An Interview With Rey Chow
An
Interview with Rey Chow
Paul Bowman & Rey Chow[*]
Abstract:
An interview with Rey Chow carried out for this special themed issue of Social Semiotics, which is concerned
with asking Rey Chow about her past, present and future work. It is organised
by questions related to her ongoing work in postcolonialism, cultural studies,
cultural theory and comparative literature, as well as her work’s connections
to history, philosophy and cultural politics.
Keywords:
Rey Chow, postcolonialism, discourse, Foucault, visuality, Žižek, Deleuze,
technology
Paul Bowman: Your work has tackled many
objects and fields: comparative literature, woman and Chinese modernity, film
and modernity, problems in postcolonialism, questions of intervention in
cultural politics, the relationships between “high” theory or philosophy and
“pragmatic” cultural-political concerns, feminism and film studies,
retheorizing translation in a postcolonial world, the relationships between
area studies, atomic bombs and US geopolitical hegemony, the status of “the sentimental”
within contemporary Chinese films, and so on – to gesture to a few. How do you
position yourself in relation to what are normally thought to be such diverse
and discrete fields? Are each of your books intended for different audiences?
Rey
Chow: It’s difficult
to talk about one’s work objectively because one’s own psychic investments are
involved, but if I am to give it a try, in response to these questions, I’d say
that (in relation to my published work) my point of departure was seldom a
particular field or its established object of study, but more often a set of
questions that came with a specific work, be it a literary, film, or
critical/philosophical text, a recurrent narrative, or a popular stereotype.
Instead of beginning with a bird’s eye view of a field, then, I am more prone
to working with features of specific works that strike me as demanding more
thought, more discussion, more debate; that suggest that there has to be a
larger set of issues that have led to those features’ visibility and
intelligibility. For instance, when modern Chinese literature was supposedly
undergoing revolutionary transformation in the early twentieth century, why
were there also these rather morose, sentimental, “politically incorrect”
stories (in what came to be known as Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction) being
published and read with such enthusiasm – what did it tell us about the
relationship between the production and consumption of fiction, and social
reform? Alternatively, among the many stories and images that can be used in
relation to people from non-Western cultures, why are some typically chosen to
represent them to a Western public, so that these cultures are either seen as
primitive and unchanging, or politically progressive and avant-garde? What
happens to the middle regions between these two extreme ends of representation?
Or, how is it that colleagues in the discipline of comparative literature tend
to love the idea of translation – which, as a topic, is perhaps one of the most
heavily theorized in the field – but at the same time seem to scorn the use of
translated works for research and pedagogical purposes as improper,
inauthentic, low-rent, etc., even in a comparative context? What kinds of
assumptions make the coexistence of such contradictory attitudes and practices
possible in the first place?
When one begins with specific questions such as these,
it soon becomes clear that the official field and/or object of inquiry to which
these questions seem to correspond is often insufficient – or at least
incapable of accommodating the critical scope and extent forced open by the
questions. The questions, in other words, tend to put pressure on the
definitions of the field(s) and objects of inquiry, and mess up their
boundaries. A more appropriate notion to invoke would be Foucault’s
“discourse,” as I see many of these fields you have named as complexly related
as discourses, once we begin with specific questions. To use the language of
electronic communications, discourses are always “linked” or “networked”
articulations; there is no telling how many “windows” can be opened or are
potentially open-able if we ask the serious questions. But then of course, the
irony is that, once the work is published and out there, most audiences tend to
read it in accordance to already-existing headings and subheadings of
knowledge, and the more familiar names of the fields and subfields are
typically reinvoked to “make sense” of what I have written. And so forth, and
so on. Still, I am fascinated by the generative nature of discourses and by the
unexpected turns they may take, as much as I am intrigued by the myths, the
long held assumptions and beliefs, that are embedded in them.
PB: You mention the “familiar name” Foucault, who seems
to be a strong (perhaps even growing) presence within your work. Would
reinvoking Foucault be a justifiable way to “make sense” of what you have
written? Or, given what you have just said about the stabilizing
(domesticating?) effects of familiar names, is it more complex than this –
despite the discernible presence and effects of Foucault’s work throughout your
own thinking on and interventions into many interlinked discourses?
