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Thursday, June 30, 2005

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:56:50 GMT

Restoration, Revolution, and Terror in Japan, Or How the Right and Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Ideology

Parts II and III

Okamoto Kozo and Shigenobu Fusako

II. Terrorism from the Left: The Japanese Red Army and the Messianic Eye

The United Red Army was composed of two major branches: the Japanese Red Army, or Sekigun-ha, was initially led by Shiomi Takaya, regenerated by Mori Tsuneo after his arrest (and later by Sakaguchi Hiroshi), and had its origins in the leftist student movements of the 1950s; Keihin Ampo Kyoto, which maintained tenuous links with the Red Army, was led by Nagata Hiroko. While the “more nationalistic” Keihin Ampo Kyoto was more focused on effecting political change within Japan (particularly the removal of the occupying American military), the Red Army was internationalist in scope and defined its goals alongside the Marxist ideal of establishing a worldwide community of workers within which colonialism, imperialism, and class-warfare would be absent (Farrell 4). According to Patricia Steinhoff,

[t]he group espouses Trotsky’s theory of a simultaneous world-wide revolution in which the proletariat of the entire world must overthrow the bourgeoisie which rules individual nation states. The Red Army believes the revolution must be violent to defeat the overwhelming power of the bourgeoise. (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 831).

While this goal in itself sounds political, the acts undertaken to bring about this revolution about, as I hope to show, take place on the level of Messianism.

Fundamental to the Red Army’s ideology was the idea of violence as both a legitimate means towards intergroup discipline and a tool for political change. During the United Red Army’s purge in the winter of 1972, in which several suspected defectors who might have “compromise[d] the goals of the cause” if allowed to live were killed, Mori Tsuneo, then the leader of the Sekigun-ha, espoused a theoretical perspective on violence that would justify not only the murders of the purge, but the use of violence in general in the group’s endeavors (Farrell 6). From this perspective, the distinction between “victims and perpetators [of violence]” among the members disappeared, since everyone was a perpetrator at one point, and members who showed signs of weakness were physically tortured as a test of their endurance and willingness to join the group. The members “began to reject the victims to create distance, even as they tried to maintain the bizarre fiction that the violent attacks were really comradely assistance. . . . The more wretched and inhuman the victims became, the easier it was to inflict further violence upon them” (Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism” 218). Even when torturers did not know why a particular person needed to be tortured, they were “[u]nable to question the authority who ordered them to perform acts of violence against friends or the theory that justified their actions,” making them forced to “question only the friends themselves.” This let them channel “their own fear, doubt, and confusion . . . into an anger that could be vented safely, even satiated, through physical violence against a dehumanized victim” (219). This logic, which Steinhoff calls “blaming the victims,” is similar to the logic motivating Seventeen’s boy-narrator towards violence: anger is vented indiscriminately towards random targets (but not imaginary ones, as in Seventeen), which opens up the space for this violence to become attached to a real-world referent outside of the training camp. If the members were more than willing to dehumanize each other to the point where torture is not only permissible but beneficial, then how difficult would it have been for them to translate this attitude outwards to the population of Japan and to the rest of the world? Albert Camus has picked up on this very same phenomenon in his philosophical essay The Rebel: concerning the military regime of Hitler, he writes,

[The torturer] must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success. When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair. (Camus 184).

No one is innocent – not the victims of torture nor the victims of terror – because no one can escape becoming the bearer of this “universal guilt.” Force is the only way to practically empower oneself in the world, to succeed, and the civilians slaughtered in the name of this success are expendable precisely because they are not innocent.

Another mode of legitimating terrorist activity for the Red Army and leftist student movements in general is the accusation that the conditions of society has driven a group of otherwise normal socially-adept citizens into terrorists, that it is the government who is the real terrorist and the leftist groups the victims who must now resort to terrorism in order to bring about justice. Jacques Derrida makes a similar point in his interview with Giovanna Borradori:

[A]ll terrorism presents itself as a response in a situation that continues to escalate. It amounts to saying: “I am resorting to terrorism as a last resort, because the other is more terrorist than I am; I am defending myself, counterattacking; the real terrorist, the worst, is the one who will have deprived me of every other means of responding before presenting himself, the first aggressor, as a victim.” (Borradori 107, author’s italics).

Even before the Red Army formed into a cohesive group, the student movements from which it sprang were already using this logic during their protests of Japanese support for the Vietnam War: the general response of the leftist students to a public which opposed the public protests was: “What is our violence compared with the violence generated by fifty thousand Americans in Vietnam?” (Farrell 63). The student movements and their sympathizers also claimed that “the state—by co-opting the masses and quarantining the extremists (by surveillance and threatened arrest)—denied them the opportunity to leave their group and seek reintegration into society” (78). Concerning the actual Red Army itself, from the moment of its foundation violence was advocated as the only means towards effective change domestically or internationally. It was argued that

the student movement, as it was then configured, had essentially been defeated by the government. New, more radical strategies—including an uprising with guns and bombs—were required. They claimed the situation was ripe for the creation of an “army” to do battle with the imperialist government of Japan. Adherents to this view also called for alliances with like-minded organizations throughout the world. Japan’s revolution would be part and parcel of an international movement (86).

Following this logic, terrorists become terrorists because a.) they have no other way of responding to social problems other than violent terrorism and b.) they cannot become lawful members of a society that has pre-emptively demonized them as terrorists. By adopting the cloak of victimhood, terrorist acts can be justified as the only way that this marginalized group of people can effect lasting political change in Japan and worldwide.

Now that some of the ideological justifications for the terrorism of the Red Army have been outlined, it would be appropriate to turn to the ways in which they have been put into practice. In 1972 members of the Red Army murdered twenty-four civilians (including “[s]eventeen . . . Puerto Rican tourists”) and injured seventy-six at the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel (Goodman 183). Two important figures in relation to this massacre are Shigenobu Fusako and Kozo Okamoto, both members of the Red Army. Shigenobu got involved with the student movements during her time at Meiji University and proved to be an intelligent and capable organizer of and participant in several demonstrations. After the leader of the Red Army, Shiomi Takaya, was arrested, Shigenobu decided to travel to the Middle East (obtaining a passport by marrying another activist, Okudaira Takeshi, who would accompany her) to “undertake guerilla training at [the PFLP’s] facilities in Lebanon” (Steinhoff, “Three Women” 314). She was involved in the decision to respond to the United Red Army purge in the winter of 1972 by joining the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in carrying out the notorious Lod Airport Massacre on May 30, 1972 as a gesture of support for Palestine (Farrell 6). Okudaira Takeshi, Shigenobu’s nominal husband, Okamoto Kozo, and Yasuyuki Yasude, another Red Army member, participated in the massacre, but Okamoto Kozo was the only survivor.

Okamoto Kozo was a much younger member of the Red Army who began demonstrating alongside the student movements at Kagoshima University, which he thought were a “form of ‘masturbation’ which made the students feel good.” In his search for “a comprehensive ideology which would link all the issues and offer a clearcut solution [to sociopolitical problems worldwide],” he joined the Red Army Faction in 1970 and received his first assignment in 1971: to prepare a room for the screening of the Red Army propaganda film “Declaration of World War by the Red Army and PFLP”. However, Okamoto was not concerned with “the finer points of ideology.” For him, “[t]he idea of being an active revolutionary was the main attraction. The precise theoretical rationale was not important, so long as it encompassed his general political frustrations and his concern about environmental pollution.” Also, “[w]hile he was personally concerned about the state of the Palestinian refugees, he said that was definitely not his motivation for entering guerilla training. He was moved by a much more global desire to participate in world revolution” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 833, 834, 830). In this respect he is similar to the boy-narrator of Seventeen: both are politically-ignorant but angry (and frustrated) individuals who want to sacrifice themselves to the service of an ideology, whether this be the ideology of emperor service or the ideology of “being a revolutionary” and fighting the “real” terrorists (or the “first aggressor[s],” to borrow Derrida’s term) of the capitalist-imperialist order.

The decision to attack the airport was not the result of careful consideration about how this would advance the cause of the revolution or how it would advance the cause of the workers of the world; it was an act from the position of what Camus calls “the end of history.” As he writes, “Values are thus only to be found at the end of history. Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value. One must act and live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional” (Camus 142). This is directly related to the kinds of justifications for the act and for the revolution given by Okamoto at his trial. During his speech at the trial,

[h]e . . . outlined the theory of worldwide revolution by the people of the third world. . . . He said this was . . . a revolutionary war in which ordinary people standing on the side of bourgeois society would be massacred. “The world did not understand what we Red Army soldiers did, but as the massacres continue, the world will perceive the true meaning of our war.” Now that the Red Army soldiers had joined in the world’s revolution, he continued, if those residents of bourgeois society who suffer from pollution were added, the revolution would be half-completed” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 842, my ellipses).

Additionally, Okamoto believed that “[s]ince the revolution is not being fought in the name of any specific values, there are no constraints on how it may be fought. . . . Only history . . . can judge whether he and his companions have been right or wrong” (815, my ellipses). Morality is provisional, as Camus tells us, insofar as any act performed in the service of a revolution will only receive its full significance once the revolutionary struggle wins or loses. If the revolutionaries win, it will have been a beneficial act, a moral act, one that was worth sacrificing the lives of innocent civilians; if not, it will have been morally unsound. The belief that lives could be sacrificed in the first place had been solidified through the aforementioned ideological presuppositions of Mori Tsuneo, under which victims were dehumanized and denounced as always-already guilty. Okamoto was fully in line with them since “the people he killed were not enemies against whom he felt a direct animosity. . . . Rather, he regards them all as faceless, inevitable casualties of the revolution” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 814, my ellipsis). If the revolution will end worldwide capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and class-warfare, then the “inevitable” loss of any number of civilians will be justified.

Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” frames a similar argument along the lines of Messianism and the retroactive signification of the revolutionary act. In Thesis XIV he writes: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” The proper way to understand history, then, is not by reading it as a linear sequence of major events, but to read how events become “historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure . . . establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin 261, 263, my ellipsis). The revolutionary act takes place in a moment of Messianic time, from the position of “Judgment Day,” the only position from which the morality or immorality of a certain act can be evaluated (Thesis III, 254). The problem arises when individuals or groups believe that they are fully justified in acting from the position of Judgment Day: violent terrorism, the murder of civilians, kidnappings, and torture can all be unproblematically justified as acts in service of a revolution whose morality can only be properly established retroactively. This frees anyone (whether on the individual or group level) capable of appropriating the banner of “revolutionary” for their cause from the considerations of violence as an appropriate means towards social change, the morality of taking lives in order to save many more (echoing the sentiments of Marat, who once frustratedly asked, “Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?”), whether or not it was ever possible to achieve the stated goals of the revolution (Camus 126). We should understand the Lod Airport Massacre as an act which took place under the Messianic register: it had no direct political goals, or if it did these goals were merely nominal. The main motivation for the attack was the idea that by attacking Israel on its own soil (the country responsible for the major problems in the Middle East), the revolution against capitalism and imperialism would be advanced. However, the belief that massacring civilians at an airport would advance this cause in any direct way is substantially misguided. Practical politics are suspended as the Red Army adopts a Messianic perspective towards world revolution in which the category of morality loses any positive existence, since the legitimacy and morality of the act can only be assigned from the temporal position of the Messiah, or “the end of history.” Now the only relationships that matter are relationships of force: which side, which political entity can exert itself above the other to achieve its Messianic goals? It is in this context that we should read Camus’s statement on the historical inscription of the terrorist act:

Cynicism, the deification of history and of matter, individual terror and State crime, these are the inordinate consequences that will now spring, armed to the teeth, from the equivocal conception of a world that entrusts to history alone the task of producing both values and truth. If nothing can be clearly understood before truth has been brought to light, at the end of time, then every action is arbitrary, and force will finally rule supreme. (146).

III. Terrorism and Disjunctive Synthesis

Violent terrorism as a mode of achieving Messianic goals (couched in the rhetoric of politics) is as much a part of Left-wing extremism as it is extremism of the Right. Groups with radically different political ideologies (restoration of the emperor to power vs. the worldwide abolition of capitalism and imperialism) can agree on the same real world methods of achieving their goals. Slavoj Zizek calls this phenomenon “the co-dependence of radically exclusive positions” (“disjunctive synthesis” in Gilles Deleuze’s terms). Zizek directs us to a scenario in which Adolf Eichmann and Feivel Polkes, “a senior high member of Hagannah (the Zionist secret organization)” were to meet in Tel Aviv to

discuss the co-ordination of German and Jewish organizations in order to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine. Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine. The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible. (Zizek, IBK 149-50).

While the context here is very different from that of terrorism in Japan in the post-war period, we can still see the same fundamental convergence of radically opposite ideologies into the same practical, real-world solutions. The impulse towards violence and violent terrorism should be read as something inherent to political extremism in general, whether of the Right or Left.

The terrorists I have briefly examined (whether actual or narrative representations) run into difficulties explaining exactly what it is they want to achieve in terms of real-world solutions to the sociopolitical problems they hold responsible for widespread inequality. While we do not know what the boy-narrator of Seventeen would say if confronted by the question of practical goals, his response would likely be similar to Okamoto Kozo’s answer to the same question: as Patricia Steinhoff tells us: “When I asked him what kind of world he envisioned after the revolution, he smiled and said, ‘That is the most difficult question for revolutionaries. We really do not know what it will be like’ ” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 814-15). Without over-generalizing, I think it is safe to say that the terrorists of the Red Army and of Oe’s fictional Imperial Way party share the same sentiments about being a revolutionary or a Rightist, respectively: it is more about fulfilling a desire to be dominated by an ideology, to have something to which one is willing to sacrifice one’s life for, than it is accomplishing anything in the way of practical solutions.

The major problem with terrorism of this kind is that even with its orientation towards a Messianic time, its symbolic determination to be decided from the perspective of the future, the perspective of the end of history, it nonetheless has no future in terms of forming political solutions. This is related to what Jacques Derrida has called the “bin Laden effect”: terrorism that is oriented towards destruction without the possibility of opening up new political or discursive possibilities. As he says,

What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the “bin Laden effect” is . . . above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. (Borradori 113).

