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The vicissitudes of postnational affects: visuality, temporality, and corporeality in global east Asian films
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The vicissitudes of postnational affects: visuality, temporality, and corporeality in global east Asian films
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THE VICISSITUDES OF POSTNATIONAL AFFECTS:
VISUALITY , TEMPORALITY , AND CORPOREALITY
IN GLOBAL EAST ASIAN FILMS
by
Jecheol Park
_________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION: CRITICAL STUDIES)
December 2012
Copyright 2012 Jecheol Park
ii
Dedication
For Byung-hee, Eunchan, Noir, Whalgi, and Manjaro
iii
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Part I: Visuality 12
Chapter 1 16
Generifying the Exotic in Kim Ki-duk’s Recent Films
Chapter 2 43
Toward the Ungovernable Exotic: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai and
Flight of the Red Balloon
Part II: Temporality 76
Chapter 3 79
The Real Subsumption of Alternative Temporalities in Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of
Cinema
Chapter 4 110
The Postnational Time that Remains: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Distance
Part III: Corporeality
Chapter 5 137
Gestures beyond Thanato-political Bodies
Afterword 185
Bibliography 190
iv
Abstract
One of the salient changes East Asian films have undergone during the
past decade of globalization is their increasing tendency to foreground affective
intensities that are excessive in relation to their thematic or signifying aspects. My
dissertation, The Vicissitudes of Postnational Affects: Visuality, Temporality, and
Corporeality in Global East Asian Films, explores political implications of these
affective features as expressed in some of the recent East Asian films, focusing on
their relationships with the postnational condition that has increasingly swept over
East Asia during the past two decades. By the term postnational condition, I mean the
recent remarkable change in the mode of socio-political power, which is characterized
by the gradual simultaneous processes of the decline of sovereign and disciplinary
powers and the rise of global neoliberal governmentality. As such, the postnational
condition needs to be understood as a double-edge sword in the sense that it makes it
possible for hitherto unrepresentable affective others to emerge at the same time that
it prepares for a new condition that makes it possible to manage and rationalize them
in such a calculative manner that it may preempt subversive forms of affective
otherness from appearing. My dissertation calls attention to how recent East Asian
films have responded to this postnational condition in different ways by developing
various kinds of narrative and stylistic strategies that can cinematically express, as
well as cope with, this affective otherness.
v
My dissertation focuses on three aspects of film experience—its visual,
temporal, and corporeal ones—in which affective otherness is expressed in films. Part
I focuses on the phenomenon of global exoticism and discusses and compares
different ways East Asian films deploy the aesthetics of the exotic vis-à-vis the
dominant neoliberal tactics of valorizing visual alterity or excess. If Kim Ki-duk’s
recent films such as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron
(2004) show how the exotic can undergo generification, thereby losing its singularity
in accordance with the neoliberal governmental management of visual excess, Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s recent films, such as Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Flight of the Red
Balloon (2007) illustrate the possibility that the residual, unvalorizable exotic can
appear in the cinema of the era of neoliberal governmentality.
Part II addresses how affective otherness can be expressed through
contingency and temporal heterogeneity. The compulsive repetition characteristic of
Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema (2005) serves to turn otherwise singular
contingencies into probabilistic, and thus valorizable chances. This examination of
Hong’s film shows how neoliberal governmentality regularizes these temporal
disturbances through the process of the real subsumption of time. Yet, alternative
thoughts on time such as Deleuze’s notion of the empty form of time and Benjamin-
Agamben’s notion of the dialectical image indicate the possibility that unvalorizable
temporal excess can remain in the form of a potential for becoming other. Kore-eda
Hirokazu’s Distance (2001) expresses this possibility by employing narrative and
vi
formal strategies that fill the time for repetition with immeasurable possibilities and
hesitations.
Part III shifts its focus to the dark underside of these seemingly subversive
affects. Biopolitical valorization of affects accompanies, as its underside, the thanato-
political suppressions of unvalorizable bodies and gestures. Yet, thanato-politics is not
simply a matter of processes of suppressing corporeal otherness, but is crucial to
maintaining neoliberal biopolitical governmentality because it justifies the need to
remove unvalorizable corporeal otherness by negatively regularizing it. Park Chan-
wook’s Thirst (2009), though performing this thanato-political valorization, discloses
how unvalorizable corporeal otherness is already internal rather than external to
neoliberal biopolitical valorization, thereby problematizing the call for the thanato-
political suppression of others. Part III also examines how unvalorizable corporeal
otherness can elude the thanato-political valorization process and subsist in the form
of the pure means without ends. Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll and Jia Zhang-ke’s
Useless illustrate how these films allow audiences to encounter unvalorizable
gestures and corporeal residues beyond the Sadean fantasy and thereby enable them
to imagine a new community grounded on pure communicability without end.
1
Introduction
One of the salient changes East Asian films have undergone in the age of
globalization, especially during the past decade or so, is their increasing tendency to
foreground affective intensities to such an extent that these affects look gratuitous or
excessive in relation to their thematic or signifying aspects. As can be seen in
paradigmatic East Asian national film movements, such as the Japanese New Wave of
the 1960s, and more recently, the Chinese 5th Generation cinema, the New Taiwan
cinema, and the Korean New Wave, what was crucial about earlier East Asian
“national” cinemas is that they critically interrogated social, political, and historical
conditions of respective nation-states, questioning and challenging officially accepted
notions of these conditions. Irrespective of whatever narrative and stylistic strategies
these films employed, signification was their primary concern in that they aimed at
critiquing the normative or hegemonic modes of signification, thus recovering non-
normative or marginal ones, or multiplying possible meanings.
More recently, however, as can be seen in the films of Kim Ki-duk, Hou
Hsiao-hsien, Hong Sang-soo, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Miike Takashi, Park Chan-wook,
and Jia Zhang-ke, affective qualities in excess of signifying processes have become
one of the most distinctive features of East Asian films. For instance, unlike Im
Kwon-taek’s Seopyeonje (1992), where the exotic nature of pansori—a form of
Korean traditional folk music—is considered to come from cultural differences
2
specific to Korea, Kim Ki-duk’s recent films, such as Spring, Summer, Fall,
Winter…and Spring (2003), or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, such as Flowers of Shanghai
(1998), show exotic images so intensively appealing that they cannot simply be the
effects of such specific cultural differences. In other words, this kind of exoticness is
in no way the kind of excess that can be dissipated by a proper knowledge about, or a
sufficient acquaintance with, the relevant cultural characteristics, but rather pure
affective excess that remains even after cultural decipherments are made.
My dissertation, The Vicissitudes of Postnational Affects: Visuality,
Temporality, and Corporeality in Global East Asian Films, explores political
implications of these affective features as expressed in some of the recent East Asian
films, focusing on their relationships with the postnational condition that has
increasingly swept over East Asia during the past two decades. By the term
postnational condition, I mean the recent remarkable change in the mode of socio-
political power, which is characterized by the gradual simultaneous processes of the
decline of the old modes of socio-political power, namely, sovereign and disciplinary
powers and the rise of the new hegemonic mode of socio-political power, that is,
global neoliberal governmentality in Michel Foucault’s sense, or the society of
control in Gilles Deleuze’s term. As thinkers such as Brian Massumi and Michael
Hardt/Antonio Negri have proposed, what characterizes the decline of the old powers
is, among others, the production and circulation of affects as non-signifying
intensities that have mostly been suppressed under the dominance of sovereign and
3
disciplinary powers, whose function is to produce religious, moral, and juridico-legal
signifying practices. This decline of the old modes of power has strongly influenced
the role of cinema as well as other forms of mass media in the society. Cinema, which
has been regarded as an important disciplinary or ideological apparatus, has
increasingly turned into an affect-producing apparatus. Indeed, this newly acquired
capacity of cinema enables it to express hitherto unrepresentable features of social
and cultural otherness in the form of affectivity.
Yet, this postnational cinematic potential to produce affective otherness is
in no way automatically emancipatory as Massumi writes:
Resistance is manifestly not automatically a part of image
reception in late capitalist cultures. But neither can the effect
of the mass media and other image- and information-based
media simply be explained in terms of a lack: a waning of
affect, a decline in belief, or alienation. The mass media are
massively potentializing, but the potential is inhibited, and
both the emergence of the potential and its limitation are part
and parcel of the cultural-political functioning of the media,
as connected to other apparatuses. Media transmissions are
breaches of indetermination.
1
I would argue that what Foucault terms global neoliberal governmentality refers to
the very form of power that is dedicated to regularize, valorize, and thus domesticate
the otherwise unruly and unpredictable potential of affects in general, and that of
cinematic affects in particular. As such, the postnational condition needs to be
1
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 43.
4
understood as a double-edge sword in the sense that it makes it possible for hitherto
unrepresentable affective others to emerge at the same time that it prepares for a new
condition that makes it possible to manage and rationalize them in such a calculative
manner that it may preempt subversive forms of affective otherness from appearing.
My dissertation calls attention to how recent East Asian films have
responded to this postnational condition in different ways by developing various
kinds of narrative and stylistic strategies that can cinematically express, as well as
cope with, this affective otherness. This process of expressing affective otherness is
not entirely liberatory insofar as these films, regardless of whether they are classified
as popular or art films, have negotiated their affective expressions in relation to global
neoliberal governmentality’s management of affective production. In this respect, my
dissertation focuses on what different forms of affective expressions some of the
recent postnational East Asian films, especially the ones made during the past decade,
have developed in order to cope differently with—to conform to, challenge, or
disturb—global neoliberal govermentality’s flexible and tolerant yet calculative
management of affective otherness. Furthermore, considering that the task of coping
with otherness is crucial to imagining a new community in the postnational condition,
my dissertation also explores what senses and imaginations of postnational
community the affective productions of recent global East Asian films can produce,
confronted with the decline of the senses of national community.
5
As this description indicates, my dissertation interweaves critical
approaches, key concepts, and significant information drawn from different fields,
including critical theories, film and media theories, social and political philosophy,
East Asian film studies, and socio-political histories of East Asia. The most important
concept throughout my dissertation is that of affect. My understanding of the term
affect is drawn primarily from the work of Deleuze (and Guattari) and/or Deleuzian
critics such as Massumi, as well as that of Lacan and/or recent Lacanian critics such
as Joan Copjec or Alenka Zupančič, but secondarily from the work of Walter
Benjamin. The most important reason I draw on their approaches to the concept is
that, unlike other cognitive, neurological, or psychological approaches, which tend to
assume the politically neutral individual nature of cinematic affective responses, these
thinkers highlight the social and political characters of affective visual, if not
specifically cinematic, experience. Deleuze’s work on affectivity is especially
important for my dissertation because not only does he develop philosophical and
political thoughts of affectivity but he also elaborates specifically on cinematic affects
in his books on cinema, Cinema 1: the Movement-image and Cinema 2: the Time-
image. But for my dissertation what is just as crucial to theorizing political
implications of affect is Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, where he elaborates a
truly ingenious theory of the complex relationship between socio-political changes
and modes of affectivity (jouissance). Furthermore, aside from those of Deleuze and
Guattari, and that of Lacan, Benjamin’s critical thoughts on modern mass culture, as
6
well as new senses of history are immensely beneficial for my exploration of the
social and political implications of cinematic affects even though his work was
written long before neoliberal governmentality historically appeared.
In addition to critical and philosophical work on the notion of affect, my
dissertation also draws much on the social and political thoughts Michel Foucault and
Giorgio Agamben have provided. Their thoughts—especially, Foucault’s notion of
neoliberal governmentality and Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, based on
his remarkable reading of Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and Benjamin’s ideas
of history, violence, and life—are enormously fruitful for theorizing the recent socio-
political changes as the postnational condition because these thoughts provide even
more concrete descriptions of these changes than thinkers such as Deleuze, Lacan,
and Benjamin’s brilliant yet somewhat abstract theories.
Interweaving these critical approaches and concepts in no way assumes
that this coexistence would not create any interference, friction, or discord between
them. Indeed, there have been ceaseless debates and discords among these thinkers
themselves as well as their disciples and proponents. Oppositions and antagonisms
between Deleuze and Freud/Lacan, as well as between their champions, among others,
are conspicuous since their texts include numerous explicitly harsh critiques of each
other. Nevertheless, at least some of their writings and talks do include thoughts that
do not simply oppose or overlap, but intensify and supplement each other to such an
extent that they seem to speak in the guise of each other in the mode of free indirect
7
speech or that they seem to form “sinthomatic” knots in relation to each other, albeit
without any clear common denominators between them. For instance, even though
Deleuze and Lacan explicitly clash against each other in understanding the notion of
desire, the Deleuzian notion of affect and the Lacanian notion of jouissance give us a
good opportunity to think them together. Ultimately, these unlikely encounters, rather
than dialogues, between these thinkers turn out to be much more productive than
appear.
2
As the title suggests, my dissertation focuses on three aspects of film
experience—its visual, temporal, and corporeal ones—in which affective otherness is
prominently expressed in films. Part I, which consists of two chapters, focuses on the
phenomenon of global exoticism and discusses and compares different ways East
Asian films deploy the aesthetics of the exotic vis-à-vis the dominant neoliberal
tactics of valorizing visual alterity or excess. As critics such as Rey Chow and Olivia
Khoo have recently pointed out, the exotic cannot be seen simply as stereotypical
signifying elements, but rather as differential fetishes that exceed the economy of the
exchange of signs. Chapter 1, however, argues that this affirmative assessment of the
exotic is subject to reconsideration if we look at the change that has occurred to the
exotic in the transition from the era of sovereign and disciplinary powers to that of
global neoliberal governmentality. Drawing on Lacan’s discussion of the university’s
2
Slavoj Žižek describes the Lacanian reading of Deleuze as an encounter rather than a dialogue
between the two. Slavoj Žižek , Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York:
Routledge, 2004), ix.
8
discourse and Foucault’s discussion of neoliberal governmentality, I show how the
exotic can undergo generification, thereby losing its singularity in accordance with
the neoliberal governmental management of visual excess. In this chapter, I illustrate
this point by discussing the affective changes from early to late Kim Ki-duk’s films,
for instance, from Bad Guy (2001) to 3-Iron (2004).
Unlike Chapter 1, which focuses on the East Asian cinema’s inevitable
adoption of neoliberal governmental processes of valorizing the exotic, through
employing Lacan’s notion of the University’s discourse and Benjamin’s notions of
distraction and awakening, Chapter 2 explores the possibility that the residual,
unvalorizable exotic can appear in the East Asian cinema of the age of global
neoliberal governmentality. As a case study, I show how Hou’s recent films, such as
Flowers of Shanghai and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), express this unvalorizable
exoticness through narrative and formal techniques that produce any-affect-whatever
and spectral exotic images.
If Part I focuses on the appearance of affective otherness in terms of
visuality, Part II, which also consists of two chapters, addresses how affective
otherness can be expressed in terms of temporality in the forms of contingency and
temporal heterogeneity. Since Henry Bergson’s and Benjamin’s critique of modern
time as homogeneous progressive time, critics have called attention to the
proliferation of temporal disturbances such as contingencies and non-chronological
labyrinthine times. Clearly, this temporal aberrance has increased remarkably when
9
sovereign and disciplinary orders have faced their crisis. But in Chapter 3, I show
how neoliberal governmentality regularizes these temporal disturbances through the
process of the real subsumption of time. In this chapter, drawing on Deleuze’s critical
reading of Bergson’s notion of time as memory, I also argue how this neoliberal
valorization of time is already implicit even in otherwise heterogeneous Bergsonian
time. I demonstrate this claim through a close reading of Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of
Cinema (2005), focusing on how its compulsive repetition serves to turn otherwise
singular contingencies into probabilistic, and thus valorizable chances.
Nevertheless, in Chapter 4, I show how there is a residual time that cannot
be reduced to valorizable contingencies and temporal heterogeneities based on the
return of the same or the similar. Alternative thoughts on time such as Deleuze’s
notion of the empty form of time and Benjamin-Agamben’s notion of the dialectical
image, I argue, show the possibility that unvalorizable temporal excess can remain in
the form of the potential to become other, to metamorphose. In this chapter, I also
examine film theories on temporal stillness recently developed by Raymond Bellour
and Laura Mulvey, focusing on their relevance to the alternative notions of time. As a
case study, I closely read Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Distance (2001) to show how this film
expresses this potential by employing narrative and stylistic strategies that fill the
time for repetition with immeasurable possibilities and hesitations. In this discussion,
I also highlight how Distance, imagining the time for becoming, enables us to
10
envision a new form of community with others to come beyond those coexisting in
different temporal layers.
If Part I and II have explored the emergence of unvalorizable affects in an
optimistic light, Part III, which consists of Chapter 5, shifts its focus to the dark
underside of these seemingly subversive affects. What also makes Part III distinct
from the previous parts is that it focuses on the ways in which films express affective
otherness in terms of corporeality. Unlike sovereign and disciplinary powers, which
suppress and exclude corporeal deviations from the society, neoliberal
governmentality is characterized by its biopolitical valorization of these corporeal
affects. However, as Foucault notes, this biopolitical control accompanies, as its
underside, the thanato-political suppressions of unvalorizable bodies and gestures.
Historically, this has determined all kinds of racism and fascism. But how do those
worthless bodies and gestures become so appalling, threatening, or dreadful that they
can provoke the population’s spontaneous call for thanato-political suppression?
Through Lacan’s notion of the analyst’s discourse and his discussion of the Sadean
fantasy, I argue that thanato-politics is not simply a matter of processes of suppressing
corporeal otherness, but involves a negative form of affective valorization. Here my
point is that this thanato-political, or fanatic valorization is crucial to maintaining
neoliberal biopolitical governmentality because it justifies the need to remove
unvalorizable corporeal otherness by negatively regularizing it. As I show in the
following sections, many of the recent “Extreme” East Asian films can be seen as
11
performing this thanato-political valorization. However, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst
(2009), though exhibiting the features of extreme East Asian films, I argue, discloses
how unvalorizable corporeal otherness is already internal rather than external to
neoliberal biopolitical valorization, thereby problematizing the call for the thanato-
political suppression of others.
The latter part of Chapter 5 examines how unvalorizable corporeal
remainder can elude and survive the thanato-political valorization process.
Interweaving Lacan’s notion of the analyst’s discourse, Benjamin’s notion of pure
violence, and Agamben’s discussions of bare life in the state of exception, I
demonstrate how this unvalorizable corporeal otherness can subsist in the form of the
pure means without ends, as can be seen in the camp inhabitant’s tics and
inarticulable babbles. In the following sections, I closely discuss Kore-eda Hirokazu’s
Air Doll and Jia Zhang-ke’s Useless to show how these films allow audiences to be
affected by unvalorizable gestures and corporeal residues beyond the Sadean fantasy
and thereby force them to imagine a new community grounded on pure
communicability without end.
12
Part I
Visuality
In recent years, some critics have challenged Edward Said’s well-
acknowledged claim that non-Western exoticism indicates a dominant Western power
over non-Western cultures. These critics have more affirmatively re-evaluated the
exotic in recent East Asian films as well as the exotic images of East Asia in recent
American and European films: exoticness has the potential to destabilize the power of
the West over the non-West.
1
The main reason for this reassessment is that, insofar as
East Asia has achieved a considerable degree of modernization in terms of its
economy, culture, and politics, the East Asian exotic—far from indicating a
backwardness—should be understood as triumphant self-expressions of East Asian
cultures.
2
But this is never the sole potential of the East Asian exotic. These critics
also point out that East Asia’s exotic images do not so much reflect the allegedly
authentic features of East Asian cultures, but rather deviate from these features.
3
In
this respect, what is exotic about East Asia involves a power to de-essentialize and
de-territorialize cultural representations of East Asia.
1
See, for instance, Rey Chow, Primitive Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and
Olivia Khoo, The Chinese Exotic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007).
2
Khoo, Exotic, 11-12.
3
Chow, Passions, 59 and passim and Khoo, Exotic, 9 and passim.
13
This emphasis on the deconstructive potential of the East Asian exotic is
remarkable enough in its attempt to redeem the hitherto marginalized or supposedly
pejorative aspect of the representations of East Asian cultures. Nevertheless, it does
not adequately take into account what kind of change has been brought to this
deconstructive power of the exotic as East Asian films made since the late 1990s have
increasingly tended to harness the exotic to enhance profitability. With the increasing
investment in tourist industries in East Asia, East Asian films have deliberately
incorporated exotic factors as guarantees of the gratification of global, metropolitan,
and multicultural audiences rather than just Western audiences.
4
As recent martial
arts blockbusters demonstrate, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (d. Ang
Lee, 2003), Hero (d. Zhang Yimou, 2002), and Promise (d. Chen Kaige, 2005), the
East Asian exotic has become increasingly spectacular to ensure the enhancement of
the films’ production values. Yet this phenomenon is not confined to the blockbuster
scene, where the production of a film is aimed almost exclusively at the box office.
Films such as Chunhyangdyun (Im Kwon-taek, 2000), Dolls (Kitano Takeshi, 2002),
and Kim Ki-duk’s recent films, including Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring
(2002) and 3-Iron (2004), indicate that East Asian art house films have also
increasingly relied on exotic features for their aesthetic appeals. This recent
4
It is crucial to point out that these recent exotic East Asian films target not simply Western audiences,
but rather multicultural global audiences who usually reside in metropolises. This point clarifies how
unconvincing it is to claim—as many non-Western film critics continue to do—that these films pander
to Westerners by meeting their illusionary expectations about the non-West.
14
phenomenon does not simply aim to expose the increasing commercialization of
exotic features; rather, what is crucial about this tendency is that the very singularity,
unfamiliarity, or alterity of the exotic has been sufficiently manageable or governable
to establish a common measure for evaluating different kinds of exotic features.
Yet how can we understand this strange process in which the insubstantial,
incommensurable quality that characterizes the exotic in turn becomes controllable?
What social, political, and economic changes have motivated this process of making
the East Asian exotic governable and thus profitable? Is there any possibility that we
can find any residual forms of the exotic that elude or exceed those governing or
regularizing processes? In Part I, I will both theoretically and historically examine
what has happened to the exotic in global East Asian films in the transition from the
era of sovereign and disciplinary powers to that of global neoliberal governmentality.
Drawing on Lacan’s discussion of the University’s discourse and Foucault’s
discussion of neoliberal governmentality, Chapter 1 will show how the exotic can lose
its singularity and undergo generification in accordance with the neoliberal
governmental management of visual alterity. To illustrate this point, I will examine in
detail the affective change that has occurred from early to late Kim Ki-duk’s films,
for instance, from Bad Guy (2001) and The Isle (2000) to Spring, Summer, Fall,
Winter…and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004). In Chapter 2, drawing on Lacan’s
notion of the University’s discourse and Benjamin’s notions of distraction and
awakening, I will explore how a residual form of the unvalorizable exotic can appear
15
in the cinema of the era of neoliberal governmentality. As a case study, I will focus on
how Hou Hsiao-hsien’s recent films such as Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Flight of
the Red Balloon (2007) express this unvalorizable exoticness through narrative and
formal techniques that produce any-affect-whatevers and spectral exotic images.
16
Chapter 1
Generifying the Exotic in Kim Ki-duk’s Recent Films
The Exotic: From the Stereotypical to the Differential Fetish
Since Said’s critique of the Western knowledge of “the Orient” in
Orientalism, the non-Western exotic has been regarded as problematic in the sense
that it indicates the ways in which non-Western cultures are stereotypically perceived
and known to the West.
5
Clearly, this critical view of the exotic discloses the
inequality of power between the West and the non-West in producing knowledge
about the non-West.
6
But as poststructuralist critics such as Homi Bhabha have
pointed out, this typical criticism of exoticism does not fully consider the irreducible
vacillation involved in exoticizing non-Western others.
With reference to Freud’s theory of fetishism, Bhabha reveals how the
colonial stereotypes of non-Western people involve an operation of the simultaneous
recognition and disavowal of differences that characterize fetishism. Fetishism, as
Freud notes, involves the split of the ego between its perception of sexual difference
and its disavowal of this perception. According to Freud, every infant starts from the
5
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).
6
For critical discussions of tourist exoticism that are similiar to Said’s view of the exotic, see John
Urry, The Tourist Gaze : Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London : Sage Publications,
1990) and Ellen Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2003).
17
primordial belief that all men have penises. Yet when an infant (usually a boy) first
perceives his mother’s (or another woman’s) lack of penis, he disavows this
threatening perception and develops the belief that his mother has a substitute for her
missing penis. The fetish is this substitute.
7
Bhabha claims that this same psychic
mechanism operates in colonial stereotypes. Starting from the belief that “all men
have the same skin/race/culture,” the Western colonizer disavows his or her
perception that “some do not have the same skin/race/culture” and fetishizes the
colonized’s exotic skin/race/culture.
8
In this respect, Bhabha highlights, “The fetish
or stereotype gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and
pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory
belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it.”
9
However, despite his
emphasis on the vacillation inherent in stereotyping the non-West, he concludes that
the stereotype is ultimately a socio-psychic defense against the troublesome alterity of
the non-West.