RC: Yes, to some extent, Foucault is a logical way to
understand what I have been writing, though it may surprise you to hear that
Foucault has been a major influence on my work only since about a dozen years
ago. Before then, I did not read him seriously because, to be completely
honest, I had conflated the ways in which some of his works, such as The
History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and Discipline and Punish, had been
popularized in the U.S. academy with Foucault’s own arguments and perspectives.
The emphases that came with such popularization – sex and sexuality,
panopticism, surveillance, and so forth – were not wrong but were not
particularly interesting to me as a close reader of literary, film, and other
cultural texts. Only when I started reading Foucault carefully on my own did I
discover that I had been quite mistaken about his contributions. In particular,
his early works, such as The Archeology of Knowledge and The Order of
Things, have been instrumental in helping me articulate issues that surface
in the trans-cultural examination of knowledge production and dissemination.
The explicit discussions of race, racism, biopolitics, populations,
governmentality, and so forth, that were documented in the Collège de France
lectures and that became widely available only in recent years, are also
crucial. If we remain strictly on the level of names, my attraction to Foucault
probably has much to do with Foucault’s own indebtedness to Nietzsche. As did
many of his contemporaries (Deleuze, for instance), Foucault inherited a
joyously nihilistic attitude toward what Nietzsche called the stones of
knowledge: the momentum that springs from a readiness to destabilize the
conventions of knowledge organization – the courage to overturn established
norms, to interrogate what has long been accepted as normal – this Nietzschean
spirit I find very uplifting. This is, of course, a simplification of the
complexities of Foucault’s work as a whole, but the Nietzschean-ness of his
intellectual energy strikes me every time I read and teach him.
What I continue to find thought-provoking is also
Foucault’s relationship to Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. I have
written here and there about this relationship, which is exemplary of a kind of
productive tension that informs the work of the most interesting authors.
Foucault helps us see the historicality of some of our most cherished,
deep-seated beliefs about ourselves, our “psyches,” our desires. This is
eminently enabling, because the perspective he brings to the psychic is
precisely that it is the kind of fiction we moderns live on a daily basis in
the most intimate manners, yet that does not mean we should simply accept it as
nature. To invoke another name: if you think of Althusser’s influential work on
ideology and subjectivity, and how Foucault, who was Althusser’s student,
reworked Althusser’s argument in the form of discipline, by elaborating not so much on the psyche per se as on
the ways “gentle coercion” is realized through a proliferating network of
institutions and apparatuses, you’d get a sense of what I mean by “enabling.”
Lacanians such as Slavoj Žižek, also taking as a point of departure Althusser’s
notion of ideology, simply proceed to argue – and demonstrate again and again,
ad nauseum! – a kind of absurd unconscious that is external to the subject in
the form of an Other, a gap, a hole that can never be completely patched over,
etc. I have learned a great deal from reading the Lacanians and from Žižek as
well, and admire the skills that go into their deft and deterministic
argumentative turns. But I am inspired by Foucault’s decision to turn away from
the psychoanalytic per se and to turn toward the sociological in all its impure
messiness. Instead of revealing over and over again how a certain unconscious
manifests itself in the most unexpected and often comical fashion, in
philosophy, politics, and popular culture alike, Foucault’s work allows us to
examine practices, which are impermanent and changeable rather than
transcendental. In this way it avoids the tendency toward dogmatism that is the other side of some otherwise very smart uses
of Lacan, Althusser, and psychoanalysis, and for that matter many
well-intentioned invocations of Marx and the notions of emancipation and
revolution. If we are after dogmatisms and absolutes – and I say this with no
sarcasm whatsoever – Foucault is definitely what we should avoid; he is big
disappointment in that department.
In brief, to respond to your questions very broadly,
my indebtedness to Foucault has much to do with gradually, and very slowly,
understanding how he used the same sources differently from some of his most
important contemporaries – how he, being just as well-versed in Marx, Freud,
and all these indispensable forebears, made a decisive move to go in a
non-dogmatic intellectual direction and what that entailed. That said, many
problems remain unresolved in Foucault’s work; that’s one reason it is such a
positive challenge to teach it. Besides, there are so many first-rate
publications on Foucault, done by scholars from such a wide range of
disciplines that he is simply a terrific pedagogical resource. One area in
which I’d like to do more in-depth research, if I can find the time, is
Foucault’s uses of visuality. I am interested in this area not in order to
write more about films and images but in order to articulate the dynamics
inherent in the encounter between the phenomenology of seeing and the emergence
of epistemic ruptures that Foucault was so good in charting. To some of my
colleagues, this is, of course, nothing new – just look at the excellent work
of Gary Shapiro, for instance – but I think Foucault and visuality would be a
richly provocative subject to explore.