Political terrorism in its ideal form is meant to open up new possibilities, perhaps the possibility of utopia, but more commonly the possibility for new kinds of things to be said and new kinds of action to emerge (not necessarily of the violent type). The terrorism I have looked at in this essay falls far short of these ideals: it provides nothing in the way of practical solutions. In this sense, the masturbatory theme of Seventeen comes full circle: terrorism of this kind produces nothing except the self-pleasure of the extremist groups who participate in and support the attacks. We can put this much more succintly by manipulating Masao Miyoshi’s statement from the Introduction to Seventeen to say that “terrorism is inevitably masturbatory” (Oe xvii).

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, New York: Vintage, 1956.
William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army, Lexington: Lexington Books: 1990
David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa. Jews in the Japanese Mind, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000.
Fred Halliday, “Terrorism in historical perspective,”
www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=6&debateId=103&articleId=1865
Kenzaburo Oe, Seventeen and J, trans. Luk van Haute, Introduction by Masao Miyoshi, New York: Blue Moon Books: 1996.
Patricia J. Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables,” in Japanese Social
Organization, ed. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
- “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto,” Asian Survey, September, 1976, vol XVI. No. 9.
-“Three Women Who Loved the Left,” in Re-Imaging Japanese Women, ed. Anne E. Imamura, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
- Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso, 2003.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Fri, 27 May 2005 03:15:22 GMT

Restoration, Revolution, and Terror in Japan, Or How the Right and Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Ideology

An Essay in Three Parts

“The greatest fanatics are children and adolescents” – Dmitri Pisarev

Most definitions of terrorism refer to it as a tool to force political change through violent activity, including assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings. An example of one such definition comes from Fred Halliday, who defines terrorism as

a distinct political and moral phenomenon, though of course interlinked with the issue of revolt and opposition to oppression. Terrorism refers to a set of military tactics that are part of military and political struggle, and which are designed to force the enemy to submit by some combination of killing and intimidation. (OpenDemocracy.com).

What such definitions miss is the fact violent terrorism can be understood on two different levels: as a means towards achieving realistic political goals or as an act directed towards the (politically unrealistic) achievement of utopia, of Heaven on earth, or the ushering in of a new golden age. Much ostensibly political terrorism is infused with the substance of the latter in that the acts performed by terrorist groups have an eye towards revolution, not of the state or of any other viable political entity, but of the entire world order: what we might call a Messianic revolution. Understanding terrorism in its dual nature allows us to read terrorism from the Right wing and terrorism from the Left wing in terms of their fundamental similarities: though the two sides can have radically different political goals, the underlying impulse towards a complete, Messianic revolution brought about through violent activity remains the same in both. In other words, within the different kinds of terrorism across the political spectrum exists the same essential kernel which motivates revolutionary violence. In the context of Japanese terrorist groups of the latter half of the 20th century, two in particular stand out: the Imperial Way Party, a fictional entity in Oe Kenzaburo’s novel Seventeen, which has as its goal the restoration of the Emperor to the seat of power and the destruction of all opposition from the left, and the Japanese Red Army, a leftist organization with links to Marxist thought and which stood for the dismantling of capitalism and imperialism worldwide. Both groups present themselves as political revolutionaries fighting injustice (in Japan or throughout the world) but their actions are informed as much (if not moreso) by the Messianic dimension as they are the political dimension. The process of identification with these terrorist organizations then is less a conscious choice to fight whatever injustice there is in the world than it is a means of erasing internal contradictions within the self and following the impulse towards violent revolution in the name of utopia.

I. Terrorism from the Right: Seventeen and Ideological Jouissance

Seventeen is based on the true story of Yamaguchi Otoya, who at the age of seventeen publicly assassinated the chairman of the Socialist Party, whom he labelled a “traitorous” leader (Oe vi). In Oe’s narrative of the boy’s life, Yamaguchi begins as a socially-inept compulsive masturbator who rises to power once he joins and participates in the violent activities of the Rightist Imperial Way Party. Up until he serves as a sakura, or paid cheerleader, for the Imperial Way speaker in the subway, the boy has no sense of identification with anyone or anything, but simply a desire to lash out (violently) against society. His political leanings are initially towards the left, since during the argument with his sister about how the building up of the Self-Defense Forces is a misguided idea and how the Conservative party, far from improving things economically, has wrecked the country: “Japan’s prosperity is shit, and the Japanese who vote for the Conservative party are shit. It’s all disgusting. . . . That kind of Japan ought to be wiped off the face of the earth, and that kind of Japanese can all go to hell” (13). However uneloquently he expresses his sentiments, from the very beginning we see that the boy thinks about politics on a level far removed from rational argument or democratic debate (a mode of thinking exemplified by his sister, who counters his violent rhetoric with logical argument rooted in the firsthand knowledge of contemporary politics she gets from being an SDF nurse). The boy-narrator’s sentiments are those of a revolutionary who foregoes a consideration of politics in order to embrace a Messianic perspective on the status of Japan. He thus adopts the role of divine arbitrator over life and death: he talks about which Japanese should “go to hell” and which Japan should “be wiped off the face of the earth.”

But while he has (to some degree) identified a particular enemy and a particular problem with Japan and Japanese politics in the confrontation with his sister, this identification is all but gone in the next scene, in which he he swings his Raikokuga sword by himself in the shed and says:

The day will come when I’ll stab the enemy to death with this Japanese sword. The enemy who I, like a man, will skewer. . . . But where is this enemy of mine? My enemy, is he my father? Is my enemy my sister? Or the American soldiers from the base? The men in the SDF? The Conservative politicians? Wherever my enemies are, I’ll kill them. (Oe 18).

The boy-narrator opens up a space for violence against an enemy without having positively defined this enemy. It is a kind of pure violence, devoid of political attachments and positive content in general, the adoption of which carves out a place within which anyone unfortunate enough to incur the boy’s wrath can serve as the target of the boy’s violent tendencies. The arbitrary designations of who “the enemy” might be point to the boy’s need for there to be an enemy, a target upon which he can exercise his violent hatred, an act which will allow him to overcome feelings of self-doubt.

The ultimately unproductive ways in which his hatred is externalized in these first two scenes (kicking his sister in the head, swinging a sword in the dark) are related to the unproductive nature of masturbation itself, a preoccupation of the narrator for most of the novel. When he kicks his sister in the head, a response to his own inability to form a rational counter-argument to her, he engages in a non-productive act, an act which resolves internal tension but creates nothing in terms of a resolution of the argument In fact, the scene itself seems structured like masturbatory stimulation followed by orgasm: the boy’s rhetoric, which is solipsistic in that it does not engage with the arguments provided by his sister but projects political concerns into a realm in which he is divine arbitrator, escalates to a point at which retreat is impossible. This build-up culminates in the final resolution of tension when the boy, in a flurry of rage and passion, kicks his sister in the head. Afterwards, the narrator is embarrassed and ultimately dissatisfied that the feeling is gone. In the first scene of the novel, in which he masturbates in the shower, he feels “the chill of an autumn afternoon [which] comes to call on my body” (4). Similarly, after he kicks his sister in the head and is half-heartedly berated by his father, he “feel[s] myself freeze, right to the guts” (18). These two images connect the actual practice of masturbation with a solipsistic argumentative method in which conclusions are not reached because the debater presumes himself to be above and beyond the realm of practical politics, making any attempt at a productive conclusion (not a violent release of pent-up tension) futile. This is the same impulse behind the boy’s swinging of the Raikokuga sword at his imaginary (and undefined) enemies: self-pleasure in the form of violent fantasy.

This metaphor, through which the political is sublated into the divine (or simply to the beyond-political), connects to the pleasure involved in suspending critical thought, in giving oneself over completely to a political movement, in subverting one’s vision to a particular ideological lens. And this ideological lens can be that of the extreme leftist or rightist position, liberalism or fascism, the restoration of the emperor or the abolition of world capitalism. After the boy has joined the Imperial Way Party and made some accomplishments in putting down leftist strikes, he experiences an unmatched degree of pleasure in devoting himself fully to the emperor: “I will keep this erection through my entire life. . . . All my life will be an orgasm” (68). Later on, he says, “I feel liberated. I no longer know the anxiety of those who have to choose. His Majesty the Emperor makes the choices” (71). Masturbation, for the boy-narrator, is a mode of getting beyond the earthly concerns of logic, rationality, practical politics, but the problem is that the orgasm experienced is only a temporary resolution of contradictions, whereas the identification with the Imperial Way Party and the complete devotion to the emperor ensures that critical thought, rationality, and politics do not have to enter his mindframe, that the contradictions will be resolved simply because they will cease to exist.

The boy’s moment of identification with the right occurs during his attendance of a speech by Kunihiko Sakakibara, an Imperial Way party member, in the subway. He overhears someone saying, “That one, he’s a Rightist, and he’s still so young. Look. He’s a real pro,” after which he

turn[s] around suddenly to face the group of three office girls who’re lambasting me. This gives them a fright. That’s it, I think. I am a Rightist. I’m seized by a sudden, intense joy. It makes me shiver. I’ve touched the essence of myself. I am a Rightist! (55).

The identification with the right emerges at the moment when he realizes that adopting this position will strike fear into the hearts of ordinary people, who will now “no longer see the wretched me who wets his penis in masturbation” and “no longer see the lonely, miserable Seventeen,” but will “look at me the way they look at other adults who possess an independent personality” (55). There is no concrete reason why he should have identified with the right over the left (his initial political leanings were towards the left); the speech in the subway simply inspires him, even though (or perhaps precisely because) it is charged with the same kind of rhetoric the boy used in arguing with his sister: a rhetoric that translates politics into a divine struggle between good and evil: “I hereby vow to you: I’ll kill them, I’ll slaughter them, I’ll rape their wives and daughters, I’ll feed their sons to the pigs. Such is Justice. Such is my duty. Extermination, that’s the divine will laid upon my shoulders at birth” (54). By reading this decontextualized statement, we do not know who is the enemy here: we get the opening up of a space which any political leader or political party can occupy (which we saw earlier during the boy’s sword-swinging). In this case, it is the left-leaning parties in Japan, particularly the parties affiliated with Socialism. The particular ideology he subscribes to has little to do with the boy’s personal politics: he seeks power, even if this just means that people who see him on the street now do not automatically assume he is a chronic masturbator, and he will identify with whichever political ideology gives him both the power to make people afraid of him and to resolve the inner contradictions involved in engaging with politics in a complex everyday, as opposed to a sublime, capacity.

This mode of ideological identification is discussed by Slavoj Zizek in the “From Symptom to Sinthome” chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology. He writes,

the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we “continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction” [Descartes]; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request – to make us obey ideological form – are there only to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus-enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such.” (Zizek, SOI 83).

Ideology is to be followed for its “educational effect,” but the subject must believe that s/he is following ideology in order to arrive at a definable teleological goal and not for its educational value, by which is meant the pleasure that emerges when the subject realizes that “I will lead a dignified, calm, moral, satisfying life, free of perturbations and doubts [if I follow this ideology] (83). This “educational effect” is felt merely as a side effect, for if the subject becomes aware of the fact that s/he is following an ideology merely for its “educational effect,” ideology would lose its grasp: this “would reveal the enjoyment which is at work in ideology, the ideological renunciation itself. In other words, it would reveal that ideology serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything” (84). Only in circumstances like this (complete devotion of the self to an ideology) can the boy-narrator live out his dream of turning his whole life into one long continuous orgasm. But he must believe that he is following Rightist ideology because this will accomplish the ultimate goal of the restoration of the Emperor to the seat of power, not because devoting himself to this ideology will provide him with endless pleasure; the orgasmic pleasure that arises once the self is dissolved in ideological identification is to be experienced as a side-effect of following the ideology.

But what about the real effects of devoting one’s self to an ideology? Yes, the subject experiences supreme pleasure through sacrificing the will towards rational and critical thought, but how does this translate into the world? Different ideologies will urge their subjects towards different goals, but in the case of the boy-narrator of Seventeen, the result is what I would call practical violence (as opposed to the pure violence described earlier, in which there is no definable enemy against which to direct anger). Violence is now directed against supporters and members of the leftist political parties in Japan: “The leftists have started organizing regular marches on the Diet. I eagerly join the Youth Group of the Imperial Way. Red workers, red students, red artists, red actors—beat them, kick them, pursue them!” He continues, “I fight like a hero. I wield my stick of malice at the students, I swing my nail-studded wooden sword of hostility into a group of women. I trample them, I pursue them” (Oe 72). Pure violence acquires a practical component once the Left is forced to occupy the space opened up by the boy’s internal aggression against a formerly undefined enemy. The most significant result of his ideological devotion, however, is left out of Oe’s narrative, possibly because it would be obvious to Japanese readers that the boy-narrator is also the future assassin of Inejiro Asanuma, the chairman of the Socialist Party in Japan. This assassination represents the culmination of the boy’s identification with the ultranationalist ideology of emperor service, which involves the destruction of socialist-inspired movements and the silencing of Leftist criticism of the government.

The use of a Japanese sword provides a heavily symbolic charge to the act on two different levels: there is the weight of Japanese nationalism on one hand and the sexual metaphor of penetration (the sword entering the body of the victim) on the other. If we read penetration in opposition to masturbation, penetration being a potentially productive sexual act between two people and masturbation being an act of pure self-pleasure, we can say that the boy’s progression from pure violence to practical violence is mirrored by his progression from masturbatory self-pleasure to productive penetration. Of course, we should not read “productive” in a positive way (the act of murder is anything but productive), but under his particular ideological entrapment the act would be productive in that it advances the cause of ultranationalism. This metaphor has its precedent in an earlier scene in which the boy imagines his “manhood” as a weapon:

“It is I, a man with his manhood . . . like a red-hot skewer ready to pierce through the virgin vagina of newly wed bride. I will keep this erection through my entire life. . . . All my life will be an orgasm. My body, my soul, all of me will continue to stand erect. (Oe 68).

At this point he transcends the shame of his compulsive masturbation habit and affirms his own sexual prowess (whether real or imaginary). The sexual ability to penetrate and the ability to kill by penetrating become intertwined in this image of the penis as a weapon (“a red-hot skewer”) in the same way that sexual violence and political violence intertwine in the final orgasmic thrust of the sword into the body of the enemy.

(Parts II and III coming soon!)

