LATE RESPONSE POST FOR WEEK 13 CLOSE READING: Monica Garcia

As we approach ethnography as a anthropological and well as representational problematic, Alfredo’s blog post concerning the limits of significations succinctly lays out the stakes in any attempt. What are the limits of the ethnographic subject? What limits does this subject reveal through the radical alterity, limits that Taussig perhaps points to in Mimesis and Alterity, or a liminality that Chow refers to concerning race in The Protestant Ethnic. Through a reading of Doane’s Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, the limits of signification, representation through the revelation and exploitation of death and catastrophe, are at once a lure and threat of referentiality. One the one hand, it is the “lure of referentiality” that maintains the gaze of the spectator, precisely because of the threat of referentiality that televisual catastrophe promises, but always defers. However, even as the threat and anxiety surrounding these limits are always disavowed through an othering of victimization and representation, there is still always the threat.

It would be interesting to think through the relation of ethnography to television in terms of temporality, distance, and representation. If television is a continuous stream of image and information that insists on the immediate, urgent and discontinuous, then how does/can one represent the ethnographic subject in this stream, particularly if this subject is one, as Fabian might argue, that is placed within another temporality? In other words, what is at stake in the televisual representation of ethnic subjects? How does such a temporality and representation figure into the body of the ethnic subject? When the televisual catastrophe collides with a catastrophe of race as infringing on national consciousness, as Giroux gestures toward, what can be said about this encounter and the implications that each has on the other? Alfredo points to these issues, central questions that draw from many of the readings from throughout the course. One question that Alfredo raised seems particularly provocative: “how does maintaining death as the limit of technology and signification help underpin particular modes of representation?”

Monica Garica