PB: Although you have not yet begun this project on
Foucault and visuality, can you say at this stage more about what interests you
about the relation between Foucault’s work and your thinking of visuality, or
about, as you say, Foucault’s “uses of visuality”?
RC: Well, perhaps “uses of visuality” is not the best
way to put it. Let me begin with something I recently wrote that is about to be
published in a collection edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton called Deleuze and the Postcolonial. My
contribution is about Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s writings and how that
might form productive links with postcoloniality. One of the illuminating
points made by Deleuze is that it is a misrepresentation to think of Foucault
as a thinker of confinement. Retracing Foucault’s work on Maurice Blanchot and
all those spaces of confinement such as the prison, the clinic, the asylum, and
so forth, Deleuze argues that what appears as confinement in Foucault is really
a secondary formation, a formalization of a relation of exclusion; what has
been confined is really the outside. As you can tell, this is a significant
shift in the way Foucault has been interpreted, and the consequences of that
shift are only slowly beginning to unfold in global critical work. If we follow
Deleuze’s reading (which does not mean we have to agree with everything he
says), then one of the things we need to come to terms with is the status of
visibility in Foucault. I cannot elaborate this status in sufficient detail
here, but perhaps I can briefly indicate some of the interesting aspects
involved.
First, I think we should ask: if Foucault’s work can
be understood in terms of a medium, what would that be? I’d suggest that it is
light. Foucault’s earliest work on madness may thus be seen as a study in light
– that is, an approach to light as a medium of thought, as this medium is
embedded in the notions of enlightenment, clarity, luminosity, and so forth
that come with the European Enlightenment. The history of madness is a history
of how a mystery – a form of darkness – ascribed to certain kinds of human
behavior gradually became visible – or visibilized – against the light of
reason. Being given visibility means that madness became discernible by way of
various scientific, medical, penitentiary, and other categories. Becoming
visible is, accordingly, a process of differentiation through light, which
renders things possible by making them visible and, importantly, divisible. The
extreme example of the working of light is Bentham’s Panopticon, and Foucault’s
famous assertion in his reading, in Discipline
and Punish, of panopticism is that visibility is a trap: light is what the
prisoners are caught in; light is what defines, watches, and improves them;
light is what reforms their souls. If we postpone the conclusion that this is
simply a bleak or pessimistic reduction of modern existence to incarceration
(the way Foucault is typically read), then the relation between visibility and
confinement could be the first step to a different kind of inquiry, an inquiry
into what Foucault calls limit-experiences. What if visibility is reconsidered
as a form of limit-experience in thought? What happens when what is assumed to
be clarity and luminosity is in fact the space of a certain boundary,
challenging us with the unthought or unthinkable? The implicit mutuality
between visibility and divisibility, between light and partitioning, is
thought-provoking, and we find a version of it in, for instance, Jacques
Rancière’s discussion of the distribution of the sensible, of what it means to
think about art and politics in terms of sharing (partage), etc.
Second, as Deleuze, Shapiro, and others have pointed
out, the relation or non-relation between saying and seeing, between words and
things, is a fascinating area in Foucault’s work that demands much more
attention. If words and things, or discourse and visibilities, are
incommensurate orders, how would we need to rethink all the relations that have
been constructed on the assumption that they are continuous, that one has
something to tell us about the other? In other words, precisely the
juxtaposition – the proximity – of words and things may reveal the void, the nonsensical
nature of their assumed correspondence and mutuality. Among contemporary
thinkers, Bruno Latour has extended the ramifications of
proximity-as-non-relation to his interesting studies of the confrontation of
different discourses (such as science, philosophy, sociology . . .) in
modernity. Foucault was clearly elaborating such a non-relation (or
disjunction) among disciplinary knowledges in a book like The Order of Things (with its unforgettable analysis of Velasquez’s
Las Meninas). It would be interesting
to see what he was trying to do with the forms of visibilities in an explicitly
visual medium such as art, as found in a painter like Manet.