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 09:04:34 GMT

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop”: Art Spiegelman, September 11th, and the Retroactive Reinscription of the Present

(Click here for AV Club Interview)

“I saw stunned pigeons sitting listlessly on the pavement in lower Manhattan for days after the explosions on 9/11. It’s almost two years later, and most New Yorkers seem to have picked up the rhythms of daily life . . . but right under the surface, we’re all still just a bunch of stunned pigeons” – Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers.

The major difference between Art Spiegelman’s 2004 book In the Shadow of No Towers, a series of ten massive comic book pages on the attacks of September 11th and their aftermath, and his Pulitzer-Prize winning Maus, a chronicle (in comic book form) of his parents’ history as Holocaust survivors, is that for the former, Art Spiegelman was there: no longer merely a notetaker of tragedies beyond representation that took place before he was born, he delivers to us a scathing critique of the hyper-visibility of the September 11th attacks by way of media imagery, the proliferation of war rhetoric (“Let’s Have Rage!” a Time magazine editorial ran) and hasty political prescriptions (for the U.S. and for the rest of the world) in place of dialogue and debate (not to mention the feckless response of the American Left), and the state of panic generalized among Americans and intensified among New Yorkers like Spiegelman himself, all with the eye (and nose) of one who has seen the World Trade Center towers collapse before the media images “burned their way into every brain, or as one who, as he puts it more succintly, “saw it all live—unmediated” (Spiegelman 1). In reference to Maus, Michael Rothberg (my teacher!) writes, “[T]he power and originality of Spiegelman’s effort derive quite specifically from this shock of obscenity that demands that we confront ‘The Holocaust’ as visual representation, as one more commodity in the American culture industry” (Rothberg 203). Whereas the Holocaust and the experience of Holocaust survivors tended to resist visualization and, by extension, commodification, Spiegelman’s chronicle of September 11th and post-September 11th politics takes place in a world where the brutality of the attacks was conveyed almost solely through the mode of visualization. Fittingly, then, each page of In the Shadow of No Towers is a collage of visual impressions of the artist’s personal recollections (the crazy homeless woman screaming at him in Russian about how the Jews are responsible for the attacks, him and his wife Anja’s mad dash to check on their daughter at the United Nations School near where the towers collapsed) and the “hijack[ing]” of “those tragic events” by “brigands suffering from war fever,” all amidst the glowing infrastructure of the soon-to-be-destroyed World Trade Center towers, the last “unmediated” image Spiegelman has of the towers (4). These pages represent, in a phrase, the extreme in the midst of the everyday, or, as Spiegelman puts it, “that faultline where World History and Personal History collide.” In an attempt to overcome trauma by finding a pure, non-politicized realm from a more innocent age, Spiegelman turns to (where else?) the newspaper comics of the early 20th century, whose very form called for disposability. However, as I hope to show, even disposable newspaper comics cannot ultimately resist politicization.

In the first page of the book, Spiegelman draws at the bottom a crowd of people terrified at the prospect of a shoe dropping on them, specifically, a shoe manufactured by “Jihad brand footware” (1). Towards the top of the page, another comic strip introduces the “21st century’s dominant metaphor”: waiting for the other shoe to drop, as in waiting for something bad to happen. After September 11th, Americans are placed in a state of panic concerning the next terrorist attack, a state of panic which threatens to become naturalized as the default mode of living, which will be justified by the end of the comic when the other shoe does in fact drop. However, the other shoe is not “Jihad brand footware,” but the cowboy boots which rain upon the city in 2004 as “New York is transformed into a stage set for the Republican Presidential Convention, and Tragedy is transformed into Travesty” (10). While it would no doubt be problematic to try to name the particular stance of Spiegelman, I think it’s safe to say that his anxiety is a product of both the attacks themselves and the fear-mongering and Biblical revenge fantasies of the Bush administration. The second page depicts a self-portrait of the artist (as a mouse, the same way he portrays himself throughout Maus) asleep at his desk while being threatened from one side by Osama bin Laden and his scimitar and from the other by a smirking, pistol-waving George W. Bush with the caption “EQUALLY TERRORIZED BY AL-QAEDA AND BY HIS OWN GOVERNMENT” (2).

We can read the artist’s paranoia towards his government and the world in general (“I insist the sky is falling, they roll their eyes and tell me it’s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”) as the natural mode of perceiving major political events, or what Peter Knight calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As his book Conspiracy Culture explains: “A postmodern form of paranoid skepticism has become routine in a world in which the conspiratorial netherworld has become hypervisible, its secrets just one more commodity. . . . [I]t has become . . . more an expression of inexhaustible suspicion and uncertainty than a dogmatic form of scaremongering” (Knight 75). Spiegelman follows this conspiratorial logic when he (in mouse form) rants about how “the government has been lying about the air quality [around the collapsed WTC towers]” and about the “displacement” logic of the government and of its major institutions (the media in particular) whereby “Iraq [is demolished] instead of Al-Qaeda” and the New York Times all but confirms the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and “displaces its guilt” by apologizing “for some minor journalist’s pattern of inconsequential lies” (in reference to Jayson Blair) (Spiegelman 3, 9).

In the case of the air quality, it is important to note that Spiegelman detects this “lie” through his sense of smell: “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like. . . . The closest he got was telling me it was ‘indescribable.’ . . . That’s exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled like after Sept. 11!” (3). While the “Cremo” brand cigarettes¹ Spiegelman is smoking and the direct reference to Auschwitz give us a connection between Auschwitz and September 11th as events for which representation fails to do justice and for which representations in their “all-too-real materiality” are given to us by “the culture industry” as the only real window into the reality of these events, it is important to note that Spiegelman, by using his sense of smell, operates outside the realm of the visible and outside of the representations provided to us by the culture industry (Rothberg 205). Smell is inevitably opposed to vision as a sense which purports to detect the reality behind visual representation by “smelling [it] out.” As Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “—I was the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.” According to Akira Mizuta Lippit, he “refus[es] the privileged sense of human beings—sight—for that most frequently associated with the animal: smell” (Lippit 82). What better way to detect post-September 11th conspiracies than by “smelling out” the lies behind the official reality fed to the American public by the newspapers and news networks? What better way to reinforce the inadequacy of representation towards an event like September 11th than by pointing out that the “indescribable” “odor of death” (in the words of W.H. Auden) surrounding the destroyed towers (and Auschwitz too) brings us closer to the real of this event than visual representation ever could? And who better to perform this task than an animal (Spiegelman’s mouse) who has not been bombarded (or terrorized?) with images and can thus smell out the reality behind a media-manipulated reality predicated on the power of image?

But it would be wrong to simply say that Spiegelman has smelled for himself the ashes of the collapsed World Trade Center towers and is thus able to provide us with a “real” account of the attacks and a deconstruction of the logic behind the American government’s response to the events. The reason why smell retains a privileged position in preserving the trauma of an event is precisely because it cannot be reproduced (and commodified) the same way an image can. Smells are “indescribable,” they “do not provide material and thus repeatable signifiers, and therefore cannot form a semiotic system” (Lippit 123). Smell, like the event itself, is unrepresentable. In the Shadow of No Towers itself is a series of images which share the similar handicap of media images in that they can never do justice to their object. The “Weapons of Mass Displacement” sequence, which I have briefly touched on earlier, is an exercise in the manipulation of the image. The panel starts with Spiegelman (as a human) sitting in a chair with a cat in his lap and a lamp on his side. As he details how various things are displaced in the media and by the government (the drive to destroy Al-Qaeda becomes the drive to destroy Saddam Hussein, the NY Times apologizes for the white lies of a reporter instead of the lie about WMDs, Haliburton is rewarded with contracts for Iraqi oil while Martha Stewart is imprisoned on fraud charges, etc.), the images themselves become displaced as Spiegelman’s head switches places with the lamp, the cat switches places with Spiegelman, Spiegelman’s shoe switches places with his head. Any attempt to represent the (il)logic of displacement through images is subject to the same laws that rule the image: any image can be displaced, wrenched from its context, and made to serve whatever truth or untruth those in power want to communicate.

Now, returning to the image of Spiegelman asleep at his desk with bin Laden on one side and Bush on the other, I have left out the most important figures of this image (and the smallest): the innocent but confused comic characters populating the artist’s desk, caught (along with the artist) in the crossfire of the “war on terror.” These comic characters – Hapless Hooligan, the Kin-der Kids, Little Nemo, Little Lady Muffkins and Old Man Muffaroo – will reappear throughout the comic as casualties of September 11th, figures forced to inhabit a new context outside the comfortable realm of newspaper print. The cover hints at this motif of lost innocence: in front of the black on black drawing of the World Trade Center towers, we see an Osama bin Laden goat kicking into the air one of the World Trade Center towers (embodied in one half of a set of twins with the towers for hats) along with classic comic book characters, now disoriented and removed from their situatedness within a purely aesthetic realm (as much as newspaper comics can fall under the “Aesthetic” with a capital “A” banner). In an interview with The Onion’s “AV Club,” Spiegelman discusses his recourse to comics of the early 20th century:

I felt the world was ending, relatively literally, and I found these works presumed a long, glowing march through enlightenment into the future. That was even though there wasn’t one for the comics, because they were really made for the day they were made, and nothing else.

As much as the comics for him have been removed from contemporary events, he cannot stop them from becoming politicized, from having their innocence stripped away. One example of a classic comic reappearing in a resignified form in the pages of his book is the brief panel from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland, in which Little Nemo would dream up grand adventures of himself travelling the world and, in the last panel, be woken up by his mother, who would tell him it was all a dream. At the end of the story about the crazy homeless woman screaming at the artist about how the “kikes did it,” we see a panel where a Little Nemo in mouse form has fallen out of bed and tells his mother, “Then John Ashcroft pulled off his burka and shoved me out the window and,” to which she, wearing a gas mask, replies, “Hush, you fell out of bed, Sweetie” (6). Fantasy and reality for Little Nemo are now forced to bear the weight of September 11th, as his dream is a bizarre conflation of anti-terrorist law, Afghan culture, and the tragic deaths of those who jumped out of the windows of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, and his reality is one in which the very air he breathes is potentially harmful. Besides this type of insertion of contemporary trauma into classic comics, there is the postscript of the book, in which many of these classic comics are simply presented as they were printed in the newspapers. This collection of comics, which concern the drive to war against England, malignant genies, patriotic speeches disrupted by disobedient youths, collapsing buildings, and Arab masquerades, could have simply been remnants of a bygone age in a pre-September 11th context, (or "ephemeral" in Spiegelman's words), they now become a network charged with the weight of contemporary politics. September 11th has retroactively politicized what was once an apolitical realm.

But how does this work? How can one event, regardless of how powerful it is, change all that has come before it? Slavoj Zizek, in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, a fascinating roller-coaster ride through post-September 11th politics and philosophy from Descartes to Lacan and Giorgio Agamben and a critique of both American politics and the impotent Leftist response in Europe and elsewhere, refers to something he calls the impossible act, which is “simultaneously probable and impossible,” an act which rearranges the symbolic coordinates of what has come before, making the impossible possible, or even the logical result of preceding events. He continues,

The encounter of the real as impossible is thus always missed: it is experienced either as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe will really happen, and thus dismiss it as impossible) or as real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe happens, it is ‘renormalized,’ perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible). The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know that the catastrophe is possible, even probable, yet we do not believe that it will really happen” (Zizek 62).

Zizek goes on to connect this with the recent debates on legalizing torture in America in dealing with terror suspects (partly accomplished through the redefinition of the term “torture” to exclude everything except organ failure and death). For Zizek, the idea that a liberal democracy would even consider the legalization of torture is an impossible act in itself, the potential collapse of democracy into fascism, but one which is eventually accepted by the American public as a legitimate tool in the “war on terror.” Zizek quotes Henri Bergson: “[O]ne can . . . insert [into the past] the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the past inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible” (62). Doesn’t this work the same way with September 11^th, that once we investigate the historical background surrounding the attacks we see that not only has the impossible event forever been possible, but it has been probable: bin Laden had been #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list for five years, the Bush administration had received the report “Osama Bin Laden determined to strike within the U.S.,” and, in more of a symbolic vein, didn’t we see the destruction of buildings by low-flying aircraft in the movie The Matrix? Of course, the last reference is not meant to be taken as a legitimate warning about future terrorist attacks, but that’s the point: September 11th rearranges what has come before so that the most facetious or benign images can become part of a symbolic network which points towards not only possibility but the probability of the impossible act.

Getting back to the postscript of In the Shadow of No Towers, we can interpret this series of classic comics as one of these symbolic networks detailing the possibility and probability of September 11th: images as harmless as a giant-sized Little Nemo running away from a man named Flip who is knocking over buildings trying to catch up to him or the Hapless Hooligan dressing up as an Arab for a circus show, running into a “tower” of acrobats, and getting beaten by them or kids attempting to disrupt a July 4th address with sticks of dynamite, are now part of a symbolic network pointing to the occurrence of the impossible act. These comics are stripped of their innocence because of the way in which, to quote Bergson again, “the past inserts itself” into “the possible,” into the symbolic coordinates of our reality, reconfiguring the past in order to make the logical occurrence of the impossible act possible. What was once a refuge the artist could turn to for relief from contemporary trauma, paranoia, and helplessness now cannot help but point directly back to the source of this trauma, paranoia, and helplessness over and over again.

When Jacques Derrida accepted the Theodor Adorno Award on September 22, 2001, he said in reference to the attacks, “My unconditional compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying this out loud: with regard to this crime, I do not believe anyone is politically guiltless” (Zizek 66). While Derrida’s statement seems directed to those who would wish to paint the contemporary situation as one of a battle between Good and Evil as well as to the American and European Leftists standing for what Zizek calls an “abstract pacifism” in the face of terrorist threats, perhaps we can apply the statement to Spiegelman’s beloved comic characters, who are violently separated from their comfortable place within “ancient” newspaper prints and injected into contemporary politics, now forced to bear part of that lost innocence we all share as a result of September 11th. In the Shadow of No Towers then is not simply a critique of contemporary politics, but a forceful reminder of how September 11th recurs endlessly and endlessly injects new interpretive frameworks into even the very realms – poetry, religion, comics – we flee towards in order to escape our memory of the impossible become real.

