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Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

Duke University Press

Contents

Note on Translations..........................................................................................................viAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................viiIntroduction..................................................................................................................11. When Reflexivity Becomes Porn: Mutations of a Modernist Theoretical Practice...............................................132. On Captivation: A Remainder from the "Indistinction of Art and Nonart" (written with Julian Rohrhuber).....................313. Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She..................................................................594. Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood.......................................................................815. "I insist on the Christian dimension": On Forgiveness ... and the Outside of the Human.....................................1076. American Studies in Japan, Japan in American Studies: Challenges of the Heterolingual Address..............................1337. Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze's Method..........................................................1518. Framing the Original: Toward a New Visibility of the Orient................................................................169Postscript. Intimations from a Scene of Capture...............................................................................183Index.........................................................................................................................187

Chapter One

It is ... better to shift the vocabulary of reflexivity, and to suggest that all acts are not so much reflexive and self-conscious as they are already proto-dramatic. —FREDRIC JAMESON, Brecht and Method

"The Crudest Example"

A striking image appears repeatedly in Walter Benjamin's discussions of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater. Many of us will remember the cultural politics behind Benjamin's reading, a cultural politics that is in line with Brecht's own radical, nonmimetic investments and aimed at destroying the Aristotelian aesthetic illusionism from which Western drama has derived its modus operandi for centuries. To begin the present exploration of reflexivity, let me dwell momentarily on Benjamin's image—a family row—to which he returns several times in his various accounts on Brecht:

The task of the epic theater, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. But "represent" does not here signify "reproduce" in the sense used by the theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say: to make them strange [verfremden].) This uncovering (making strange, or alienating) of conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted. Take the crudest example: a family row. Suddenly a stranger comes into the room. The wife is just about to pick up a bronze statuette and throw it at the daughter, the father is opening the window to call a policeman. At this moment the stranger appears at the door. "Tableau," as they used to say around 1900. That is to say, the stranger is confronted with a certain set of conditions: troubled faces, open window, a devastated interior. There exists another point of view from which the more usual scenes of bourgeois life do not look so very different from this.

This remarkable passage was first published in German in 1939, but the picture Benjamin depicts, together with the types of agency involved, exemplifies a modernist mode of theoretical thinking that has remained with us to this day.

A number of words in the passage pinpoint the emphases characteristic of such thinking. First and foremost is the rendering of a familiar situation as strange: the point of such estrangement is to allow for a rational uncovering (Entdeckung, usually translated as "discovering") of conditions that have become automatized and thus unnoticeable, even as these conditions precipitate a crisis. Second is the presence of a stranger, whose appearance on the scene transforms the dynamics involved in the interior. Positioned in the doorway, between the inside and the outside, the stranger turns the happenings inside into an astonishing sight, with bits and pieces of visual information caught as though they were frozen in a still photograph or tableau. Third, the setting involved is that of a family, in a society where policemen may be called to restore domestic order. (!) Fourth, the more usual scenes of the middle class can look similarly astonishing to yet another point of view, that of the epic dramatist. Whereas the emotional core of Aristotelian drama depends for its effect on the audience's cathartic identification with the spectacle of closely knit kinship networks in crisis, the "crudest example" (das primitivste Beispiel) named here to demonstrate how the epic theater works is also that of kinship in crisis—in the updated version of the middle-class family in disarray—but kinship now appears for the purpose of soliciting observation and change rather than compassion and identification.

Even in a small example such as this, Brecht's well-known principle of alienation (Verfremdung), a principle he considers necessary to all understanding, is amply evident. If the hallmarks of the dramatic in the Aristotelian tradition are "the strong centralization of the story, a momentum that [draws] the separate parts into a common relationship," and "[a] particular passion of utterance, a certain emphasis on the clash of forces," in the case of epic theater "one can as it were take a pair of scissors and cut it [a story] into individual pieces, which remain fully capable of life." Accordingly, with the cutting impulse of the epic work, the aim of the alienation effect, produced by artistic means such as acting, is "to make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in his approach to the incident."

Staging: A Mediatized Theoretical Practice

As has often been noted, Brecht's theory of alienation shares affinities with the notion of art as argued by the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky, who in his famous essay of 1917, "Art as Technique," advocated an art of "making strange" (ostranenie) as the means to disrupt habitualization and refresh perceptibility of the world. As Shklovsky writes, "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.... The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." Although their political orientations were by no means identical, what Shklovsky and Brecht had in common, it is fair to say, was a predilection for estrangement, and in particular for locating in artistic practice a capacity for defamiliarizing and making conscious conventions (literary, historical, or social) that have become so...