the naked gaze 肉眼

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.

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).