(1.) The “Cremo” brand cigarettes, as Michael Rothberg points out, pun on the name Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, uses to describe the crematorium at Auschwitz: the “cremo building.”

Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture, London, Routledge: 2000
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2000
Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2000 (what are the odds of that?)
Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London, Verso: 2003

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 06:00:57 GMT

Trying to Interpret Awlad Haratina

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1988/mahfouz-bio.html

Naguib Mahfouz is no rising star like Shiina Ringo or (to some degree) Murakami; he’s a well-established star who’s been both a cultural symbol of Egypt (and poster-child for Egyptian Nationalism) and a tireless, but cautious, chronicler of social injustice in the Middle East through his more than a hundred short stories, thirty novels, and two hundred articles from 1939 to the present day. His 1959 novel, Awlad Haratina, which translates into Children of the Alley, depicts five generations of life in the alley of al-Gabalawi. The main protagonists and antagonists, however, require no description for the theologically-minded reader, since the lives of these alley-dwellers are a giant re-enactment of the spiritual history described in the Bible and Qu’ran. (For this reason, I think the more gendered Sons of the Alley might be a more appropriate title). But, as I hope to show, while the allegorical structure of the novel is unmistakable, this interpretation is under constant threat of being undermined, or at least complicated, by the connection the reader living in 1950s and 60s Egypt might draw between the figure of the mighty leader whose rule is (ostensibly) enforced by thugs whose job it is to silence dissent against power by keeping the population in violent submission to authority. Whether the religious allegory is meant as a benign cover for the more pointed political commentary of the latter interpretation or if these two interpretations merely coexist on a complementary level is a question I will attempt to answer, or at least discuss. And again, my analysis will be somewhat limited since I am using Peter Theroux’s translation in place of a version in the original Arabic.

The history of the alley, like the history of the prophets, is cyclical: a chosen one enters a world of debauchery, gathers followers in order to save them from a life ruled by vicious gangsters, and triumphs over unjust authority to create a race of chosen people. Time passes, the village slips back into debauchery, the chosen people lose touch with spiritual ideals, and a new chosen one emerges to redeem another group of followers from the clutches of state authority. Eventually, we end up with three groups of self-proclaimed chosen people in constant conflict with one another, until the false magician Arafa shows up to plunge the world into the spiritual void that is our current condition.

In the first scene, the sons of Gabalawi: Abbas, Galil, Ridwan, Idris, and Adham are gathered within a room in Gabalawi’s gated mansion. Adham is the child of a black slave and the child of a different mother from the other four children, but Gabalawi nevertheless entrusts to him the task of overseeing the property after Gabalawi’s death. Idris (his Biblical referent is “Lucifer,” the Qu’ranic is “Iblis”), who resents Adham’s half-breed status and refuses to treat him as a member of the family, is the only desenter. Idris is expelled from the mansion and forced to make a living in the desert, with the condition that anyone who helps him in any way will also receive Gabalawi’s damnation. Adham goes to work on collecting rents from other tenants of the estate and calculating various accounts which he then submits to Gabalawi. He falls in love with and marries a slave woman, Umaima, and begins to feel sorry for Idris, who lives in poverty and disgrace outside of the mansion. Idris eventually persuades him to peek at the silver box in Gabalawi’s room, which holds a book containing the inheritance records of all of the people of Gabalawi’s mansion and the people living in the surrounding village, or in other words, knowledge of the future. Adham is caught by Gabalawi and expelled from the mansion forever, but after a long life of despair and struggle (including the birth of a set of twins: Qaidra and his murderous brother Humam), he has a vision of Gabalawi in which Gabalawi tells Adham that he has forgiven him and that “[t]he estate will belong to your children” (Mahfouz 88). From this first section, the basic plot of the most of the other sections should be fairly easy to imagine. The other main characters are Gabal (Moses), Rifaa (Jesus), Qassem (Muhammad), and Arafa (who has no direct allegorical connection, but to whom we can attribute the name of modernity or technology; more on Arafa later).

The reading I have just offered is the preferred reading of most Qu’ranic scholars and conservative state officials in Egypt and the Middle East in general: Mahfouz is writing a modern day version of the prophetic history of the Qu’ran (the 114 chapters of the book correspond to the 114 chapters of the Qu’ran) in which the prophets guide the village-dwellers towards spiritual truth and a life for themselves and their children free from the sporadic violence of gangsters who create empires upon hashish and opium and the protection money extorted from peaceful families. But if the interpretation of this novel is confined to a purely religious level, then what do we make of its implicit commentary on contemporary Middle Eastern governments and ruling authorities?

Hosam Aboul-Ela writes that the descendants of al-Gabalawi “find it increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of virtue and community in the neighborhood they inhabit, as the patriarch (arguably [Gamel] Abdel Nasser) becomes ever more isolated in his mansion, and ‘gangsters’ (Egyptian State Security) perpetually rise up to run others’ lives for them” (Aboul-ela 346). Removing ourselves from the straitjacket of the Qu’ranic-based interpretive model, we allow the possibility of connections like the one Aboul-Ela has described. From the novel: “The people are even used to buying their own safety with bribes, and their security with obedience and abasement, and were severely punished for the smallest thing they said or did wrong—or even for thinking something wrong” (Mahfouz 4). We can let Gabalawi stand in for any number of derelict state authority figures worldwide who are content to while away in luxury as an elite, Mafia-like crew dominates the lives of citizens through threats and beatings. Or Gabalawi can stand for, as Aboul-Ela hints at, patriarchal authority in general, the Law of the Father, under which conflict is resolved through violence and endless power struggles instead of through the more matriarchal ideal of compromise. This is all up to the reader. However, Mahfouz can easily sidestep such accusations of criticizing the government (which at the same time holds him up proudly as the cultural symbol of Egypt) by allowing the more benign religious interpretation to claim precedence over the political one. While the religious interpretation is much more strongly hinted at, the political, while it must remain subordinate to allegory, nevertheless murmurs in the background.

Even so, the character of Arafa ensures that the allegorical model becomes just as subversive and critical, if not moreso than, the political model. Arafa is an example of a false prophet, who learns how to impress the people by creating, testing, and demonstrating the power of the bomb. Whether he stands in for technological advancement or simply modernity itself is open to question, but the crucial importance of this character is that he is responsible for the death of Gabalawi when he sneaks into the overseer’s house to find Gabalawi’s book of accounts (which Adham had searched for earlier) in which he believes he can find the source of Gabalawi’s power, but ends up killing the old man (unknowingly) when he gets caught. With the emergence of modern science and its power to dominate nature and turn human subjects into thralled spectators of forces beyond their control, the authority of God and his prophets is reduced to nothingness. The opening of the Arafa section:

No one contemplating the state of our alley would ever believe what the poets say in the coffeehouses. Who are Gabal and Rifaa and Qassem? What sign is there, besides the coffeehouse stories, that any of them accomplished anything? All the eye can see is an alley sunk in darkness and poets that sing of dreams. How did this happen to us? (363).

And here are Arafa’s thoughts on the alley’s prophetic legacy:

God damn them all. . . . Each of them [Al Gabal, Al Rifaa, Al Qassem] is so stupidly, so blindly proud of its man—all proud of men of whom nothing is left but their names. And they never make any attempt to go one step beyond that false pride! Bastards. Cowards. (367).

Once the accomplishments of our stand-in prophets sink into oblivion as their followers become the bickering neighborhoods of Al Gabal, Al Rifaa, and Al Qassem, the stage is set for the false prophet Arafa, who is ridiculed as a bastard wherever he goes, to gain power not through physical strength (“Protection rackets are not the only way to riches,” he says), but by fighting off the gangsters with the power of the bomb. His ambitions extend further after he sneaks into Gabalawi’s mansion, strangles a slave to death to keep him quiet, and learns the next morning that the sight of his loyal slave’s dead body has literally scared Gabalawi to death. Now Arafa’s self-imposed duty is to bring Gabalawi back to life through magic. Following Mahfouz’s logic then, the creation of the atom bomb (or perhaps the arrival of modern warfare in general) has not only given science precedence over the authority of God, but has put science in the position of God. (This move did not go well with his Middle Eastern audience and this section of the novel is often cited as one of the factors motivating an attacker to stab and severely handicap Mahfouz in 1994.)

The aim of the earlier leaders was to unite the people under the banner of spiritual truth and fight the injustice of the gangsters. Arafa’s aim, however noble, sidesteps the basis of spiritual authority, which is based not on the prophet’s performance of dazzling miracles but on the willingness of followers to have faith in an unseen but all-powerful entity. In Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, Jesus Christ, in Ivan Karamazov’s poem “The Grand Inquisitor” is castigated during his Second Coming for this very reason: rejecting the temptation to force his followers into obeisance through miracles. The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor says:

And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself, his own miracles this time, and will bow down to the miracles of quacks, or women’s magic, though he be rebellious, heretical, and godless a hundred times over. . . . You did not [come down from the cross] because . . . you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified (Dostoevsky 256).

This is less an indictment of Christ himself than it is an appraisal of the weakness of his followers. Now the titular word awlad can be read literally: children, in the sense that the followers of Arafa are incapable of offering the kind of free love and blind faith in God required of true believers and true men; instead, they submit to the authority of the charlatan who “terrifies” them with false miracles. Arafa, unlike Christ, treats his followers like children and reduces the authority of an invisible and all-powerful God to spectacle. The idea of the authentic vs. inauthentic miracle has its precedent in the Qu’ran. In verses 103-129 of Sura 7, Al A’raf, or The Heights (as translated by Yusuf Ali), Moses battles Pharoah’s magicians as a way of establishing the authority of God over that of Pharoah. While the pharoah’s magicians perform “a great feat of magic” (al-sehreen adheem) by “bewitching the eyes of the people” (saharu al-ayoun al-nas) (7:116), Moses’s rod turns into a snake and “swallows up straightaway all the falsehoods which they fake” (7:117). The Arabic word for “bewitch” is saharu and the word for “magic” is sehr, both of which share the common root of seen, ha, and ra, or simply S, H, R. In the passage, these words are contrasted with al haqq or “truth,” and Ayat Rabbuna or “the Signs of our Lord.” The inauthentic miracle or false magic of the sahara (sorcerer) is exposed when confronted by the authentic Ayat min al-Rabb. Qu'ranic verses themselves are referred to as Ayat, so this passage is as much a validation of Moses's miracles as it is of the Qu'ran itself.

Arafa, then, is not just your dime-a-dozen sahara, but the sorcerer who destroys the authority of God only to appropriate this authority to force the children of the alley to remain children, to replace faith-based belief with the power of the spectacle, to replace blind trust in God with service to whomever can detonate the bigger bomb, to harness the powers formerly reserved to God in order to spread fear among the alley-dwellers and to turn conflicts between neighborhoods into armed struggles for worldwide hegemony. Now we can see how the allegorical and political interpretations converge on a single point. With modernity comes both the loss of proper and meaningful authority and the emergence of conditions which turn religious conflict contained within certain neighborhoods into full-blown war. Rather than religious conflict escalating into war, however, it is more often the case in contemporary times that severe and violent conflicts are begun completely outside the realm of religion (imperial or neo-imperial aggression and the often excessive reaction against it is more responsible here) and then are re-framed as religious conflicts in order to facilitate unproblematic identification with a certain side. Biblical myth can be brought out to justify, for example, the Israelis’ unquestioned right to the land of Palestine, and Qu’ranic doctrines can be imposed upon the primarily political motives of the people who attacked the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. We see this in Awlad Haratina as the leaders of the three neighborhoods do not use the truths of God revealed to their specific groups as a way of guiding their actions, but as a way of justifying their wars against the other neighborhoods. Modernity does not replace a religious understanding of the world with a more political one, but strips the religious understanding of its authority or validity; but while most major conflicts are in fact politically-motivated, religion can be called upon and God can be resuscitated in order to provide one side with the moral authority over the other: an “axis of evil” must be toppled, a “crusade” must be waged in order to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, a settler class has a God-given right to occupy the territory of another. While I am drawing an explicit connection between the gangsterism in Awlad Haratina and the policies of the current administration in the United States, I should note that Mahfouz’s novel does end on a more optimistic note than one would expect:

Overpowered by fear, the overseer and his men sent their spies everywhere to search homes and shops and impose the cruelest punishments for the slightest offenses. They beat people with sticks for a look, a joke or a laugh, until the alley endured a nightmarish atmosphere of fear, hatred, and terrorism. Yet the people bore the outrages steadfastly, taking refuge in patience. They held fast to hope, and whenever they were persecuted, they said, “Injustice must have an end, as day must follow night. We will see the death of tyranny, and the dawn of light and miracles” (448).

Friday, October 01, 2004

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 20:21:29 GMT

Shiina Ringo and Polyphonic Imitation

http://www.time.com/time/asia/2003/cool_japan/rinngo.html
http://www.toshiba-emi.co.jp/ringo/english/

If Murakami Haruki was an obscure reference for anyone unfamiliar with Japanese culture, then Shiina Ringo probably won’t be ringing any bells. However, this 25-year-old singer/guitarist/drummer/pianist has been invaluable in suggesting a much-needed new direction for contemporary Japanese music in an age when modern Japanese culture in general is commonly (and almost reflexively) perceived if not as a direct imitation of Western culture, then as something that is and always has been derived from a limited understanding of the West (a perception over 100 years old). Douglas Hyde, a famed Irish nationalist writer, gave a speech titled “The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland” in 1892 (24 years after the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s first significant, in terms of cultural influence, contact with America) in which he called upon the Irish to embrace their own national traditions and culture instead of unquestioningly importing their pastimes, names, and fashions from England, since this would turn Ireland into “a nation of imitators, the Japanese of Western Europe, lost to the power of native initiative and alive only to second-hand assimilation” (1). If in fact the post-Meiji Japanese culture is little more than an imitation of the Occidental culture imposed upon them over the course of America’s interventions into Japan over the last 150 years, then how can the contemporary or avant-garde Japanese artist produce something that is authentically modern and not either a regression to pre-modern (read: pre-Meiji) culture or a mere imitation of America's? I wrote the words “authentically modern” as a place-holder for something that doesn’t exist: we don’t really have a way to universally categorize everything as modern, pre-modern, post-modern, or even non-modern, since the term ‘modern’ itself is a Western invention which can be interpreted as nearly-synonymous with capitalism and the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Who can define what this term truly means in any given non-Western nation, aside from the basic equation: Westernization + Capitalism = Modernization? (“+ Capitalism” can almost be ignored, it’s subsumed under the first term). We can’t say that each nation develops along its own lines and at its own pace, that we can simply have an “authentic” Japanese version of modernity, an Indian modernity, a Burundian modernity, since modernity, as Fredric Jameson says, is constituted by whether or not a nation belongs to the dominant system of global capitalism (2). And then ‘avant-garde’ becomes incredibly problematic, since there’s no way to truly be avant-garde, however you define it, if the art you produce is rooted in passive imitation of another culture. Taking this line of thought to its logical limit, Western (cultural) hegemony not only forces alien cultures into conformity with a new set of standards upon which art is to be produced, evaluated, and historicized, but it obliterates the possibility of an “authentically” modern, postmodern, or avant-garde art from emerging in a non-Western culture by controlling the terms and concepts which categorize and periodize art. But I’m making some huge leaps into waters best left uncharted by someone with my beginner’s level of understanding, so I’ll go back to talking about my favorite Japanese singer now.