10
Unlike Bhabha, who considers the exotic only in terms of lack, negation,
and substitution, critics such as Rey Chow and Olivia Khoo emphasize that the East
7
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Freud, Vol. XXI, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), 153.
8
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 74.
9
Bhabha, Location, 75.
10
Bhabha makes it clear that the stereotype is “an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in
denying the play of difference . . ., constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in
significations of psychic and social relations.” Bhabha, Location, 75; emphasis in the original.
18
Asian exotic in the recent films on which they specifically focus involves a positive
potential to diverge from any kind of knowledge about the “authentic” non-West,
regardless of whether this knowledge is produced by the West or the non-West.
Focusing on the 5
th
Generation Chinese films’ self-exoticist tendency, Chow
advocates this tendency by claiming that self-exoticism should be understood in terms
of “cross-cultural commodity fetishism.”
11
Yet Chow understands this notion in
terms of Spivak’s deconstructive reading of Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism
rather than in terms of the “orthodox” understanding of the notion. According to
Spivak, value embodied by commodity fetishism is a differential of commodity
exchange rather than a representation of labor. Likewise, the value embodied by the
Chinese exotic is a differential of the circulation of images among culturally different
collectives rather than a representation of the “authentic” Chinenessness. As long as
the Chinese exotic is defined as the differential, it diverges from any
knowledge/power that tries to construct the “authentic,” “essential,” or “pure”
Chineseness, regardless of whether this power is produced by the West or by China.
By shifting focus from mainland to diasporic Chinese films, where exoticness is
much more heterogeneous and complex, Khoo highlights the differential or eccentric
much more than the essential quality of the Chinese exotic. She also clarifies this by
11
Chow, Passions, 56-65.
19
understanding the term exotic to be that which is outside the systems of signification
and classification.
12
The Exotic in the Era of Sovereign and Disciplinary Powers
The critics discussed thus far, from Said to Khoo, share the idea that
sovereign and disciplinary powers in Foucault’s terms produce the hegemonic
knowledge of non-Western otherness. Yet as previously discussed, clearly an
irreducible inconsistency exists in their different perspectives on the non-Western
exotic—particularly between Said/Bhabha and Chow/Khoo. My approach to the non-
Western exotic, as I will now discuss, demonstrates how this apparent inconsistency
about the status of the exotic is not so much a problem, but is rather inevitable in
theorizing the relation between sovereign and disciplinary powers and non-Western
otherness.
Lacan’s theory of the discourses allows us to conceive of the relationship
of the exotic to sovereign and disciplinary powers in terms of that of object a to the
master’s discourse. In his seminar entitled “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,” Lacan
proposes a theory of the discourses that is not only comparable to, but also much
more sophisticated than Foucault’s notion of discourse and his later work on the
forms of power. What Lacan calls the master’s discourse, which is one of the four
12
Khoo, Exotic, 7. For positive statements of the exotic from the phenomenological and/or Deleuzian
perspectives, see Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) and
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion (New York: Verso, 2002).
20
discourses Lacan proposes, theorizes how sovereign and disciplinary powers both
subsume and fail to subsume otherness by simultaneously putting it into signification
and leaving some remainder behind.
S1 S2 S1: master signifier; S2: knowledge
------- ------ $ : subject; a: surplus jouissance
$ a
(Master’s Discourse)
Like the Foucaudian sovereign and disciplinary powers, the master’s
discourse describes the process of alienating the identification of the subject through
the signifying chain.
13
The discourse of Orientalism is an example of the master’s
discourse as it strives to identify non-Western people and their cultures through a set
of ethnic and racial stereotypical significations. This is the whole point of Said’s
critique of Orientalism. Lacan’s notion of the master’s discourse also makes a similar
point, but it also includes what Lacan terms object a—that is, the cause of desire or
surplus jouissance, which Foucault’s notion of sovereign and disciplinary powers
ignores. By using this formula of the Master’s discourse, Lacan clarifies the status of
object a in relation to sovereign and disciplinary signifying powers. It is defined as
the non-signifying remainder that emerges from the signifying operation. It is crucial
13
For Lacan’s detailed account of the process of the alienation of the subject within a signifying chain,
see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1977), ch.6.
21
to note that, although this remainder is non-signifying and thus regarded as a waste, it
nonetheless impacts the subject as a purely affective force or intensity.
14
In this respect, the object a in the master’s discourse designates the exotic
that deviates from sovereign and disciplinary powers or that results from their failure
to subsume completely non-Western otherness. This discussion makes it evident why
inconsistency has appeared in conceiving the exotic among the previously discussed
critics. This inconsistency has everything to do with the elusive character of the
exotic as object a. The otherness of the exotic is officially registered as nothing
insofar as it has no meaning from the perspective of signifying sovereign and
disciplinary powers. However, given that it produces affective effects on the subject,
it cannot be dismissed simply as nothing. Furthermore, by paying more attention to
these non-signifying affective effects, as Chow and Khoo did, one can claim that
exoticism has a much more positive potential to swerve off the hegemonic discourses
of the non-West.
This understanding of the exotic as object a also enables us to distinguish
exoticism as such from specific ethnic, racial, and/or national differences. Chow
made a similar observation about this distinction. Problematizing the prevailing leftist
notion of the third world texts as national allegories, according to which Chinese
“national” films should be read as allegories of social, cultural, and political issues
14
For a more detailed clarification of Lacan’s notion of the master’s discourse, see Alenka Zupančič,
“When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, eds. Russell Grigg et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
22
specific to China, she claims that the 5
th
Generation Chinese cinema’s self-exoticist
features, such as “stunning sensuous qualities,” involve differences irreducible to any
specific differences of China from other parts of the world, thereby reinventing
Chineseness.
15
In this respect, the exotic as object a involves singular rather than
specific differences, or it involves difference-in-itself in Deleuze’s term.
16
For
example, the exaggerated—thus, exotic—yellowish color of the desert in Chen
Kaige’s Yellow Earth can be a singular difference of China irreducible to any specific
feature of Chineseness. As such, the Chinese exotic looks unfamiliar or inassimilable
not only to non-Chinese people, but also to Chinese people. Thus, it is untranslatable
from any cultural perspective rather than being untranslatable only from non-Chinese
perspectives.
The Exotic in the Transition to Global Neoliberal Governmentality
Although critics such as Chow and Khoo pertinently theorize the exotic as
a pure or sensual differential rather than involving cultural stereotypes or specific
cultural differences, this theorization does not sufficiently consider the change that
has occurred to the exotic in the transition from the age of sovereign and disciplinary
powers to the age of global neoliberal governmentality. They optimistically seem to
15
Chow, Passions, 57.
16
See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), ch.1.
23
assert that, the more non-Western exotic film images proliferate and circulate around
the world, the more potentialities of alterity the world will have. However, in doing
so, they fail to take into account how the more flexible form of power called
neoliberal governmentality has increasingly replaced more rigid disciplinary
mechanisms since the 1970s, thereby allowing the exotic to circulate globally, but
under calculative control and management.
Scholars such as Ernest Mandel, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson
similarly stress the increased flexibility of the new form of late or post-Fordist
capitalism that has increasingly replaced the older form of early or Fordist
capitalism.
17
In addition—and more significantly—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
have pointed out that this new form of capitalism is flexible enough to engage the
production of affects, as evident in the service sectors of the economy.
18
Moreover,
they believe that the only form of power that obstructs the emancipatory potentials of
alterity and heterogeneity is that of sovereign and disciplinary powers; thus, Hardt
and Negri conclude that the increase in the production of affects under the new form
of capitalism will intensify “the collective potential of insubordination and revolt” of
the multitude, thereby disintegrating the hierarchical sovereign and disciplinary
17
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London : Verso, 1978) ; David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity (Malden: Blackwell, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
18
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 289-294.
24
powers.
19
Yet once we listen to Foucault’s later work, their conclusion can seem
hasty at best. In his later work on liberal and neoliberal governmentality, Foucault
demonstrates how the new flexible form of power deregulates sovereign and
disciplinary powers, but “it cannot do this—and this is the other side of the coin—
without at the same time managing the dangers and mechanisms of
security/freedom.”
20
Consequently, Foucault stresses that apparatuses (dispositifs) of
security are crucial to understanding how liberalism and neoliberalism operate. As he
clearly points out, “The apparatus of security . . . ‘lets things happen.’ Not that
everything is left alone, but laisser-faire is indispensible at a certain level”
21
in order
to “establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but [by] achieving an
overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers.”
22
Like Hardt and Negri, Foucault also acknowledges that post-Fordist capitalism
subsumes affects within the economic sphere. However, at the same time, he makes it
clear that this subsumption allows us to manage and control affects through economic
calculations rather than by making our life unstable, unpredictable, or risky. Foucault
gives an example of the neoliberal subsumption of affects by noting how, from the
19
Negri and Hardt, Empire, 29.
20
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66.
21
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 45.
22
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, eds. Mauro Bertani et al., trans. David Macey (New
York: Picador, 2003), 249.
25
neoliberal perspective, the affective relationship between mother and child is
perceived in terms of investment, capital costs, and profit.
23
But what happens to affects when they are made manageable and
controllable if they are not simply suppressed as under the sovereign and disciplinary
forms of power? Lacan’s theory of the discourses is once again helpful here. Just as
Foucault focuses his work on the change in the form of power from disciplinary
mechanisms to liberal and neoliberal governmentality, Lacan proposes a similar
change in the mode of discourse from the master’s to the university’s discourse.
S2 a S1: master signifier; S2: knowledge
------- ------ $ : subject; a: surplus jouissance
S1 $
(University’s Discourse)
The university’s discourse shows that object a, which was excluded as a
non-signifying affective remainder (“a”) from the signifying operation in the master’s
discourse, is now put into a new kind of valorizing operation (“S2a”). In this new
operation, knowledge (“S2”) enables one to determine the value of object a that is
undeterminable in the master’s discourse. Valorized by this knowledge, Lacan notes,
different object a’s—that is, different jouissances or affects—lose their
incommensurable singularities and become commensurable and thus countable in
23
Foucault, Biopolitics, 243-244.
26
terms of extensive quantity. As Massumi argues, this valorization of affects indicates
that affects can serve as means of producing surplus values,
24
which accounts for
how the affects evoked by the non-Western exotic, when subsumed by neoliberal
governmentality or what Lacan calls the university’s discourse, become less singular
and more generic. However, this neoliberal valorization of affects in general and the
exotic in particular should not be confused with sovereign and disciplinary powers’
determinations of value. The new valorization process is much more flexible (i.e., it
does not aim to determine value precisely, but is content with determining the
approximate range of value) and much more instable than sovereign and disciplinary
powers’ rigid, stable valorization. Moreover, unlike the latter, which aims to regulate
each individual and each object, the former is content with regulating a population or
a multiplicity of objects. This is why knowledge in the university’s discourse takes
the form of statistical, probabilistic data rather than a deterministic knowledge about a
specific person or object. Despite this flexibility, this valorization process still works
to assess affects.
24
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 218-219.
Massumi distinguishes between the notion of affect and the notion of emotion; the former is a pure
intensity beyond measure whereas the latter, as a valorized intensity, serves as a source for economic
exploitation.
27
From Inassimilable to Governable Exoticness: Kim Ki-duk’s films
South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk’s films, particularly his earlier ones
from Crocodile (1996) to The Coast Guard (2002), have provoked intense debates
among local as well as Western film critics. Significantly, those who harshly criticize
them usually speak about their politically incorrect treatment of women or the
filmmaker’s lack of skill in filmmaking.
25
On the other hand, those who acclaim his
films mostly focus on the fact that they address social outcasts or that they are
characterized by strikingly sensual or affective qualities.
26
This division of responses
indicates that his films have produced a great amount of affective “waste” that
sovereign and disciplinary institutions have to throw away, given that the negative
responses to his films are ultimately complaining about his and his films’ lack of
discipline.
27
Yet from the previously discussed theoretical point of view, it is also
problematic that the champions of his films applaud their affectivity uncritically
without scrutiny. Indeed, when we examine affective features of his films more
attentively, we can be aware of a certain change in his films’ affectivity that has
occurred from his earlier to his more recent films. I would argue that if his earlier
films, from Crocodile (1996) to The Coast Guard (2002), tended to produce the
25
See, for instance, Tony Rayns, “Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk,” Film
Comment, 40.6 (Nov/Dec 2004) and Darcy Paquet’s review of The Isle at
http://www.koreanfilm.org/kfilm04.html#3iron, accessed July 8, 2010.
26
See, for instance, Adrien Gombeaud, “Break on Through,” Kim Ki-duk, eds. Adreien Gombeaud et
al. (Paris: Edition Dis Voir).
27
Kim once described (or was forced to describe) his films as a waste in a “masochistic” manner.
28
singular exotic that disturbed still lingering sovereign and disciplinary powers, his
more recent films, from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring (2003) to the
most recent film Arirang (2011), have increasingly generified the exotic to meet the
global neoliberal governmentality’s demand to valorize affects.
28
One of the best
ways to identify this change is by comparing his earlier and more recent films in
terms of the strategies both sets of films share in common to enhance the intensity of
the exotic.
Muteness: Bad Guy and 3-Iron
Mute characters often appear in Kim’s films. In most cases, they are not
speech-handicapped, but rather seem to refuse to talk for unknown reasons or simply
seem reticent. For the West, a lack of speech or reticence has often been stereotyped
as a sign of Asian exotic modesty or shyness; however, muteness in Kim’s films
cannot simply seen as a certain form of lack, but rather a locus or moment in which
spectators—whether Western or non-Western—experience intensive affects. In other
words, from the perspective of the signifying disciplinary power, this lack of speech
is regarded as defective, but Kim’s films remarkably transform it into good
opportunities for non-signifying affects to be expressed. As Steve Choe and Hye
28
Jinhee Choi insightfully but somewhat descriptively comments on this affective change: “If Kim’s
previous films are filled with primal passions and perversions, his later films are subliminal,
foregrounding mood over overt emotions.” Jinhee Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 178. For a different account of the valorization of the
non-Western exotic, Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (New York: Routledge, 2001).
29
Seung Chung, drawing on Bela Balazs’s and Deleuzes’work, pertinently note, in
these speechless moments, Kim’s films often offer spectators visually intensive
images, such as expressive close-up images of faces that are comparable to those in
silent films.
29
Bela Balazs, an early formalist film theorist, and later Gilles Deleuze
have emphasized the affective quality of expressive close-up facial images in cinema,
particularly in silent cinema. According to both thinkers, the affective close-up
images of faces as well as other objects involves something indefinite in excess of
“determinate space-time, spatio-temporal co-ordinates, objects and people, real
connections between all these givens.”
30
Indeed, these silent affective images
characteristic of Kim’s films to a large extent account for his films’ exoticness.
The two most expressive of his films that include such speechless facial
images are Bad Guy (2001), one of his earlier films, and 3-Iron (2004), one of his
more recent films. At first glance, both Bad Guy and 3-Iron look similar in evoking
such indefinite affective excess. However, a more careful examination reveals that,
unlike Bad Guy, which to a large extent leaves silent facial affects indeterminate, 3-
Iron tends to regularize the affects of the silent protagonists’ close-up images. Han-gi,
the male protagonist in Bad Guy, is a thug who remains silent throughout the film
with the exception of one scene. He is far from an apparently gentle businessman-like
29
Steve Choe, “Cinema of Cruelty: Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Economy,” Positions, 15.1
(2007) and Hye Seung Chung, Kim Ki-duk (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
30
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson et al. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 97.
30
gangster; instead, he looks like an unpleasant, untidily dressed rascal or tramp from
the normative disciplinary point of view. Nevertheless, his images often impact us as
indeterminate affective forces that have become detached from his social condition.
This indeterminacy of his affective quality is already clear from the
“notorious” opening scene. The scene begins with a shot showing a pretty young
college girl named Seon-hwa sitting on a bench on a busy street in Seoul. Passing-by,
Han-gi notices her, approaches her, sits next to her on the same bench, and begins to
stare at her. Feeling uncomfortable with his gaze, she averts her eyes and answers a
call from her boyfriend. When her boyfriend shows up, she leaves the bench to hug
him lovingly and chat with him. Suddenly, Han-gi intervenes and kisses her by force.
Beating him with a trash can, her boyfriend succeeds in separating the two of them.
When Han-gi is about to leave, Seon-hwa demands that he apologize to her; when he
refuses, a passing group of the Marine Corps beats him and demands that he
apologize to her. When he still refuses to do so, Seon-hwa spits on him and leaves
with her boyfriend. Eventually, Han-gi is left alone within the frame. From the
perspective of the social norms of behaviors, Han-gi is a bad guy like the title
indicates. However, because we spectators are affected by his silent facial close-up
images in this scene, we can feel that he is to some extent obscure and that his act has
something beyond disciplinary morality. Clearly, as the film narrative moves forward,
we can more or less empathize with him through the fact that he is also socially
vulnerable, yet has a responsibility to his followers. Still, he remains unfathomably
31
violent, whimsical, and uncontrollable beyond our empathy with him, and this
affective eccentricity is intensified by, among other factors, his speechless close-up
images.
Furthermore, Han-gi’s affective indeterminacy does not dissolve even
when we eventually hear him speak in one scene, “Love? Bullshit! No love for the
gangster!” when he violently beats one of his followers for unclear and mixed reasons.
Even at this moment, the signifying aspect of what he says is less important than the
affective intensity of his voice, for his voice is inaudibly coarse, thereby adding
something extra-linguistic to the meaning of what he says. In this respect, his mute
close-up images are not simply equivalent to those in silent films. Rather, they are
also reminiscent of early sound films, such as Fritz Lang’s M (1931). As Michel
Chion notes, the appearance of the voice in cinema did not simply mean the
restoration of speech in the silent cinematic world, but rather added something
eccentric or bizarre to silent cinema, and early sound films like M experimented with
this unnatural and enigmatic dimension of the voice.
31
Similarly, mute characters and their expressive close-up images
characterize Kim’s more recent film 3-Iron. Not one, but two protagonists are
speechless throughout the film, except for the ending sequence, when the female
protagonist Seon-hwa begins to speak very clearly, “I love you.” Like Han-gi in Bad
31
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999)
32
Guy, Tae-seok, the male protagonist of 3-Iron, also seems to live outside disciplinary
social norms by stubbornly keeping silent even though he is able to speak, as
indicated within the narrative. He also looks weird or even insane in that all he does is
find a temporarily vacated house and live in it without permission until the owner
returns. However, at the same time, he seems normal and has probably no intention of
harming others. He is a well-educated handsome young man, who has a clean-cut,
charming appearance and is “fashionable” enough to ride a BMW bike. He even
cleans the houses he occupies and does the laundry. In this respect, his seemingly
insane behavior might be legitimated as the work of housekeeping or house-sitting,
although he is not officially hired by the homeowners. Moreover, as the film narrative
moves forward, it makes it clear that he is morally innocent or even better than most
of the selfish people in the film. For instance, in an early scene, he encounters
speechless Seon-hwa in a luxury house in which he has mistakenly chosen to live. As
soon as he becomes aware that she has been extremely abused by her hypocritical,
violent husband, he rescues her from him by leaving together with her. From then on,
they become partners in their “unauthorized” housekeeping.
In this respect, it turns out that both Tae-seok’s and Seon-hwa’s behaviors
look insane and dangerous only from the previous rigid disciplinary perspective.
From the increasingly hegemonic, more flexible neoliberal governmentality’s
perspective, the way they live is perfectly tolerable or even idealized as “chic”
33
nomads.
32
They live their free lives, but at the same time manage and control their
behaviors so that these behaviors do not harm others; in fact, their behaviors can be
affectively tolerable or even attractive to others at large. In this management of affect,
the affective close-up images of the silent characters can no longer retain their
singularity, but rather become generic enough to attract as much attention as possible
from the metropolitan multicultural audience at large.
There is a distinctive scene that shows this generification of the exoticness
of the mute characters. Boldly enough, even when its owners are present, Seon-hwa
enters a house that she and Tae-seok previously occupied to take a little nap. At first,
feeling somewhat embarrassed, the owners ask her identity, but soon smilingly let her
take a nap. What is interesting about this scene is that the house is a hybrid of
Western and traditional Korean styles and the owners are in a somewhat modernized
style of traditional Korean dresses (han-bok). Here, it should be noted that the styles
of their house and dress are clearly multicultural, but only generically so. These styles
exemplify a generic exoticism that cannot derail a generic multicultural population
from their expectations about the exotic. In this respect, the homeowners’ tacit
hospitality to her indicates that the kind of exoticism that characterizes Seon-hwa’s
32
Chung seems to make the similar point as I do, stating: “The free-spirited nomad is thus distinct
from the crude petty criminals and rugged working-class men and women who populate Kim’s early
films, from Crocodile and Wild Animals to Address Unknown and Bad Guy”—although, unlike mine,
her tone in this statement is celebratory or at least neutral. Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 60.
34
and Tae-seok’s exotic muteness is as generic as the owners’ metropolitan exotic
lifestyles.
Cruelty: The Isle and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring
From the outset, Kim’s films have been highly distinctive in terms of their
unimaginable cruelty. This feature makes his films exotic in the sense that it evokes
some supposedly non-Western qualities, such as wildness, primitivism, or
backwardness. However, this exotic quality does not simply represent any kind of
defects or lacks vis-à-vis normative social behaviors. Rather, as his films’ depictions
of cruelties as shockingly and grotesquely sensual indicates, the images of cruelties in
his films have such excessive or eccentric forces that they cannot simply be reduced
to illegal or non-normative behaviors (e.g., sex crimes, perversions, sado-masochist
acts) .
33
The cruelty of his work, as Cedric Lagandre notes, “remains in excess in
relation to every possible meaning, it remains purely gratuitous.”
34
Thus, if cruelty
makes his films exotic, it does so in the sense that cruelty involves an affective excess
33
From the outset, Kim’s films have been controversial for their portrayals of men’s sexual abuse of
women. Some local as well as foreign critics, usually females, have harshly berated both Kim and his
films for their ultra-phallocentric tendency. Although these critics’ views are reasonable in some
respects, they have resulted in upholding the disciplinary mechanisms they have otherwise interrogated.
For two of these criticisms, see Tony Rayns, “Terrorism,” and Shim Yeong-sup, “The Crocodile Who
Didn’t Go to the Sea,” [“Pada ro naagajimotha nun ago”], Cine 21, May 16, 2000.
34
Cedric Lagandre, “Spoken Words in Suspense,” in Kim Ki-duk, 59.
35
over that which sovereign or disciplinary power constructs as illegal or non-
normative.
Although cruelty has been a consistent feature throughout his work, a
notable change is evident from his earlier to more recent films in terms of how this
affective feature is expressed. Some critics have already pointed out the affective or
aesthetic changes from his earlier to later films. Comparing Bad Guy and Samaritan
Girl (2004), for instance, Derek Elley argues that, although both are cruel, the latter is
“handled in a cooler, more transcendental way.”
35
Likewise, focusing on The Isle
(2000) and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring, Jinhee Choi notes that, “[i]f
Kim’s previous films [like The Isle] are filled with primal passions and perversions,
his later films [like Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . .and Spring] are subliminal,
foregrounding mood over overt emotions.”
36
Although these views seem descriptively
justifiable, their use of the ill-defined notions such as “transcendental” or “subliminal”
makes it hard, if not impossible, to know precisely what is at stake in this aesthetic or
affective change. As with the affective change in the characters’ muteness, it is crucial
to scrutinize this change in light of the recent drastic changes in the dominant form of
power from sovereign and disciplinary apparatuses to global neoliberal
governmentality. In Kim’s later films, starting approximately with Spring, Summer,
35
Derek Elley, “Samaritan Girl,” Variety, Feb 16-Feb 22, 2004, 43.
36
Choi, Renaissance, 178.
36
Fall, Winter. . . and Spring, cruelty is not so much excluded by the dominant power
mechanisms as worthless, gratuitous, or anxiety provoking, but becomes
domesticated as acceptable or even attractive in a way that conforms to currently
hegemonic neoliberal governmentality. However, there is a cost for this domestication
of cruelty. To be able to be manageable or controllable, cruelty becomes subject to the
process of generifying affects, losing its uncontrollable singularity. One of the best
ways of showing this affective change in terms of cruelty would be to compare The
Isle, one of Kim’s earlier films, and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring
(hereafter abbreviated as Spring, Summer), one of his more recent films. It is
significant to note that, while similar acts of cruelty seem to repeat in both films, the
comparison of the two reveals a stark contrast in terms of how they express cruelties.
