the naked gaze 肉眼

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.

The Spirit of Money

In his well-known essay on rail travel, Michel de Certeau compares travel to “'traveling incarceration,” the condition of being “immobile inside the train, seeing immobile things slip by.” It is a very similar sense of incarceration or entrapment which the Hong Kong journalist Yuen Yongding (Alex Man) feels, in Stanley Kwan’s 关锦鹏 1988 film Rouge 胭脂扣, as he gradually realizes that the mysterious woman who has been following him and now is nostalgically recalling her trips to the now-defunct theatre, is in actuality a ghost. Terrified, Yuen rushes to a window at the back of the bus and starts shaking it violently, as if the bus actually were his prison.

In fact, the two of them had been just sitting by the window, “seeing immobile things go by.” Simultaneously “immobile” and extraordinarily “slip[pery],” these “things” which they were observing were historical sites which Fleur (Anita Mui), the ghostly courtesan, remembered from her youthful days. The old brothel, she notes with wry amusement, has been converted into a kindergarten. The old Tai-ping theatre, meanwhile, has been replaced with a 7-11, and it is precisely Fleur’s baroque descriptions of visiting the theatre every weekend with her fellow courtesans.

As Fleur narrates these vivid memories—and as the camera itself is momentarily drawn into that nostalgic space as well—Yuen becomes increasingly anxious and distressed, ultimately standing up and asking her in horror, “What are you? You’re not human.” She is, in fact, a trace of the city itself, a splinter of nostalgic investment which had succeeded in inserting itself under his skin, invading the prison-like sanctity of the public tram.

Nature vs. Nurture

(Many thanks to Abbas Raza for a couple of reposts at 3 Quarks Daily. 3QD is an excellent filter blog which brings together a daily collection of articles "in the areas       of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else       we deem inherently fascinating". In the spirit of this sort of cross-disciplinary eclecticism, in the following post I consider some of the social implications of current debates over evolution.)

A recent lengthy article by Gina Kolata in the Times on anatomical and physical differences between the average American a century ago and today cited the University of Chicago economist Robert W. Fogel to the effect that

Over the past 100 years … humans in the industrialized world have undergone a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.

Of course, the article hurries to explain, the “evolution” being referred to here involves not “changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form.” Instead, it is argued that these “changes in the human form,” are actually due to environmental factors such as nutrition, etc. (and particularly, it is argued, conditions during fetal gestation).

Fogel’s non-Darwinian use of the term “evolution” here is actually quite timely, given current debates in Kansas and elsewhere over whether “intelligent design” should be considered a valid alternative to evolution in schools. Even beyond the design vs. evolution “debate,” however, Fogel’s discussion of a “form of evolution” to describe changes due to environmental conditions rather than genetic mutations underscores a series of controversies with the scientific community, as well as within society at large .

Strangers in a Strange Land

(Some friendly links have introduced me to a couple of blogs I was not previously aware of. First, there is the fascinating blog Supernaut by an occasionally China-based choreographer who also appears to be a double (redoubled?) transsexual, who posted  (reposted) my recent blog on Shi Shuqing’s Her Name is Butterfly. Second, the French-language blog Poxx: Un aire de déjà vu cites
my recent post on Never Let Me Go in the context of a more general discussion of Ishigura’s novels. Speaking of discovering blogs, the following post is about a fascinating Spanish-language blog I recently discovered, and the network of Sino-Spanish blogs which he himself recently discovered).

While living in self-imposed exile in Italy following the June 4th Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, Zhang Dali 张大力 found himself feeling lonely and alienated in this foreign culture. As a result, Zhang created what was essentially a graphic "signature" of his own self-image—a minimalist profile with an accentuated brow-line and thick lips drawn with a single stroke of black spray paint—and then started painting this image on public walls throughout the city. In a recent biographical sketch of the artist, the art critic Wen Pulin 溫普林 recalls his old friend's own description of how he originally began to practice this graffiti:

[Zhang resolved, a]t the very least I was determined to have this city remember me. Upon reflection, he decided that his most Asian feature was the "Northeastern" shape of his skull—a large head without a "spoon-like" protrusion in the back. Therefore, he started leaving graffiti images of his profile in streets and alleys throughout the city. "Next to my [Zhang Dali's] drawings, I would also write Chinese characters, to let people know that this had been drawn by a Chinese. I simply wrote anything that came to mind, because in Italy, the significance of a Chinese character is simply to denote the Orient, and my intention was to initiate a dialogue. Two days later I went back to take a look, and found that people had written in Italian over my drawing. Therefore, I took a photograph of the sketched head, and that was how I came up with this idea." The first person had written, "Who are you?" Zhang Dali was very excited. When he went back the next day, he found that someone had written, "Fuck your mother," and "You fucking fascist." Some people thought that he was a skin-head, while others painted a Communist hammer and sickle over his sketch (江湖飄：中國前衛藝術家外傳 (上), p. 17).

As Wen concludes ironically, “It can be said that Zhang Dali's dialogue in Italy was a success.” This initial response to his work, therefore, encouraged Zhang to continue his graffiti, which over the following decade (including after returning to Beijing) not only developed into a highly distinctive and nuanced art-form, but also came to function as a powerful emblem of Zhang's own public identity.

Last week, the expatriate author of the blog Chinochano wrote about some obscene graffiti some children had written on a wall in Beijing, and then segues into an interesting discussion of public wall-writing in China—mentioning, of course, Zhang Dali, among other examples.

The next day, Chinochano published another post on athletics in China, the first comment to which (written by a certain Jorge/Jason Rap) had no direct relevance to the post itself:

你好.我是西班牙出生的中国人.很想跟其它的华人聊天.
我很高兴发现这个网络

［Hello, I am a Spanish-born Chinese, and am very interested in chatting with other Chinese. I am very happy to have found this web-site.]

Coincidentally, perhaps, the sentiment expressed in this comment echoes quite directly Zhang Dali’s sense of cultural alienation while living in Italy, with Chinochano’s blog being used as a sort of virtual “wall” for public expression.

Advocacy and Analysis

In an Op-ed column in this past Sunday’s NY Times, Stanley Fish discussed the case of Kevin Barrett, the University of Wisconsin Ph.D. and coordinator for the “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth,” who is scheduled to teach a course on “Islam: Religion and Culture” this fall, but who has argued that the US government was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. After he discussed these views on a conservative talk show, State Representative Stephen Nass (R) lead calls for Barrett’s dismissal from the university.

In his editorial, Fish argues that much of the ensuing controversy over whether or not  Barrett’s political opinions should be protected misses the point of what “academic freedom” does and does not cover. The point of academic freedom, Fish argues, “has nothing to do with content,” but rather “is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.”  Therefore, he concludes,

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Ironically, Fish’s essay advocating a clear distinction between advocacy and analysis has been roundly criticized for its implicit ideological agenda (for some of these discussions, see Long Sunday and Sherman Don).

I, too, will consider Fish’s editorial and the issues it raises, but will approach them somewhat indirectly, by turning first to two other recent incidents which underscore the power of speech and its implicit limits. On July 9th, Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi was in response to verbal taunting. Although FIFA states that both parties denied that the taunting was racist in nature, they nevertheless gave Materazzi a surprisingly harsh two-game suspension. More recently, on July 28 Mel Gibson was pulled over for drunken driving, and proceeded to launch into a profanity laced, anti-Semitic tirade, saying among other things, "F------ Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

Although there are numerous important distinctions between the Materazzi, Gibson and Barrett controversies, there are nevertheless suggestive points of convergence between the three incidents, ones which inevitably complicate any simple response to the Barrett matter.

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).