Shiina Ringo’s music is often categorized under J-POP (a term for Japanese pop music) along with the mishmash of dance club music and derivative pop rock. I would draw some distinctions here . . . first let’s look at some lyrics. The following is from the J-POP superstar Hamasaki Ayumi’s song “Free and Easy”:

Believe in me.
I'll always be here.
The proof that you're alive
exists inside of me.

In this, this dirty city,
you're the person who
gathers up and shows me
something beautiful. (translation from Hamasaki’s official website).

As you can see, the singer centralizes the male figure (presumably) as the one who will show her “something beautiful” as she passively waits for him. The female is reduced to preserving a version of him within herself, not unlike Wordsworth’s narrator in “Tintern Abbey,” who demands that his sister become a passive retainer for his personal “exhortations”:

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!

Hamasaki’s “I’ll always be here” emphasizes a state of content situatedness. “Here” is an unproblematically defined place where fixed gender roles dominate (moving man, situated woman still “here” to remind him of who he is). “Here” is also where love is realized, emotion can transcend the limits of the “dirty city,” and scripted relationships last forever.

Now excerpts from two songs by Shiina. The first is “Tokyo Girl,” which I have attempted to translate:

My dream is over,
So now I’m looking for another one.
You’re not there, sometimes
The brightness dies, Aoyama

Since love is lost in the brightness,
I want to see the murky shade.
Alone I’ll dance freely one more time.
My dream is dead, Shinjuku.

Where can I go that’s good?
The night is aging over the dying city,
My happiness flows along and
Turns into fog, Tokyo.

Each verse ends by naming a district of Tokyo, the last one naming the city itself: Ginza, Asakusa, Aoyama, Shinjuku, Tokyo. The “dirty city” is now the divided city, “here” becomes a multiplicity of places only similar in that the singer feels isolated in each one of them, “I’m always here” becomes “You’re not there.” Perhaps the singer in the Hamasaki piece feels a little bit like Shiina’s: after all, both are waiting for an abstract lover to arrive and rescue them from isolation. The only difference would be that Shiina chooses to dramatize this process of waiting and reads into it something much more than the anticipation of a love sweeping down from the sky to redeem a lonely girl. Shiina expresses her own non-situatedness as well as the fundamental non-situatedness of everyone: waiting as the natural(ized) state of life (to borrow a theme of Samuel Beckett’s). “You’re not there” doesn’t imply that anyone is returning anytime soon, it simply says that the singer is waiting for lack of anything better to do. We can then read “Alone I’ll dance freely one more time” as the singer’s attempt to turn her detachment into something positive, which fails because she cannot remove considerations of spatiality from her mind: “Where can I go that’s good?” The naïve answer would be: nowhere! Not implying that there is no location in which she can be happy, but that to be happy, the preoccupation with location must be overcome. You exist in the mind alone, you dance freely regardless of your physical location, you walk the earth dispossessed of your attachment to any one place, any one person, or any one emotion. All well and good, if you’re a Zen master and not an early 20s Tokyoite trying to form a proper relationship with both your desire-object and the city which detaches you from him and you from the rest of world.

“Yattsuke Shigoto,” which translates to something like “A Half-Assed Job,” is a song on Shiina’s 2003 album Karuki, Zamen, Kuri no Hana, or Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower (a title which I’m NOT going to attempt to explain). Here is an excerpt, translated by Brian Stewart and Takako Sakuma (3):

Nothing can hold my interest
Not much upsets me,
What day was today anyway?
It's not really an issue.
...Ah I just wanna be hurt.

the more interest and motivation it takes away the more I fit the mold.
or perhaps I'll do my job through copulation... am I planning this out?

Control me,
It's so fucking tedious.
When is the last train on the Ginza line?
It's not really an issue.
..Ah I just wanna be a machine.

Again, we get the theme of the city dissolving the individual, this time in a corporate setting. The abstract worker loses her/his temporal orientation (“What day was today anyway?”), sense of individuality (“the more I fit the mold”), and sense of purpose (“perhaps I’ll do my job through copulation”) under the demands of a repetitive and mind-numbing job. The verses are consistently sung in a sleepy, half-dead tone of voice, beginning with her drawn out “mainichi” (“every day”), over a slow, churning dance-hall backbeat and big band melodies which recall the urban traveling music of American black-and-white films of the 1950s and 60s. The possibility of our poor worker finding any satisfaction whatsoever in her/his job is not even hinted at; s/he can find meaning only in the act of reproduction, and even this notion is problematized (“am I planning this out?”). If this meaningless funeral procession is life, then what value could there be in bringing another life into this world, s/he asks. The line I’ve left out up to this point, “Ah I just want to be hurt” echoes the desperation of the cutter. As Slavoj Zizek writes, “cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold on reality, or . . . to ground the ego firmly in bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existent” (4). Pain as a reassurance of one’s own bodily existence, the only way for our worker to convince her-/himself s/he is a physical being and not just a corporate automaton. However, what do we make of her having this very desire, to be “a machine?” If s/he actually becomes a machine, the obsession with knowing that the self is a real physical being disappears. It is this tension of having a physical human body which is appropriated to serve as a cog in a hyper-capitalist economy that drives the worker to despair. If s/he could be one or the other, either a human being in full ownership of the body, or a machine with no claims to ownership over a physical body, things would be much simpler.

But there is still the question of Shiina’s voice. To get back to the starting point of this essay, how can a Japanese singing under the American genre of rock music be anything but an imitator and how can a Japanese pop/rock singer distinguish herself from the large mass of J-POP music which is generally (and perhaps rightfully so) construed as a mere imitation of American pop music? The very general answer is that she must sing within a multiplicity of different voices (something I hinted at in the last paragraph), knowing full well that a single authentic voice that would separate her from other imitation-based acts is at the moment impossible, but that a new voice can properly emerge by singing through the voices currently available to her. While this may seem like a bit of a generalization, Japanese pop music emphasizes a vocal gender division: men’s voices (in rock music, at least) are expected to be raggy and guttural, while womens’ are generally velvety and almost always high-pitched (even the singer for the rock group “Brilliant Green,” whom I think is great, maintains a bubbly voice over the heaviest of guitar riffs). Shiina demonstrates her capacity for polyphonic singing in her “Torikoshi Kurou” (“Worry Wart”). The first verse, in Japanese and English (translated by Brian Stewart and Takako Sakuma), is as follows:

e, i mama yo haji mo sutesaran
anta hodo no otoko nado iran
moesakaru tsume toke ni keri
anta dake ha ubawaretakunai

I don't care, I'll toss away my shame.
There's no man as good as you.
As if burning, my nails melt (into your back)
I won't let anyone take you away.

There is a marked distinction here between “anta hodo no otoko nado iran” and “moesakaru tsume toke ni keri” (which correspond the 2nd and 3rd lines of the translation). The former sounds like a typical J-POP tune (think of Hamasaki: “You’re the person who gathers up/ and shows me something beautiful”). But the latter brings about powerful images of not just an innocuous and abstract desire for love, but an overwhelming, possessive desire rooted in physicality. Accordingly, and this is where Shiina’s genius comes in, her voice is a baby-girl whining for “anta hodo no” and “anta dake ha” and a throaty moan for “moesakaru tsume” (“burning fingernails”). This continues throughout the song, as the harmless “Please, don’t go anywhere” and “stay here with me” are sung alongside the more troubling “I’ve grown out my hair” (in Japan, indicating a one-sided romance) and “If you want to believe in this woman, shut up and come along then” (an implicit request for sexual intercourse). Each line is given its appropriate vocalization: submissive baby-girl for the former and hardened, mockingly-masculine for the latter.

I don’t want to simply equate her throaty “moesakaru” (“burning”) with a masculine voice and suggest that Shiina switches facilely between feminine and masculine modes of singing. Rather, the way she strains out the first two syllables, “moe,” indicates not that she has adopted the masculine voice, but that she is struggling to adopt this voice and to rid herself of the passive attachment to her lover we see in her whiny “anta hodo no” (“as good as you”). It’s a struggle she can’t win, a struggle that is doomed to cycle between her physical need for sex and her attempt to transcend female embodiment through adopting the male voice; it’s a struggle that necessarily ends where it started: with the narrator’s indifference to this cycle: “e i mama yo” (“I don’t care”). This is perhaps what Shiina’s new voice is: neither a feminine nor a masculine voice, but a feminine voice straining not only to become masculine, but to become something other than what Japanese pop-singers’ voices have always been. Maybe we can call this attempt to escape from the vocal modes within which Japanese pop music must operate Shiina Ringo’s truly avant-garde moment. Yes, terms like modern, post-modern, and avant-garde have arrived from abroad to categorize art, and yes, Japanese pop-music is often excluded from the realm of the avant-garde because of its supposedly inherent trend towards imitation, but it’s the struggle to dissociate one’s self and one’s voice from these past trends and tired performative modes that I think allows for something like a non-Western avant-garde to emerge. In other words, all contemporary Japanese music is necessarily influenced by American rock and hip-hop to the extent that Japanese performers are required to imitate, to varying degrees, these forms of music. In order to create a truly original way to sing rock, the performer must first sing within the pre-given modes as they currently exist, and then find ways to distance oneself from these pre-given modes. And I feel that by introducing the idea of struggle (for a new voice, for a new body, for a new location) into the genre of Japanese pop music, Shiina Ringo points to the world beyond J-POP and takes important steps towards altering the pop-rock genre of music as it was imported from America so that a specifically Japanese form of pop-rock can emerge.

1.) Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1994).
2.) Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, (London: Verso, 2002).
3.) http://www.centigrade-j.com/translations/yattsukeshigoto_shenaringo.htm
4.) Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, (London: Verso, 2002).
5.) http://www.centigrade-j.com/

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:26:34 GMT

Murakami Haruki, the Screen of Fantasy, and the Passively-Active/Actively-Passive Protagonist

"And yet, despite his disclaimers, despite his three-year self-imposed exile in the Mediterranean, despite -- or because of -- his alienation from rootless, monied Tokyo, Murakami is very much a writer of modern Japan, nostalgic for missing idealism, aghast at sudden wealth. For in his Japan, the old has been destroyed, an ugly and meaningless hodgepodge has taken its place, and nobody knows what comes next." - Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post, 12-25-89.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4192909-99930,00.html
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=624215
http://www.complete-review.com/authors/murakamh.htm

Murakami Haruki is likely the most internationally-acclaimed Japanese novelist around today. His recurring themes of urban isolation, fascination towards the Western thing (be it jazz records, cars, or fast food), human malaise towards global capitalism and the homogenized life it offers, resonate cross-culturally: as the realities and limitations of a consumerist lifestyle and ‘coca-colonization’ (to borrow from Pico Iyer) settle in worldwide, artistic responses offer a way for the neo-colonial subject to symbolically work through these realities. Of course, that’s just my generalization in the way of explanation of Murakami’s popularity, the links at the top offer much more specific theories on the subject. Before I continue, however, I should confess my own limitations: I have only read a handful of his novels, all of them English translations. Since I want to talk about how language is used to represent the ambiguous position of Murakami’s protagonists, the latter of course is a key limitation of mine. But for my purposes, I’m going to treat the English translations as their own texts and not mere surrogate figures for another ‘real’ text which offers a much cleaner window into Murakami’s intentions than translation will allow. And I’ll limit my scope to what I think is Murakami’s most interesting work (and the first one I read; he tends to get a bit repetitive): the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes.

Some of the stories of The Elephant Vanishes concern themselves with revealing the phantasmal behind the everyday: a single woman is terrified of a tiny goblin in her front yard (no real indication whether or not it’s a hallucination), a factory worker tries to impress a female co-worker by allowing a gnome who is the world’s greatest dancer to temporarily possess his body, and a lost cat named Noboru Watanabe traverses stories and transforms into the athletic fiancé of a protagonist’s sister and then into an elephant keeper who vanishes along with his caged elephant one morning (now you know where the title comes from). Others are much more rooted in reality, focusing on the ways in which dissolved subjects deal with the fact of the Westernized and spatially-homogenized city. ‘The Second Bakery Attack,’ as one of the first stories in the collection, does a good job of situating the characters in the generic Japanese city which is home to many of our isolated subjects. The story is about a starving couple who perform a symbolic attack the global capitalist order when they force employees of McDonalds at gunpoint to make thirty Big Macs. It wasn’t their original intention to hold up a McDonalds; they actually wanted to rob a small bakery, like the husband had done as a teenager, but the independently-run bakeries have all but disappeared and besides, McDonalds is the only thing open at 2:30 AM. While the robbery is taking place, another couple sleeps ‘like a couple of deep-sea fish.’ The end of the story places our now-satiated couple in the midst of urban image and sound: the empty parking lot, the giant neon ‘SONY’ sign shining upon them, the sound of trucks on the highway overlapping with birdsongs, and the ‘cowboy music’ on the car stereo courtesy of the American Armed Forces radio. The husband dreams of being at the bottom of a boat and ‘waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged’ (1). If he does in fact ‘belong’ anywhere in the first place, it is certainly not here, where no aspect of life is free from the incursion of global capitalism: private moments are intruded upon by the glow of neon advertisements, nature is eclipsed by the sounds of trucks on pre-dawn deliveries, and music is little more than a reminder of Japan’s military surrender and the disempowerment and directionlessness of the individual postwar subject. There are few differences between this couple and the teenagers who slept during the robbery: what are they both but mute subjects blind to the reality of their own insignificance in the face of the city, or, to conflate images, ‘deep-sea fish . . . waiting for the rising tide?’