Like most of Kim’s early films, both the hero and the heroine of The Isle
are socially marginalized. Hyeon-sik, the hero of the film, is a fugitive who killed his
unfaithful wife and her lover and has just escaped into an isolated fishing resort,
where visitors enjoy fishing in their respective floating cottages. He meets the heroine
of the film, Hui-jin, who works at this resort and also prostitutes herself to male
visitors. Yet the film is far from being committed to a social critique that accuses
disciplinary mechanisms of disenfranchising these social minorities or representing
them as lacking social virtues. Rather, it focuses more on the affective disturbances
created between these characters, which such social critique would have ignored in its
sole emphasis on signifying aspects. These disturbances stem particularly from the
37
way in which the film involves these characters in a series of acts of cruelty: violent
attacks on others, acts of self-mutilation, cruelties to animals, etc. Yet, it is important
to note that the cruelty of Kim’s films depends not so much on how acts of cruelty are
depicted as graphically gruesome, but rather on how—occurring in unthinkable
ways—they take the spectator by surprise. Adrien Gombeaud eloquently writes: “It
seems that for Kim Ki-duk nothing is more beautiful than that moment when the body
changes its normal working condition, no longer obeys the mind, tears itself away
from the straight jacket of the spirit to react only to instinct, like a knee becoming taut
after the sharp tap of a mallet.”
37
Consider, for instance, the film’s two disturbing scenes of self-mutilation,
which are salient examples of the cruelties that appear in the film. The first scene
concerns Hyeon-sik’s self-mutilation, while the second concerns Hui-Jin’s. The first
scene begins with the moment Hyeon-sik sees two detectives searching for him in the
fishing resort. Terrified, he swallows a set of fishhooks and pulls the fishing line to
mutilate his throat. Hui-jin sees him suffering from extreme pain and hides him from
the detectives’ search by sinking him under the surface of the lake. After the
detectives are gone, she pulls him out of the water by spooling the fishing line. The
scene of Hui-Jin’s self-mutilation is even more traumatic to the audience. Appalled by
Hui-jin’s excessive attachment to him, which led her to kill two people, Hyeon-sik
leaves her secretly while she is sleeping. Deeply grieved by this loss, Hui-jin puts a
37
Adrien Gombaued, “Break,” in Kim Ki-duk, 13.
38
set of fishhooks into her vagina and mutilates it by pulling the fishing line. Hearing
her scream, Hyeon-sik returns to rescue her from the water by spooling the fishing
line.
Watching these scenes is, indeed, extremely disturbing,
38
but the reason
for this disturbance is not simply that the scene is described as graphic or that, as
Linda Williams puts it, “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost
involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.”
39
In fact,
in comparison with hardcore images of slasher horror films or contemporary extreme
films such as Miike Takashi’s Ichi the Killer (2001), the acts of cruelty in Kim’s film
are much less explicitly depicted. In addition, the shocks of these scenes for the
audience are not confined to the effect of bodily mimicry as the characters’ acts of
cruelty are so exaggerated and artificial that they would not provoke the audience’s
mimicry. Rather, what is more shocking and disturbing about these scenes concerns
the very bizarre, unthinkable ways in which fishhooks are abruptly used as a means of
mutilating and catching humans rather than as a means of fishing. In other words,
these scenes give unbearable shocks to thought or, more precisely, to the audience’s
power of thinking. Nevertheless, the shocks of the scenes do not lead the audience to
given concepts or ideas that enable them to understand and thus overcome these
38
It has been reported that several members of the audience of some international festivals fainted
when they saw these scenes.
39
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film Theory and Criticism
6th
edition,
eds. Leo Braudy et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 730. Following Williams, Chung
reads these scenes as causing an involuntary mimicry in the spectator’s body. See Chung, Kim, 20.
39
shocks. The characters’ acts of self-mutilation by means of fishhooks are themselves
experienced by the audience as nonsense while being affectively intensive. In other
words, they are primarily felt as affective intensities by the audience though
secondarily they may be put into symbolic signification processes and thus may be
interpreted as expressions of guilt and genital purification.
40
As it were, their acts
cannot be deemed as signifying metaphors or symbols, but rather as affective
intensities.
In this respect, the cruelty that characterizes the self-mutilation scenes in
The Isle can be best understood in terms of what Antonin Artaud proposes as the
theater of cruelty. Deleuze writes on the cruelty of cinema, bringing Artaud’s idea to
cinema: “[I]f it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it (the
nerve, the brain matter), it can only think one thing, the fact that we are not yet
thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself, thought which is
always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed.”
41
As the two self-mutilation scenes indicate,
insofar as what is cruelest about The Isle concerns shocks to the spectator’s thought
rather than to his or her imaginary body, these acts of cruelty correspond to this
Artaudian-Deleuzian notion of cruelty.
40
Mun-im Paek claims that Hui-jin’s self-mutilation should be interpreted as a ritual of genital
purification. According to Paek, through this ritual, “Hui-jin is refuting Hyeon-sik’s phallocentric
interpellation of her identity (“you whore”) with her body, not words.” Qtd. in Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 53.
Although this interpretation is quite probable, the shock her self-mutilation gives the audience is not
entirely reduced to this symbolization.
41
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 167; emphasis in the original.
40
Similar acts of cruelty also appear in Kim’s later film Spring, Summer,
including acts of self-suffocation, cruel punishments, and cruelties to animals, but a
crucial difference exists between this film and The Isle in terms of how these acts
engage in the process of producing exoticness. Consider, for instance, a sequence that
displays these cruelties in a highly condensed form. In a way that is reminiscent of
the plot of The Isle, the hero of Spring, Summer kills his unfaithful wife and escapes
into an isolated monastery floating on a lake, where he grew up under an old monk’s
care. Tormented by the memory of his deed, he attempts suicide in a bizarre, cruel
way: by closing up all the openings of his face—i.e. his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth—
with paper upon which the Chinese character 閉 meaning “shut” is written. This
suicide attempt fails as the old monk intervenes by beating him harshly with a stick.
The following punishment the old monk imposes on him is even more bizarre and
crueler. The hero is forced to perform a painstaking task of carving a Chinese-
character sutra out of the wooden floor. Even the detectives who come to arrest him
permit him to finish this job before arresting him. This sequence ends with the old
monk’s cruel act of self-immolation, in which he suffocates himself in the same way
the hero did before burning himself.
If one simply considers the characters’ bizarre manners of imposing
cruelties to themselves and others, one might say that, as in The Isle, these cruelties
also exemplify the Artaudian-Deleuzian aesthetic of cruelty, shocking the spectator’s
41
thought process. However, unlike the shocks in The Isle, which remain uncontrollably
disturbing, risky, or anxiety provoking for the audience primarily under the
dominance of sovereign and disciplinary powers, these shocks in Spring, Summer
rather appear glamorous or appealing to audience members, especially those
metropolitan cultural citizens who are learning management skills to control their
affective lifestyles. Unlike The Isle, which leaves acts of cruelty unhinged, Spring,
Summer valorizes similar acts of cruelty by attributing them to generic feelings about
Asianness or Buddhism.
42
However, this valorization of cruelty in no way indicates
“[Kim’s] (partial) sublimation of ressentiment” as Chung claims,
43
but rather can be
understood as a process of gentrifying cruelty. In other words, through this
valorization process, cruelties have become more pleasurable while simultaneously
becoming generic, losing their singular differences. In this respect, if Spring, Summer
looks exotic, it is because much of the exotic in this film is, as Michael Sofair argues,
“a calculated effect” under the currently hegemonic, global neoliberal governmental
rationality.
44
So far I have discussed what happened to the exotic in East Asian art films
from the declining era of sovereign and disciplinary powers to the subsequent era of
the present, global neoliberal governmentality. As I have theorized with reference to
42
See, for instance, Choi, Renaissance and Raynes, “The Strange Case.”
43
Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 109.
44
Michael Sofair, “Film Reviews: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring,” Film Quarterly, 59.1
(2005): 36.
42
thinkers such as Lacan, to the extent that the exotic as affective intensities eludes and
exceeds signifying processes, it exists as uncontrollable excess in relation to
sovereign and disciplinary powers. This is the very reason why Kim Ki-duk’s early
films, such as The Isle and Bad Guy, seemed so controversial even among critics in
the lingering era of sovereign and disciplinary powers in South Korea. However, as
the change in the exotic in Kim’s later films, such as Spring, Summer, vividly
illustrates, the present, dominant mode of power—global neoliberal governemtality—
has imposed its tacit regulations on the production of the exotic in cultural and artistic
practices, including even art films like Kim’s.
43
Chapter 2
Toward the Ungovernable Exotic: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai
and Flight of the Red Balloon
The Exotic on the Other Side of Global Neoliberal Governmentality
As discussed in Chapter 1, the exotic, which involves affective intensities
or singular cultural differences that sovereign and disciplinary powers cannot contain,
tends to be subsumed by the currently hegemonic, global neoliberal governmentality.
In addition, as I argued when discussing the affective transition in Kim Ki-duk’s films,
this subsumption of the exotic entails generifying it so as to tranquilize its singular
otherness. Indeed, this tranquilization of the exotic reveals the fundamental limit of
the laisser-faire or deregulation characteristic of neoliberalism. Foucault clearly notes
this limit by quoting a phrase from English statesman Walpole—“quieta non movere
(let sleeping dogs lie)”—as epitomizing this feature of (neo)liberalism.
45
Despite all kinds of efforts on the part of the neoliberal governmental
mechanism, however, these sleeping dogs do wake up and the tranquilizing process
fails. Foucault clearly acknowledges that the security mechanism of neoliberal
45
Foucault, Biopolitics, 1 and 20. Here, Foucault further clarifies the implication of the laisser-faire of
(neo)liberalism by contrasting this quotation with a different quotation: “Acheronta movebo (I will
move the Infernal Regions).” The latter is a part of what Freud quotes from Virgil’s poem Aeneid and
places as an epigraph in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. The entire quotation is “Flectere si
nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo,” translated as “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move
the Infernal Regions.”
44
governmentality is not always successful but is vulnerable to its errors. He writes:
“[G]overnments can be mistaken. And the greatest evil of government, what makes it
a bad government, is not that the prince is wicked, but that he is ignorant.”
46
Deleuze
also makes an important remark about this mistake of neoliberal governmentality. In
his essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” Deleuze discusses the significance and
limitation of what he terms “control society,” or the society governed by neoliberal
rationality. Setting up correspondence between control societies and information
technology, he claims that in these societies “the passive danger is noise and the
active, piracy and viral contamination.”
47
However, unlike Foucault, who describes
this emergency only as caused by the inherent limit of neoliberal governmentality,
Deleuze makes it clear that the moment when neoliberal governmentality falters is
precisely the moment when resistances to it make their appearances.
48
Returning to Lacan’s notion of the university’s discourse, which accounts
for neoliberal governmentality as discussed in Chapter 1, we can see how his
46
Ibid., 17.
47
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 180.
48
In his conversation with Tony Negri, Deleuze claims: “You ask whether control or communication
societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the
‘transversal organization of free individuals.’ [. . .] Creating has always been something different from
communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so
we can elude control.” Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations, 175. Given that his
term control society refers to neoliberal governmentality, here Deleuze makes it much clearer that the
failure of neoliberal governmentality to work properly involves creative resistance to neoliberalism.
45
formulation of this discourse provides us with an even more precise understanding of
neoliberal governmentality’s errors.
S2 a S1: master signifier; S2: knowledge
-------- -------- $ : subject; a: surplus jouissance
S1 $
(University’s Discourse)
Alenka Zupančič writes in her remarkable reading of this discourse:
What is being exploited and squeezed in every imaginable
way is now precisely our enjoyment as an immediate source
of surplus value. [. . . ] Drives are plastic; just let them come
up with another symbolic (or imaginary) configuration of
enjoyment that can then be detached from enjoyment per se,
cashed in as “positive value,” and of course sold back to us
as “life-style” (of enjoyment). Yet what at the same time
drops out below is precisely a pure negativity: the death
drive as incarnated in the subject who is in no way the
master of knowledge and value accumulated in this
discourse, and even less the master of enjoyment, but who is
their fall-off, excrement, the refuse of his or her own
(ideological) value, refuse of the very value so generously
attributed to the subject in this discourse (I am referring of
course to the ideological celebration of free subjectivity).
49
What is noteworthy about her account is that what occurs in the master’s discourse
repeats in the university’s discourse, albeit at a different level. Just as the signifying
operation of the master’s discourse leaves behind some irreducible remainder that is
49
Zupančič, “Surplus Enjoyment,” 173.
46
surplus jouissance, the university’s discourse valorizes this surplus jouissance but
simultaneously “drops out” a new form of irreducible remainder: the subject who
purely incarnates the death drive.
50
Here we need to call attention to two important points that can be drawn
from Zupančič’s account. First, Lacan’s formulation of the university’s discourse
reveals that the management mechanism of neoliberal governmentality fails not by an
external cause, but because of its constitutive limit. When neoliberal governmentality
fails to valorize or generify the exotic, this in no way means that there are some
extremely mysterious, exotic phenomena that, from the outset, hamper or oppose its
valorization process. Rather, the process of valorizing or generifying the exotic does
work properly while simultaneously producing an unvalorizable worthless remainder
or waste as its own by-product. The second important point concerns the nature of
this unvalorizable remainder peculiar to the university’s discourse. Like the object a,
the remainder of the master’s discourse, this new form of remainder, which is
represented by the matheme $ (the barred subject) in Lacan’s formula of the
University’s discourse, is a non-signifying, affective intensity that eludes the
signifying practice. However, insofar as it even escapes from or survives the affective
valorization process of the university’s discourse, this remainder is also distinct from
50
Each of the four discourses—the master’s, the university’s, the hysterics’, and the analyst’s— has
its own remainder, as Lacan states: “[E]ach of these little four-legged schemas has the property of
leaving its own gap.” Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan Book XVII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2007), 203.
47
the object a that can be given an affective value. To put it in thermodynamic terms as
Lacan does, if the remainder of the master’s discourse is an entropic element—i.e.,
the wasted energy that is no longer available to use but nonetheless can be measured
or counted as part of the total energy just like a portion of energy dissipated as
friction heat in physics—that of the university’s is the entropy of this entropy, namely,
the wasted energy that is neither available to use nor measurable.
51
From this
discussion, it becomes evident why this new remainder disturbs both sovereign and
disciplinary powers and neoliberal governmentality as it is worthless excess in terms
of both signifying and affective valorizations.
In this respect, I argue that the exotic includes something uncontrollable
even in excess of what is permissible by the laisser-faire principle of neoliberalism in
the guise of metropolitan consumerist multiculturalism. This something, the kernel of
the exotic, allows us to encounter singular otherness that eludes and even may baffle
both more tolerant, neoliberal governmentality and the old but lingering sovereign
and disciplinary powers. However, unlike the singular otherness that only eludes
sovereign and disciplinary powers, whose affective intensity provokes our
unconscious desires for it no matter how opaque, this new kind of singular otherness,
insofar as it insists beyond any kind of assessment or evaluation, cannot attract or
51 My understanding of the remainder of the university’s discourse is indebted to Zupančič’s
following argument: “The valorization of enjoyment is part of a new process of what I previously
called distillation. In [the University’s] discourse, it is no longer knowledge that is being detached
from the entropic element of work/enjoyment, it is this very entropic element itself that is being
detached, in the name of knowledge and value, from its own entropy or negativity.” Zupančič,
“Surplus Enjoyment,” 173.
48
appeal to our unconscious desires for it, only provoking too much intense anxiety to
be governed by any calculative rationality. This singular otherness can only exist on
the other side of neoliberal govermentality.
Spectatorship beyond Attention Economy
The question of the exotic in cinema has made us reexamine the existing
theories of spectatorship. Already in the 1970s, the heyday of film apparatus theories,
for critics such as Laura Mulvey, the impact of women’s fetishistic exotic images on
the spectator complicates, if not disturbs, the otherwise patriarchal male-dominant
cinematic apparatus. According to Mulvey, the fragmented fetishized close-up images
of women’s bodies, as in Joseph von Sternberg’s films, are so fascinating that they
can make inoperative the male protagonist’s interrogating voyeuristic gaze that
otherwise would exercise power over women’s bodies.
52
Nevertheless, for Mulvey,
this power of the female exotic is limited in the sense that it is an illusionary image of
a woman that serves to disavow the sexual difference between men and women, the
recognition of which can provoke castration anxiety for men.
53
52
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London:
Macmillan, 1989), 21-23.
53
In response to Mulvey’s view of the fetishistic female image, some critics such as Kaja Silverman,
Gaylyn Studlar, and D.N. Rodowick have claimed that this form of image much more disturbs the
male-dominating visual economy than Mulvey expects in that the male character or spectator becomes
passive—i.e. exhibitionist or masochist—with regard to this image. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of
Semiotics (New York : Oxford University Press, 1983), ch. 5 ; Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of
Pleasure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), ch. 2; D.N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of
Difference (New York: Routledge, 1991), ch.1.
49
More recent critics such as Laura Marks have been even more positive
about the subversive power of the exotic, stressing how intercultural fetishistic film or
video images, which are “translations into a material object of some sort of affect,”
remain inscrutable, resisting their complete decipherments.
54
As these discussions
indicate, exotic cinematic images have facilitated thinking about the affective aspects
of spectatorship that have been ignored by most of the film apparatus theories.
55
Yet
it is also important to note that the impact of the exotic on the spectator has been, for
the most part, discussed in relation to cinema as disciplinary apparatus. Consequently,
little dialogue has focused on the ways in which the exotic would influence
spectatorship when cinema takes the form of a neoliberal governmental apparatus.
Although not specifically focusing on cinema, Jonathan Crary’s two
influencing books on visual perception in modern visual technologies, Techniques of
the Observer and Suspensions of Perception, provide us with a rare opportunity to
consider the relationship between the exotic and the spectator within cinema as a
neoliberal governmental apparatus. In the former book, Crary explores how
nineteenth-century scientific discussions of vision made a major turn from
geometrical to physiological optics, how physiological optical devices such as the
54
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 80.
55
It should be noted that the emphasis on affectivity in spectatorship is distinct from that on counter-
cinema spectatorship predicated on the Brechtian notion of self-reflexivity. Insofar as counter-cinema
strategies aim to make spectators aware of the underlying conditions of classical realist cinema,
theories of counter-cinema spectatorship also ignore affectivity in spectatorship, focusing only on
cinema’s epistemological (in)capacities.
50
phenakistiscope or the stereoscope increasingly displaced the older geometrical ones
such as the camera obscura, and most importantly how this turn in visual culture
allowed and at the same time managed hitherto suppressed unstable visual
phenomena.
These [physiological optical] apparatuses are the outcome of
a complex remaking of the individual as observer into
something calculable and regularizable and of human vision
into something measurable and thus exchangeable. The
standardization of visual imagery in the nineteenth century
must be seen then not simply as part of new forms of
mechanized reproduction but in relation to a broader process
of normalization and subjection of the observer.
56
Although Crary does not employ the term governmentality, which was rarely known
in the period during which he wrote this book, by making explicit the significance of
the turn from geometrical to physiological optics, he virtually addresses the historical
turn from disciplinary to governmental apparatuses in modern visual culture. He does
not simply celebrate the appearance of physiological optical devices as marking the
liberation of an unstable corporeal force from disciplinary visual apparatuses, but
rather highlights how these new devices serve to control and regularize such unstable
forces.
If there is ever a “liberation” of vision in the nineteenth
century, this is when it first happens. In the absence of the
juridical model of the camera obscura, there is a freeing up
56
Jonathan Crary, The Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 17.
51
of vision, a falling away of the rigid structures that had
shaped it and constituted its objects. But almost
simultaneous with this final dissolution of a transcendent
foundation for vision emerges a plurality of means to recode
the activity of the eye, to regiment it, to heighten its
productivity and to prevent its distraction. Thus the
imperatives of capitalist modernization, while demolishing
the field of classical vision, generated techniques for
imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and
managing perception.
57
He clearly discerns a significant break between the older and the newer
forms of visual technologies, but he nonetheless seems to underestimate the
flexibility of the latter devices by claiming that, by imposing attention, they prevent
distraction. In his more recent book, Suspensions of Perception, however, Crary
provides a much more nuanced account of the ways in which visual technologies in
modern as well as more contemporary era impose more dynamic or unstable attention
that involves a degree of distraction.
My contention [. . . ] is that modern distraction was not a
disruption of stable or “natural” kinds of sustained, value-
laden perception that had existed for centuries but was an
effect, and in many cases a constituent element, of the many
attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects.
58
57
Ibid., 24; emphasis added.
58
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 49; emphasis in the
original.
52
This renewed understanding of the impact of modern and contemporary visual
technologies on spectators resonates much more with Foucault’s idea of the laisser-
faire of governmentality by making it clear that visual technologies such as cinema
are flexible enough to accommodate distracting alterities, but these alterities in turn
attract visual subjects’ attention.
Crary’s idea of “dynamic” attention helps us to develop a theory of
spectatorship of the exotic in cinema as a neoliberal governmental apparatus. When it
comes to cinema as a disciplinary apparatus, the emergence of the exotic can be
distracting for spectators because, left behind the chain of significant narrative events,
it has a strong affective power to seduce some of the spectators away from their main
concern with narrative signification. Cruel acts like self-mutilation in Kim Ki-duk’s
film The Isle, for instance, can strongly distract spectators with their gratuitous
affective shocks from their attention to the signifying processes that constitute the
film narrative. Yet once exotic qualities undergo the process of being generified or
valorized in neoliberal governmental apparatuses, the distractions these qualities
arouse for spectators become stabilized to a certain extent. This generic exotic may
still distract spectators from their engagement in the film’s signifying processes, but,
to the extent that this distraction is stabilized, it, in turn, allows them to be attentive to
the affective value of the exotic. This stabilized distraction of the generic exotic can
be even more clarified by understanding it as quasi-hypnosis. According to Crary,
53
hypnosis vividly illustrates “[this] link between attention and dissociation.”
59
When a
person is hypnotized, he or she becomes dissociated from his or her sobriety into a
dream-like trance. However, this is not at all a state in which the subject is absolutely
free floating; rather, as the post-hypnotic suggestion indicates, it involves a state in
which the subject is highly attentive to phenomena of affective value, like the
hypnotist’s words.
60
For example, unlike the cruel acts in The Isle, for instance, those
in Kim’s film Spring, Summer—no matter how distracting—in turn stabilize their
effects of distraction by enabling spectators to concentrate on the affective value of
Asianess or Buddhism that these acts can evoke.
In short, dynamic attention or stabilized distraction can be seen as the
spectatorial correlate of the generic exotic image in cinema as a neoliberal
governmental apparatus. In this respect, when cinema serves neoliberal
governmentality, not only does it engage the regularization of affective cultural
alterities, but it also serves to control and manage the ways in which subjects
experience those alterities. Indeed, this form of cinematic apparatuses aims to
produce flexible, versatile, or tolerant subjects who, for all their distractions
stemming from a diversity of cultural alterites, are capable of maintaining attention to
these distractions by managing and controlling them. Such spectatorship of
59
Ibid., 67.
60
See also Janet Bergstrom’s interview with Raymond Bellour in “Alternation, Fragmentation,
Hypnosis,” Camera Obscura, 3/4 (1979) for Bellour’s nascent thought about cinema as a hypnotic
apparatus.
54
manageable distraction, to the extent that it is subject to a calculating rationality, can
be considered, or, more precisely, measure, in terms of affective labor. Recently,
thinkers such as Marcia Landy, Jonathan Beller, and Kara Keeling have elaborated
upon theories of affective spectatorship that identify spectators as de facto affective
laborers rather than as consumers.
61
Insofar as these theories attribute a form of
productive power to spectators rather than identifying them as passive consumer-
subjects regardless of whether this power produces social reality, social network, or
economic value of film, these theories mark a significant turn in the history of
theories of film spectatorship. Yet given that, as already argued herein, the spectator’s
affective labor is regularized and valorized in the cinema of neoliberal rationality, it
should be clear that the productive spectator does not ultimately resist or challenge,
but rather serves the present neoliberal global governmentality.
Nevertheless, as I previously discussed, insofar as neoliberal
governmentality sometimes fails to regularize the exotic, leaving some remainder
behind, there is a possibility of thinking about the ways in which spectators can be
distracted by this remainder. I would argue that the residual spectatorial distraction
can be caused by the residual exotic, into which the spectator’s attentiveness cannot
assimilate itself even in a dynamic way. In fact, Walter Benjamin’s discussion of
distraction as opposed to contemplation is in discord with Crary’s quasi-Hegelian
61
Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998);
Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); Kara
Keeling, The Witch’s Flight (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
55
claim that distraction can be integrated or sublated into attentiveness or contemplation.
Benjamin employs the term distraction to describe the way in which the subject is
disturbed by the instability and fragmentation of his or her life that characterize
modernity. As such, the term refers to the condition of perception in which the subject
can no longer pay much attention to the objects he or she encounters. Clearly, not
unlike Crary’s claim, Benjamin highlights how modern technologies like factory
machines or the cinema train people to adapt themselves to distracting experiences.
62
This adaptation process enables them to be more comfortable with such disturbances
and thus serves as the process of buffering those shock experiences. However, as
Susan Buck-Morss eloquently writes, “Benjamin was suggesting that the new
mimetic techniques could instruct the collective to employ this capacity effectively,
not only as a defense against the trauma of industrialization, but a means of
reconstructing the capacity for experience that had been shattered by the process.”
