Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Age of the World Target, also published by Duke University Press.

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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 conventionalized as to be unrecognized. As is well-known, Brecht was also inspired by Chinese acting, which he saw in a performance by the Beijing Opera actor Mei Lan-fang's company in Moscow in 1935. In this non-Western art form, he found affirmation for the rationality of his own theatrical methods, aimed as they were at the nonfusion and nonintegration between audience and actor, between actor and fictional character, and between spectacle and emotion. Elsewhere, Brecht sums up the moral of these methods in this manner: "Non-aristotelian drama would at all costs avoid bundling together the events portrayed and presenting them as an inexorable fate, to which the human being is handed over helpless despite the beauty and significance of his reactions; on the contrary, it is precisely this fate that it would study closely, showing it up as of human contriving."

Rather than being the synonym for social isolation, therefore, alienation in Brecht is attributed a specific kind of agency, namely, the ability to de-sensationalize the emotional effects of Aristotelian drama by puncturing its well-wrought illusionism, a piece of fiction premised on transcendent unities and coherent relations. As Stanley Mitchell puts it, "To be anti-bourgeois or proletarian was to show how things worked, while they were being shown; to 'lay bare the device' (in the words of the Russian Formalists). Art should be considered a form of production, not a mystery; the stage should appear like a factory with the machinery fully exposed." Obviously, the stranger in Benjamin's example of the family row is a personification of this kind of interruptive work. Alienation may thus, logically, be equated with the camera, whose capacity as a relatively new scientific and artistic apparatus still held the promise, as of the late 1930s, of a revolutionary aesthetics. The stranger's foreign body, accordingly, is the artificial device—a prosthesis—by which the procedure of estrangement is formalized; such formalization is technologically commensurable with the possibilities brought about by the then-novel medium of film.

What remains provocative, however, is perhaps less the felicitous fit between alienation effects as such and the medium of film—a point that is, in retrospect, easy enough to make—than the unfolding, within Brecht's method, of an ambitious conceptual experiment, one that takes the form of an aggressive stilling: the tableau. Roland Barthes's description of the tableau may be borrowed here for clarification:

The tableau (pictorial, theatrical, literary) is a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, irreversible and incorruptible; while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view.... The tableau is intellectual, it has something to say (something moral, social) but it also says that it knows how this must be done; it is simultaneously significant and propaedeutical, impressive and reflexive, moving and conscious of the channels of emotion. The epic scene in Brecht, the shot in Eisenstein are so many tableaux.

By the sheer force of its abruptness (to which theorists such as Benjamin would attribute sensations of shock and astonishment), the tableau captures an existing situation at the same time that it renders it fluid and movable, and hence no longer entirely coincident with itself. What makes the tableau in Brecht's method so interesting to consider from today's point of view is not simply that it is cinematic but also, and more important, that it works by incorporating the echnicality of a newer medium into an older one. The techniques of film—in particular the principle of montage, as Benjamin stresses—are used by Brecht to form a vision of theatrical productivity that is simultaneously a demand for thinking, a demand that occurs in the interstice between (two or more) different media. This is how I would define reflexivity in this context: as it appears in Brecht's method, reflexivity is a conscious form of staging (what Jameson, as cited in the epigraph, calls a "proto-dramatic" act), which materializes as an intermedial event, in ways that far exceed the genre of drama.

Although Benjamin is ostensibly discussing the specifics of Brecht's epic theater, then, he is really exploring a larger, more difficult aesthetic question: How does thought—and more precisely, thought's critical self-consciousness—emerge, and how can such emergence be grasped, in ways that do not simply collapse back into the ruts of idealism? To this extent, it is possible to see epic theater as a medium (or more precisely, an intermedium) designed for the articulation of epistemic thresholds and hence, utopically, for the mobilization of thought away from mentation's tendency toward transcendence. As the process in which thought becomes aware of its own activity, reflexivity takes place, in Brecht's hands, in concretely mediatized terms—indeed, as an intermediatized staging. Going further still, we might argue that the Brechtian imprint, which eventually found its way into studies of literature and art as well as theater, film, and performance in a broad sense, has to do with turning reflexivity itself into a perceptible object. In such a process of objectification, the abstract operation of thinking, rather than being seamlessly woven into the fabric of the production (as the actant that motivates what happens but remains itself invisible), is made to assume protruding forms, most noticeably as gests or gestures but also as titles, scenes, captions, posters, parables, verses, songs, and other visible and perceptible bits and pieces. Thought, in other words, has been made ex-plicit through staging: rather than drawing things into itself by unifying them, it splits them up, moves them apart, and gives them independence, in a series of sensuous ex-plications (out-foldings).

It is also possible to state all this in the language of space, and argue that the special theoretical or speculative event embedded in Benjamin's description of the epic theater is that of (re)conceptualization through spatialization. Space is, in this instance, not a matter of an already existent physical environment but rather an insertion, into a continuum, of an interval, gap, and area of noncoincidence, such as the deliberate implantation of an outsider perspective in a familiar or familial interior. Space is thus a phenomenological field in which a movement of doubling-cum-dis-alignment may occur, in turn enabling the epistemic limit of an existing set of conditions to become palpably perceptible—and marked off in their historical particularity. Defined in this manner, the epic theater anticipates much of the way conceptual art continues to work in our contemporary contexts. The practice of installation art, for instance, is a good case in point. Often the result of an intermixing of things—an intermixing that comprises uncertainty of origination, disparateness of collected objects, politics of display, and diversity of reception—installation art, it may be said, exhibits the (otherwise imperceptible) noncongruities that, when apprehended phenomenologically, serve as the means to draw attention to reflexivity as an ongoing process. And insofar as space signifies a discursive-relational production or reception of knowledge, the epic theater also anticipates much of poststructuralism's way of deconstructing epistemic boundaries.

Reflexivity, Artistic Form, and the Senses

If what we call "theory" in the late twentieth century is inextricably bound up with the ramifications of reflexivity, then the protrusion or ex-plication of thought in sensuous forms and the practice of reconceptualization through spatialization may well be theory's predominant maneuvers. To that extent, we can begin to understand Benjamin's statement that "Brecht has attempted to make the thinking man, or indeed the wise man, into an actual dramatic hero. And it is from this point of view that his theatre may be defined as epic.... Following Brecht's line of thought, one might even arrive at the proposition that it is the wise man who ... is the perfect empty stage [den vollkommenen Schauplatz] [on which the contradictions of our society are acted out]." This conscious attempt to mediatize reflexivity as a thinking that is sensuous but unsensational, and that appears as a rational rather than tragic performance, is one of the most widely adopted, if largely unacknowledged, of Brecht's legacies. For exactly that reason, Brecht's method has not only been influential in the study of drama proper but, arguably, even more so in transdisciplinary theoretical practice on the left. In his magisterial account of Brecht's continuing relevance and contemporaneity, Fredric Jameson offers an invigorating formulation of this method:

It is tempting to suggest that it is precisely Brecht's well-known slyness that is his method, and even his dialectic: the inversion of the hierarchies of a problem, major premiss passing to minor, absolute to relative, form to content, and vice versa—these are all operations whereby the dilemma in question is turned inside out, and an unexpected unforeseeable line of attack opens up that leads neither into the dead end of the unresolvable nor into the banality of stereotypical doxa on logical non-contradiction.

Any examination of theory after the heyday of theory must, I believe, take the legacy of this method into account.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Captureby REY CHOW Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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