‘The Kangaroo Communique,’ ‘A Window,’ and ‘On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning’ are about the desire to break out of the crushing isolation which has become an almost natural emotional condition for the metropolis-dweller. Male subjects find solace in fantasy: one pores over what they should have said to the ‘100% Perfect Girl’ he caught a glimpse of on the street, another spills his heart out in a letter to a woman who has made an idiotic return request for a product she purchased at his department store, and in ‘A Window,’ our protagonist, who works for ‘The Pen Company’ critiquing the letter-writing skills of anonymous amateurs, gets a chance to meet a woman whose letters have interested him. He never sees her again after this meeting, but during the course of his life looks out at the city from the train and wonders if any of the lighted windows in random buildings might be hers.

But we have to keep in mind that fantasy structures these subjects’ desire for contact; it is precisely the knowledge that the object of desire is impossible to attain that constitutes the attraction in the first place. Our lonely male protagonists are happy in their isolation, isolation sustains their being. Would not the ‘100% Perfect Girl’ become a little less perfect if all of a sudden, a normal relationship took the place of the fantasy that the narrator forged out of the pain of regret? In Murakami’s novel South of the Border, West of the Sun, a middle-aged owner of a jazz club becomes bored with his wife and fantasizes about a girl he used to know when he was twelve years old. He eventually meets this girl and a sexual relationship begins, but she reveals very few personal details and only periodically drops by to visit him; he, on the other hand, is constantly fantasizing about her and obsessing about the state of affairs that had him marrying his present wife and letting the other girl slip away. Again, we get the feeling that the desire exists only because the relationship is impossible. Discussing Lacan, Slavoj Zizek writes, ‘Man can relate to woman only in so far as she enters the frame of his fantasy.’ Or in other words, fantasy teaches us ‘how to desire’ and ‘provides the co-ordinates of our desire – which constructs the frame enabling us to desire something’ (2). How would Murakami’s protagonists experience such intense desire in the first place if they didn’t first place the women they randomly encounter into personal fantasies? There is nothing about the women themselves that justifies such overwhelming desire, but they are made to occupy a role within the frame of the male fantasy, and being placed in this role is what makes them desirable. The space the figure occupies, not the figure itself, generates desire.

Turning to a different question, how do we characterize such subjects in terms of activity or passivity? The bakery attackers try to attack the symptoms of global capitalism that they indirectly hold responsible for their late-night hunger pangs, but don’t seem to mind when faced with their own powerlessness at the end of the story. The letter writers of ‘The Kangaroo Communique’ and ‘The Window’ and the observer in ‘100% Perfect Girl’ seem happy simply to narrate their situations of isolation; if they do engage in direct attempts to alleviate their isolation, they are not represented in the stories. But we don’t want to call them passive victims of the metropolis or cogs in some capitalist machine either, since they are acting against their isolation, even if they themselves know that their actions are merely attempts to act out private fantasies, the goal being to preserve the possibility of fantasy more than to actually fulfill their desire for human relationships. They are acting from positions of powerlessness, or being complicit in their own powerlessness against forced urban isolation . . . somewhere between activity and passivity, a situation for which neither the English language nor the Japanese (to my knowledge) has a verb form. But just because it’s not present in our language doesn’t detract from the reality of the situation. In fact, the Greek and Latin languages do have verbs to characterize this space between activity and passivity.

This is where I want to bring in an essay by Fritz Senn, a prominent critic of James Joyce. He has pointed to a similar situation regarding the main character of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, whose predicament is that he knows his wife is going to have an affair in his own house while he is out running errands and visiting friends, but he does not try to prevent it and in fact, seems to facilitate it: in one extended fantasy sequence, he imagines himself watching the affair through a keyhole in his bedroom door, in effect taking part in his own cuckoldery. The Greek term for this ambiguous situation of active-passivity or passive-activity on the part of Bloom and on the part of some of Murakami’s protagonists is ‘Middle diathesis,’ or as Senn tells us, ‘the so-called middle voice, partaking of the active and the passive.’ In Latin, it is the ‘deponent,’ or a verb that ‘is passive in looks but active in intent’ (3). I would call the fantasizers in the three stories I grouped together the reverse of this description: I think they are active in looks, but passive in intent. The letter-writing and the narrative expression of ‘what I should have said’ appear to be active attempts at fulfilling their desire, or at least indications of an intent (past or present) to fulfill that desire. But there is a fundamental passivity at work here, since the ostensibly active attempts are made with the prior knowledge that a real relationship outside of the world of fantasy could never exist. The attempts are merely a way to preserve fantasy (a passive pursuit) and keep it separate from the corrupting influence of reality.

The middle voice or the middle way: where the subject is condemned to a position of in-between-ness and displaced desire, like Odysseus negotiating his twenty-year-long return to Ithaca, Leopold Bloom wandering the labyrinth of Dublin, the bakery attackers with the insatiable hunger for something other than a mass-produced existence, the letter-writers desperate to sustain fantasies secretly generated from corporate professions which forbid contact between producers and consumers, the loner who turns half-second meetings of strange eyes into allegorical fable and fantasy, ourselves as we attempt to narrate our self-consciousnesses outwards through the inadequate modes of writing, speech, and image: what are we all but ‘deep-sea fish waiting for the rising tide to carry us where we belong?’ It’s this idea of getting-there as a lifelong and life-consuming process forever resisting true fulfillment that I think is the major theme of Murakami’s short stories and novels.

(1) Murakami Haruki, ‘The Second Bakery Attack,’ The Elephant Vanishes, trans. Jay Rubin (Vintage Books, London: 2001), pp. 47-48.
(2) Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (Verso, London: 1989), pp 118-119.
(3) Fritz Senn, ‘Joyce the Verb,’ Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce (Lilliput Press, Dublin: 1995), pp. 18-19.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:56:58 GMT

Can the Unlawful Speak?: A Review of Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo

Victoria Brittain’s and Gillian Slovo’s theatrical production Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (1) juxtaposes the testimony of Guantanamo detainees and their families, the many condemnations of the prison and the undefined legal status of detainees by human rights organizations and human rights lawyers, and Donald Rumsfeld’s tautological justifications of not only the legality of detaining indefinitely Guantanamo’s 594 ‘unlawful combatants,’ but the necessity of these detentions in the ongoing American ‘war on terror.’ The bulk of the dialogue for the three act play is pieced together from the 25 hours of spoken testimony of former detainees and the family members of detainees during one-on-one interview sessions conducted by the playwrights. The rest comes from the statements of (primarily British) figures in the international debate over the legality of Guantanamo such as Lord Justice Johan Steyn, the third most senior judge in Britain, famed human rights attorney Gareth Peirce, and of course, United States Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld. What the playwrights have done is put into dialogue these voices in order to expose the fundamental absurdity underlying the existence and continued justification of the Guantanamo detention center.

In the words of Lord Justice Steyn that open the play, the detainees have been placed in a ‘legal black hole’ in which they exist outside any legal classification, whether as prisoners of war (who would be subject to the rules of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war) or American prisoners (who would be tried in American courts). Rather, the detainees are labelled as ‘unlawful combatants,’ a category of criminal that has yet to be incorporated into the American or international judical system, and consequently dispossessed of the legal rights of the classifiable criminal.

The characters rarely ever interact with one another, delivering most of their lines directly to the audience. Indeed, the only instance of character interaction is when Donald Rumsfeld fields questions from a group of unnamed ‘Newspapermen’ during one of his speeches on Guantanamo’s role in the ‘war on terror.’ The voice, as the only mode of communication from stage to audience, becomes the site of dramatic struggle, with testimony struggling to be heard and recognized against a discourse validating illegal detentions by dealing in vague accusations about the detainees’ desire to ‘kill people.’ So we hear the detainee Moazzam Begg reading aloud the letter he plans to send to his sister detailing the inadequate food provisions and discussing the difficulties of having a newborn son while he is imprisoned followed by Donald Rumsfeld’s accusation that ‘[the detainees] are among the most dangerous, best trained vicious killers on the face of the earth.’ In the real world, of course, the words of the Attorney General of the United States are privileged above those of detainees because Rumsfeld’s words are uttered from a position of power while the detainees speak (or write) from a position of powerlessness. What the play does is level the discursive playing field, isolating the voices of detainees, lawyers, and Secretaries of State from their circumstances of utterance and reception so that the voices of the disempowered and marginalized can do battle with the voices of the United States Government outside of the hierarchical disparities between the two and without the typical interference of media distortion.

The titular phrase ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ is not just an example of how easily collections of buzzwords can be thrown together to legitimate the often excessive treatment towards terror suspects (whether they be nations or human beings), it is the actual inscription on the main entrance gate to Camp Delta, the holding place for the detainees of this play. In its original context, while the surface meaning may be difficult to decipher, the message is unmistakable: the honorable American government has a duty to defend freedom by imprisoning suspected terrorists, or ‘unlawful combatants’ whose goal in life is to destroy it. But distanced from its inscription on the prison gate and placed into the context of the play, the potential meanings multiply. The word ‘bound’ can be read as ‘determined’ to defend freedom (Honor is determined to defend freedom), or as honor ‘bound,’ as in shackled, in order to accomplish the defense of freedom. According to this reading, the concept of honor must be arrested, temporarily suspended, in order to succeed in this defense of freedom. While it is difficult to attempt a definition of ‘freedom’ in this context (and in the context of contemporary American politics in general), we can say that the institutional power of the American government to illegally detain and place outside of international and domestic law anyone it suspects of being a terrorist means its ‘freedom’ to operate outside the confines of law in its construction/consolidation of the American Empire. Or we can say that ‘freedom’ simply pertains to the increased purchasing power of the American consumer directly resulting from the neo-colonial muscle America flexes throughout its empire: the ‘freedom’ for the American to buy what he needs and what he wants at an affordable price. The purpose of this tangent pertains to the fact that in Guantanamo, word games are a part of official political discourse, a tool used by the powerful in order to mask the realities of Guantanamo and the sufferings it creates. The observer's role is to read how the excesses and tautologies of Guantanamo are themselves inscribed into the slogans and political discourses formed in its defense.

One example of a political word game, which I have already touched on, is the creation of the category ‘unlawful combatant,’ which marks its subject negatively as a person without a concrete legal status. This blanket signifier can be applied to almost any subject with ties to Middle Eastern or African countries: the ‘unlawful combatants’ focused on in Guantanamo are Bisher al-Rawi, who was detained by authorities while traveling to Gambia to help his brother Wahab al-Rawi start a cooking oil business, Moazzam Begg, who made plans to build a school in Afghanistan, and Jamal al-Harith, a Manchester native detained by the Taliban while traveling through Pakistan and Afghanistan and afterwards taken to Guantanamo Bay during America’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Despite being British citizens with no ties to terrorist networks and who pose no significant threat to America or its interests, they are given the unfortunate label which has the appearance of signifying a terrorist bent on destroying the U.S., but is really a term that embodies the lack in a judicial system that cannot incorporate subjects that may or may not have plans to carry out attacks on the U.S. As Gareth Peirce tells us, ‘I think slowly the world has become aware that Guantanamo Bay is a convenience, it’s a resource pool for American intelligence.’ But what about the term itself: ‘unlawful combatant?’ As with the word ‘bound’ in the slogan ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,’ we can extract multiple meanings. ‘Unlawful,’ as it is used by Donald Rumsfeld, pertains to either the detainees’ predilection for breaking the law or to their already having broken the law. Rumsfeld tells us, ‘We said from the beginning that these are unlawful combatants, and we’re detaining them. We call them detainees, not prisoners of war.’ But are not the detainees ‘unlawful’ in the sense that they have no determined or determinable legal status? They exist outside the bounds of law, not because they are potential or actual criminals, but because there is no way to legally define them. ‘Outlaws’ would be another appropriate label.

There is also the issue of how the United States Government represents the realities of the prison to the outside world. Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights charity worker, points out one of the discursive manipulations at work here:

[I]n the first few months at Guantanamo they had 32 suicide attempts and then suddenly the suicide attempts [seemed to stop]. There was effort on behalf of the powers that be down there to act as if, ah, everyone’s calmed down now, they’re taking their Prozac, there’s no problem. But then we discover that far from suicide efforts stopping, they’d just been re-classified by the military into Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior. There were more than 40 of those in a six month period, since the re-classification of suicide attempts.

Grim realities can be erased, buried within nebulous phrasings by ‘the powers that be,’ and it is up to the discerning reader to locate and expose these gaps and discursive games at work in state discourse. As with Rumsfeld’s speeches, this act of re-classification is delivered with the eye of the camera in mind, an effort to manipulate reality into a sanitized and media-friendly form, which is contested by the testimony running throughout the play that gives us a more accurate version of what goes on in Guantanamo. We read truth-value into the testimony because of the detainees’ and detainees’ family members’ physical and psychological proximity to Guantanamo, while Rumsfeld’s discourse is mocked because of the obvious distance of the speaker from the subject matter and the urgent need to convince a demurring American and international audience of Guantanamo’s importance in ‘the war on terror.’ As the former detainee Jamal al-Harith reminds us, ‘They use words but there’s evil behind it man. There’s malice.’

One of the most interesting elements of the play is the way the spoken and written language of the detainees themselves is represented. Neither the spoken testimony of Jamal al-Harith nor the whistleblowing letters of the detainee Moazzam Begg reach some purely mimetic status, since the capacity to use spoken and written language in the service of challenging authority and unmasking the realities of Guantanamo has been severely limited. Jamal al-Harith details a situation in which the detainees attempt to organize themselves into units by electing leaders for each cell block, called ‘Emirs,’ who would administer campaigns of organized disobedience against the guards if they mistreated any one detainee. He says, ‘[W]hen we tried to organise Emirs, they kept putting them [in isolation] so people were afraid to become Emir now. So [we] tried to use codes, and one of the codes was like ‘Have you got a cook in your block?’ . . . ‘No, we haven’t got a cook,’ ‘Well you need to get one’ (my ellipsis). Of course, ‘cook’ is only the latest link in an endless chain of signifiers for the forbidden referent of the leader. By responding to the act of signifying by erasure of the referent, the guards punish the utterance of language itself; in such conditions, how can there emerge a testimony that both challenges the legality of Guantanamo and reveals the unreported injustices that take place on a daily basis within its walls?