63
In other words, for Benjamin, modern technologies also distract subjects in a new
way that goes far beyond those mobilized for training purposes. It is crucial to note
that this supplemental distraction—what Benjamin calls “awakening”
64
—casts light
62
For this role of modern technology in giving people a training ground for adapting themselves to
modern shock experiences, see Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4,1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et
al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 327-329.
63
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialetics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcade Project (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1990), 268.
64
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, eds. trans. Howard Eiland et al (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 463-464.
56
on things discarded as worthless by the circuits of capitalist production and
consumption, although this distraction is in no way recognized as attention labor or
affective labor insofar as such an act is not expected to produce value of any kind and,
thus, seems futile.
Nevertheless, this residual distraction is not for nothing. Benjamin makes
this clear when he describes what new forms of perception the medium of film has
opened up. Film techniques such as close-up, slow-motion, or montage expose
spectators to unknown aspects of the experience of modernity or unfamiliar
relationships between entities surrounding their lives. Ultimately, the residual
distractions that these film techniques cause allow spectators to “discover the optical
unconscious.”
65
The same can be said of the residual exotic. The residual spectatorial
distraction allows spectators to experience the optical unconscious of the exotic
beyond both its signifying and affective values.
The Unvalorizable Exotic in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai and Flight
of the Red Balloon
Unlike the 5
th
Generation mainland Chinese filmmakers such as Zhang
Yimou or Chen Kaige, the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien does not seem to
focus much on exotic qualities in his films; rather, his films have focused so much on
65
Walter Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility (Third Version)” in Walter Benjamin,
266.
57
Taiwanese people’s recent or contemporary modernized lives that they leave little, if
any, room for primitive passions. More importantly, as his Taiwan trilogy—City of
Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995)—
demonstrates, even when his films deal with Taiwan’s past, they describe ordinary
Taiwanese people’s quotidian lives in a way that is reminiscent of Italian neo-realist
films or Ozu Yasujiro’s films, that is, without foregrounding any seemingly
mysterious or unfamiliar rituals. Nevertheless, as Hou co-produced his films
transnationally with Japanese or French production companies, his filmmaking style
has undergone a significant change from very static and austere to more mobile and
sensual realism. One significant consequence of this change would be that some of
his recent films, such as Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Flight of the Red Balloon
(2007), began to produce exotic qualities, albeit in more subtle ways than those of the
Chinese 5
th
Generation filmmakers. In the following examination of the films
Flowers of Shanghai (hereafter Flowers) and Flight of the Red Balloon (hereafter
Flight), I demonstrate how these films—although partly relying on the generic
exotic—ultimately succeed in creating new unvalorizable exotic images that
challenge and resist the global neoliberal management of the exotic.
Any-affect-whatever in Flowers of Shanghai
From his first Taiwan New Cinema film The Boys from Fengkuei (1983)
onward, especially in his Taiwan trilogy, Hou’s films have focused on the modes of
58
life in Taiwan that have not been considered so meaningful by sovereign and
disciplinary powers, such as Japanese colonial rule or the KMT’s de facto neocolonial
rule. Hou’s work, among others, was possible as a result of the decline of these
powers, of which the most important sign was the abolition of martial law in 1988.
This situation opened up a number of possibilities for thinking about the future of
Taiwan; however, as in other East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and
mainland China, neoliberal governmentality has increasingly swept over nearly all
aspects of life in Taiwan, regularizing and sometimes closing those possibilities.
Although his City of Sadness gained both critical acclaim and box office
success in Taiwan, Hou’s subsequent films, starting with The Puppetmaster, have
increasingly lost attention—even from national critics and journalists, let alone
general audiences—as they have hardly helped revive the Taiwanese film industry.
66
This situation indicates that the kind of affects that Hou’s films produce are not so
much generic that their value can be assessed within neoliberal calculative rationality.
Eventually, from Good Men, Good Women on, Hou had to co-produce films
transnationally with Japanese film companies like Shochiku or French ones like
Margo Films. This change in Hou’s career was not confined to budget issues related
to filmmaking. Beginning with Flowers, the subject matters of Hou’s films began to
go beyond Taiwan so that his films could better reach global audiences.
66
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Poetics and Politics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,” in Chinese-Language Film:
Historiography, Poetics, Politics, ed. Sheldon H. Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005),
170.
59
Flowers seems unusual for a film by Hou insofar as it deals with arguably
one of the most sensational subject matters: life in a luxury brothel within a foreign
concession of Shanghai during the late nineteenth century. In addition, it overtly
displays the Chinese exotic, showing all the visual details of the life in the brothel in
terms of decor, costumes, and people’s mannerisms. Thus, it is no wonder that for
some critics this film risks being judged for its Orientalist attitude, just as Zhang
Yimou’s films do.
67
However, the way in which Flowers produces the Chinese exotic
is much more complex than it first seems. As Nicholas Kaldis writes:
[I]nstead of falling into the trap of conservative cultural
essentialism, reactionary nationalism, or joyous capitulation
to global capitalization, Flowers of Shanghai actually
embraces exotic images of China, multiplies them,
reproduces them, and fixates on them, smothering the
(Western) viewer in an excess of Oriental fantasy.
68
Here Kaldis justifiably points out that there is something so excessive in Flowers’s
appropriation of the Chinese exotic that it could make Western audiences
uncomfortable with those images. What matters here is not only its quantitative
excess of exoticness, but also the need to ask whether the film produces qualitatively
different kinds of exoticness that can disturb not only Western but also non-Western
67
See, for instance, James Udden, No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 141.
68
Nicholas Kaldis, “Compulsory Orientalism: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai,” in Island on
the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds. Chris Berry et al. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2005), 130.
60
audiences. Although providing overtly exotic images to satisfy to some extent the
global neoliberal governmentality’s demand for the valorizable exotic, Flowers also
deploys narrative strategies and audiovisual techniques to include otherwise
suppressed, unvalorizable exotic images within the film in the form of “any-affect-
whatever.”
Clearly, as Kaldis claims, the time-space of Flowers is permeated with the
exotic from the beginning to the end as the film never takes spectators outside the
exotic inner space of the brothel except through some indications of the outside
incidents, such as the scene in which people in the brothel go to see a suicide scene
outside (although the camera never moves to show the incident, lingering inside
instead). Nevertheless, at least some of the audience would feel that this kind of
exoticness is also quite banal. The film narrative discloses that all the affective factors
that constitute the exoticness of the brothel are highly calculated. It is, among others,
the affective attitudes of the “flower girls” (courtesans) that are most delicately
calculated. Flower girls’ changing attitudes often bewilder their male customers, but
whenever miscommunications occur between the girls and their customers, mediators
such as Master Hong, Madam, and the servants skillfully try to resolve these issues
by translating the girls’ unintelligible attitudes in terms of their financial needs. As
these mediation processes repeat themselves throughout the film, it turns out that the
exotic objects and gestures in this world are already clichéd—that is, valorized. To
61
some extent, this recognition can be the film’s self-reflexive confession that the film’s
use of the exotic is also calculated to attract as large an audience as possible.
Nevertheless, not all the exotic qualities the film arouses are generically
valorized in this way. The film also provides the audience with some opportunities to
encounter unvalorizable exotic images. The image of Crimson (played by Michiko
Hada), the flower girl whose sponsor is Master Wang (played by Tony Leung), is an
example of this par excellence. From the beginning of the film, Crimson appears to
be the most vulnerable among all the flower girls in the brothel. She seems to have
failed in the management of her affective labor despite the fact that this kind of
control or management is crucial to affective workers like her. She has lost customers
as a result of her inappropriate decision to serve only Wang. Moreover, unlike other
flower girls, who seem to use their affective capacities skillfully, her affective state
often veers out of control, even to the extent that her attitudes seem to be annoying. In
this regard, Wang’s abandonment of her in the middle of the film seems to have been
anticipated from the outset even though the explicit reason for this is her affair with
an opera singer. Ironically, despite her devalued affective demeanor, the film focuses
as much attention on her as other flower girls by employing a parallel narrative
structure that treats four central flower girl characters equally. In this way, the film
formally leaves room for unvalorizable affects like those of Crimson but does not go
62
so far as to re-valorize those affects—that is, give definite values to them—as in
standard melodramas.
69
These unvalorizable affects that Flowers allows can be better understood
as examples of “any-affect-whatever”, expanding Deleuze’s notion of any-space-
whatever to the domain of affects. Deleuze redeploys Pascal Auge’s term any-space-
whatever as one of the two kinds of the affection image (the other kind of which is a
face or its equivalent). Whether disconnected from other spaces or emptied of its
contents, Deleuze claims that the space “no longer has co-ordinates, it is a pure
potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of
things or milieu which actualize them.”
70
Whereas Deleuze defines this term in
relation to the signifying chain, or “the sensory-motor situation” in his terms, I
propose to define the term any-affect-whatever in relation to reconnected, revalorized
affection images. The affection image, which Deleuze understands as disconnected
from the signifying chain, can be reconnected to the affective chain and can thus be
valorized in the era of neoliberal governmentality. As such, any-affect-whatever is to
be defined as an image that expresses pure affect, disconnected or emptied in relation
69
Critics such as Linda Williams and Miriam Hansen have underscored the potential subversiveness
of classical melodramas in the sense that they produce massive affects. From the perspective I have
proposed, however, these critics rarely consider how classical melodramas tend to “generify” the
affects of sadness, thus domesticating them. See Williams, “Film Bodies,” and Miriam Hansen, “The
Mass Production of the Senses,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill et al. (London:
Arnold).
70
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 120. Deleuze also discusses any-space-whatever in relation to the time-image.
What he terms the purely optical and sound image Italian neo-realism illustrates is established in any-
space-whatever. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 5.
63
to this affective valorization process. This term no longer refers to particular
determinate affects, but rather to singular affects whose values are indeterminate.
Significantly, Flowers deploys several cinematic techniques to unfold
otherwise suppressed any-affect-whatevers within the film. These have to do with the
two changes in Hou’s filmmaking style. First, the unstable, unmotivated camera
movements characteristic of this film constantly distract the audience’s attention
away from the valorized affection-images, thereby enabling them to encounter any-
affect-whatevers. Hou’s own description of this style of cinematography implies this
point:
From The Boys from Fengkuei to Flowers of Shanghai, my
understanding of space has changed. I used to think the
camera had to be set at a distance to show emotionless and
objective observation. But in Flowers of Shanghai, I realized
that objective observation had to depend on subjective
maneuvers in presenting characters. I could be cool or
emotional toward the characters when shooting. My feelings
are not important in terms of objectivity, because there is
another pair of eyes simultaneously watching the characters.
No matter how close the camera is, there is [the] same effect
of a double gaze. The camera is like a person standing
beside me watching the group of characters.
71
Here, it is important to note that, contrary to Hou’s intention, the detached, static,
long shots in his earlier films did not turn out to be emotionless for the audience.
71
Hou, qtd. in Gary G. Xu, “Flowers of Shanghai: Visualizing Ellipsis and (Colonial) Absence,” in
Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 119; emphasis
added.
64
Indeed, some of the images of the natural landscapes captured in this format were so
emotionally appealing to some of the non-Taiwan audience that a travel agency
organized a package tour called “journey to the places in Hou Hsiao-hisen’s films.”
72
This vividly illustrates how Hou’s earlier films’ affection-images have in turn been
valorized in the era of global neoliberal governmentality. In this context, his change
in cinematography is significant. Instead of stating it simply as the transition to
mobile cinematography, he describes it as a shift to a double gaze, suggesting that the
purpose of his new cinematographic style is to create another gaze beyond his
control.
73
In other words, he deploys mobile cinematography in the way that can
make residual, unvalorized affection-images distract both Hou himself and the
audience of his films from his and the audience’s habitual attention to valorized
affection-images.
Indeed, as Udden pertinently points out, the camera movement in Flowers
is so whimsical that there would be few audience members who would be
comfortable with it. The camera sometimes seems to be motivated, following
72
Yueh-yu Yeh, Poetics and Politics, 171.
73
Critics such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Anne Friedberg, or Giuliana Bruno have claimed how the
mobility of the camera may threaten to disturb the ideological identification of the spectator-subject
with the transcendent camera. Yet, characterizing this quality of cinema as counteracting only to the
operations of the disciplinary film apparatus, they have not considered how this mobility can be
governed in the form of dynamic attention by the neoliberal governmental film apparatus and how
there can be different modes of camera mobility that can challenge this governance. The double gaze
of Hou’s recent films can be seen as efforts to realize these different modes of camera mobility. See
Jean Louis-Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Movies and
Methods Vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), Anne Friedberg,
Window Shopping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and Bruno, Atlas.
65
characters’ movements, but other times it seems to move irrationally, making
attractive or significant characters pass off-screen or causing objects like lamps to
obstruct our views.
74
Consequently, this irrational camera movement potentially
leaves almost all the exotic images floating and unstable. This is how almost all the
flower girls’ gestures to some extent remain unfathomable, thereby producing any-
affect-whatevers even though the audience would know their gestures are in fact
highly staged in their calculative rationalities.
Another notable technique that facilitates the process of producing any-
affect-whatever is the use of fades that serve as elliptical intervals. Just as those of
Italian neo-realist films, the narratives of Hou’s films, starting with the The Boys from
Fengkuei, have always been episodic and elliptical in the way that scenes or
sequences are loosely connected or sometimes include huge gaps. In Flowers, this
elliptical narrative style continues, but another kind of ellipsis is added to it: the intra-
scene ellipsis. Here fades are not only used for transitions between scenes, but often
abruptly intrude into the middle of the scene. Significantly, some of the gaps created
by this kind of intrusions are beyond measure. Since it is not certain, as Gary G. Xu
puts it, what exactly has happened during this interval or how long this interval is, the
interval “implies infinite possibilities.”
75
During this three- to four-second interval,
74
Udden, No Man, 148.
75
Xu, “Ellipsis,” 119.
66
the audience cannot entirely predict what comes after the fade. In this sense, this kind
of interval can be seen as any-affect-whatever par excellence.
One remarkable scene best illustrates this kind of interval as any-affect-
whatever. One of the early scenes where Crimson is grumbling at Master Wang in her
enclave abruptly fades out. When the next shot fades in, we sees Crimson crying and
Wang feels embarrassed in the same place. Then we see Wang asking one of
Crimson’s servants what Crimson really wants—the very question that haunted
Sigmund Freud. We are never sure what happened to them during the interval, but it
is clear that there an affective change occurred during the interval, although this
change is beyond measure, and that we the audience have endured affects in their
state of indeterminacy. This is one way in which the film shows how images of
Crimson most purely express any-affect-whatever.
The process of subsuming the exotic under neoliberal governmentality has
never made the exception of art cinema. Rather, contemporary art films that
illuminate exotic otherness have always had to negotiate with this kind of affective
valorization processes. In Flowers, Hou seems to have had to employ clichéd
valorized exotic images to meet the demand of global neoliberal governmentality for
economically harnessing the exotic. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Flowers also
creates unvalorizable, residual exotic images that resist and elude the neoliberal
governance of the exotic by developing some of the narrative and formal techniques
that produce any-affect-whatevers.
67
The Spectral Cosmopolitan Exotic in Flight of the Red Balloon
If in the past era of accelerated modernization the exotic was supposed to
be found in rural areas, in the present era of global neoliberalism, this is no longer the
case. Metropolises have increasingly usurped the very place for the exotic as they
have become increasingly cosmopolitan, multicultural, and transnational. In this way,
the exotic has now become an important feature of metropolitan life. However, as we
have seen, this exoticness has simultaneously undergone generification and has thus
almost exhausted its singularity and alterity as a result of the global neoliberal
valorization and regularization of culture.
Nonetheless, curiously enough, Hou Hsiao-hsien—who has shown a
preference of bringing light to rural natural landscapes—recently made two films,
Café Lumière (2003) (hereafter Café) and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) (hereafter
Flight) in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and Paris. But Café and Flight are not
interested in visiting “exotic” tourist sites or attractions within the cities or in
intensifying their exoticness; instead, they visit spaces for quotidian life such as busy
streets, subway stations, bookstores, ordinary cafés, and even apartments. This
indicates that Hou has continued to adopt ontological realism as his main aesthetic
approach while simultaneously, as in Flowers, Café, and Flight, attempting to elicit or
create unvalorizable, affective forms of alterity, unfamiliarity, or exoticness from
these spaces and quotidian lives there. If, among the two films, Flight seems even
68
more interesting, it is because it draws on much more cinematic techniques than Café
does to produce these unvalorizable exotic qualities.
To elicit these residual exotic qualities, Flight continues to employ the
similar delicately mobile cinematographic technique that involves a double gaze, as
Flowers did, while also deploying more diverse cinematic techniques that serve to
produce exoticness in its “spectral” form in Derrida’s sense. Derrida’s own definition
of the term spectral helps fully explain how the spectral form of the exotic can
produce ungovernable exoticness:
The production of the ghost, the constitution of the ghost
effect is not simply a spiritualization or even an
autonomization of spirit, idea, or thought, as happens par
excellence in Hegelian idealism. No, once this
autonomization is effected, with the corresponding
expropriation or alienation, and only then, the ghostly
moment comes upon it, adds to it a supplementary
dimension, one more simulacrum, alienation, or
expropriation [. . . ]. Once ideas or thoughts (Gedanke) are
detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost
by giving them a body. Not by returning to the living body
from which ideas and thoughts have been torn loose, but by
incarnating the latter in another artifactual body, a prosthetic
body, a ghost of spirit, one might say a ghost of the ghost.
76
The distinction between the spectral and the spiritual is crucial: both are forms of
expression or exteriorization of an idea or thought, but they differ in the sense that the
spiritual refers to the natural or authentic form of expression whereas the spectral
76
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 26.
69
refers to the artificial or inauthentic one. Yet this does not imply that the two
constitute a new dichotomy or a Hegelian dialectical opposition. As the quotation
makes clear, unlike the spiritual, which is subject to the Hegelian dialectics, with the
term spectral Derrida designates “a supplementary dimension” or a residue of the
spiritualization process that accrues to, as well as destabilizes, this process. Another
important characteristic of the spectral is that it is always embodied in artificial,
prosthetic, secondary, or parasitic rather than natural, original, primary, or host bodies,
which explains why the spectral evokes feelings of alterity, unfamiliarity, and anxiety.
Clearly, insofar as the exotic is defined as an affective excess deviated from
signifying processes, which spiritualize and idealize material beings, the exotic is
already spectral. Yet as it becomes valorized and thus regularized under neoliberal
governmentality, it no longer remains a specter, but rather as a specter turned spirit.
Nevertheless, even from this process of spiritualizing the exotic, the unvalorizable,
residual exotic can appear as a new form of specter, which once again deviates from,
as well as supplements this process.
Seeing the exotic as spectral can lead us to some important insights about
the exotic. It will no longer be tenable to assume that the exotic can only come from
non-Western worlds since specters can emerge from any kind of spiritualization
process regardless of whether this process happens in the West or the non-West.
Another important insight would be that the ungovernable exotic comes from
supplementary, affective processes that can be distinct from well-known identity-
70
blurring processes variously termed as those of hybridization or transnationalization,
as the latter has now become part of the neoliberal valorization.
As in most of Hou’s films, the storyline of Flight is quite simple if one
considers only the “significant” events at the sacrifice of insignificant details. Song, a
Chinese film student, begins to live with a Parisian family as a babysitter for the child
Simon, who lives with his single mother Suzanne (played by Juliette Binoche), who
works dubbing Chinese puppet shows. While taking care of Simon, Song remakes
Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short film The Red Balloon, featuring Simon. Meanwhile,
Suzanne is having trouble with Marc, her tenant, who does not pay the rent while she
waits for her daughter Louise, who lives in Brussels—possibly with her father—to
return. Last but not least, a strange red balloon floats and sometimes lingers around
Simon and Song.
The film depicts a Parisian life that is already characterized as
transnational in many respects. Indeed, transnational cultural exchanges between
China and France appear in the film in a variety of ways: a Chinese woman works in
a French family, a French woman translates Chinese puppet shows, a Chinese woman
filmmaker makes a remake of a French film (that reflexively refers to Hou’s situation),
and so forth. The identity-blurring processes caused by these cultural exchanges
already show the exoticness of contemporary Paris. However, the film does not
simply reproduce a multifarious portrayal of spiritualized transnational life. By
71
employing supplemental processes of spectralization, the film imbues otherwise
familiar landscapes of the global city of Paris with uncanny atmosphere.
One of the film’s notable visual features is that it often creates doubles of
people or objects utilizing images reflected in mirrors or windows. It seems normal
when both the actual source and its reflected image are simultaneously seen within
the frame, but when only reflected images are seen within the frame, this cinematic
experience begins to communicate a sense of otherness. For instance, in the scene
where Song and Simon are walking along a street, what we see for the first few
seconds are only their reflections in a cafe window, although after this short period of
time their actual images appear within the frame due to the camera panning. During
those few seconds we might get a sense that the reflected images of Song and Simon
suddenly look unfamiliar to us even though these images ostensibly resemble their
referents outside the frame. This antinomic feeling can be described as the feeling of
“uncanniess” (Unheimlichkeit in German) that Freud once wrote about, given that he
defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar.”
77
This dimension of unfamiliarity within the
familiar is also the first and foremost feature of what Derrida terms specter since—as
a supplementary dimension added to something, as previously discussed—the specter
evokes a sense of alterity. Consequently, during those few seconds we see a
77
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 220.
72
spectralization process emerge because the reflected images add a sense of alterity to
the otherwise ordinary perception of Song and Simon. Their spectral doubles enable
us to feel as if Song and Simon have become endowed with unknown, unfathomable
qualities supplemental to their transnational properties.
78
The film also provides several interesting instances of spectral sound
images, such as the scene in which Suzanne is dubbing a Chinese traditional puppetry
into French. During the first few seconds, we hear her vocal dubbing when only the
Chinese puppet is within the frame while her visual image remains outside the frame.
Although her visual image appears in the subsequent shot, during this time we
encounter another instance of spectralization because it seems as if her voice,
temporarily disembodied from her own body, has become reincarnated in the puppet’s
body, an artifactual body. In Michel Chion’s vocabulary, this vocal specter is an
example of “acousmêtre,” which Chion defines as “a sound that is heard without its
cause or source being seen.”
79
When a voice becomes an acousmêtre in a film, Chion
writes, it acquires a sense of otherness that cannot be attributed to its alleged source,
as can be seen in many films, such as Norman’s dead mother’s voice in Psycho
(Hitchcock, 1960) or the unseen Mabuse’s voice in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
78
This production of spectral double illustrates what Slavoj Žižek terms “interface effect.” By this
term, Žižek means the way in which a shot incorporates its reverse-shot instead of being sutured by an
autonomous reverse-shot According to Žižek, in comparison to the standard suturing procedure, this
effect adds to the reverse-shot a spectral dimension, which would be suppressed in the suturing dyad of
the shot and the reverse-shot. See Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears (London: BFI, 2001), ch.2.
79
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999), 18.
73
(Lang, 1933). Moreover, in the disjointed juncture of the voice and the body in the
dubbing scene in Flight, not only do we see a spectralization of Suzanne, but also
bear witness to a spectralization of the puppet in the sense that the alleged voice of
the puppet, disembodied from its body, becomes reincarnated into Suzanne’s spectral
voice. The sense of uncanniness that this spectralization process can impart to the
audience accounts for the supplementary inscrutability of Suzanne and the Chinese
puppet beyond the characterization of them as transnational insofar as the ordinary
mode of representing them would be enough to determine them as transnational. The
spectral qualities that haunt both Suzanne and the puppet indicate the ineradicability
of the unvalorizable residual exotic.
Finally, the appearance of the ordinary yet obscure red balloon is also
notable. We should be careful not to draw a hasty conclusion that the red balloon
stands for the transnational exchange between Chineseness and Frenchness given that
Flight is a transnational (Chinese or Chinese/French) remake of the French film The
Red Balloon. Just as Suzanne’s spectral voice does with respect to the puppet, the red
balloon during the process of disembodiment acquires an extra dimension of alterity
that cannot be ascribed to a cultural feature of Chineseness or a combination of
cultural features of Chineseness and Frenchness. Indeed, the balloon in Hou’s film
cannot be thought to have the quasi-anthropomorphic or magical character that
74
Lamorisse’s film has; rather, it looks ordinary.
80
Although it does not appear to have
a purpose or intention, it nonetheless seems to have an unknown extra dimension that
cannot be attributed to any positive nature, as evident in the scenes in which it attracts
Simon’s attention or lingers around him for no explicit reason. Thus, from the
Derridian perspective, if Lamorisse’s balloon is understood as a spirit, the one in
Hou’s film becomes a specter, obtaining an extra dimension of otherness that cannot
be reduced to any positive national character.
We can see the spectralization of the red balloon not only in the context of
the production of the film. We can also see how it is spectralized within the film text
itself in multiple ways. It is reincarnated, for example, in the painting titled Le ballon
by a Swiss painter named Felix Vallotton, in the painting on the wall of a building on
a street in Paris, and in Song’s remake of Lamorisse’s film. For the audience of the
film, these multiple spectralizations not only amplify the visibility of the otherwise
barely visible balloon, but also intensify the sense of alterity or singularity about the
balloon that would otherwise simply embody Frenchness, Chineseness, or a hybrid of
features of the two, evoking the national or transnational.