Third, Foucault suggests a quite unique reading of
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (in the Collège de France lectures), in that,
instead of placing the emphasis on the hand, he puts it on the condition of the
invisible. Whereas most interpretations of this well-known notion tend to
concentrate on the hand, as the directive that, in unseen ways, helps regulate
things on the market, Foucault’s reading stresses rather the unknowability of
the actual forces shaping things in the market. By taking seriously the
adjective invisible, he is raising the interesting question how the
relationship between the sovereign and the economy in the modern state is
marked by a non-knowing – and it is this condition of not knowing everything
that defines sovereignty in the age of economic liberalism. These are just my
preliminary observations, but it seems that there is much going on in
Foucault’s thinking about visibilities that will compel us to change the way we
have been looking at even a familiar issue like liberalism as an ideology of
political governance.
PB: How do you assess the increasing visibility or discursive
proliferation of ways of visualizing and discoursing “the postcolonial” in
general?
RC: Like many theoretical trends, the postcolonial has
been fashionable for a while, though many people also express a lack of
interest in its continued relevance, while others try to suggest that it has
been superseded by other terms. I don’t find the debate at this level – that
is, the relevance of the term postcolonial as a fashionable theoretical turn
that may or may not still have purchase – very interesting. Indeed, the term has
probably lost its aura as a hot item, but perhaps it is during its cooler
period that it has more to reveal to us. To that extent, the term may have more
in common with a term like modern/modernity: in both cases, the controversies
over the more positivistic question of chronologies – When exactly was
modernity? When exactly was the colonial, giving rise to the “post,”? etc. –
have to give way to another perception, namely, that even when the chronologies
can never be pinned down with absolute certainty, the marker itself continues
to evoke historical issues and effects that permeate vast subject areas. It is
the evocative quality of the term postcolonial that interests me, precisely
because in that quality lies the suggestion that things are not quite finished
and can perhaps never be finished. The postcolonial as what is residual,
open-ended, and incomplete: this is how, I believe, it will likely continue to
matter, and why there seems to be such a proliferation of ways of visualizing
and discoursing it in general.
In a more pedantic frame, the postcolonial has already
transformed well-established fields of knowledge. To take the most obvious
example: the field of English. When I was an undergraduate at the University of
Hong Kong, pursuing studies in English meant, as it still means in many
post-British places of higher education, learning the line of great works that
progresses from Chaucer, through Milton and Shakespeare, to Johnson, Pope,
Swift, to the Romantics and the Victorian novelists, and finally to the modern
and contemporary writings of the British Isles. Today, it would be impossible
to adhere to this curriculum without appearing provincial, and without missing
the wonderful creative works by writers writing in English who for one reason
or another cannot be restricted to the British Isles or even the British
Commonwealth. Writers such as Rushdie, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Lahiri, Desai,
Ondaatje . . . (and these are only a very few among many) demand different
conceptual categories, different codes of organization, and a quite different
kind of literary history that is still in the process of being written.
Classifying them as “postcolonial” may be just a provisional trick, but this
trick, precisely because it is not entirely satisfactory, also forces a field
such as English literature to update and renovate itself. The process is not
unlike housecleaning or remodeling: what can be thrown out? What has been lying
in the basement or in the attic that we have no use for, that is simply taking
up space? What alternative arrangements of space – and the intimations of time
that come with such spatial rearrangements – may be introduced? How do some odd
pieces of furniture compel us to change the views of entire rooms, and why had
we not done it before? What would such a change do to the demographics of the
house, the folks who have been living there as though they were the rightful
permanent owners – and their offspring? Who should be the future occupants of
the house, if it is being made over? So you see, the demands placed by the term
postcolonial on the established manors (manners) of academic learning are what
I find most thought-provoking. In addition to English, similar demands have
been placed on fields such as French, East Asian Languages and Literatures,
even German, and much newer fields such as Women’s or Gender Studies. The work
required in each case to overhaul the older paradigms is quite different, of
course, but in each case my sense is that some seismic shifts are happening,
and this is not because of some fashionable trend in theory, with the
postcolonial being one of the more recent terms, but rather because the
theoretical term is itself a belated reflection of the historical, cultural,
and social transformations that have been occurring over a long period of time.