In the case of Moazzam Begg, who reads aloud the letters he has sent to his father from Guantanamo, we see how the conditions of Guantanamo damage and distort written language just as easily as they do spoken language. At several points during the reading of the letters, Moazzam mouths words that have been censored from his letters as the sound of a buzzer takes their place. In most cases, these censored words are impossible to decipher from context, but they seem to be related to specific instances of abuse. His complaint that ‘there has been a gross violation of my human rights’ is somehow allowed by the prison’s Censor Board, possibly because it is a non-specific accusation. As the complaints about living conditions and the Censor Board’s deliberate retention of his outgoing and incoming mail continue throughout his letters, we find out that he has been injured severely and possibly brain-damaged. Then, prison reports say that he has confessed to be an al-Qaeda operative and is now being held in solitary confinement. The implication is that because of his ongoing complaints that have tried to reveal the fundamental lawlessness upon which Guantanamo is built, he has been punished by way of extorting a false confession out of him. Again, language is deprived of its referential capacity, since anything derogatory is censored and attempts to communicate injustice are punished by criminalizing the communicating subject. Language produced in Guantanamo is analyzed and policed by authority to the effect that the testimony (by which I mean both the letters sent to his father and the extorted confession) that emerges from Guantanamo is necessarily inadequate and distorted. In this Foucauldian paradox, the conditions of Guantanamo create its own supposed terrorists (guards extorting false confessions out of innocents), the evidence of which can then be trumpeted to sustain Guantanamo as a tool of terror suppression.

However, the playwrights generally do not rely too heavily on testimony; they incorporate a variety of legal and human rights authorities to elucidate both the lawlessness of Guantanamo and the impossibility of adequately communicating the suffering of the detainees to an outside audience. As Gareth Peirce, discussing her correspondences with former detainees, explains, “Maybe it’s the testimony of every survivor from a concentration camp or a massacre or a . . . How do you tell it? How do ordinary words tell it?’ (playwrights’ ellipses).

One issue I have with the play is that it uses Donald Rumsfeld as a synechdochic figure for the American ‘war on terror’ and its policy of holding terror suspects indefinitely; the result is that all of the arguments against Guantanamo from legal authorities, reporters, detainees, and detainees’ family members become directed at him alone; he becomes the embodiment of the injustice perpretated by the American government to which all the frustrations can be directed. While most of the characters giving testimony or providing statements on the realities of Guantanamo are scattered around the stage and illuminated by the spotlight when it is their turn to speak, Rumsfeld occupies a central position: in front of him are the seated family members of the detainees and former detainees and behind him are current detainees lying on beds in orange prison jumpsuits (he is also temporally situated in the center of the play, since he delivers his lines in the middle of Act Two). It almost leads you to believe that he is the core around which Guantanamo is structured, whose private machinations have created and sustained the prison and the larger ‘war on terror.’ This is out of place considering that characters in the play broadly implicate the ‘United States government’ (Lord Justice Steyn) and ‘the Americans’ (Clive Stafford Smith) as guilty parties in the continued existence of Guantanamo. The fact is the institution is an implementation of American post-September 11 public policy, not the string-pulling and word games of a single individual, regardless of the position that he holds. We should not expect Donald Rumsfeld to stand in for the excesses of the American ‘war on terror’ any more than we should expect the anguish produced by Guantanamo to be represented by a single detainee. Guantanamo is a result of military and presidential decisions and could not survive without support of members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, international support from Tony Blair and members of the U.K. Parliament, biased or outright derelict media coverage within the United States, and the (resulting) American public’s condonement (or ignorance) of the prison. The voices in favor of holding the detainees indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay are just as numerous and diverse as those in favor of removing the detainees and trying them in American courts; we should hear more of these voices instead of allowing them to be subsumed by the smug equivocations of Donald Rumsfeld.

This minor complaint aside, Guantanamo is an important intervention into American political culture in an age when media sources in the U.S. and abroad seem all too eager to side with power and ignore the excesses commited in its name. The recent challenges to Guantanamo’s legality by the United States Supreme Court and the upcoming military hearings for detainees conducted by the Pentagon give the play an added significance.

(1) Premiered at the Tricycle Theater in London on 20 May 2004, now playing at New Ambassador's Theater in London (16 June 2004 to 4 Sept), and coming to 45 Bleecker in the East Village of New York City from 20 August.

Note: I've written this in a more formal style than my other stuff because I'm sending it to some magazines; I'll let everyone (all 2 or 3 of you) know if I succeed. Wish me luck!

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 20:25:26 GMT

Dublin’s Prick with the Stick: Bloomsday 2004 as Cultural Commodity and Academic Breeding Ground

For anyone unfamiliar with the work of James Joyce, “Bloomsday” refers to June 16, 1904, the day of Joyce’s now-immortalized walk around Dublin with his wife-to-be Nora Barnacle and the day in which Ulysses, his magnum opus about a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner with a Jewish background, takes place. It is commemorated in Dublin through festivals, performances, museum exhibits, book releases, film screenings, academic sessions on Ulysses, the rest of Joyce’s works, and anything else Joyce-related, and an outdoor sausage breakfast for 10,000 people in honor of Leopold Bloom and his morning feast upon “the inner organs of beasts and fowls,” running throughout the week. But while worshipers, academics, and just plain fans of James Joyce may flock to Dublin to partake in the festivities, it is hard not to pick up on a sense of resentment among the Dubliners of 2004 who aren’t exactly in a state of perpetual awe towards this giant of Modernist literature, some of whom may respect Joyce’s contribution to Irish literature and culture, others to whom the statue of a cane-carrying James Joyce on O’Connell Street is known as “The Prick with the Stick.”

What does James Joyce mean to this city in a more pragmatic sense, outside of the symbolic and aesthetic value he has injected into it through a lifetime of meticulously-crafted fiction (and drama)? Economic considerations are huge here, from James Joyce statues in convenience store windows to the boom in tourism during the week of Bloomsday. To give you an idea about how important the latter is to the city of Dublin, delegates to the academic symposium were invited to an address by the Lord Mayor of Dublin at City Hall, who in effect thanked the delegates for their patronage and offered platitudes on the importance of Joyce to the city. This is more than a collection of enthusiasts, this is an industry: Joyce is a driving force behind tourism in Ireland, and this is not limited to Joyce scholars and other academics, for there are countless tourists more than willing to dress up as James and Nora Joyce on Bloomsday or Leopold and Martha Bloom despite having not read Ulysses or not having the slightest idea why the figures they are celebrating are significant. In the “Hades” chapter of Ulysses, Joyce compares statues of Irish heroes (Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell) to the shades in the land of Hades as described in Homer’s Odyssey, who exert a tremendous influence upon the future course of Odysseus’s life. In this sense, the dead figures of the past determine the lives of the living in terms of providing a mythological or symbolic background against which to view one’s actions and in providing a national consciousness which structures communities and which can be mobilized as a revolutionary force. What is Joyce but one of these shades, an almost metonymic figure of Irish national culture and its rich literary tradition exploding out of a history in which the Irish were a country of cannibals and savages, according to the English? What is Joyce but a commodified version of one of these shades, whose image can be purchased for 10 euros (clink of coins) (1) and touted around as some kind of Irish cultural symbol in the same way that one might view an Sudanese wall decoration purchased at Pier 16 Imports as a symbol of an essentialized Africa?

Even though he probably could not predict his transformation into commodity, Joyce seems to have been aware of the effects his writing would have on the academic community. He once famously claimed: “I’ve put in[to Ulysses] so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality” (2). Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are more or less accessible to the reader of above-average intelligence, but Ulysses with its wild interplay between form and content and reliance on often obscure allusions presents a daunting task for any reader, which is where John Boland, writing in the Irish Independent, claims the Joyce industry has arisen from. He writes,

“[T]he more difficult the work, the more explication of it that is required, the more theses that can be written on it and the more courses that can be taught about it, which is why you don’t find too much attention paid to William Trevor and Patrick Kavanagh, the meaning of whose work is clear to every intelligent reader and thus renders such academic scrutiny redundant” (3).

I can’t help finding a grain of truth in this statement, as dismissive as it is towards the academic profession, as if professors were nothing more than passive explicators of texts that are beyond the comprehension of students. But my feeling is that Ulysses simply provides a more fertile ground for a variety of readings and re-readings than, for example, Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry, and this is what drives academics and students alike to engage with it, often a lifetime commitment. Additionally, studying Joyce does not mean that one limits oneself to the field of Joyce’s lifetime and the period of high modernism, but there is a near infinite amount of connections to be made in the fields of post-colonial studies, race and gender studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, philosophy, music theory, even neuroscience, biology, and astrophysics. This has to do with the inherent nature of any text: as Edward Said claims, once texts are produced, they are in the world, and as a result subject to the interventions of whatever new theories and methods of understanding that may be produced in the world, provided that we find sufficient evidence within the text itself. It is in Joyce’s more complicated texts where he has provided windows for theories and fields that have been produced (and that are yet to be produced) to intervene and produce meanings out of these texts. This, I would reply to John Boland, is why Joyce has been privileged in academia over Patrick Kavanagh.

Here is a short anecdote: In London, a few weeks before I went to take part in Bloomsday in Dublin, I was having a conversation with someone I had met, a software engineer with an interest in Joyce. Being a Londoner, he couldn’t comprehend the fact that I didn’t drink, since having a few drinks after work (or at other random times) is an essential part of the culture. He brought up “After the Race,” a story set in a pub from Joyce’s Dubliners and in which people take turns buying rounds of drinks. He asked if I wanted to really know what it was like to be involved in a situation like that, if I’d ever be tempted to directly engage with what I was reading, if just reading about pub culture and refusing the opportunity to take part in it was a passive activity. My response was that reading has never been a passive activity for me, that whenever I read anything I am constantly making connections with personal events and with other literary texts and theories, so regardless of whether or not my reading has a material basis in the setting of the text itself, it is an actively constructed reading which will always be different from anyone else’s. Of course, we were in a pub at the time, so I’m still not sure how clearly I could communicate this to him while trying to talk over Daft Punk and Grandmaster Flash. But getting back to my point, Ulysses demands the highest degree of active reading, it is a text which opens itself up to countless interventions that it is up to us to create. Academics don’t simply use it to make careers out of explaining it (that would be another instance of Joyce as commodity), but to make meaning and to further our understanding in and out of pre-existing and soon-to-be-existing academic fields. We should be able to distinguish the cultural commodification of Joyce from the importance of Joyce’s literary achievements and the ways in which they continue not only to influence our readings of modernist and post-modernist texts, but the ways in which we read anything.

1.) In Joyce’s short story “Araby,” about a boy who is sickened by the commodification of the Orient that he sees in the English-run Araby marketplace in Dublin, the clink of coins disgusts the boy-narrator and serves as the moment in which he realizes the tawdriness of the Araby marketplace, which cheapens the cultures it proposes to represent.

2.) Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

3.) John Boland, “Why we should still reJoyce (and read Joyce),” Irish Independent, 16 June 2004.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Tue, 04 May 2004 07:38:51 GMT

Victimization and the Real: The 25th Hour as National Allegory

The ban on a critical perspective towards the events of 11 September 2001 seems to have been lifted, as a cursory glance at any contemporary news network will show. Whereas in the months following the event one could be accused of supporting the terrorists for assigning a modicum of blame to the U.S. government for the attacks, there now exists the possibility of taking a critically distanced position on the events of September 11, to read the event, however atrocious, as one that was politically-motivated, without being labeled a supporter of terrorists. I have to take issue with Thomas Friedman's Op-ed column in the New York Times on 28 March 2004, in which he confessed his ignorance to the hearings on the possibility of the government's failure to prevent September 11 because of his belief that the events were somehow without originary circumstances and without traceable activities and behaviors that could have been identified at an earlier time. For someone supposedly politically tuned to the world and full of sweeping proclamations about what Israel should and shouldn't do or who should be allowed membership in the United Nations Security Council and who should be kicked out of it (India and France, respectively), his refusal to listen to the September 11th Trials represents a return to the polarization of discourse in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists, George W. Bush told the nation, providing those who had lost the capacity for language with an uncritical discourse to deal with a Manichean political situation in which support for the government's policies would be the only available American position. It is this situation of discursive paralysis that Spike Lee's important film, The 25th Hour (2002), touches on.

The 25th Hour centers on the last free day in the life of Montgomery Brogan, a New York City drug dealer who has been convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. The events of September 11th loom over the lifeless city in which subjects possess no critical language to deal with national tragedy and in which Montgomery (or Monty, as he is referred to by friends) similarly lacks the language to deal with the personal tragedy of both the arrest and his violent beating (which I will get to later). Language becomes an empty form, existing only to provide a semblance of now non-existent social relations. The emptiness of language is highlighted in a moment of comic relief in which a Russian gangster, Kostya, uses the American idiom "Funny you should say that" to refer to something humorous and Jacob, a high school English teacher and Monty's friend, cannot explain to Kostya how to amend his language. While the idiom refers to an ironic occurrence, Kostya uses it to refer to a statement that is actually funny. Language's referential capacity, if it does still exist, serves a meaningless function anyway. At a base level, none of the characters really care whether or not Kostya knows the intricacies of the language, now that it has become an empty form which does not or cannot provide real communication. There is no possibility of truth behind most utterance in the film either, since we do not have an authoritative position from which to evaluate the truth-content of these utterances. When the close friends of Monty - Jacob and the investment banker Frank - have a conversation in which Frank says that their friendship with Monty ends once Monty goes to prison, since prison will effectively end his life (which Monty "fuckin deserves,") what does it mean when later on in the film he tells Monty he will be there for him when he gets out? There is no way to evaluate Frank's character based on his language: we cannot know whether his pledge of support is genuine or just a nice thing to say to someone before he begins a heavy prison sentence.