80
In comparing Lamorisse’s and Hou’s films in terms of the nature of the balloon, Sean Metzger and
Olivia Khoo point out that the balloon in the former film is “guided by the exigencies of chance”
whereas in the latter it is “paced by non-events.” Sean Metzger and Olivia Khoo, “Introduction,” in
Futures of Chinese Cinema, eds. Sean Metzger and Olivia Khoo (Chicago: Intellect, 2009), 15. While
their argument is not without pertinence, it does not precisely reflect the key characteristics of the two
balloons. Unlike their assessment, the balloon in Lamorisse’s film acts like a human being, thereby
implying necessity rather than chance, whereas the one in Hou’s looks ordinary but also haunted by an
extra dimension of alterity.
75
As I have theoretically argued using Lacan’s discourse theory and
Benjamin’s notions of distraction and awakening, the residual, unvalorizable exotic
can appear in the cinema of the era of neoliberal governmentality. Hou’s recent
postnational films such as Flowers and Flight express this possibility through
narrative and formal techniques that produce any-affect-whatevers and spectral exotic
images. In this cosmopolitan era, the exotic is no longer considered marginal as it was
in the era of sovereign and disciplinary powers, but has instead been reassessed in
terms of affective intensities. Moreover, as it can be more generally understood as the
supplementary affective potential that exceeds any signifying and affective
valorization process, it turns out that the exotic can be found in any-being-whatever.
As Hou’s Flight suggests, exotic images that appear and co-appear in this form enable
us to imagine an alternative community grounded on incommensurable alterity rather
than a common measure.
76
Part II
Temporality
Part I demonstrated how some of the global East Asian films allow us to
experience affective otherness in the form of exoticness and what kinds of change this
affectivity has undergone in the transition from the era of national sovereignty to that
of global neoliberal governmentality. However, given that exoticness is often
associated with temporal qualities such as primitiveness or backwardness, we can
also consider the experience of affective otherness in terms of time. Clearly,
postcolonial historiographic films made from the late 1980s to the early 1990s in East
Asia—including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness (1989), Chen Kaige’s Farewell
My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yi-mou’s Life (1994), and Park Kwang-su’s Single
Spark (1995)—showed their capacity to reconstruct or recover alternative memories
of past experiences from the perspective of culturally marginal or subaltern people,
contesting the officially acknowledged memories of them. Indeed, the decline of
sovereign and disciplinary powers has opened up these possibilities for constructing
alternative temporalities characteristic of cultural others. But what became of these
attempts when global neoliberal governmentality increasingly took the place of the
old forms of power from the late 1990s onward? More specifically, in what ways
have the affective valorization processes of neoliberal governmentality influenced the
affects characteristic of those alternative temporalities? Are there any residual
77
cinematic times that can survive or escape these valorization processes in such a
manner that the audience will have the chance to experience postnational otherness in
the form of ungovernable time?
To address these questions theoretically, Part II will examine both theories
of cinematic time and politico-philosophical thoughts on time and history in the
context of neoliberal governmentality. In Chapter 3, I will examine how global
neoliberal governmentality regularizes alternative temporalities through the process
of the “real” subsumption of time. This chapter will also address the question of how
this “real” subsumption process is also at work in cinematic time, demonstrating that
even the Bergsonian heterogeneous cinematic time, which Deleuze explores in his
Cinema 2: The Time-image, is already marked by a fundamental limit imposed by this
process. As a case study, I closely read Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema (2005) to
illustrate how its compulsive repetition serves to turn otherwise singular
contingencies into probabilistic, thus regularized chances. In Chapter 4, however, I
will discuss how there can be a residual time that is not reduced to valorizable
contingencies and temporal heterogeneities predicated on the return of the same or
the similar. More specifically, rereading Deleuze’s notion of the empty form of time
and Benjamin-Agamben’s notion of the dialectical image, I will theorize this
unvalorizable residual time, in which one gets a potential to become other or to
metamorphose oneself. As a case study, I closely read Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Distance
to show how this film expresses this potential by employing narrative and formal
78
strategies that fill the time for repetition with immeasurable possibilities and
hesitations.
79
Chapter 3
The Real Subsumption of Alternative Temporalities in Hong Sang-soo’s
Tale of Cinema
Time in the Transition to the Era of Neoliberal Governmentality
Modernity is characterized, among others, by the abstraction and
rationalization of time. This rationalization consists of the simultaneous processes of
suppressing qualitative affective intensities of our temporal experience and reducing
them into quantitative signifying articulations. Thinkers such as Bergson and
Benjamin have contested this modern conception of time. In Matter and Memory, not
only does Bergson claim that time is essentially durée, a qualitative indivisible flow,
protesting against the prevalent apprehension of time as a quantitative divisible based
on the reduction of time to space, but also that the past images involving insignificant
details and affective tones to a greater or lesser degree flow into the present images
involving things of use and significance.
1
Similarly, albeit with a different focus,
Benjamin, in his “On the Concept of History,” accuses the modern notion of
homogeneous empty time of progressing toward a dominant historical end while
simultaneously leaving behind other aberrant temporalities. Alternatively, he proposes
1
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
80
the notion of the “now-time”—namely, the time for arresting the progression of
history—which can awaken us to those past forgotten temporalities.
2
Historically, the dominance of this quantitative homogeneous time in
modernity was accelerated by the disciplinary mechanisms that held sway over all the
sectors of societies, whether capitalist or socialist, in the era of Taylorism and
Fordism. As Marx theorizes in Capital, in the society of commodity exchange, the
(exchange) value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor
time—that is, “the labor-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions
of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and
intensity of labor prevalent in that society.”
3
This idea indicates that the production
of commodities and the human labor that participates in the process can only be
perceived in terms of quantitative homogeneous time. This process of rationalizing
time, as Alliez and Feher argue, was not only dominant in the production sector of
society, but was also applied to other social sectors, such as the consumption sector
(i.e., that of the reproduction of labor power) and the public service sector (i.e., that of
the reproduction of the relations of production).
4
In other words, the organization of
2
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-
1940, eds. Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006).
3
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 129.
4
Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, “The Luster of Capital,” Zone, 1/2 (1987), 342-343.
81
mass consumption and what Althusser calls state apparatuses like families or schools
also required the notion of abstract time for their monolithic operations.
5
Yet even when sovereign and disciplinary powers were dominant,
qualitative aberrant times subsisted beneath the surface of the quantitative
homogeneous time. As Chakrabarty puts it, India’s labor history shows that “human
activity [. . . ] is often associated with the presence and agency of gods or spirits in
the very process of labor” as workers’ ritual of worshiping machinery indicates.
6
Although it is a part of the labor process, Chakrabarty claims, this singular time for
the ritual is incommensurable with the abstract time that characterizes the remaining
production process. Moreover, numerous historiographic studies on gender, class, and
ethnic minorities’ cultures have demonstrated that, in the reproductive sectors, such as
those of consumption and public service than in the productive sector, alternative
immeasurable times were much easier to escape from the dominance of quantitative
homogeneous time.
Indeed, as the postwar histories of anti-colonial and counter-cultural
resistances tell us, sovereign and disciplinary powers have been increasingly losing
their hegemony all over the world and people have overtly claimed to liberate their
own inalienable times from the dominance of abstract time in all sectors of their
5
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (New York: Aakar Books, 2006).
6
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 76.
82
societies. However, according to Alliez and Feher, the dominant power blocs that
consist of the state, management, and labor unions have often responded to these
crises of sovereign and disciplinary powers by undertaking “a vast enterprise of
‘forced translation,’ that is, of translating or converting into quantitative terms
compatible with the system the qualitative propositions of social transformation.”
7
Concerning the notion of time, this means that some of the hitherto aberrant and thus
supposedly unproductive times have been accepted by the dominant power blocs as
productive, as long as they are measurable in terms of exchange value.
Consequently, in the production sector, the post-Fordist mode of capitalist
production has increasingly replaced the previous Fordist and/or Taylorist ones first
in the First World and more recently in the Third World as well. With this new mode
of production, the accumulation of capital no longer simply depends on the
prolongation of homogeneous labor time, but rather on the creation of “flexibly
specialized” labor that can satisfy the specific kinds of demands from a variety of
qualitatively different consumers or the increase in the productivity of labor by means
of the introduction of new automation or management systems. In other words, in the
era of post-Fordism, qualities rather than quantities of time are considered to be
crucial to determining the value of commodity, but these qualities, no matter how
different, are considered as commensurable rather than incommensurable (i.e., as
7
Alliez and Feher, “Luster,” 320.
83
specifically rather than singularly different).
8
Ultimately, from the perspective of
production managers or entrepreneurs, in this era, the time for production is still
considered measurable, although not in a monolithic way. In short, we cannot simply
say that production time has become heterogeneous; rather, it has become rationalized
under neoliberal governmentality insofar as that heterogeneity is regularized through
economic calculations.
This neoliberal rationalization of heterogeneous time has also swept over
reproduction sectors. To the explosion of consumers’ demand for quality of life, post-
Fordist capitalism has responded with the production of a variety of customized
goods and services. Clearly, this response to some extent enables consumers to realize
their desires for their own singular times, but customization already indicates a
regularizing control of these times. Furthermore, the singularity of time undergoes
regularization not only via the production process but also from the consumers
themselves. As Foucault puts it, in the era of neoliberal governmentality, the terms
worker and consumer are no longer tenable as every human being is considered to be
an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his
own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings.”
9
People no longer
simply think of their acts of consumption (e.g., those of taking specialized counseling
8
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 82-83.
9
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226.
84
service or participating in cultural activities) as means of subsistence, but rather
consider them as investments that can increase their economic value measured in
terms of not only their intellectual but also their affective capacities.
It is important to note, then, that neoliberal governmentality seems to
achieve a Hegelian sublation of the dialectical opposition of homogeneous continuous
and heterogeneous aberrant times. In other words, the neoliberal governance of time
corresponds to what Alexandre Kojeve calls the end of history. Kojeve understands
the Hegelian end of history as the coming of the situation in which no more
dialectical processes of negation remain—the disappearance of “Action negating the
given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object”—that have made
history possible.
10
However, this should not be understood as the annihilation of any
difference between the two kinds of time through a unification of them into one. The
differences between the two remain, but in a state of equilibrium, far from leading up
to antagonisms, as both are subject to valorization processes. Foucault clarifies this
when he discusses a form of governmentality, raison d’Etat, claiming that “the coup
d’Etat does not break with raison d’Etat. It is an element, an event, a way of doing
things that, as something that breaches the laws, or at any rate does not submit to the
laws, falls entirely within the general horizon, the general form of raison d’Etat.”
11
10
Qtd. in Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 6.
11
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 262.
85
According to Foucault, no matter how the two seem oppositional, the disruptive
aberrant time of the coup d’Etat can coexist peacefully with the homogenous
continuous time of raison d’Etat.
In fact, even before post-Fordism arrived, Marx had already anticipated
this dialectical synthesis of the temporal opposition by proposing that “a specifically
capitalist mode of production” is achieved only by the passage from the formal to the
real subsumption of labor under capital. According to Marx, in the early stages of
capitalism, “capital subsumes the labor process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes
over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of
production.”
12
This implies that this mode of capitalism—that is, Fordist or Taylorist
capitalism—inevitably involves the opposition between the heterogeneous time of
“real” labor and the homogeneous time of “abstract” labor that the capitalist system
requires from a worker. However, when capitalism advances to the next state, Marx
claims, “[capital] revolutionizes [workers’] actual mode of labor and the real nature of
labor process as a whole” by introducing cooperation, a division of labor, and most
importantly machinery.
13
Marx terms this transformation “the real subsumption of
labor under capital,” suggesting that this transformation ultimately resolves the
opposition between the real and the abstract time of labor that has lingered even in the
earlier stages of capitalism. He argues how, in this new stage, the extraction of
12
Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 1021; emphasis in the original.
13
Ibid.
86
relative surplus value is more important than that of absolute surplus value; in other
words, the increase in surplus value depends on increasing the productivity of labor
intensively in a given length of time rather than simply prolonging the length of labor
time.
14
Despite the anticipation of post-Fordist capitalism that Marx created, his
thought is still within the limits of anthropocentrism, as he continues to claim that
only labor time is valorized, thereby privileging human agency over the exterior
object. However, Deleuze and Guattari nullify this superiority of human subjects to
their exterior objects as they reformulate Marx’s idea of the passage from the formal
to the real subsumption of labor under capital by proposing the transition from social
subjection to machinic enslavement. Social subjection refers to humans’ subjective
relation to the exterior object or tool. This indicates the inevitability of the human
being’s dependence on his or her environment, but, at the same time, acknowledges
the human being’s status as the subject with regard to his or her exterior. In contrast,
as Deleuze and Guattari point out, in the regime of machinic enslavement, which
dominated the archaic imperial formation and returned during the later stages of
capitalism, “human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine” rather
than users of it.
15
Consequently, Deleuze and Guattari underscore that, in this regime,
14
Ibid., 1023-1024.
15
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 457.
87
surplus value is no longer extracted from human labor, but rather “becomes
machinic.”
16
This conclusion should not be understood simply as the domination of
human labor by a machine; instead, as Deleuze and Guattari write, this machinic
enslavement works “in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the
transcendence of a formal Unity.”
17
In this respect, in the same way that Foucault
discusses the temporality of governmentality, Deleuze and Guattari theorize machinic
enslavement not simply as the unification of human labor and its exterior objects into
one, but as their peaceful coexistence in which differences are sustained. Thus, when
considered in terms of temporality, the transition to the regime of machinic
enslavement involves history coming to an end, where the subjects and objects of
different temporal rhythms can coexist without causing catastrophic ruptures.
Nevertheless, as the word enslavement suggests, Deleuze and Guattari in no way
consider this regime to be a realized utopia. Although external regulations like
repression or subjection no longer exist in this regime, internal regulations continue to
operate to such an extent that all the qualitatively different times can participate in the
machinic valorization process without creating too many conflicts or antagonisms.
16
Ibid.,458.
17
Ibid. For socio-historical implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between social
subjection and machinic enslavement, see also Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992).
88
The Cinematic Affective Time from Contingency to Repetition Compulsion
Born in the modern era, cinema is one of the important media that record,
preserve, and transform our modern temporal experience. When it comes to the past
and the present mainstream cinemas modeled on classical Hollywood cinema, films
have tended to realize the modern notion of time as the homogeneous progressive
time that both Bergson and Benjamin problematize. The plots of these films are
usually characterized by the linear chain of events connected according to
conventional causalities. These plots are usually teleological: The endings tend to be
marked by moments in which all the conflicts and questions are resolved. Not
surprisingly, this temporality of the cinema was prevalent in the era of sovereign and
disciplinary powers, as the cinema often served as, in Althusser’s or Foucault’s terms,
a state ideological or disciplinary apparatus par excellence during this period.
However, film theories on cinematic time make it clear that the cinema is
also characterized by the emergence of contingencies that rupture and resist the
dominant form of homogeneous progressive time. Throughout the history of film
theory, the temporality of the contingent has been of central concern, especially for
those who champion the ontological realism of the cinema, including Benjamin,
Bazin, Kracauer, and more recently Mary Ann Doane and D. N. Rodowick.
18
The
18
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.
4,1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2006); André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Realism” in What is Cinema? Vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge:
89
idea that these thinkers share in common is that the cinema is capable of capturing
some of the supposedly insignificant and ephemeral fragments of our experience that
usually go unnoticed. For instance, Kracauer claims that a daily random moment in a
film “affects us strongly, or even primarily, as just a fragmentary moment of visible
reality, surrounded, as it were, by a fringe of indeterminate visible meanings. And in
this capacity the moment disengages itself from the conflict, the belief, the adventure,
toward which the whole of story converges.”
19
In this way, to the extent that
contingencies or chance occurrences are considered not simply to lack meanings but
also possibly to take the spectator by surprise, they are experienced as affective
intensities in excess of historical signifying processes.
20
The cinematic contingent, no matter how potentially disruptive, has also
been harnessed by the time of progressive narrative. As Doane examines in great
details, this is even the case with actualities made prior to 1907. Otherwise uneventful
fragments of life were appropriated by the time of progressive narrativization and,
thus, could “be readily imbued with meaning through its very framing as [an]
event.”
21
Meanings have also been retroactively attributed to chance occurrences
through narrative techniques such as flashback. In such cases, once a flashback has
Harvard University Press, 2002); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
19
Kracauer, Theory, 303.
20
Doane, Emergence,143.
21
Ibid., 169l emphasis in the original.
90
succeeded in loading the contingent with meaning, the dominance of progressive time,
though momentarily disrupted, can be restored. It should be noted that here we
encounter a cinematic equivalent of the formal subsumption in Marx’s sense of the
term; through this process, the signifying value of the indeterminate “real” or
“historical” fragments of time are reductively determined by progressive narrative
time.
22
Although the formal subsumption of cinematic contingency under
progressive time was normative and hegemonic in the era of sovereign and
disciplinary powers, the tension between the two temporalities, as Doane
demonstrates, could not be entirely eliminated.
23
In particular, when the regime of
these powers irreversibly came to a crisis, during those postwar heydays of counter-
cultural movements in Europe and the US, decolonizing movements in the Third
World, and anti-authoritarian movements in the East Asia, the contingent and the
22
I am tempted to argue that this process can also be conceived as that of the “temporal” suture if we
expand the notion of suture to such an extent that it can account for the temporal domain beyond the
spatial one. As is well known in film studies, the notion of suture is elaborated to designate the
cinema’s continuity in editing technique in general and the technique of the shot-reverse shot in
particular for maintaining the seamlessness or transparency of the cinematic space. However,
considering Jacques-Alain Miller’s original definition of the term, according to which the signifying
chain suppresses the disturbing force of jouissance by making a signifier stand in for it, the notion of
suture can be more generalized to refer to any cinematic techniques that attempt to suppress affective
processes through signifying processes. For the original idea about the notion, see Jacques-Alain
Miller, “Suture: elements of the logic of the signifier,” trans. Jacqueline Rose, Screen 18 (Winter,
1977-1978). For the applicability of the notion to cinema, see Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,”
in Cahiers du Cinema 1969-1972, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990);
Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly (1974), Stephen Heath,
Questions of Cinema (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981), ch. 3; Kaja Silverman, The Subject of
Semiotics (New York : Oxford University Press, 1983), ch. 5; and more recently Slavoj Žižek, The
Fright of the Real Tears (London: BFI, 1999).
23
See Doane, Emergence, ch. 7.
91
ephemeral greatly proliferated, destabilizing the homogeneous progressive time.
Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-image, among others, best theorizes different ways in
which films of this period experimented with time against the hitherto hegemonic,
homogeneous progressive temporality. In his prequel Cinema 1: The Movement-
image, Deleuze shows how the history of classical cinema can be seen as that of the
processes of the rationalization and stabilization of heterogeneous, indivisible, and
immeasurable movements as durée.
24
Insofar as the movement as durée as such is
the way the contingent makes its appearance, his work on the movement-image can
be understood as theorizing the cinematic processes of the formal subsumption of
contingencies under the narrative time. In contrast, his work on the time-image,
which refers to the ways in which films have challenged and resisted the rationalizing
processes of the movement image, can be read as exploring a variety of ways in
which cinematic contingencies disturb, challenge, or disrupt the cinematic processes
of the formal subsumption of time.
The first and foremost way in which contingencies fragment and explode
progressive narrative time, according to Deleuze, is through “purely optical and
sound images.” Unlike “the sensory-motor situation,” where the character as well as
the spectator is able to react to what he or she has perceived—that is, make his or her
situation meaningful—the purely optical and sound situation “outstrips [the
24
Deleuze claims that the movement image is an “indirect representation” of time, which means that
the movement image subordinates time to movement. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement-Image,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 271 and passim.
92
character’s as well as the spectator’s] motor capacities on all sides, and makes him
see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He
records rather than reacts.”
25
These images are, among others, characteristic of
Italian neorealist films, but can be seen in many other films that describe people’s
disoriented lives in personal and social crises.
One might see purely optical and sound images as the cinematic
equivalent of what Barthes designates as a punctum in a photograph, the indexical
trace of something almost insignificant captured by chance simply because something
was there when it was photographed.
26
Yet, for Deleuze, what is crucial about these
images is less that they come directly from historical reality by chance than that they
are experienced as affectively intensive contingencies, regardless of whether they
historically have real referents or are artificially staged.
27
This is the reason why not
only films depicting contemporary lives but also fiction films dealing with bygone
25
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 3.
26
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 40-41
27
As Deleuze clearly states regarding its relevance to Bazin’s fact-image, purely optical and sound
images seem exactly the same as the contingent real image underscored by those who champion
ontological cinematic realism. However, to the extent that Deleuze’s theory of cinematic image is
indebted to Bergson’s notion of the image developed in Matter and Memory, it should be noted that
the purely optical and sound image cannot be understood in the same way as the contingent indexical
image is conceived. Questioning the long-lasted dualism of spirit and matter, Bergson proposes a third
term image to synthesize the two: “[B]y “image” we mean a certain existence which is more than that
which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence
placed halfway between the “thing” and the “representation.” Bergson, Matter, 9; emphasis in the
original. Since Deleuze theorizes the cinematic image from this perspective, it is pointless to oppose
external, profilmic reality to the mentally produced idea. For Deleuze, the source from which the
image comes does not matter. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1. For the notion of fact-image, see Bazin,
“Aesthetic.”
93
historical periods can have these images. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness (1989) is
a good example of the latter. Although the film portrays the bygone period of several
years after Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese rule, it abounds with purely optical and
sound images artificially staged and performed. Because of the abundance of these
images, the film allows the audience to experience that period as tumultuous and
indeterminate rather than as resolutely moving forward.
According to Deleuze, not only their indeterminacy and opacity but also
their evocative power enable purely optical and sound images to disrupt and disable
homogeneous progressive time. Following Bergson’s discussion in Matter and
Memory, Deleuze claims that—to the extent that they cannot extend to reactions—
purely optical and sound images appearing in the present can evoke, by association,
images analogous to them from a temporal region (Deleuze also calls a “sheet” or a
“plane”) of the past (just as, when one is confronted with an unfamiliar situation, one
evokes some recollections analogous to it). The evoked images from the past flow
more loosely and freely than the progressive present ones and are thus distinct from
former present ones that move in a progressive way like the present present ones. In
this respect, concerning these images, it is pointless to speak about the distinction
between real and imaginary or between homogeneous and contingent. Another
important point about these evoked images is that the past in itself from which these
images are derived consists of an infinite number of temporal planes, as Bergson
illustrates using the metaphor of the cone.
94
Figure 1. The metaphor of the cone that Bergson provides to conceive of time as consisting of
an infinite number of temporal planes.
The present purely optical and sound images can evoke any temporal
planes from the past only if they include anything analogous to or associated with
these images. Consequently, in principle any temporal planes from the lurking past
can flow into the present homogeneous progressive narrative at any moment; as a
result, films made in accordance with this kind of temporal experimentation make
cinematic time even more instable, heterogeneous, and complicated than films
characteristic of a homogeneous progressive time occasionally accompanying purely
optical and sound images.
Clearly, as Deleuze shows, this kind of temporal experimentation with
multilayered temporal structures can be best seen in films by Orson Welles and Alain
Resnais among others. However, it is also important to note that many non-Western
or Third World films employing this temporal experience—e.g., Lucia (Umberto
Solas, 1968), Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968), Single
Spark (Park Kwang-su, 1995), and Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien,
95
1995)—have appeared in the postcolonial and post-dictatorship eras. As critics have
argued, these films can be seen as cinematic attempts to write alternative modes of
history that redeem minorities’ or subalterns’ repressed opportunities to speak about
their experience of the past.
28
Yet this temporal experience includes a more important
aspect beyond the change in the agency of historiography. This temporal
heterogeneity beyond homogeneous progressive time enables the audience to
experience affective intensities that cannot be reduced to a multiplicity of signifying
practices and their agents. As both Deleuze and Bergson indicate, the pure past or the
pure memory in itself from which one evokes particular recollection images is not
marked by any personality or any collective agency, but subsists as impersonal or
singular.
29
In this respect, what is crucial in this temporal experience is, according to
Deleuze, feeling:
28
For recent discussions of subaltern memories realized in East Asian cinema, see June Yip,
Envisioning Taiwan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Kyung-hyun Kim, The
Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), ch. 4; Chris Berry and
Mary Farquhar, China on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Bliss Cua Lim,
Translating Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) and David Martin-Jones, Cinema and
National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). For instance, concerning films like
City of Sadness, Berry and Farquhar state: “[W]hereas official history builds the past as the deeds of
famous men—and sometimes women—these counterhistories aim to convey the experiences of the
nameless ordinary people whose lives are not recorded in preserved documents, like the family in City
of Sadness.” Berry and Farquhar, China, 32.