That said, it must be pointed out that some troubling
patterns of knowledge production continue (they too have a life of their own).
The apparent popular use of the notion of the postcolonial in conjunction with
a big-name theorist is one example. Here, the situation is somewhat analogous
to what has been well known in the world of art: the first-world artist, like
Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky, Duchamp, etc., is usually allowed identification in
the form of a name of his own, that is to say, in the form of single
authorship, while the artists of the non-Western world have typically been
identified in the form of the group to which they supposedly belong, and
instead of being given their individual names, these artists remain, typically,
anonymous. This divide between the artist as individual author and the artist
as anonymous member of a collective is an entrenched part of the modern West’s
way of organizing what are so called art museums and ethnographic museums. This
silently racialized epistemic boundary has been the object of critique by
scholars such as Sally Price, James Clifford, Alfred Gell, Michael M.J.
Fischer, and others; I am simply borrowing their insights here. But those
insights can be taken much further if we see how the realm of theory is
comparable to the realm of art: there are, on the one hand, the individual
artists or theorists with recognizable names such as Derrida, Foucault,
Deleuze, Rancière, Badiou, Butler, and so forth, and on the other, we have a
collective category, the postcolonial, which is not unlike the typical
ethnographic museum where non-Western artists or theorists can be thought of en
masse, as a group exhibit whose interest value lies not in the individual
genius of the artist or theorist but in the anonymous contributions s/he makes
to the group as a whole. In the one case, even when the contributions are of a
collective value, the artist or theorist is visibly individuated; in the other
case, even when the contribution is of a private, eccentric, or avant-garde
nature, the artist or theorist is by default judged in accordance to the group,
in accordance to what Albert Memmi has called the mark of the plural. So, the
coupling of the postcolonial with particular big-name theorists could be
exactly the place to begin a different kind of intervention, one that would
require us to pose questions about the status of theory as, de facto, a kind of
contemporary art (whereas the convention has been to think of theory as a kind
of philosophy), and what such art – and with it performativity – means in terms
of authorship, ownership, the politics of individualism and collectivity as it
is linked to the non-Western world.
PB: In light of these connections, hierarchizations and
separations that you are pointing out – the various forms of
connection/separation between “the Name” and (or versus) “the postcolonial,”
the artwork and the ethnographic work, and other such “Western ways of
organizing” – one term seems conspicuous by its absence here: namely, the old
chestnut of “capitalism” – and the sets of terms associated with it:
commodification, consumption, appropriation, exploitation, and so on. How does
capital/ism relate to or feature within this (or these) complex discursive
process(es)?
RC: For me, the link between capital/ism and these
discursive processes is the general mode of abstraction derived from exchange
value. I am making a huge statement here, I know, so let me just explain myself
in the following way. Abstraction tends to be frowned on because it suggests
vagueness, lack of precision, generalization, etc., but one of the most
important legacies we have from the many investigations of capital is that
abstraction is structural to human social relations based on exchange. (I would
include under that rubric everyone from Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin, to
Jameson, Baudrillard, and Žižek.) A book I have found particularly useful is by
the German Marxist philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel, on manual and intellectual
labor; the book shows how even empirical and mundane acts of human exchange,
like going to the butcher to buy a piece of meat, are acts of abstraction –
that is to say, they involve a mental operation that is inscribed materially or
embodied in the very unreflective or spontaneous behavior of exchange itself –
in a manner that is inaccessible to non-humans. For precisely this reason (the
presence of reflection or lack thereof), much of the cultural work that takes
off from the critique of capital tends to elaborate on consciousness – on how
consciousness has been manipulated or duped. Exchange value through
commodification, in other words, is largely associated with the production of
what is called false consciousness, to which reality appears, as Marx writes in
The German Ideology, in an upside down version. Although its analyses
are anything but crude, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment must
still be understood in terms of this powerful Marxist critique of false
consciousness. For Adorno and Horkheimer one of the major manifestations
of false consciousness in late capitalism is the culture industry, which
brought about an unprecedented scope and scale of reification of human life
through the mass commodity. I believe that this uncompromised dismissal of
postwar mass culture, American-style, was what led a theorist such as Fredric
Jameson to offer a more redemptive analysis of mass culture by identifying in
it implicit forms of utopianism (the famous example in Jameson’s corpus being
his insightful reading of the film Jaws).