The remnants of the collapsed World Trade Center towers are seen only once, through Frank's apartment window as Frank and Jacob look out of it. Frank's way of dealing with the national tragedy of September 11 and the personal tragedy of losing his friend is to limit these events to the realm of the logical or the theorizable. Monty was a friend, his logic runs, now he has made a mistake, which himself and Jacob could under no circumstances have prevented, and deserves to be sent to jail. He has not been visibly affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center, in fact he refuses to move out of his apartment despite the physical danger of being in close proximity to Ground Zero in the months after the attack. Monty's prison sentence and September 11 are both events towards which Frank makes the claim "I can live with it." You might then wonder whether Frank's "If you ask me, he fuckin' deserves it" applies to America's victimization as well as Monty's arrest. An earlier scene shows Frank in his Wall Street cubicle downtrading on airline stocks, in effect profiting from September 11. Traumatic events are subsumed under a rhetoric of logic or natural consequence for Frank, so that all he has to do to get past them is create theories or to reduce the traumatic event to the function of a wealth-generating object, which is in essence a demand of his profession: to seek out and exploit every opportunity to generate private or corporate wealth. The collapse of the towers, the traumatic event, becomes one more source of wealth for Frank; no longer outside of representation or the rules of a logical system, it is subsumed as a function of Frank's professional life. Translate the traumatic event into the language of the familiar and it will lose its traumatic nature. It is not as easy as that however, as I hope to show.

Monty is a pretty boy, and because of his fear being raped in prison, the last thing he requests from his friends Frank and Jacob is to beat him until he no longer looks "like this." Of course, they vehemently protest, but after pushing Frank around and slapping him, Frank breaks down and delivers a furious beating until he is dragged away by Jacob. Frank externalizes his underlying feelings towards Monty, but in a way completely alien to the logical principles behind which he has attempted to operate. If the world is based on fundamental principles of exchange value, where Monty gets what he deserves and traumatic events can be "live[d] with" (and profited from), then this scene represents the collapse of reason, or the inability to confine trauma within the realm of reasoning, necessitating its externalization in the form of symbolic violence. Frank, having momentarily let go of his dedication to rational precepts, now wails like an infant as he looks at his bloodied hands. Is he now mired in some pre-linguistic realm, his proximity to the site of trauma and his participation in the act itself confronting him with the real of trauma and forcing him to regress to a pre-rational, pre-linguistic state where things cannot be explained away or subordinated to functions within a capitalist profession predicated on scavenging and converting suffering into corporate or private wealth?

And right after the event, when Monty must face the inevitable car ride to prison with his father, what does Monty do but mask the real of the event with language? Instead of telling him, "I told my childhood friends to make me ugly," he lets his father and girlfriend believe it was "hooligans" who jumped him. "Did you at least get some good shots in?" his father asks. "Yeah, I got some good shots in." Language is once more stripped of its referential capacity: here it is a tool to temporarily prevent the incursion of trauma into the lives of human subjects and to continue the semblance of real social relations when the only reality is that of the alienation and dissolution of the subject by overwhelming events.

Earlier, when Monty sees the words "Fuck You" scrawled on a bathroom mirror, he launches into one of the most intense monologues of film history, in which he delivers into the mirror a "Fuck you" specific to every ethnic and class group in New York City, including his father, James Brogan, his girlfriend Naturelle, and, of course, Osama bin Laden. While Monty gets swept up in this rhetoric of violent revenge upon those responsible for the national tragedy of September 11th (and many others who aren't), a way to direct self-hate outwards upon the rest of the city and world, he knows he must return to the originary circumstances from which he began the monologue, with him looking at a scrawled message on a bathroom mirror. "Fuck you, Monty." He tries to scratch out the message but it's there to stay. It's his fault for what happens, he reasons, and he who has been complicit in both his own arrest, and much later, his self-imposed beating.

If these represent the two post-September 11th discursive possibilities: the rhetoric of unrestrained revenge on an unjust world and the inwardly-directed blame for one's own condition, it is only at the end of the movie, through Monty's father James's counter-monologue to Monty's earlier vitriol that we get a third possibility or way of dealing with loss. The monologue is a detailed exploration of the possibilities for Monty's future if he lets his father drive him out of the city instead of taking him to prison, the underlying theme being that of "starting over." To start over Monty must return to the symbolic desert, where the possibility of an active forgetting exists. The critic Petar Ramadanovic, in an essay on Nietszche, says that "active forgetting" is a way of "sav[ing] humans from [the disaster of] history," a specifically human capacity for "overcom[ing] loss" (1). The desert in many ways is the symbolic site of such forgetting, where the subject frees himself from the demands of society and rediscovers himself in isolation, returning to the city (if he chooses) with a heightened consciousness. Perhaps more importantly, James's monologue allows Monty to critically rethink his externalized self-hate. As they drive, the figures he once damned: Korean grocers, African-American basketball players, Pakistani cab drivers, appear to him in a fantasy sequence with warm smiles. At one point, he sees an African-American child on a bus, who etches his name into the window fog: TOM. Monty etches his own name into the car window and waves goodbye. Language regains its referential capacity, its capacity to communicate essences between subjects, for the names are concrete referents to the subjects who communicate them. Instead of these two discursive poles of blaming the self and blaming everyone but the self, Monty, with the help of his father, reaches towards the possibilities of removing one's self from the constraints of the spirit-sucking metropolis to develop a new, higher consciousness in the originary world of the desert and of reinjecting meaning into an overblown, empty language by simplifying it to its basic, meaningful, and stable signifiers. But James's monologue ends the same way Monty's does, with a return to the circumstances in which it was uttered. After having progressed through a fantasy sequence of the possibilities of Monty's new life in the desert community, including the friends he'll make, the jobs he'll work, and family he'll have with Naturelle, we are returned to the space of the car in which a badly bruised Monty is on the way to prison. Not that Monty has transcended personal trauma, but that the possibility to transcend it exists, a possibility which can only be realized once the anger and despondency of hatred towards the self and towards the rest of the world gives way to a new discourse of reimagining one's place in the world in relation to others and working to overcome trauma and loss by reconstructing a damaged national and personal consciousness.

Petar Radomanovic, From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche's Active Forgetting and Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster, Postmodern Culture, January 2001 issue.

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 02:06:37 GMT

"It’s Like Knowing James Caan isn’t Italian": Articulating Race in The Sopranos

"I wanna talk about this new movement you're spearheading. No pun intended." -- Ralph Cifaretto, to an American Indian activist (dialogue from The Sopranos)

"I'll eat that dog for lunch. Ya mudda's an animal!" - Jake La Motta, dialogue from Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull

"Your location is not special" -- J. Richard Gott III

Race is a dominant theme in The Sopranos, ranging from Tony Soprano’s fear, bordering on antipathy, of African-Americans with potential power over his life (Meadow’s half-black boyfriend, the black cop who won’t be bribed out of giving Tony a speeding ticket) to the series’ play with the Italian-American mobster stereotypes that are in many ways necessitated by a culture who has internalized a pre-formed image of the Italian mobster and needs to latch on to this image in order to find the narrative realistic. The episode I want to focus on is Episode Three of the Fourth Season, entitled “Christopher,” which provides an image of racial conflict and tension primarily between Italian Americans and American Indians (but which also draws in other races) during the time of an anticipated Christopher Columbus parade (hero to Italians, murderer to American Indians). Before I start, however, I want to briefly examine the context within which articulations of Italian Americanness have been asserted in postmodern media. I will exclude the romanticized narrative of the Godfather series and go straight to the more complicated approach of Martin Scorcese, whose movies often attempt to represent slices of Italian America: from the mobster wannabes (Mean Streets) to would-be middle-class heroes (Raging Bull) to glamorous and impulsive killers (Goodfellas, Casino). It is not within the director’s power (or intention, it would seem) to get beyond culturally-constructed stereotypes, but to self-consciously mobilize them within the film, to give the semblance of capitulating to cultural stereotypes, but in actuality drawing attention to the fact that the representation of these stereotypes is the only real way to provide what the audience will view as “real” Italian American life. So we have Jake La Motta’s wife cursing at him from her apartment window to the streeet, Tommy La Motta’s gruesome public beating of a supposedly promiscuous friend and the ensuing sit-down in a café, the mustached mob boss in Mean Streets with the power to represent and direct the narratives of his underlings’ suicides by snapping his fingers, and other scenes which register alongside the audience's expected conception of Italian America.

Quentin Tarantino’s approach to race takes a different angle by ridiculing the idea of a pure race in this contemporary age. The recent Kill Bill Vol. 1 has a Chinese-Japanese-American Yakuza boss so sensitive about her race (specifically, her non-Japaneseness) that she will “collect [the] fucking head” of anyone who mentions it, thus attacking the notion of pure-bloodedness, the idea that only a full Japanese would have the necessary character to lead a crime family. The gesture problematizes cultural mythmaking in general, which is usually based on the idea of the linear passage of pure blood through generations, by putting someone who is racially-mixed AND an outsider in a position of power. Also worth nothing is the scene in True Romance (which Tarantino wrote, but didn’t direct) when the Sicilian mobster is about to kill Christian Slater’s character’s father. The father, in a sick laughter-studded monologue, tells the mobster that his skin color is darker than that of other Italians because the Sicilians of old copulated with “niggers” and produced a half-breed race. Tarantino problematizes the notion of a pure race by making characters whose positions are supposed to be validated by their pure racial lineage products of racial miscegenation.

“Christopher” centers around the counteractive efforts between Italian Americans’ promotions of a parade celebrating Christopher Columbus’s achievements and the American Indians’ protest of a celebration of the figure who they believe opened the door for hundreds of years of European imperialist aggression and hostility towards the original inhabitants of America. These protests erupt into violence at times, putting some members of Tony Soprano’s crew in the hospital. While some of Tony’s underlings, especially Silvio Dante, are insistent upon confronting the Columbus protest groups, Tony urges them to stop drawing heat upon the Soprano crew during a time when the boss of the family, Corrado “Junior” Soprano, is on trial by the state of New Jersey. A crew member, Ralph Cifaretto, speaks to a professor of American Indian Studies, one of the vocal forces behind the protests, but instead of using the strongarm tactics the crew usually employs to get difficult men to submit to their will, Ralph threatens him with publicizing the knowledge that one of the central figures of American Indian culture, an actor, is actually half-Italian.

Like True Romance, figures who need pure-bloodedness to validate their positions are revealed (or threatened to be revealed) to be racially-mixed. Later on, Ralph finds out that the actor’s Italianness is actually relatively well-known and that it is similar to the knowledge that James Caan, who plays Sonny in The Godfather I and II, is not Italian. However, it is different from True Romance in that it is the actor’s racial purity, not the character’s within the episode’s/film’s reality, that is in question here. If fictional characters are the source of national pride, identification with the character in question is diminished with the knowledge that the actor, not the character, is not a pure-blooded and a thus qualified representative of the character. When cultural heroes are sought out through media representations, pure-bloodedness takes on an extra dimension.

What I found interesting was the way other ethnicities are brought into the mix, namely, Jewishness and African-Americanness. Tony, Hesh (a Jewish friend of Tony’s), and his Puerto-Rican stable assistant are discussing the topic of the parade when the assistant makes a comparison of Columbus to Hitler. Hesh is understandably upset, and scolds the aid for his “anti-Semitism” and for “trivializing the Holocaust.” In another scene, an Italian-American activist is being interviewed by Montel Williams (played by himself) on television. Montel similary scolds his subject for using the term “Middle Passage” to characterize the Italian migration to America, a term of course reserved for the passage of dispossessed Africans to America in slave ships. It isn’t a case of remembering lived experience and refusing to let that experience be trivialized by a comparison to other events, but the attempt to preserve one’s post-memory (memory of events not directly lived by the subject) from trivialization. Almost every articulation of race in this episode is based on post-memory – nationalism in the contemporary moment cannot be realized through contemporary figures, who are easily distortable media representations, or through organizations like the anti-Italian-American Defamation League, represented here by an uninspiring, cliché-spouting speaker; nationalism must necessarily be achieved through post-memory and the preservation of this post-memory.

J. Richard Gott III, a Princeton astrophysicist, coined what can be seen as a quintessential part of the definition of modernity with this dictum: “Your location is not special” (Levi 382). Before modernity (and please allow me to generalize), ethnic groups clung to creation myths and the myth of their racial uniqueness and purity as distinct from the rest of the world. However, once these ethnic groups come into contact with each other, they realize that each one has their own myths and that there is nothing outside of the myths to validate one ethnic group over another. Hence, “Your location is not special.” What might characterize postmodernity, then, is the mess of racial identities in conflict with each other and the efforts to keep each one purified and beyond comparison in the realm of post-memory. Montel Williams will not allow Italians to appropriate the term used to characterize his ancestor’s passage to America any more than Hesh will let his assistant compare the imperialist slaughter of American Indians to the systematic and state-controlled slaughter of Jews in Europe. Each version of nationality preserved in post-memory, but how safe of a preservation is it? Doesn’t the fact that they are challenged in two different contexts point to the possible collapse of the purity of post-memory? Might not an age emerge in which all the post-memories merge together into an undifferentiated understanding of past by way of their collective and uniform commodification? A little extreme, I know, but don’t exclude it from consideration!

Eloquence in the midst of this cacophony is (sort of) realized through Tony’s final comments to Silvio: "Look at you: you got a smart kid at Lakawana College, you own the best strip club in Jersey, you got a wife who's a piece of ass (or at least she was when you married her). Did you get all of that because you're Italian? No. You got it because you're you, because you're smart, because you're . . . whatever the fuck." This is a gesture towards getting beyond nationalistic pride – viewing ethnic or national identity as a mere component of one’s self, not the determining force. This provides hope for a different kind of unity than the one I described earlier, with all nationalisms uniformly trivialized and commodified. No, what Tony is pointing towards (whether or not he knows it) is the transcendence of race as a category: not that we trivialize post-memory of the experience of past generations, but get beyond race by refusing to let it overdetermine one’s actions or beliefs; it is the utopia of a singular humanity, not living in imposed or commodified conformity, but a conformity achieved by having transcended racial and other categories in favor of a unified human race. Not that locations are not special anymore, just that the demand that locations be special is overcome.

Neil Levi, “ ‘See that Straw? That’s a Straw:’ Anti-Semitism and Narrative Form in Ulysses,” Modernism/Modernity 9.3, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.