29
Bergson writes: “[I]t is chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in
the brain: they are not in it: it is the brain that is them.” Bergson, Matter, 151. In a commentary on
Bergson, Deleuze restates: “The past is not to be confused with the mental existence of recollection-
images which actualize it in us. It is preserved in time. [. . . ] Memory is not in us; it is we who move
in a Being-memory, a world-memory.” Deleuze, Cinema 2, 98.
96
[This labyrinthine time-image] is a cinema which, in an
endeavor to sketch the present, prevents the past from being
debased into recollection. Each sheet of past, each age calls
up all the mental functions simultaneously: recollection, but
equally forgetting, false recollection, imagination, planning,
judgment. . . What is loaded with all these functions, each
time, is feeling. [. . . ] It is feeling which stretches out a sheet
and is modified according to its fragmentation.
30
The affective temporal experiences in the films discussed thus far are not
only conditioned by the decline and crisis of sovereign and disciplinary powers, but
also in turn serve to deepen this crisis by enabling the audience to feel more clearly
how the same kind of temporal disturbances and heterogeneities seen in the films
characterize the temporality of the audience members’ present day. In other words,
the spectator may experience his or her present day more seriously as a series of
crises rather than the process of progress or evolution. Furthermore, it is important to
note that even films that deal only with the distant past can allude to the recent past or
the present by association. For example, as Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar point out,
some of the Chinese 5
th
Generation films, such as Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984)
and Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou, 1987), “are set in the prerevolutionary period but
use it as a metaphor to speak of the postrevolutionary era.”
31
Nevertheless, as global neoliberal governmentality has increasingly
replaced those sovereign and disciplinary powers since the 1960s in the First World
30
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 124.
31
Berry and Farquhar, China, 32.
97
and since the 1990s in the non-Western or Third World, the hitherto subversive,
temporal heterogeneity has gradually become an object for the global capital’s real
subsumption of time. The experiences of the contingent, ephemeral, and elusive past
are no longer considered singular, beyond measure; rather, their affective intensities
can now be valorized although this valorization is not as rigid or abstract as that in the
case of the formal subsumption of time. Marxist geographers such as David Harvey
and Fredric Jameson have already addressed the intensive exploitation of time
peculiar to post-Fordist or late capitalism in general, while more recent media
scholars have more specifically explored how media in the era of post-Fordism or
neoliberalism serve as a means of valorizing the fugitive, contingent, or elusive in our
everyday lives.
32
Television is arguably a medium that has much contributed to this process
of valorization of affective temporal experience. As Richard Dienst writes:
“[T]elevision appeared at a certain historical moment to incorporate everyday life and
culture as ‘free’ time into the body of capital through the mediation of the image.”
33
Critics such as Mary Ann Doane and Nick Browne have pointed out that, unlike that
of cinema, the temporality of television is to a large extent characterized by
contingency, emergency, and ephemerality insofar as regularly programmed shows
32
See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden: Blackwell, 1990) and Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991).
33
Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 58.
98
can always be interrupted by advertisements, breaking news, and even channel-
switching audiences.
34
In this sense, television seems to be a medium that was born
to disrupt and undermine homogeneous progressive time. Yet, although in a different
way than the cinema as disciplinary apparatus has dealt with contingencies, television
tends to valorize and regularize the contingent as measurable degrees of affectivity,
thereby depriving it of singularities and relieving us from the anxieties that such
contingencies might have caused. Through this affective valorization process, we
learn to evaluate and calculate how much affectively appealing a given contingency is.
Even without relying on these theories of post-cinematic media, however,
I would argue that we can already find a theory of affective valorization of cinematic
time in Deleuze’s philosophy of time in general and of cinema as time-image in
particular. Deleuze does not explicitly disclose it in Cinema 2, but in his earlier work
Difference and Repetition he discussed the fundamental limit of the temporal
heterogeneity characteristic of the Bergsonian memory. Clearly, Bergson claims that
homogeneous progressive time is already ready to be interrupted and thus to become
heterogeneous through the unannounced intrusion of any of the infinite number of
different sheets of the past. According to Bergson, however different the sheets may
be, they are “so many repetitions of the whole of our past life” in the sense that, as his
metaphor of the cone illustrates, they are analogous in relation to the pure past that
34
Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in The Historical Film, ed. Marcia Landy
(London: The Athlon Press, 2001); Nick Browne, “The Political Economy of the Television (Super)
Text,” in American Television ed. Nick Browne (Langhorne: Harwood, 1994).
99
remains the same.
35
In other words, they are different but simultaneously analogous
to the extent that they are all actualizations of the same pure past that is unrealizable.
Bergson also makes it clear that these temporal planes are only distinct from one
another in terms of “degrees of contraction” in such a manner that “[our recollections]
take a more common form when memory shrinks most, more personal when it widens
out.”
36
In this sense, the heterogeneity and difference that characterize Bergsonian
time as durée is marked by a limit, as Deleuze writes:
Presents succeed, encroaching upon one another.
Nevertheless, however strong the incoherence or possible
opposition between successive presents, we have the
impression that each of them plays out “the same life” at
different levels. This is what we call destiny. [. . . ] We say
of successive presents which express a destiny that they
always play out the same thing, the same story, but at
different levels: here more or less relaxed, there more or less
contracted. This is why destiny accords so badly with
determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in
choosing the levels.
37
In other words, despite the differences in content between successive presents, which
Bergson and Deleuze portray as temporal planes, Deleuze claims that the pure past
remains the same as the immemorial form that grounds these differences just as the
35
Bergson, Matter, 168.
36
Ibid., 169.
37
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 83.
100
Freudian primal scene does so in relation to its different actualizations or, in Freud’s
terms, “transferences” throughout one’s life.
To the extent that Bergson’s thought on memory grounds Deleuze’s
account of cinematic experimentations with heterogeneous time, such
experimentations in cinema can be seen as marked by a limit from the outset. This
limit, I would argue, is concerned with the valorizability of the affective intensities of
cinematic temporal disturbances. As Bergson and Deleuze acknowledge, the
difference between temporal affective intensities turns out to be one of degree rather
than kind or nature in Bergson’s terms. In this way, no matter how seemingly singular,
each temporal disturbance can ultimately be valorized. Here, time is not valorized in
an abstract or extensive way as when time is formally subsumed by capital or
signification. Nonetheless, affective temporal experiences are ultimately valorized—
counted in terms of affective exchange value—and thus become exchangeable among
themselves. Insofar as the affective value of each temporal experience is determined
in a way internal rather than external to the cinematic time machine as Bergson and
Deleuze indicate, this valorization process can be conceived as the cinematic form of
the “real” subsumption of time in Marx’s terms. Insofar as it operates this valorization
process, this cinematic time machine and the films produced from this machine can
be seen as a realization of what Deleuze and Guattari term “machinic enslavement” in
the domain of cinema. Films produced in this enslaving machine may be enormously
heterogeneous and unstable nearly every moment in terms of their temporalities,
101
being full of purely optical and sound images and evoking a number of sheets of the
past that are intertwined in a labyrinthine way. Yet given that these temporal
disturbances are regularized by being considered commensurable as different
magnitudes of affective value, they will no longer cause any unbearable crisis in our
temporal experience, but will rather offer us some chances to estimate and calculate
the expected values of these heterogeneous temporal experiences in a way than can
reconcile homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of time. Thus, as Foucault writes
about the temporality for governmentality, in this kind of time-image, disturbing
times and disturbed times, though distinct, can coexist without antagonism, thereby
realizing a Hegelian end of history.
The World of Probabilistic Contingencies in Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema
Hong Sang-soo’s work is a good example that uniquely shows the change
in cinematic time that occurred during the transition from the declining era of
sovereign and disciplinary powers to the increasingly hegemonic era of neoliberal
governmentality. Kyung Hyun Kim pertinently points out that Hong’s work has
consistently hampered the progression of teleological, linear narrative by presenting
repeating banal stories, presenting the same event from two different perspectives, or
coalescing the past, the present, and the future.
38
From the perspective of what I have
38
For Kim’s discussion of how Hong’s films challenge homogeneous progressive time, see Kim,
Remasculinization, ch.7 and his recent Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011), ch.5.
102
discussed regarding the change in temporality, however, we can see that there is a
nuanced yet significant change from his earlier to later films in the way that his work
has experimented with time. Two distinctive features characterize the temporality of
his earlier films, from The Day a Pig Fell into the Fall (1996) to Virgin Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors (2000). First, rather than being dominated by a predetermined,
organic mode of linking events, the film narrative is characterized or even seems to
be ruled by contingency, ephemerality, and insignificance, just like that of Italian
neorealist film. The contemporary life Hong’s work describes is bombarded with all
kinds of contingencies, including chance encounters, missed appointments, inevitable
waiting, sudden quarrels, unscheduled journeys, temporary relationships, and
everyday banalities. The other distinctive temporal feature concerns the ways in
which the narrative is woven by different perspectives. When another perspective
appears, as David Bordwell points out, it sometimes shows what has been elided from
what the audience has seen or, as in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
sometimes gives an alternative version of what the audience has seen.
39
This manner
of weaving the narrative ultimately tends to expand contingent incidents in terms of
their frequencies or their intensities. A different perspective sometimes forces the
audience to confront new kinds of contingencies, new facets, angles, or details of
what they have already seen, or new complications in characters’ relationships.
39
David Bordwell, “Beyond Asian Minimalism: Hong Sangsoo’s Geometry Lesson,” in Hong Sang
Soo, ed. Huh Moonyung, trans. Yook Jin-young (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007), 26.
103
Although these two features have persisted to some extent, a new temporal
feature has increasingly held sway over Hong’s later films, from Turning Gate (2002)
to his most recent The Day He Arrives (2011): the repetition of contingencies across
as well as within his films.
40
Examining the oeuvre of a filmmaker from the auteurist
perspective readily indicates that certain central motifs repeat themselves throughout
his or her career. Yet in Hong’s later films, the act of repetition is not only
exaggeratedly foregrounded and thus highly reflected, but also at times almost a
principle or central theme for weaving the narrative, as especially evident in Tale of
Cinema (2005) (hereafter abbreviated as Tale) and The Day He Arrives.
41
With this
new narrative strategy, Hong no longer needs to heterogenize time by means of the
multiple perspective narrative as in his earlier films. As Kim points out regarding
Turning Gate, the apparent linear form of the narrative already seems to “weave the
past as well as the future into the present.”
42
In this way, Hong’s new strategy even
more deeply disables and undermines linear progressive time as it implies that a
seemingly linear progressive narrative can also be seen as a series of repetitions or
variations. Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate in discussing Tale, Hong’s narrative
strategy of repeating the contingent risks endorsing the neoliberal governance of time
40
While writing this chapter, Hong’s new film In Another Country came out.
41
Curiously enough, in his interviews, Hong has been reluctant to reveal that he has consciously
employed the strategy of repetition. He has often said that he was not conscious of what he was
repeating at the time when he made a film or that he later realized this fact through his discussions with
staff members. For example, see his interviews included in Hong Sang soo.
42
Kim, Hallyu, 134.
104
and thus does not go so far as to unfold the potential of time beyond the limit set by
the real subsumption of time.
Repeating the contingent is already clear in Turning Gate. Specific
elements, including certain phrases (e.g., “It’s hard to become a human, but let’s not
become monsters” and “You in me, me in you”), the gesture of shaking one’s body,
and the behavior of stalking someone, are repeated throughout the film. Even a
mythic story or a fortune told by a fortuneteller is echoed through the protagonist’s
situations. However, in this film, these repetitions still seem to be chance occurrences
or a matter of coincidence. The characters do not seem so much aware of their acts of
repetition. Thus, when something repeats, it seems to give the spectator the sense of
irony or déjà-vu rather than that of destiny.
However, Hong’s subsequent film Tale seems to force the audience to feel
“the compulsion to repeat” anything in Freud’s sense. The existence of the
compulsion is clear from the structure of the film. The film consists of two parts. The
first part is a film within the film and the second part repeats or echoes this framed
film at different points and levels. This mise-en-abyme structure of repetition is also
found within the first part (i.e., the film within the film) itself since a play that
appears in the beginning is echoed throughout the first part. Moreover, the source for
repetition exceeds the boundary of the film text. In some respects, Tale repeats
Turning Gate as well (e.g., the repetition of the phrase uttered by the protagonist of
105
Turning Gate, “Shall we die? I want to die innocently without having a sex” and the
reappearance of the same actor Kim Sang-kyung in the form of a similar character).
It seems almost impossible and meaningless to summarize the plot of Tale
because, as in Hong’s other films, not only does almost nothing significant happen in
the film, but also, seen from a different perspective, so many chance occurrences,
insignificant happenings, and failed attempts occur. In Deleuze’s terms, almost no
effective, sensori-motor situation that links events in a chain of causality is found in
the film. Characters do not react, in any coherent and meaningful way, to the
situations in which they find themselves. Rather, they do something almost
impulsively. For example, Sang-won, the hero of the film within the film, faces
difficulty in having sex with Young-sil, his lover, and abruptly suggests that she join
him in a double suicide. Without any hesitation and for no clear reason, she accepts
this proposal. Their surprising acts do not seem so embarrassing for the audience
partly because these acts no longer seem sublime, heroic, or even romantic but have
already been repeated so many times in the era of sovereign and disciplinary powers
that they now seem insignificant or even ridiculous to some disenchanted people.
However, for some audience members who realize this suicide attempt is a repetition
of the attempt already made by the hero of Hong’s Turning Gate, the surprising acts
may seem farcical. In other words, in this film, repetition compulsion serves to
relieve the audience of the shock or anxiety the contingent may arouse in them. As
106
such, repetition also seems to give minimal consistency to this film, which would
have otherwise seemed much more anarchic.
Freud discusses this relieving, pleasurable, or even comic effect of
repetition compulsion. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud calls attention to
how infants often repeat the shocks they suffer so many times that they can transform
them into joyful games (“fort-da games”). According to Freud, this repetition enables
infants to transform themselves from passive sufferers of the shocks into active
agents for these experiences.
43
As I discussed in Chapter 1, in “On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,” Benjamin reads Freud’s idea of fort-da games in relation to the role of
modern technology. Like fort-da games, Benjamin claims, modern technologies like
factory machines or even the cinema serve as a buffer against shock experiences and
thus succeed in regularizing them.
Indeed, in Tale, across different characters and situations and even
between dream and reality, all kinds of things repeat themselves, from seemingly
sublime acts such as the double suicide attempt to insignificant, small gestures such
as bending over to lace one’s shoes or smoking Marlboro Reds. However, we should
note that this repetition compulsion is quite different from that of the industrial
factory machine or the film apparatus of the classical era. Akira Lippit eloquently
43
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII, ed. by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press,
1955), 14-16.
107
writes about the instability characteristic of the contingencies of Hong’s work,
focusing on his earlier films:
It’s never clear in Hong’s work whether this elsewhere—
where questions, messages, and characters resurface—is
where they are supposed to be, or where they happen to be.
The accidental encounters, implausible reunions, journeys,
telephone calls, repeated phrases, and revised scenes that
form many of the elements of Hong’s work always tremble
on the line between an immutable narrative metaphysics in
which every conclusion is fantastically predetermined and a
purely random, although equally fantastic, series of
accidents.
44
Unlike the sovereign and disciplinary apparatus, which performs a strict, mechanical
process of repetition, Tale operates a much more flexible or even random process of
repetition. Although elements of Tale repeat themselves still randomly and
unpredictably, the film at least leaves the audience with the impression that anything
from Tale will repeat itself somewhere, someday. With Tale, the balance between the
immutable metaphysics and the purely random series, which Hong seems to have
maintained in his earlier films, has been broken, and the tendency toward
predetermination has begun to outweigh the anxiety about unpredictability.
Unlike the film as sovereign and disciplinary apparatus, which serves to
put contingencies into signification processes, Tale assigns almost no signifying value
to the repeated contingencies. Yet, to the extent to that they are pleasurable and
44
Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Hong Sangsoo’s Lines of Inquiry, Communication, Defense, and Escape,”
Film Quarterly, 57.4 (2004), 25.
108
entertaining to the audience due to their regularization by repetition, these repeated
contingencies are products of affective valorization processes. Moreover, insofar as
the film leaves us with the impression that those contingent elements that have yet to
repeat themselves will or may do so somewhere someday, one could argue everything
in this film has already potentially been subject to affective valorization processes.
Consequently, the affective potential of time in Tale persists, but in a much more
regularized form than in Hong’s earlier films, thereby coming closer to reaching
agreement with the current global neoliberal govermentality’s manner of managing
contingencies as affectively valorizable.
Clearly, Tale includes some intriguing moments in which repetitions occur
in ways that far exceed our expectations, in distorted ways, and even those in which
they do not happen against our expectations. For instance, near the end of the film,
the director Lee, who made the framed film, turns out to be a person entirely different
from what most of the audience would have expected. Also, the rumor about the
actress Young-sil—namely, that her body is covered with scars—turns out to be
groundless.
45
Nevertheless, here, we should recall what Deleuze writes about the
limit of the Bergsonian time as memory; “[H]owever strong the incoherence or
possible opposition between successive presents, we have the impression that each of
45
Nonetheless, when we hear what Young-sil utters while having sex with the hero Dong-soo, we get
the impression that someday the hearsay may become true, for what she utters is ambiguous and may
even sound like “please don’t beat me” although it also sounds like “please do [it] slowly” or “please
don’t do this to me.”
109
them plays out ‘the same life’ at different levels. This is what we call destiny.”
46
Those difference, better yet, those variations, then, can be seen as inherent to the
return of the same destiny rather than being in discord with it.
I started this chapter, calling attention to the idea that homogeneous
progressive time, which has been dominant in the modern sovereign and disciplinary
era, is in decline in the present era of global neoliberal governmentality. Clearly, this
change allows us to experience more heterogeneous, labyrinthine, and non-
teleological times replete with affective intensities. However, I have argued that, as
heterogeneous time has increasingly become subject to the real subsumption of time
by global neoliberal governmentality, the heterogeneity and contingency
characteristic of such a time have been regularized and valorized, albeit in a different
way than the former form of homogeneous progressive time. I have also
demonstrated how this tendency to valorize contingency and temporal heterogeneity
is found even in Hong Sang-soo’s recent films, such as Tale, in the form of the return
of the similar or the same, although his films seem self-conscious about or even
mocking their own engagement in this valorization process. In Tale, contingencies
seem to be regularized and stabilized through their possibilities of returning, albeit
with some variations.
46
Deleuze, Difference, 83.
110
Chapter 4
The Postnational Time that Remains: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Distance
The Cinematic Time as a Caesura in the Postnational Neoliberal Era
As I have already discussed, with the neoliberal governmental real
subsumption of time, the temporal experimentations in cinema that disturb and
undermine homogenous progressive time seem to have reached an impasse. As it
turns out, the affective intensities of time that are characteristic of these
experimentations, which have been considered to be beyond measure, are valorized
and regularized under global neoliberal governmentality. We have also seen how the
Bergsonian conception of time as durée and the Deleuzian cinematic time predicated
on this concept, serving as the foundation for these experimentations, have already
involved this impasse. Is this valorization the ultimate destiny of time as such? Or can
we still think of a residual potential of time that eludes this real subsumption process?
Deleuze also provides an alternative notion of time that crosses the limit
of the Bergsonian notion of time. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze proposes
time as “the empty and pure form” or time as a series as an alternative to the
Bergsonian approach to time as memory or coexisting temporal sheets.
1
Unlike the
latter, “which includes difference [between temporal sheets], but in order to
1
Ibid., 88-89.
111
subordinate it to the Same and the Similar” as its foundation, what is crucial about the
empty form of time or the series of time is its potential to overrun the “Same” and the
“Similar” and thus to disjoint and unground time irrevocably.
2
Here it is essential to
note that Deleuze underscores the function of a caesura with reference to Hölderlin. If,
for Bergson, time is divided commensurably, if not equally, between different
temporal sheets or planes, the caesura distributes time incommensurably to such an
extent that a groundless, formless change or metamorphosis can be brought into being
between the before and the after or between the past and the future.
3
This
incommensurable distribution of time allows time to take not simply the form of the
coexistence of temporal sheets, but more importantly the form of disjointed temporal
series. Whereas the unpredictability and contingency in the case of the former simply
consist of the uncertainty about which one will be selected among the already
coexisting temporal sheets, those of the latter open up the possibility that a new
temporal series can emerge that makes any harmony or resonance impossible between
it and any of the temporal series that have existed, whether actually or virtually.
This approach to time might seem to revive the notion of linear or
progressive time, albeit in a different way. Yet, Deleuze makes it clear that this empty
form of time involves a form of repetition rather than simply a form of progression or
2
Ibid., 94.
3
In Difference, Deleuze describes this temporal distribution as “unequal,” but it should be
“incommensurable” or “irrational” in its mathematical sense to express his intention more precisely, as
this temporal division in no way allows a common measure between divided parts. For the “irrational”
division or cut of time, see Deleuze, Cinema 2, 180-182.
112
succession. Here, repetition takes a form of tripartite repetition: the series of
repetition in the mode of the past or before, that in the mode of the present or during,
and that in the mode of the future or after. The first stage is the repetition of the past
as the historical condition, during which the imagined past act seems to be too big for
the present agent to be equal. The second is that of the present of metamorphosis,
during which the present agent becomes equal to and capable of the past act. The
third is that of the future as the production of the new, during which “[the event and
the act] turn back against [the present agent] which has become their equal and smash
[the agent] to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and
dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth.”
4
To take an example from Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte,”
5
when the agents of the French Revolution in 1789 would have long
wanted to perform a revolutionary act equal to that of building the Roman Empire
before they actually became capable of doing it, they were repeating a past
revolutionary act as a historical condition under which a new revolution is produced.
When the agents were eventually capable of performing such an act, they
demonstrated the repetition of the present of metamorphosis. Finally, when the
4
Deleuze, Difference, 89-90.
5
When theorizing repetition, Deleuze makes reference to as well as modifies Marx’s theory of
historical repetition as discussed in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” For Marx’s
discussion of repetition, see Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-
Angels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978),
594-597.
113
French Revolution—which was initially thought to be a moderate bourgeois
revolution—appeared to be more radical than initially expected, it exemplified the
repetition of the future as the production of unconditional, groundless excess.
The most important stage in this tripartite repetition, Deleuze notes, is the
repetition of the future, for this is the only one newly added to the Bergsonian time as
memory, which already involves the first two stages of repetition, namely, those of
the past and the present. In this respect, it is in this third stage of repetition that the
Nietzschean eternal return, as understood to be that of the different, is realized in its
purest:
[The pure form of time] has broken the circle of the Same
and arranged time in a series only in order to re-form a circle
of the Other at the end of the series. [. . . ] The form of time
is there only for the revelation of the formless in the eternal
return. The extreme formality is there only for an excessive
formlessness (Hölderlin’s Unförmliche). In this manner, the
ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal
ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-
to-come to return.
6
Yet Deleuze asks whether, regardless of how big a difference may have
occurred between the before and the after, namely, between the past and the future,
we can still find an identical generic time that makes this temporal difference as
secondary or specific. In other words, one could suspect that the Bergsonian time as
memory lingers in this new approach to time. To resolve this issue, Deleuze calls our
6
Deleuze, Difference, 91.
114
attention to the status of the second moment of the empty form of time, the moment
of the caesura or the during between the between the before and after:
[W]hat is this agent, this force which ensures
communication [between the different series]? Thunderbolts
explode between different intensities, but they are preceded
by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which
determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though
intagliated. [. . . ] The question is to know in any given case
how the precursor fulfils this role. There is no doubt that
there is an identity belonging to the precursor, and a
resemblance between the series which it causes to
communicate. This ‘there is,’ however, remains perfectly
indeterminate. Are identity and resemblance here the
preconditions of the functioning of this dark precursor, or are
they, on the contrary, its effects? If the latter, might it
necessarily project upon itself the illusion of a fictive
identity, and upon the series which it relates the illusion of a
retrospective resemblance? Identity and resemblance would
then be no more than inevitable illusions. [. . . ] All that,
however, would be possible only because the invisible
precursor conceals itself and its functioning, and at the same
time conceals the in-itself or true nature of difference. Given
two heterogeneous series, two series of differences, the
precursor plays the part of the differentiator of these
differences. In this manner, by virtue of its own power, it
puts them into immediate relation to one another: it is the in-
itself of difference or the ‘differently different’—in other
words, difference in the second degree, the self-different
which relates different to different by itself.
7
It becomes clear what makes difference between the empty form of time
and the Bergsonian time as memory. Unlike the latter, which does not call much
attention to the caesura or interval that irreducibly comes about when moving from
7
Deleuze, Difference, 119; emphasis in the original.
115
one to another temporal sheet, what is crucial about the alternative form of time is
that this caesura or the interval en-velops what Deleuze calls the differentiator of the
differences between the temporal series—singular temporal intensity that has the
potential to de-velop generic or specific ones. The identity considered to exist
between the series is merely the result of the retroactive reflection on the movement
between the series. Thus, the irreducible excess, which is considered to be realized in
the after-series, makes its appearance in advance, between the before- and the after-
series, albeit in the form of the in-itself of difference, in its virtual or obscure form.
