic. Both Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones, for instance, are pirates (albeit a ghostly one, in the case of Jones) operating on the margins of the seventeenth century British empire, and Howl, formerly the prized apprentice of the English king’s head sorceress, also moves pirate-like through the kingdom in his ambulatory castle, declining requests that he lend his formidable powers to the king to help win the war (based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the movie appears to be set in Britain during an unspecified war reminiscent of WWI) .

Never Let Me Go (Clones)

(Many thanks to Matt for a very useful follow-up  to my earlier post on Gore and Heidegger, as well as to David at GreenCine and to Chris in recent carnival for referencing the same post. Thanks, also, to Helmut for an interesting discussion of my preceding post on masochistic performances. Building on these questions of the ethical status of worldly representations, together with the implications of bodily desecration, I now turn to Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel about cloning and organ harvesting, Never Let Me Go.)

In History in Three Keys, Paul Cohen discusses the curious fact that there were an abundance of terrifying rumors circulating in China during the spring and the summer of 1900, at the height of the Boxer Rebellion—rumors which were not only unsubstantiated, but furthermore were actually worse than the admittedly dire reality which inspired them. When faced with terrifying, chaotic circumstances, it would appear to make sense for people to create hopeful rumors as a means of reassuring themselves, but why create and circulate rumors which are even worse than the actual circumstances themselves?

Cohen suggests that the answer to this dilemma may lie in the terror of the unknown—the  possibility that, when faced with a lack of knowledge concerning what is going on, there is a natural impulse for people to fill that vacuum with something, anything, even if it be something of nightmarish dimensions. For instance, Cohen cites Paul Fussell’s observation (in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War) that

It is easy to understand why soldiers require constant good news. It is harder to understand why they require false bad news as well. The answer is that even that is better than the absence of narrative. Even a pessimistic, terrifying story is preferable to unmediated actuality.

This role of rumor as filling in a perceived vacuum, an “absence of narrative,” meanwhile, has its precise inverse in the specific content of the actual rumors circulated among the Boxers at this fin-de-siècle moment, many of which contended that Westerners were trafficking in human organs, including human eyeballs (for photography), women’s nipples, little boys’ testicles, or taking Chinese orphans and “cutting out their vital organs and severing their limbs.” That is to say, inspired by a litera vacuum of understanding, these rumors revolve around a paranoid fantasy of the emptying out of the human body—yielding, in effect, a “body without organs” which, as Deleuze and Guattari would argue, can then be “peopled” and “populated” by new “intensities.”

Chinese rumors of organ trafficking are, of course, not new, and can be dated back at least to the Song dynasty (10th to 13th century). As recently as 2001, the US House of Representative held hearings on whether the Chinese government was harvesting the organs of executed criminals. These fantasies are else evident at the level of popular culture, as in the “Hell Money” episode of the X-Files (March 29th, 1996) featuring a group of Chinese immigrants to the US who had to pay off their snake-heads by entering a lottery—a lottery which was periodically held to determine which of them would have to donate one of their own organs to sell on the black market (curiously, this is one of the few episodes of the series which does not appeal at all to the supernatural—as thought the exoticism of the Chinatown was somehow already exotic enough).

This theme of organ donation is also at the heart of Never Let Me Go, the latest novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day). Set in 1990s England, Never Let Me Go features a community of human clones who have been created, it is gradually revealed, for the purpose of ultimately donating their organs (as many as three or four, which they donate serially while being carefully kept alive).

Never Let Me Go (Twins)

(Many thanks to Said for an interesting follow-up to my  post on memes and Fallen, as well as to Janet for referencing the same post in a recent carnival. The underlying concern of that post--namely, the invisible bonds of virtual contagion which link us together--is developed further in the following discussion of three Chinese works (from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora in the US) which each revolve around two individuals who are quite literally bound to each other).

On July 4th 1983 (Independence Day), Hsieh Tehching and fellow performance artist Linda Montano tied themselves together with an eight foot long rope, and vowed to remain tethered together in this way, 24 hours a day, for the next 12 months. While they had previously been sexually involved (see 萧元’s 2002 book, 《做壹年》Steven Shaviro, in the introduction to the DVD Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance Art Documents 1978: 1999 inaccurately claims that Montano and Hsieh had never met before they began the performance), they nevertheless vowed not to touch either sexually during the year of the performance.

This rather remarkable performance was one of several which the Taiwanese artist Hsieh performed in New York beginning in the late 1970s. In his first (begun in 1978), he locked himself in a room and vowed not to leave for a full year and, furthermore, not to speak to anyone, watch television, or even read during that time. In his next project (begun in 1980), he vowed to punch in on a time clock every hour, on the hour (24 hours a day), for a full year. Hsieh’s next performance (begun in 1981) consisted of remaining outside for a full year (including a New York winter), never once entering a structure with any sort of roof (this is the only one of his performances which he failed to complete, on account of being arrested near the end of the performance). Following his 1983 “Rope” performance, his final year-long performance was the paradoxical commitment not to “do art” (including talking about art, reading art, viewing art, etc.) for a full year. This was then followed by the multi-year (1986-1999) “performance” consisting of a commitment not to “make art” or to “show it publicly” until the end of the millennium.

Obscene Images (3)

(With this untimely post, I finally complete a triptych on “obscene images” I began more than a month ago. As should be clear from each of these discussions, I am not concerned here with the obscene in the conventional sense of the “indecent; lewd” [L. obscenus, obscaenus], but rather in the faux-etymological sense of the “ob-scene,” or that which is situated against [ob] the visible scene [L. scæna, scena "scene, stage," from Gk. skene "scene, stage," originally "tent or booth," related to skia "shadow, shade"]. In particular, I am concerned in this particular post with the politics of viewing and representing the womb.)

Michael Winterbottom’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) is a movie-about-a-movie. Or, to be more precise, it is a movie about an aborted (or, at best, still-born) movie. Ostensibly a cinematic adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s ostensibly unfilmable eighteenth century novel, Winterbottom’s film quickly shifts into a metacinematic exploration of the inherent impossibility of that task. The eponymous narrator (Steve Coogan) struggles to narrate the story of his life, but can never seem to get beyond the moment of his birth. It is appropriate, therefore, that one of the defining moments of the work  features the actor Coogan (playing himself playing the unborn Tristam Shandy) being inserted, naked and upside down, into an enormous artificial replica of a uterus—ostensibly in preparation for filming a corresponding in-utero scene for the movie. This uterus (with the naked Coogan inside) then reappears again later in the film, this time, however, shrunk to roughly uterine size and inserted back into a meta-scene of the attempted filming of Tristram Shandy. In the latter scene, the apparent realization of the ostensible (male) fantasy of reentering the womb is ironically contrasted with the now-miniature Coogan/Shandy’s vociferous complaints about being ignored and overlooked within a film of which he is ostensibly the protagonist.

This fantasy of an adult man reentering a (mother’s) womb has a precise parallel in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film, Talk To Her (Hable con ella). Inserted into the main plot-line regarding the male nurse Benigno’s (Javier Camara) quasi-necrophilic infatuation with the comatose body of his ward, the ballerina Alicia, (Leonor Watling), there is a miniature film-within-a-film entitled “The Shrinking Lover”—which consists of a fantasy sequence in which a man takes a potion which shrinks him to miniature size, and then proceeds to disappear into an (over-sized model of a) woman’s vagina. This film-within-a-film is presented in the style of a silent surrealist film—and the silence of the film ironically echoes the literal silence (and silencing) of Benigno’s catatonic female interlocutor in the main film itself.