hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
IMAGISTIC COLLECTIVITIES
Respondant: Catherine Liu, Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies link to faculty profile
Moderator: Michelle Cho
"Angel of Saudade: Tangram and Kaleidoscope in "Konvolut K" and Circle K Cycles"
Andrew Leong, University of California, Berkeley
An 1818 lithograph entitled, The Triumph of the Kaleidoscope, or the Demise of the Chinese Game, depicts a Chinese man, lying prone, with a "Chinese brainteaser" (tangram puzzle) spread out before him. A Frenchwoman has planted her foot on his shoulder. In one hand, she holds a kaleidoscope, in the other, a scroll with kaleidoscope patterns. In response to this image, Walter Benjamin poses the tantalizing problem: "To verify: whether... the brainteaser undoes the kaleidoscope or vice-versa."
This paper puzzles through the problem of "tangram :: kaleidoscope" as means to work with the pieces of two fragmentary texts: Karen Tei Yamashita's Circle K Cycles and "Konvolut K" of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. I argue that both texts operate on the principle of "dream collection," the accumulation of bits and pieces that suggest, but never definitively make, a narrative whole. Following the dream-collection nature of Circle K and "Konvolut K" the paper works through the presentation of a series of juxtaposed images. I present, in stereographic fashion, photographs, newspaper clippings, advertisements, and lithographs from the geographical and temporal states that Circle K and "Konvolut K" are "about": (late 20th century multinational convenience stores, late 19th century Parisian arcades, Brazilian-Japanese migrant laborers living in Japan, the 'birth' of industrial production in Europe, world exhibition halls, a 12-story Japanese "pedestrian center"...).
The goal is to explore how the regimes of vision and construction suggested by tangram and kaleidoscope animate descriptions of "dream states" and "dreaming bodies." I link Benjamin's conceptions of a social collective as a "dreaming body" and "awakening child" to Yamashita's descriptions of saudade as "the feeling you have when waking a child," and as a "traveling state" which the children of Japanese immigrants "carry ... in their blood, under their skin, behind their eyeballs, set in their teeth.
"Spectacle and the ‘Other’ A Journey Through the Global Looking Glass"
Charlotte McIvor, University of California, Irvine, Berkeley
Through spectacle, representations of language, bodies and ideas come to be circulated as commodities as spectators are empowered through address to buy in or derive pleasure from whatever is the “greatest show” of their present moment or situation. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” If images can be understood to constitute representations, then it can perhaps be said that the circulation of representations results in the constitution of a social relationship. According to Debord, participation in the spectacle does not imply passivity but rather serves as a point of reference for understanding how social relations are to be enacted.
In the history of discourses of colonialism, postcoloniality and globalization, representation manifested specifically through spectacle has been crucial in articulating narratives of hegemony, resistance and hybridity for all subjects involved. The meaning of spectacle to these projects, however, has not remained stable but has rather morphed to accommodate the shifts in desire within these projects over time. Spectacular events, such as the display of “Othered” cultures as an accessible commodity in World Fairs or popular entertainment, function to persuade the spectator to personally identify with a “spectacle” through entertainment or voyeuristic delight. This process of securing self-identification through a relationship to a cultural object results in the creation of social relationships that are mediated through an understanding of imperial or globalizing projects as framed by the images (or spectacles) that an individual has access to.
I will engage in an examination of the term spectacle, tracing its relationship to colonial and global expansion. I will specifically be addressing the commercial presentation of the recently launched MTV Desi, aimed at South Asian Americans. Within the framework of my paper, I will reveal spectacle in this context as a site of commodity consumption that lends itself to the interactive self-fashioning of the spectator according to an understanding of specific and weighted power dynamics. By putting this revelation in conversation with the increased mediatization of the contemporary age, I will trace how the digital age has changed the nature of interaction with spectacle and relate these shifts to the professed politics of globalization.
Debord writes further, “The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” By thinking through how the commodity expressed through spectacle struggles to achieve its colonization of social life, it will be possible to imagine strategies for re-imagined engagement and begin the difficult work of dismantling centers of power obscured by the social power of the spectacle and hidden by the process of commodity production.
"The Uses of Whales: Orca Whales as Mirrors for the Universal Human Subject"
Amanda Moore, University of California, Irvine
If one has ever traveled through Vancouver or other coastal towns in the Pacific Northwest, it would be hard not to notice the ubiquitous images of wild Orca whales painted as murals on buildings, dominating public spaces as sculptures, and available for purchase in every store. I found in the course of my dissertation research that these are not images without a history and a context, no matter how resolutely ahistorical and universal they strive to be. How does the subjectification of Orca whales, a space of animal subjectivity that is not just 'imagined' but created through specific disciplinary practices, serve as a mirror for the ideal, universal human being in the Vancouver, Seattle, and Victoria urban and suburban regions? Why the frantic desire to reproduce images of the whales everywhere? What is the relationship between the universal, healthy, individualized human being, the image of the Orca whale, and the ideal mode of citizenship on the rapidly urbanizing US/Canadian Pacific border? How do the actual practices enacted on Orca whale bodies model the same kinds of techniques and technologies used on human bodies?
This talk would be based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Canada and Washington state in 2001 about the subjectification of wild animals, specifically the interface between the highly managed wild Orca whale population in Puget Sound and the highly medicalized captive Orca whale population that circulates through aquariums worldwide. I found in the course of my research that the whales were not just formed into subjectivities that the biologists, trainers, and managers created for them, but that the whales, once made, did a great deal of social 'work' themselves in the arenas of education, historical memory, and moral training. The whales were both imagined and 'created' as competitive individuals living in an egalitarian self-regulating society, then the considerable work that went into creating the animals was hidden and the whale was held up as a model of nature, and then that model of nature was used as an ideal model of human society. It is, of course, no coincidence that this image of natural society was produced in the 1980s and 1990s in this region, the same era that saw a free market globalization of many sectors of the economy, rising real estate prices for coastal property, and the fading power of the resource-extraction based industries that had been the backbone of the region's economy and set the tone for its civic life. These animals are not just symbols though; the Orca whales of Puget Sound are subjects of the globalized market in this region themselves, and are living in new kinds of animal life-worlds that converge in surprising ways with the imagination of idealized human life-worlds.