8
This is what Deleuze means when he writes, “[T]he eternal return is indeed the
consequence of a difference which is originary, pure, synthetic and in-itself (which
Nietzsche called will to power). If difference is the in-itself, then repetition in the
eternal return is the for-itself of difference.”
9
To the extent that the empty form of time as Deleuze discusses has the
potential to produce the singular intensities that can traverse the limit of the
Bergsonian Mnemosyne, it is capable of producing temporal experiences that, from
the outset, escape the neoliberal governability of time. The caesura or interval
between the before and the after, during which the potential of becoming an other
8
In a similar vein, Agamben writes on the contemporary as untimely: “The contemporary is he who
firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darkness. All eras, for
those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who
knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present.”
Giorgio Agamben, “What is Contemporary,” in What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David
Kishik et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 44.
9
Deleuze, Difference, 125.
116
makes an appearance, is capable of creating a temporal excess beyond its
valorizability under global neoliberal governmentality. This temporal excess can in no
way be measured or calculated in terms of the degree of contraction or relaxation of
the pure past. In this respect, the empty form of time or the time for the caesura
indicates that a different kind of temporal disturbance can exist that resists being
integrated into the temporal stability proper to the post-historical condition, as Kojeve
and Foucault discuss. As it turns out, this kind of temporal aberrance can blast a time
for producing unvalorizable affects out of the balance between the homogeneous
progressive time and disturbing contingencies in the same way that Benjaminian
materialist historiography can blast a time “filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]” out of
the homogeneous empty time.
10
Significantly, Deleuze also discusses the kind of cinematic time-image
that corresponds to the empty form of time or time as a series. This kind of time-
image is distinct from the Bergsonian time image as a multiple of coexisting temporal
layers: “[The first two time images] essentially concerned the order of time, that is,
the coexistence of relations or the simultaneity of the elements internal to time. The
third concerns the series of time, which brings together the before and the after in a
becoming, instead of separating them; its paradox is to introduce an enduring interval
10
Benjamin, “History,” 395. Susan Buck-Morss suggests the relevance of Benjaminian materialist
historiography to the present situation at the end of history, stating: “The juxtaposition of these past
fragments with our present concerns might have the powesr to challenge the complacency of our times
when ‘history’ is said by its victors to have successfully completed its course, and the new global
capitalist hegemony claims to have run the competition off the field.” Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld
and Catastrophe (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 69.
117
in the moment itself.”
11
It is also important to note that Deleuze remarks about this
interval within the moment itself in a footnote, stating: “In a fine story (Le baron
Bagge, Ed. Du Sorbier), Lennet-Holenia assumes that death does not occur in a
moment, but in a space-time located ‘between the moment itself,’ which may last
several days.”
12
Here Deleuze once again underscores how the caesura between the
before and the after should not simply be regarded as an instant, but rather as a
temporal duration in which there is a becoming or metamorphosis.
In this context, it is worth examining recent discussions on cinematic
stillness, delaying, and repetition insofar as these temporal aberrances are some of the
ways in which cinematic caesurae or intervals make their appearances. In “The Film
Stilled,” Raymond Bellour, the pioneer of discourses on the stillness in the cinema,
calls attention to the existence of still images (e.g., freeze-frame within films) that
film theory has thus far neglected.
13
He highlights how interpolated still images can
interrupt the film’s movements, thereby enabling repressed privileged or transcendent
instants to return in the cinema. This is a very significant intervention in film theory
considering that, since Deleuze’s claim that cinema is characterized by “any-instant-
whatever” that makes every instant immanent to the film image, the notion of the
11
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 155; emphasis added.
12
Ibid., 308, n. 39.
13
Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” in Camera Obscura 24 (1991).
118
privileged instant has been considered unthinkable in cinema.
14
In another essay,
“The Pensive Spectator,” Bellour clarifies the impact of stillness in cinema on
spectatorship, noting that this temporal aberrance “make[s] the spectator of cinema,
this hurried spectator, a pensive one as well.”
15
In other words, it gives additional
time to the spectator to enable him or her to “reflect differently on film, on cinema.”
16
Although Bellour’s discussion of stillness in cinema deals with the
cinema’s new capability of giving the spectator time for reflection, he is not much
concerned with its significance in terms of the way we experience time and history.
Laura Mulvey expands on Bellour’s pioneering research on stillness in cinema by
including not only other temporal disturbances (e.g., delaying, suspension, and
repetition), but also the role of post-cinematic technologies (e.g., VCR or DVD) in
creating such disturbances. Moreover, she explores the significance of these temporal
aberrances in terms of how they affect “cinema’s relation to history.”
17
She argues
that, rather than being indifferent to history, new media technologies offer the
audience “a means of returning to the lost histories of modernity and left
14
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 3-8.
15
Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Company (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2007), 123.
16
Ibid.
17
Laura Mulvey, “Passing Time: Reflections on Cinema from a New Technological Age,” Screen
45.2 (2004), 154.
119
aspirations.”
18
For example, viewing an old film on DVD enables the audience to
slow down, stop, or return to any portion of the film, providing access to the
otherwise inaccessible details of the film and while allowing them to elicit new
meanings and affective intensities from this altered temporal experience.
19
Although both Bellour and Mulvey discuss the ways in which the
cinematic temporalities of stillness, delaying, and repetition make homogeneous
progressive time untenable, they do not go so far as to think about whether and how
these alternative cinematic temporalities can also destabilize the neoliberal
governance of time and produce a temporal excess that deviates from this real
subsumption of time. For they do not consider how these alterations of time now
seem to serve as new means of valorizing time by giving the audience affective
pleasure, as can be seen in TV commercials or entertaining TV shows, rather than
offering the audience opportunities for reflection on the past and the present. To the
extent that we live in an era where non-chronological heterogeneous temporal
experiences are measured and valorized, it would be crucial to ask what kind of
differences temporal aberrances cause to emerge rather than simply whether or not
they create differences.
18
Ibid., 144.
19
For further elaborations on her thoughts about stillness, delaying, and repetition in cinema, see
Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
120
In “Difference and Repetition,” Giorgio Agamben provides one response
to this vexing question by re-reading Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image in
relation to cinematic time. According to Benjamin, the dialectical image that
materialist historiography aims to produce is defined as an image “wherein what has
been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”
20
Agamben
argues that the two processes of repetition and stoppage are at work in this dialectics
of the past (i.e., what has been) and the now-time (Jetztzeit), or dialectics at a
standstill in Benjamin’s terms. Here repetition refers to the way in which the past
recapitulates itself in the now-time. What Benjamin means by repetition coincides
with Deleuze’s understanding of the Nietzschean eternal return, as Agamben claims
that “repetition is not the return of the identical,” but that of the potentiality or “the
possibility of what was” rather than the actuality of what was.
21
Agamben defines
stoppage, the other process at work in dialectics at a standstill, as “the power to
interrupt, the ‘revolutionary interruption’ of which Benjamin spoke.”
22
In the same
way that Deleuze discusses the empty form of time, Agamben explains the process of
stoppage through the poetic technique of the caesura. In other words, by stoppage
Agamben refers not simply to “a chronological pause,” but to “a prolonged hesitation
20
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, eds. and trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 462.
21
Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International,
ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 315-316.
22
Ibid., 316.
121
between image and meaning”—that is, a power that “pulls [the image] away from the
narrative power to exhibit it as such.”
23
Consequently, Agamben’s reading of
Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image comes close to Deleuze’s notion of the
empty form of time.
Agamben’s central idea in “Difference and Repetition,” is that these
processes of repetition and stoppage work in cinematic montage—that is, in the (de-
)coupling of shots in its narrow sense, but more broadly in any forms of (de-)linkage
of cinematic elements. Ultimately, he claims that the cinematic image produced
through repetition and stoppage “is a means, a medium, that does not disappear in
what it makes visible.” In other words, the cinematic dialectical image in its
Benjaminian sense that is produced in the time for a caesura is an image as a pure
means without end in Agamben’s terms. This lack of an end indicates how the
possibility of the past that returns in the now-time is not reduced to any form of the
same or the similar, including the Bergsonian pure past, but is precisely a potential to
produce something different from, yet possible in, what was in the past. It is, thus,
crucial to note that, given that it is defined as a means without end, the cinematic
dialectical image as Agamben discusses involves temporal excess that deviates not
only from the homogeneous empty time characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary
23
Ibid., 317.
122
powers, but also from the heterogeneous yet valorizable time characteristic of global
neoliberal governmentality.
24
Community in the Repetition of Potentialities in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Distance
As in other East Asian countries like mainland China, Taiwan, and South
Korea, the sense of national community in Japan has been drastically eroded since the
early 1990s as a result of global neoliberal governmentalization of the whole nation-
state. In the era of neoliberal governmentality, in which every individual has to be an
entrepreneur capable of calculatively managing his or her relationships with others
from the perspective of political economy, the kind of imagination of a national
community grounded on spontaneous affective solidarities seems no longer viable to
Japanese people. In response to this decline in the imagined national community,
neonationalism emerged, insisting on the restoration of the senses of the past
communities, such as the family or nation.
25
This historical context gives us a new
perspective from which to view some of the Japanese national and transnational films
24
Unlike Benjamin, who lived in the era of sovereign and disciplinary powers, Agamben emphasizes
how the cinematic dialectical image should be made different from pornographic or advertising images
that have become central in the era of global neoliberal governmentality. Ibid., 319. For another
notable work of Agamben that reads Benjamin’s notions of the dialectical image and the now-time, see
Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005).
25
Yoda Tomiko argues that this seemingly critical power of neonationalists turns out to co-opt the
anxiety and fear provoked by neoliberal policies, thereby shutting down “domestic resistance against
new economic and political configurations that are taking shape” Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to
Millennial Japan,” in Japan after Japan, eds. Tomiko Yoda et al. (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), 28.
123
made since the 1990s. Popular melodramas such as Iwai Shunji’s Love Letter (1995)
as well as artistic films such as Kitano Takeshi’s Fireworks (1997) and his more
recent film Doll (2002) seem to attempt to interrupt the neoliberal rationalization of
social relationships and evoke suppressed affective memories based on contingent
and ephemeral yet affectively intensive social bonds. However, it should be noted that
these memories tend to be concerned with affective temporal experiences that can
only be regularized and valorized under the control of neoliberal governmental
apparatuses, albeit in the guise of neonational nostalgia for the past imagined
communities.
26
As such, these cinematic attempts to re-imagine affective
communities still seem to appeal to the sense of community based on the same or the
similar, thereby precluding the possibility of imagining different kinds of community
grounded on groundless affective relationships. In this respect, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s
film Distance (2001) is worth examining because it offers us an alternative
imagination of community by creating a new temporal experience that repeats, in
Agamben’s terms, “the possibility of what was” in the way the dialectical image does.
26
David Harvey claims how nationalism, which is supposedly opposed to neoliberalism, can serve as
a buffer against the threatening tendency of neoliberalism to disintegrate social bonds: “In principle,
neoliberal theory does not look with favor on the nation even as it supports the idea of a strong state.
The umbilical cord that tied together state and nation under embedded liberalism had to be cut if
neoliberalism was to flourish.[. . .] But, as we have seen, the neoliberal state needs nationalism of a
certain sort to survive. Forced to operate as a competitive agent in the world market and seeking to
establish the best possible business climate, it mobilizes nationalism in its effort to succeed.” David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 84-85.
124
Through this experimentation with time, Distance re-imagines how we, while living
in the era of global neoliberalism, can build new relationships without having to rely
on the past communal bonds. Indeed, through these recreated relationships, the films
provide new imaginings of a community irreducible to the notions of community that
neonationalism evokes.
Although Distance makes reference to Aum Shinrikyo’s notorious 1995
Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, it is far from sensational. The focus of the film is not
on the tragic incident itself, nor is it on Aum members’ daily lives, unlike Mori
Tatsuya’s two documentaries A (1998) and A2 (2001). Instead, Distance mainly
follows four ordinary people who have familial connections to the cult perpetrators.
Moreover, rather than modeling itself on the real incident, the film makes some
changes to it as if to distance itself from most of the official representations of the
incident in the mass media. A poisoned water supply replaces the real sarin gas attack,
and the perpetrators—unlike those in real life—committed suicide after the attack.
To a certain extent, the film seems sympathetic to the cult perpetrators and
their vision of community. This sympathy seems justified, given the way in which the
film’s narrative opposes the cult members’ intimacy to the survivors’ isolation. The
isolation of each survivor from the others is deeply felt, especially during the first
fifteen minutes or so. During this time, the survivors’ daily lives are shown in
sequence through parallel editing. Since their relationship with one another is not
known until they gather at the same place, this editing technique serves to profoundly
125
reinforce the survivors’ feelings of isolation and loneliness. In contrast, in the
survivors’ flashback scenes in which the cult members are talking to them, the cult
members appear greatly delighted by and confident of the cult’s new community life.
A more detailed examination of the film, however, demonstrates that such
an impression is at most one-sided. Apart from the fact that the group’s attack is
unforgivable, the film presents a few signs that call into question the sense of
community within the group. First and foremost, it turns out that the group’s intimacy
does not transcend a family relationship, but rather bases itself on such a relationship.
Sakata (played by Asano Tadanobu), one of the group’s former members, tells the
survivors that the group looked like a family when he joined it. In so saying, he
suggests that the group substituted for its members’ real families. The problem here is
that, where only the replacement of family members occurs, all the limitations
inherent to the family remain intact, including its patriarchal power structure and its
tendency to develop an exclusionary attitude toward others. These limitations are
found in several portrayals of the group. Consider, for instance, how Sakata describes
the group leader as a paternal figure. In addition, as can be seen in fragmentary
flashbacks, the group members display a somewhat condescending and didactic
attitude toward their family members. Furthermore, another aspect undercuts the
group’s seemingly utopian quality: unlike the group members’ firm convictions,
distrust and anxiety lurk within the group. Sakata’s departure from the group
illustrates this. In a flashback, he is so suspicious about an elite member that he can
126
no longer maintain the cult community life and flees from it. In these respects, the
ambivalent portrayal of the group community life embodies a failed attempt to build a
post-familial community rather than a successfully realized one.
However, Distance does not simply stop at this point of failure, presenting
a hopeless vision of a utopian community. Rather, the film allows a real breakthrough
to unfold elsewhere, on the side of the isolated survivors. The bulk of the film
consists of what happens while the survivors and the surviving former member of the
cult, Sakata, are making their pilgrimage together to an isolated lake within a forest to
mourn for the dead. When they are ready to return home after a short ceremony, they
find their car stolen and have to spend the night together in a hut in which the dead
cult members previously lived a community life before carrying out the attack and
subsequently committing suicide. In this place, the survivors contemplate and talk to
each other about the reasons why the dead abandoned them and what the dead really
wanted. This narrative draws attention to the fact that the survivors found themselves
by chance under the same circumstances as the dead did. The survivors seem to begin
to develop relationships with one another in the same way and in the same place as
the dead did. However, the survivors’ resultant relationships are qualitatively
different from those developed by the dead. The survivors do not share the same
strong sense of familiarity, empathy, or homogeneity as the dead presumably had.
Instead, they come to have an indeterminate feeling for one another, which is neither
one of familiarity nor one of estrangement, but one of in-between.
127
This contradictory relation of the survivors to the dead can be best
understood as one of repetition—not that of the habitual present nor that of the pure
past, but that of the potential of becoming different or the possibility of what was, as
Deleuze and Agamben propose. The survivors repeat what the dead did in this way.
Lacan similarly conceives the notion of repetition from a psychoanalytic perspective,
distinguishing it from that of reproduction or what Freud terms the compulsion to
repeat. Unlike the latter, which presupposes the existence of a common trait that can
be copied over and over again, the notion of repetition involves “something that
occurs . . . as if by chance” so that it surprises, disconcerts, or stupefies the subject.
27
In other words, repetition—far from being the recurrence of something familiar
pertaining to the existing concepts or order—is defined as the unexpected recurrence
of unfamiliarity as such. Lacan further remarks that “[r]epetition demands the new,”
or that repetition in itself constitutes “the most radical diversity”
28
; what is repeated
is chance, difference, or unexpectedness itself rather than the very incident itself that
occurs by chance insofar as “You cannot step into the same river twice” as
Heraclitus’s famous aphorism says. Thus, what emerges in repetition is potential
itself that can generate infinite new possibilities regardless of what actually occurs by
27
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XI., ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 54. Lacan claims
that the compulsion to repeat is the subject’s tendency to refer this unfamiliarity of the contingent to
the given possibilities, comparing it to the compulsion that “direct[s] us toward the obligatory card—if
there is one card in the pack, I can’t draw another.” Ibid., 67.
28
Ibid., 61.
128
chance. This elaboration accounts for what the survivors in Distance really do when
they repeat what their dead loved ones did: the kinds of relationship they develop
with respect to one another are not simply what the dead did—i.e. substitute family
relationship—but rather are those permeated with singular affective intensities of
uncertainty, hesitation, or even anxiety that might have been at least potentially
aroused “during” the time when the dead were creating a new relationship. In this
way, Distance allows new indeterminate possibilities to emerge through the survivors’
repetition of the dead.
29
Here it is crucial to note how these possibilities are singular
or precarious enough to exceed the limit of the valorizability, whether extensive or
intensive, of time.
If the survivors’ relationships with one another are at the mercy of chance,
is it ever possible to imagine a community emerging from such relationships? The
answer would be no if one only considers the restricted notion of community
characterized as homogeneity, essence, or intimacy, as evident in Benedict
Anderson’s notion of the nation. However, Jean-Luc Nancy proposes an alternative
notion of community predicated on unpredictable or indeterminate relationships. For
Nancy, what makes a community is not a common being, but “being-in-common,”
which “has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and
29
Kore-eda says about Maborosi, “Everything in the film is repeated twice. And it starts with a dream,
so it should end with one.” Gabriel M. Paletz, “The Halfway House of Memory: an Interview with
Hirokazu Kore-eda,” CineAction 60 (2003), 57. In fact, he employs this narrative technique of
repetition quite consciously in nearly all his feature films, especially when he is to portray
relationships between the lost loved one and the survivor’s continued life.
129
ultimate identity” but with “finitude, or the infinite lack of infinite identity.”
30
Indeed,
to the extent that this notion of community does not presuppose any common
substance or essence, it is open to unexpected indeterminate possibilities. This notion
of community is ultimately characterized by exteriority or alterity rather than by
intimacy or empathy. In other words, this notion involves a relationship based on
one’s encounter with the alterities of others rather than on one’s recognition of
something one has in common with others. Thus, far from being an obstacle to
forming a community, one’s unexpected encounter with the alterities of others makes
an alternative form of utopian community possible.
Furthermore, Distance employs some important stylistic and narrative
strategies to reinforce the singularity of the time that repeats the potential to become
different, thus enabling us to imagine an alternative notion of community as being-in-
common. The three most important strategies include (a) its improvisational acting
and shooting styles, (b) its singular aesthetic of distance, and (c) its unpredictable plot
twist. First, as Kore-eda himself states, the actors in Distance had to improvise more
than the actors in any other of his feature films: “I started out on Distance with just
the actors from After Life and no script. I would give them a situation and a kind of
character background, and then the emotions, the response and the language would
30
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. and trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxviiii.
130
emerge from the actors.”
31
To maximize unpredictability, Kore-eda sometimes did
not even tell his actors the motivations and direction he had given to other actors. In
this way, the improvisational acting in Distance permitted the actors a great deal of
freedom from a preplanned direction and consequently enabled more unexpected
situations to emerge.
32
Moreover, as its exclusive use of handheld cameras suggests, the film’s
cinematography is mostly improvised. This improvised shooting style is obviously
reminiscent of that of Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité or Cassavetes’s films. Notably,
Deleuze considers these films to be best examples of realizing time as series or an
empty form of time, delineating their important characteristics:
“[T]he character is continually passing the frontier between
the real and the fictional (the power of the false, the story-
telling function), the filmmaker has to reach what the
character was ‘before’ and will be ‘after’; he has to bring
together the before and the after in the incessant passage
from one state to the other (the direct time-image); the
becoming of the filmmaker and of his character already
belongs to a people, to a community, to a minority whose
expression they practice and set free (free, indirect
discourse).”
33
31
Qtd. in Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Cinema (Berkeley:
Stone Bridge, 2005), 210.
32
Mes & Sharp, Midnight, 210.
33
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 153.
131
Similarly, the precarious, improvised handheld camera of Distance keeps leaving
characters in the time of incessant passage from the before to the after. This
precarious cinematography also affects the temporality of the space of the hut in
which both the survivors and their lost family members stay in different temporal
layers. The unpredictability of shooting refuses to determine the time of the space as
either the time of the before (i.e., the time when the dead are staying there) or that of
the after (i.e., the time when the survivors are staying there), but rather leaves it in the
indeterminate time of the during, the caesura, the now-time when the possibility of
what was subsists.
Second, employing a singular aesthetic of distance, the film expresses the
potential of a situation or an incident to generate infinite possibilities rather than
capturing a specific situation or incident itself. One might wonder why the spatial and
emotional distance among the survivors does not diminish during, or even after, the
night they spend together, communicating with each other. Although in appearance
they still keep their distance from one another, however, the nature of the distance
among them qualitatively changes while they spend the night together. As previously
mentioned, during the first fifteen minutes of the film, the distance among them
indicates their complete isolation or lack of communication. The parallel editing used
in that part reinforces this sense of isolation as if to materialize barriers to their
communication. But a change occurs in the visualization of the distance while they
are staying in the same hut. It is in turn within its mise-en-scene that the film mostly
132
visualizes such a distance. Indeed, this visualized distance materializes the very kind
of personal relationship Nancy terms exposition insofar as their being-in-common in
the same place at least indicates the fact of their exposition to one another, if not of
their realized interaction.
34
Thus, this distance embodies neither their isolation nor
their realized interaction, but the in-between—i.e., each survivor’s encounter with the
alterities of the others. In other words, given the indeterminacy or in-betweenness
inherent in this encounter, this distance visualized within the mise-en-scene expresses
a germ or potential to generate infinite possible relationships among the survivors.
One of the most remarkable images visualizing this distance so as to open
up the possibility for a new community is the static shot in which the survivors are
waiting for a train on a platform in order to return home. Here, in appearance,
everyone seems to think for him- or herself, independent of each other. Yet, this
distance, which is neither too long nor too short, visualizes neither their isolation nor
their actual communications, but rather expresses an indeterminate germinal state that
can generate infinite possible communications among them. In other words, this
distance does not simply mean that nothing happens among these survivors; rather, it
visualizes a sense that an unexpected incident might yet occur.
Furthermore, distance also matters between the diegetic characters and the
audience. Just like the distance among the survivors, the distance between them and
the audience remains to be diminished until the end of the film. This seeming distance
34
Nancy, Community.
133
is obviously one of the main reasons the film received mixed to poor reviews,
35
yet it
is this distance that gives the audience a chance to imagine a new community in all its
possibilities. In this sense, the film’s spectating distance serves as a signal seducing
the audience into this act of imagining an alternative form of community.
Finally, a significant plot twist occurs near the end of the film. Sakata
begins to have doubts about the identity of Atsushi (played by Arata), the survivor
who is supposed to have lost his sister. He finally asks Atsushi, “Who are you, really?”
adding that Atsushi’s putative sister said that her brother had died three years earlier.
Atsushi retorts that she might have lied. As in plot twists frequently employed by
many recent films, including The Sixth Sense (1999), this twist incites the audience to
look back on the entire narrative from a radically different angle. However, unlike
most twists, which eventually bring unexpected closure to the narratives, the twist in
Distance never reassures the audience with a rearrangement of plot elements. It does
awaken the audience members to a number of fragmentary details that they might
have missed. But rather than filling in the gaps in plot, this process opens up hardly
resolvable questions: in what ways do the survivors repeat their dead family members
while they form a relationship with one another? More specifically, in what ways
35
One report made by Susan Morrison about the press screening of Distance at the 2001 Toronto
International Film Festival bears witness to this mixed to poor reception: “The Film Festival’s press
screening of Distance that I attended was perhaps two-thirds full, an auspicious beginning given the
universal praise given to After Life. By the film’s end the theater had emptied out considerably, the
press tending to vote with their feet. [. . .] [M]any of the negative reviews referred to it as too long and
too unengaging [. . . ] ‘distanced’, as it were.” Susan Morrison, “Distance: Hirokazu Kore-eda,”
CineAction 57 (2002), 58.
134
does Atsushi (or Sakata) repeat the dead Aum group members’ attempt to build a
community while he is developing relationships with other survivors?
In a way, the plot twist itself, that is, Sakata’s suspicion, constitutes an
example of such a repetition. Given Sakata’s past suspicion about the dead elite
member, he repeats his relationship with that elite member through his new
relationship with Atsushi. Then, what does he repeat through this new relationship?