In the case of a thinker such as Žižek, “false”
consciousness is analyzed by way of mass culture – the films of Hitchcock,
media events, jokes, even popular song lyrics – as well as scholarly texts such
as the writings of Hegel, Lacan, and other philosophers. Not only does Žižek not
seem to worry about the culture industry as Adorno and Horkheimer did; in his
case the more orthodox notion of falsehood has become irrelevant, as ideology
is not something to be deconstructed but rather something that works with a
logic that cannot be reduced to consciousness per se. Variations of this
formulation are often offered by Žižek: they don’t know what they are doing,
but they are doing it . . . His way of dealing with consciousness, then, is by
displacing it onto another manifest level, such as repetitive behavior that
indicates another dimension – an unconscious – that has a life of its own and
that can bring us much closer to whatever the truth may be. Žižek’s way of
handling capital, that is to say, is not the “vulgar” Marxist way of interrogating
class relations; nor is it Adorno’s manner of pitting avant-garde artistic
forms/practices against commodified cultural relations. Rather, it is to show
how the follies of so-called consciousness already live a kind of objectified
existence, external to us, in our language, our behavior, our social
relations, our most cherished desires, and so forth.
Obviously, I can go on and on about capital,
abstraction, exchange value, and consciousness, but the question I would pose
to the Marxist tradition of dealing with consciousness is its anthropocentrism.
There remains an implicit belief in human nature as such in these sophisticated
elaborations of consciousness. Whether it is through the criticism of mass
culture (as what produces false consciousness) or a Lacanian revelation of the
unconscious in all kinds of unexpected objectifications, the work on
consciousness (or its variant, subjectivity) remains chained to a kind of
human-centered universe. If we are to take seriously Foucault’s suggestion that
Man himself is a fairly recent historical invention, then consciousness – be it
in the form of false consciousness, the unconscious, subjectivity, and so forth
– would need to be given a new historicity, perhaps no longer the one it
received from Marx and his predecessors like Feuerbach and Hegel, and their
followers, but a different kind of history in which human consciousness itself
no longer takes center stage. One trajectory in this posthuman direction is
already laid down by our new technologies, in the midst of which
de-humanization has become our normal way of life, in the sense that the human
has now become, literally, bits of information, dispersed and circulated
ubiquitously in ways that are beyond individuals’ conscious control. Another
trajectory is perhaps the larger ecological framework that compels us to
reexamine some of the terms that had been thrown out with the focus on capital:
nature, animal, earth, spirituality . . . It is not an accident that Deleuze is
being read with so much interest. I may not agree with everything I read by
Deleuze but the questions he raises are timely, precisely because they help us
think of capital/ism in a historical and also millennial dimension, so that
those forces that seem anachronistic in earlier discussions of capital/ism
begin to matter in a new light.
PB: Your use of the word “timely” to account for the
current popularity of a figure who was mainly writing between the 1960s and
1980s is provocative. There is much that might be asked about this “anachronistic”
relation, and the “forces” it may testify to. But what do you think are the
forces which determine visibility, intelligibility, clarity or popularity here
(in the contexts of “engaged” or “politicized” scholarly work), and, moreover,
how does academic writing (whether that be philosophical or anti-theoretical) relate
to, connect with or intervene into the objects it is concerned with (such as
cultural or political “issues” and “problems”)?
RC: I don’t think the 1960s through the 1990s were that distant
from us. Deleuze and his contemporaries were writing during a period when
important world events were unfolding – the cold war, movements of
decolonization on different continents, the Cultural Revolution in China, May
’68, the civil rights movement in the U.S., and so forth. One could say that
these were the decades when Europe’s sense of itself was undergoing a
significant shift, and that this was reflected in the many philosophical and
theoretical writings that continue to influence us to this day. One consequence
of this shift is a change in the way race and ethnicity are conceived. While
the Holocaust remains for many people the definitive event of racial or ethnic
violence in the twentieth century, it has become increasingly impossible to accept
this definitiveness. Instead, the work on race and ethnicity these days must
address other episodes of violence and discrimination that have been occluded
precisely in this exclusive focus on anti-semitism, which, while being
intolerable, is also part of what of what we mean by the term Eurocentrism. So,
in doing my own work, I have tried to think by juxtaposing happenings that
seem at first unrelated. What does it mean for Foucault to talk about, let’s
say, literature as a form of self-referential writing (whose power comes from
its knowledge of its own impotence) when we think not so much in the context of
the European avant-garde but in terms of the pluralistic, perhaps
incommensurate, histories of world literature? How may deconstruction as a
subversive practice of language teach us about (French) colonialism as a type
of governance? Why is the essentialism of the Lacanian Real so attractive
at a time when we have supposedly learned to historicize and contextualize
everything? How do comparative literature and area studies serve as silent
partners to each other?
