Questions for 4/13

Hi All. Sorry for the lateness of these questions. See you in class tomorrow.

Framing Question:

Within the somewhat dizzying turns that Rey Chow makes throughout The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the discussion of coercive mimeticism in ethnic subjects is particularly provocative in regards to the (im)possibilties of radical identity politics and their relation to biopower. The desire for a self-preferentiality of one’s (ethnic and local) experience, the celebration of such a performative identity, as many of the films and reading that we have encountered have posed, became a means of empowered representation and as something in resistance to hegemonic power and representation. Autoethnography offered then, through the shift of means and authorship of production and representation, a possibility for a radical identity politics, a genre that would give a “voice” to those that previously had none in mainstream media. However, as Chow argues, ethnicity does not become something outside of circulation and exchange, and more fundamentally power, but rather as an already biopoliticized economic relation, then this resistance would seem to not only be subsumed under capitalism and biopower, but moreover as flowing from and built into these processes. So how can we make sense of postcolonial cultural politics? For this shift, Chow turns to mimesis as a way to think through cross-cultural interactions and exchange. Chow writes,

“There nonetheless lingers a fascination with mimeticism as an older – indeed, anthropologically primitive – mode of representation, wherein a magical, immanent resemblance between sign and thing can somehow still be fantasized, imagined, posited” (102).

In this discussion of mimesis, one is immediately drawn to Taussig’s discussion of mimesis in the other’s ability to imitate, an ability that is primitivized. In Taussig’s project, the act of becoming (like) someone else seems complicated when taking into account the asymmetrical conditions of exchange in mimesis that Chow finds in this cross-cultural relation. On another level, Chow seems to go farther with her third level of mimesis – “the level at which the ethnic person is expected to come to resemble what is recognizably ethnic” (107).

Drawing from the Foucauldian notion of the confession, the act of performing one’s ethnicity becomes on the one hand a form of self-mimicry, but also becomes a symptom of a collective subjection through a coercive mimeticism­, where one’s authenticity can be legitimated and whose social and cultural existence can be rewarded.

Mimesis, an act that ethnic subjects perform “in order to exist as themselves,” becomes a modification of desire itself, where the ethnic subject compulsively confesses their own authenticity. This mode of power is not to be found outside of the self, but rather internalized and engendered as an ethnic subject. Does it become a question of the exteriority versus interiority? Whereas Taussig fails to provide a theory of subjectivity, Chow would seem to argue that it is the mimetic compulsion of the ethnic subject that continually determines and drives subjectivity.

How does Chow’s notion of the compulsory self-ownership of ethnicity and the performative confession that is required for the “authentic” subject complicate Taussig’s argument? How does Chow go farther? If reiterations of self-mimicry are linked to the confession's application in biopower, allowing a most intimate and internalized power relation, where the radical becomes complicit in the very powers that subordinate it, what does Chow see as a radical form of identity politics, if any?

Close Reading :

From Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I, P. 29:

Before the assembled public, one of the professors, a certain Wolke, asked the students selected questions concerning the mysteries of sex, birth, and procreation. He had them comment on engravings that depicted a pregnant woman, a couple, and a cradle. The replies were enlightened, offered without shame or embarrassment. No unseemly laughter intervened to disturb them--except from the very ranks of an adult audience more childish than the children themselves, and whom Wolke severely reprimanded. At the end, they all applauded these cherub-faced boys who, in front of adults, had skillfully woven the garlands of discourse and sex.

In this passage, Foucault describes an effort typical of modern (European) sexual education amongst children to incite in them a highly codified discourse about sex. Against assumptions of a Victorian-style silencing of children's discursive treatment of sex, Foucault argues that the sexuality of children, in the case of boarding schools as one primary example, was a constant issue not only amongst teachers, architects and psychologists, but also in conversations between adults and children. This discursive production of sexual subjects, he argues, has been instrumental in a state power that ensures its economic viability through biopolitical means.

While Foucault lays out a rationale for regulating and producing a sexual discourse amongst these children, he leaves the laughter of adults uninterrogated. Within the analytic framework she sets out, can this episode be understood as an imitation of the assumed primitivity of the children's sexual drives? What work is the instruction's reprimanding intended to accomplish? If we take his irritation to be an attempt to prevent the debasement of the purity of the children's discourse, what work does the moment do for the construction of adult subjects?

What role do children as 'pure beings,' an element contained within Man yet separated by a caesura, play in the development of the modern biopolitical order? What links can we draw between their purity, and that of whiteness within the discourse of a liberalism that, as Chow argues, tends to construct images of essentialized, yet 'equal' ethnic identities, as it obscures the political plane upon which a process of hierarchization and exclusion take place?

Screening Question:

In Born Into Brothels, as in "News Advisory--Listen to the Children," children are positioned as the figures who are to give insight of "detailed knowledge," as phrased in the News Advisory, of their personal experiences, through the use of their “voice” as a kind of confessional. Inciting a discourse on the part of these children, moreover, is represented as capable of somehow saving them. Such an optimism for the mediums of speech and videography can be seen as a kind of 'ethnographic compulsion,' or the desire to gather a detailed account of their lives through the confessional. If biopower can be seen as a protection and promulgation of pure or bare life, a life that must be protected at all costs, then what kind of violence do we think Chow would argue is justified, even mandated by these depictions of the kind of life to be saved? What liberation or salvation is to be found in this particular instance of an 'incitement to discourse,' and what role does that incitement play in the construction of a biopolitical order?