In this admittedly eclectic and heterologous way of
reading, anachronism is more a question or a contentious claim than a
certitude, since temporality itself can no longer be assumed as clearly indexical,
with neat divisions into the past, the present, and the future. Rather, when
one reads this way, temporality tends to operate in the form of upsurges,
through the unexpected proximities constructed around seemingly unrelated
things. (Of course, this way of reading is closely related to technologies of
photography and film as well as modernist painting.) In that vein, what may
seem anachronistic – let’s say, questions about religion, nature, animality,
and affect, to give some of the most topical examples – could be rethought as
the effects of bracketing or suspension from a particular time, which is not to
say that such questions have become irrelevant once and for all. Indeed,
anachronism could be another way of understanding the indispensable element of
time lag in thinking and intellectual work in general. To use a term from
Deleuze, anachronism could be a matter of deterritorialization, the
deterritorialization, or nomadization, of time’s complete correspondence
to itself. Instead, anachronism suggests that time is always “out of joint,”
that this out-of-jointness or fugitiveness need not be something to lament, as
philosophers such as Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, in their discussions of
technologies and technics, seem to suggest (quite sentimentally, in my
opinion).
The problem with our latest technics such as
digitization is not, I think, that they have produced an alienating world in
which time is out of joint; quite the contrary: the newest technologies of
capture, as they become ever-more exact, efficient, and flawless, are leading
to a vanishing of time lag. As it enables numerous forms of instantaneous
documenting, immediate replayability, live coding, simulcast, open access, and
so forth, digitization is eliminating from time precisely that out-of-jointness
that is fundamental to the imagination and creative work. When you think of it,
there is no such thing as an imperfect or belated copy of anything anymore.
Everything is readily available as a present/now and interchangeable with something
like it. That elimination of time’s potential to be anachronistic, to be just
approximate, to become fossilized, to become fugitive from itself – a potential
that for thousands of years was preserved by the imperfect technics of
reproduction – is I think the greatest challenge posed by our contemporary
media. But we do not really know what consequences this will have on our
thinking, memory, habits of learning, or interpersonal communications. There is
a lot of speculative talk about the possible consequences, but it’s probably
still too early to tell. Suffice it to say, for now, that this fundamentally
changing relation to time – a relation which pervades everything from politics
to art, health care, sexuality, or bureaucratic record-keeping, a relation
which is rewriting the way we as a species leave our imprints on the universe –
is one of the “forces” – and a major type of violence – we need to reckon with,
even in the small arena of academic work. Of course, we’d need to ask what
divisions of academic work we are talking about: the humanities always have a
harder time justifying their existence (an effect also of the history of
technics, perhaps?) but many scholars are genuinely attempting to go beyond the
more restrictive disciplinary boundaries in order to create more supple, rather
than mutually exclusive or ignorant, networks of thinking and writing. That is
an encouraging sign.
Rey Chow was Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University
from 2000 to 2009, and is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at
Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University. Since 1991 she has
authored the following books: Woman and Chinese Modernity; Writing
Diaspora; Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and
Contemporary Chinese Cinema; Ethics after Idealism; The
Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; The Age of the World
Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work; and Sentimental
Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. Primitive Passions was
awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association.
Chow’s work has been widely excerpted, anthologized and translated into major
European and Asian languages. She serves on the editorial and/or advisory
boards of over 30 academic journals, book series, and research centers around
the world.
Paul Bowman, the interviewer, teaches cultural studies at
Cardiff University. He is the author of several books on cultural studies and
popular culture and editor of The Rey Chow Reader (Columbia University
Press, 2010).
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