Some viewers might think that he once again alerts other people to the cult’s secret
plots; such viewers might then cast doubts about all the details regarding Atsushi,
eventually concluding that Atsushi, who is a son of the Aum leader not seen in the
film, has indoctrinated his neighbors, including his putative sister and a hospitalized
old man. These viewers might further think that, by disguising himself as a survivor
who lost his sister, Atsushi has just embarked on a new project of indoctrinating other
survivors. In fact, this interpretation came about from a debate about Atsushi’s
identity on the IMDb (The Internet Movie Database) website. Of course, reading the
film in this way presupposes that the film belongs to the thriller or horror genre. But
aside from the fact that the film employs very few conventions of those genres, the
biggest problem of this reading strategy is that it ends up making the audience blind
to infinite indeterminate possibilities that the film’s enigmatic fragments or gaps open
up. Thus, given that Sakata’s repeated suspicions are never confirmed, one of the best
conclusions we can draw about them is that what is repeated in his suspicions is the
alterity as such of the others. In other words, far from signaling that others might be
135
evil plotters, the repeated alterity indicates that unexpectedness has, and will have,
occurred in the relationships between him and others. In this sense, Sakata’s
repetition allows the audience to imagine a new community defined by alterity or
being-in-common.
The plot twist can also lead the audience to ask how Atsushi repeats the
Aum cult’s failed attempt to form a community. If the audience is no longer obsessed
with discovering Atsushi’s real identity, the twist might turn in a different direction,
spurring the audience to contemplate in greater detail what he has been doing in his
relationships with others. In the flashback in which he is asked by a policeman if he is
influenced by the cult, Atsushi simply responds, “I don’t think I’m influenced. But I
just love the smell of lilies.” This statement best epitomizes how he repeats the cult’s
community building. Given that lilies are a symbol of Aum Shinrikyo, his statement
indicates that he no longer treats lilies as a symbol, but as fragrant objects. What is
crucial here is the chance, unfamiliarity, or difference he might encounter when lilies
take him by surprise through their smell rather than through their symbolic meaning.
Thus, although he still appears to be under the influence of the cult, for him the cult
no longer remains the same community with which he has been affiliated; instead the
cult’s attempt to form a community has now become open to infinite indeterminate
possibilities that the cult might have pursued but did not. This account can explain the
surprise or embarrassment his final enigmatic act—that of burning a photograph of
his family and the dock—might arouse among most of the audience. This act also
136
illustrates the way in which he repeats the cult. Just as the other cult members burned
the bodies, so Atsushi burns the photograph and the dock. However, as the surprise
his act arouses suggests, what is repeated here is also the chance, difference, or
alterity of the act. The first act of burning by the cult is possibly a ritual for the dead,
in which they are purified and elevated to a spiritual realm. As with the lilies,
Atsushi’s repeated act of burning no longer serves as a symbol, but as a sign
indicating that a difference or change occurred in him. Since the film ends here, the
audience, far from being able to fix this difference or change to a specific one, cannot
but accept it as a moment that opens up infinite new possibilities. In this way, the plot
twist of this film does not retroactively fix otherwise vague relationships between the
survivors, but rather amplifies this vagueness much more, which results in offering all
new kinds of chance encounters to these relationships.
As I have argued using Deleuze’s notion of the empty form of time and
Benjamin–Agamben’s notion of the dialectical image, there can be a residual time
that has the potential to become different or to metamorphose and thus to traverse the
limit set by the neoliberal management of time. Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Distance
expresses this potential by employing narrative and stylistic strategies that fill the
time for repetition with immeasurable possibilities and hesitations. Imagining the
time for becoming, Distance enables us to envision a new form of community with
others to come beyond others coexisting in different temporal layers.
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Part III
Corporeality
Chapter 5
Gestures beyond Thanato-political Bodies
From Bio- to Thanato-politics
Unlike sovereign and disciplinary powers, which basically rely on mobilizing
violent means to rule over societies, neoliberal governmentality seems to mobilize
only peaceful means to regulate societies. Foucault’s discussion of governmentality in
distinction from sovereignty seems to vindicate that point:
Now that power is decreasingly the power of the right to
take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live,
or once power begins to intervene mainly at this level in
order to improve life by eliminating accidents, the random
element, and deficiencies, death becomes, insofar as it is the
end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too.
Death is beyond the reach of power, and power has a grip on
it only in general, overall, or statistical terms.[. . .] In the
right of sovereignty, death was the moment of the most
obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute
power of the sovereign; death now becomes, in contrast, the
moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on
himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy.
1
1
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, eds. Mauro Bertani et al., trans. David Macey (New
York: Picador, 2003), 248; emphasis added.
138
Clearly, to the extent that it consists in making a population survive, the governmental
power serves to promote all kinds of welfare institutions and medical services to
resist death. This is the reason why Foucault introduces the term biopolitics to
designate the new realm of politics opened up by the emergence of governmentality.
Yet, as Foucault also points out, there is a dark underneath of this
seemingly positive aspect of governmental power’s management of life. The other
side of the processes of making live is, according to Foucault, those of letting die as
can be seen in racism, especially in Nazism. He emphasizes that racism, particularly
since the 19
th
century, does not indicate a regression to the old form of power,
sovereignty, but a corollary of governmental biopower:
[R]acism makes it possible to establish a relationship
between my life and the death of the other that is not a
military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a
biological-type relationship: “The more inferior species dies
out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer
degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the
more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the
stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able
to proliferate.”
2
In other words, from the perspective of governmentality, it is necessary to detect and
remove a few threatening beings in order to increase the chances of the survival of the
majority of a population. It is also for the similar reason that the death penalty persists
even in the biopolitical governmentality that consists in fostering life. For, as
2
Ibid., 255.
139
Foucault notes, putting a criminal to death in this political regime is permitted only
because of “the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of
society,” not because of the illegality of the crime.
3
From Foucault’s account, it seems obvious that thanato-politics is
naturally derived from the logic of biopolitics. But a more careful examination of his
account reveals that there is an irreducible tension regarding the beings that thanato-
politics target. On the one hand, these beings are inferior, or have little value. But this
fact does not in itself justify the necessity of killing them, for they will naturally
perish according to the law of natural selection even if they are left unattended. The
real reason governmentality requires thanato-politics is, thus, that those beings are not
simply considered inferior, but rather they are considered to be a threat to the
majority of a population’s survival. In other words, these beings have a destructive
power that potentially does harm to the majority of a population. Consequently, the
short-circuiting of the inferiority or the lack of value to the destructiveness involves a
valorization process whereby a negative magnitude of value is attributed to the beings
considered inferior. This valorization process can be called the thanato-political
valorization process in distinction from the biopolitical valorization process whereby
a positive magnitude of value is attributed to beings.
3
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990), 138.
140
Once again, Lacan’s theory of discourse provides a way of theorizing this
thanto-political valorization process. As we have seen in previous chapters, Lacan’s
notion of the university’s discourse allows us to theorize neoliberal governmentality
and its affective valorization process. We have seen how the formula of the
university’s discourse allows us to see an unvalorizable residue or excrement (marked
by $) fall off from this process.
S2 a S1: master signifier; S2: knowledge
------- ------ $ : subject; a: surplus jouissance
S1 $
(University’s Discourse)
Yet, Lacan’s theory of discourse suggests that this unvalorizable remainder does not
necessarily remain unvalorized but can be valorized in a new discourse called the
analyst’s discourse.
a $ S1: master signifier; S2: knowledge
------- ------ $ : subject; a: surplus jouissance
S2 S1
(Analyst’s Discourse)
Here it should be noted that the analyst’s discourse is the most obscure of
the Lacanian four discourses. In his seminar entitled The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, Lacan did not speak much about this discourse, and many different
attempts to explain this discourse have thus far been made. But as some critics have
141
proposed, I think it is productive to read the analyst’s discourse, especially its upper
part (a$), as equivalent to the pervert’s fantasy because the latter’s formula “a ◇ $”
coincides with the upper part of the analyst’s discourse.
4
Lacan’s formula of
perversion or the Sadean fantasy which reverses the formula of the neurotic’s fantasy
“$ ◇ a” exactly follows Freud’s notion that “neuroses are, so to say, the negative of
perversions.”
5
By this notion, Freud means that, unlike the neurotic, who tends to
harness preliminary sexual activities such as looking, sucking or touching as means of
achieving the ultimate sexual aim, the sexual intercourse, the pervert fixates himself
to this preliminary means itself as if it were the ultimate sexual aim.
By presenting perversion as the reversal of neurosis, however, Lacan
develops a more radical idea than Freud suggested. In “Kant with Sade,” Lacan
explores in depth the ethical implication of perversion. Lacan claims that what Sade
did is exactly to elevate the quest for jouissance to the status of the Kantian moral law.
This is possible because, according to Kant, any maxim, regardless of its content, can
be regarded as a moral law or a categorical imperative if it “could always hold at the
4
For readings of the analyst’s discourse in terms of the pervert’s fantasy, see, for example, Slavoj
Žižek, “Object a in Social Links,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, eds. Russell
Grigg et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 114-115 and Dominiek Hoens, “Toward a New
Perversion: Psychoanalysis,” in Jacques Lacan, eds. Russell Grigg et al., 95-96.
5
Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Freud, Vol. VII, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 165.
142
same time as a principle of a universal legislation.”
6
In other words, Kant’s formal
definition of the moral law ironically allows the Sadean unconditional imperative to
enjoy [jouir] to be regarded as a moral law that everyone must obey.
In this respect, reading the analyst’s discourse as the pervert’s fantasy
enables us to understand how the unvalorizable remainder of neoliberal
governmentality’s affective valorization process can be valorized. This otherwise
worthless remainder (marked $) can be assigned a value because, in the pervert’s
fantasy, it can serve as “the instrument of jouissance (marked by a)” that has now
been elevated to a moral law or an end to pursue.
7
The value of the unvalorizable
remainder can thus be determined depending on how much it contributes to achieving
jouissance. Yet, it should be noted that this valorization is a negative one from the
perspective of neoliberal governmentality or biopolitics, for here jouissance, insofar
as it is beyond neoliberal affective valorization, appears no longer appealing but
rather threatening or dreadful for the population at large. In other words, the analyst’s
discourse as the pervert’s fantasy accounts for the thanato-political underside of the
seemingly pacifying biopolitics of neoliberal governmentality.
Clearly, insofar as it is elevated to a moral law, this thanato-political
valorization process seems to redeem unvalorizable residual beings from futility. In
6
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002),
45.
7
Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” Écrits: The first complete edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 654.
143
this sense, this valorization process may justify contemporary fanatic movements
such as Islamic fundamentalism or Aum Shinrikyo that challenge neoliberal
governmentality. But no matter how appealing it may be to fanatics, this process is
problematic in two respects. First, rather than redeeming unvalorizable residual
beings, this fanatic valorization process tends to justify the neoliberal
governmentality’s thanato-political turn. It is, among others, due to this fanatic
valorization that all kinds of recent wars on terror such as the war with al- Qaeda
have received support from the population at large. As they appear more and more
ethical through the fanatic valorization process, fanatics become more and more
threatening to the majority of a population. Ultimately, this can lead to the
population’s demand for thanato-political reactions to the fanatics.
8
What is even more problematic about these thanato-political valorization
processes, however, is that, like signifying and affective valorization processes, these
processes generify unvalorizable residual affects, thereby disregarding their affective
singularities. Discussing the Sadean fantasy, Lacan clearly makes this point. Even
though it assumes the form of the moral law, he claims, this fantasy ultimately makes
8
In recent years, critics have emphasized how biopolitical, neoliberal management has legitimated the
extermination of supposedly wasted lives. In this kind of scholarship, there is a tendency toward
advocating those figures of death as opposed to those of life valorized by biopolitical concerns. Clearly,
these efforts are significant enough in problematizing neoliberal governmentality. Yet, insofar as these
figures of the Thanatos are already products of thanato-political valorization processes, this scholarship
may run the risk of serving to justify the neoliberal biopolitical call for the population’s survival. See,
for example, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routeldge, 2004); jasbir k.
puar, Terrorist Assemblages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Richard Grusin,
Premediation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
144
determinate the otherwise indeterminate potentialities of both jouissance and the
barred subject ($) as its instrument by petrifying jouissance in the object and
alienating the subject as “nothing but the instrument of jouissance.”
9
In fact, this
restriction is already inherent in the formal principle of the moral law rather than
simply being attributed to the Sadean imperative to enjoy. Whatever the maxim, if it
can become the universal ground that determines everyone’s will, it serves as the
horizon beyond which no act of our own can overstep. Consequently, the Sadean
fantasy allows us to imagine how unvalorizable affective bodies or gestures can be
valorized beyond neoliberal affective valorization, but it can only do so at the price of
regularizing the affective intensities of these bodies and gestures.
The Thanato-political Regularization of Affects
Then, how can we understand the thanato-political regularization of
unvalorizable affects? Freud’s discussion of affects allows us to theorize this process.
In the previous chapters, we employed Lacan’s notion of jouissance as synonymous
with the Deleuzian notion of affect. But Freud already used the term affect in virtually
the same way that Deleuze does. For Freud, the drive has two kinds of elements as its
representatives: “the idea” and “the quota of affect.”
10
The former concerns the
9
Ibid., 652, 654.
10
Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Freud, Vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 152.
145
content of the drive whereas the latter the intensity of the drive. What is notable about
the affect, Freud claims, is that it “has three possible vicissitudes” regardless of what
happens to the idea that represents the drive: “either [the affect] is altogether
suppressed, so that no trace of it is found, or it appears as an affect which is in some
way or other qualitatively coloured, or it is changed into anxiety.”
11
Among these
three, what is most relevant to the thananto-political valorization of affects, is the last
one, the transformation of the affect into anxiety.
In his later two essays, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety,” Freud explores in greater detail this transformation of the
affect into anxiety. This transformation concerns, among others, the paradoxical
tendency of the psyche to repeat the traumatic experience compulsively. In the former
essay, Freud clearly distinguishes the original traumatic experience from its repetition
afterwards. If the traumatic experience itself provokes the affect of “fright,” the
repetition of that experience transforms this affect into “anxiety.” Then he articulates
the distinction and the relationship between the two affects:
‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger
or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one.
[. . .] ‘Fright’, however, is the name we give to the state a
person gets into when he has run into danger without being
prepared for it.[. . .] I do not believe anxiety can produce a
traumatic neurosis. There is something about anxiety that
11
Ibid., 153.
146
protects its subject against fright and so against fright-
neurosis.
12
From his account, the affect of fright is characterized as singular or immeasurable
because one is affected with this affect when one is struck by something
unpredictable and thus indeterminate. In contrast, however, anxiety is a regularized or
generified form of the affect of fright because one is affected with such an affect only
when one can predict, on the basis of one’s previous traumatic experience, what one
will encounter. In other words, the affect of fright that was once characterized as
singular is transformed into the generic affect of anxiety insofar as the latter is
aroused from one’s preparedness for something. No matter how dangerous this
something be, it can be seen as reproducible, thereby provoking a reproducible kind
of affect.
In the latter essay, Freud addresses this affective transformation in a
similar but more refined way. Instead of two different terms for designating the
affects in question, Freud uses the same term anxiety to designate both kinds of affect:
“A danger-situation is a recognized, remembered, expected situation of helplessness.
Anxiety is the original reaction to helplessness in the trauma and is reproduced later
on in the danger-situation as a signal for help.”
13
By using the same term anxiety and
12
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Freud, Vol. XVIII, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 12-
13.
13
Sigmund Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Freud, Vol. XX, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 166-
167; emphases added.
147
changing only its modes, Freud makes it clear that what occurs in this affective
transformation is the process of regularizing anxiety by making it reproducible in
advance of the encounter with the danger.
Notably enough, for Freud, it is the superego that serves as the agent of
this thanato-political regularization of affects. As he makes clear in “The Ego and the
Id,” the superego does not only represent some moral ideals (“You ought to be like
this (like your father),” but also prohibit the ego’s access to some jouissance because
they “are his prerogative” (“[Y]ou may not do all that he does.”).
14
But what is
crucial here does not lie in whether or not the superego prohibits jouissance, but in
the way the superego regularizes it while prohibiting it. This becomes evident if we
consider some of the examples Freud discusses about the jouissance the superego
prohibits, such as incest and the enjoyment of all women, etc. This list of jouissance
indicates that those kinds of jouissance the superego simultaneously prohibits and
possesses are no longer singular nor obscure but generic and explicit. As Joan Copjec
cogently notes, the superego dissolves or blocks “the disturbing enigma, the enigma
of being, which jouissance poses.”
15
In this respect, it is not surprising that Lacan
considers the Oedipus Complex as Freud’s dream.
16
No matter how horrible, all the
14
Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Freud, Vol. XIX, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 34.
15
Joan Copjec, “May ’68, The Emotional Month,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek
(New York: Verso, 2006), 109.
16
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 118.
148
mythic kinds of jouissance Freud discusses, including those coming from incest or
from being a primal father, cannot be seen as singular but as generic.
From the foregoing discussion of the thanato-political regularization of
affects, it is now clearer what purpose thanato-political affective valorization
ultimately serves. By transforming unvalorizable affects into generic ones, it enables
neoliberal governmentality to preempt unvalorizable affects as such from disturbing
neoliberal affective valorization processes. In other words, this affective
transformation allows us to predetermine what will come next as threatening or
dangerous, thereby directly leading us to feel that it has to be removed rather than
causing us to think about what to do with it. For this reason, what is primary about the
thanato-political underside of neoliberal governmentality is this predetermination of
unvalorizable affects as determinate affects such as fear or disgust rather than using a
physical violence to kill beings that provoke those affects.
Asian Extreme Cinema as a Thanato-political Apparatus
From about 2000 on, “extreme” East Asian films have garnered an increasing
amount of attention from global audiences. Clearly, this phenomenon has to do with
the transnational popularity of the brand “Asia Extreme,” in the name of which UK-
based film distributor Tartan Films released a series of East Asian films usually
considered gory, visceral, or gratuitously violent. Yet, this type of East Asian films
149
has not been restricted to this brand, but has proliferated to the extent that “Asia
Extreme” may be a representative of contemporary East Asian cinemas.
This trend also has been one of the hottest issues among critics working on
Asian cinema, such as Chi-Yun Shin, Jay McRoy, and Daniel Martin. Chi-Yun Shin
accuses this trend of simply commercializing affects without critically engaging the
political and cultural issues of East Asian nations.
17
Critics such as Jay McRoy and
Daniel Martin do not so much address this phenomenon directly as delve into those
films belonging to this trend in the context of the horror genre. Focusing on
contemporary Japanese horror films, McRoy points out how those films function as
metaphors of the larger socio-political concerns of contemporary Japan. Martin,
focusing on the British reception of the films, demonstrates that the British audience
has a tendency to see them in relation to the tradition of the Western horror genre
rather than within the context of the East Asian histories and cultures.
18
While these
critics justifiably read extreme East Asian films in terms of the specific conditions of
their productions or receptions, they rarely ask about their affectivity and its social,
political, and ethical implications.
Yet, one of the most glaring features of these extreme East Asian films is
their “extreme” way of exhibiting brutal acts and bodily mutilation. If we focus on
17
Shin Chi-Yun, “Art of branding: Tartan "Asia Extreme" films” in Jump Cut: A Review of
Contemporary Media. no. 50. spring 2008, n. pag. Web. Accessed 30 December 2008.
18
Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema (New York: Rodopi
B.V.,2008), and Daniel Martin, “Japan’s Blair Witch: Restraint, Maturity, and Generic Canons in the
British Critical Reception of Ring,” Cinema Journal 48.3 (Spring 2009), 35-51.
150
only a few East Asian filmmakers, such as Park Chan-wook, Miike Takashi, and Kim
Ji-woon who can be representative of the filmmakers of this type of films, we can
easily see how their films are devoted to graphic depictions of the ways in which
Sadean figures brutalize victims’ (or each other’s) bodies. In these films, the Sadean
figures often impose extreme violence on bodies by dismembering or mutilating
bodies, extracting viscera, or torturing bodies.
These extreme imaginations the films show have been applauded both by
critics and young audiences for their transgressions of and resistances to of all kinds
of moral and social norms as Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano writes:
[“Asia Extreme”] also carries a set of cultural assumptions
and implications that guides—and sometimes misguides—
the viewer in assessing the political and ideological
significance of the films. Youth audiences, who would
normally be reluctant to watch foreign films with subtitles,
are drawn to such films by virtue of their non-mainstream
sensibilities and attractions. [. . .] There might be a
continuity between European art cinema of the 1960s (and
even the contemporary) and the Extreme cinema of the
1990s onward in the sense that some of the attractions of
foreign films in the U.S. lie in the depiction of subject
matters that are not easily permissible within Hollywood,
such as sex, gore, and violence.
19
Clearly, as these authors claim, there is a similarity between European art cinema of
the 1960s and extreme East Asian films of the 1990s onward. However, we need to
19
Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, “Introduction,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing
Boundaries in Asian Cinema, eds. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2009), 6.
151
consider the difference between the historical contexts of these two kinds of films.
Unlike the depiction of the taboos in the former, one that challenged and disturbed
sovereign and disciplinary powers still dominant in those days, the seemingly similar
depiction of the latter rarely targets those declining powers but attempts to challenge
neoliberal governmentality’s affective management.
As if to challenge and resist currently dominant neoliberal
governmentality, extreme East Asian films have brought light to unvalorizable
affective otherness excluded from neoliberal affective valorization. The main
characters are often obsessed with unhealthy, ugly kinds of affective expressions and
behaviors like fury, hostility, and sadomasochistic behaviors. Park’s Vengeance
Trilogy—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance
(2005)—, for instance, shows worlds imbued with fury and hostility. In Miike’s films
such as Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001), all kinds of Freudian incestuous
and sadomasochist characters appear. Kim Ji-woon’s films such as I Saw the Devil
(2010) show thoroughly evil, destructive characters who seem to have born to do evil.
Indeed, these ugly affects reveal the limit to the neoliberal valorization of affects, that
is, how some affects are left behind by these valorization processes. Arguably,
Miike’s films such as Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer are the best examples that
indicate the existence of a huge gap between valorized and unvalorizable affects. In
Audition, the heroine, a contemporary version of femme fatale, appears emotionally
attractive and mysterious in the beginning, but later turns out to be, or rather suddenly
152
turns into, an appalling Sadean figure. Likewise, Ichi in Ichi the Killer at first looks
very timid and shy, thus appealing in a sense, but when bullied by anyone,
metamorphoses into an impassionate brutal killer.
Another way in which unvalorizable affective otherness manifests itself in
extreme East Asian films is through their graphic displays of bodily torture and
mutilation. Sadean figures in these films do not simply aim to kill people, but are
devoted to staging the processes of bodily disintegration. As Freud would have put it,
these evil characters are supreme embodiments of perversion in the sense that their
acts are fixed on means rather than ends. These films rarely avoid showing the scenes
of bodily torture and mutilation, but rather endeavor to depict them in every detail as
if this visceral display is itself the aim of the films. As can be seen in films like Ichi
the Killer or I Saw the Devil, “diabolically evil” characters often love to chop human
bodies into pieces, and the films often graphically depict these chopping processes.
20
The scenes of torture are also often illuminated in extreme films. In Lady Vengeance,
people compete with one another in torturing a criminal who have kidnapped and
killed their children. In Ichi the Killer, an “experimental” form of torture with a
bunch of needles is graphically shown. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, we encounter
scenes where the enraged protagonist violently tears the kidneys out of organ
20
In his second Critique, Kant distinguishes between four different modes of evil: 1) the fragility of
human nature, 2) the impurity of the human will, 3) radical evil, and 4) diabolical evil. Kant sees the
fourth mode of evil as impossible for human beings, for it directly opposes itself to moral law. But as
Zupančič eloquently notes, this seeming opposition would actually elevate evil to the status of moral
law. In this sense, diabolical evil corresponds to the Sadean imperative to enjoy, which is no more or
less than moral law as such. See Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (New York: Verso, 2000), ch. 5.
153
traffickers’ bodies while they are awake. To the extent that those mutilated or tortured
bodies only provoke fear, disgust, or repugnance, these graphic displays reveal how
the neoliberal valorization of bodies is in no way comprehensive but has left some
abject forms of bodies behind.
No matter how repugnant and repellant, however, these extreme films’
graphic displays of brutal acts, ugly affects, and bodily tortures and mutilations to
some extent make audiences reassuring because they ultimately enable us to measure
and valorize, even if negatively, otherwise unfathomable and unvalorizable affects. In
so doing, these extreme displays of otherness can deprive us of chances to encounter
more obscure, more uncertain forms in which unvalorizable otherness makes its
appearance. Clearly, in Audition and Ichi the Killer, for example, when we are struck
by the fact that seemingly attractive people are in fact monstrous, we can realize how
our neoliberal ways of valorizing affective otherness are limited. But this realization
comes with the determination of unvalorizable affective intensities as monstrous. To
the extent that this determination has a reassuring effect of regularizing unvalorizable
otherness, it precludes other possible forms of encounter with this otherness.
Moreover, as long as the depictions of unvalorizable otherness are directly
opposed to those of valorizable otherness, they easily provoke a backlash against such
horrible otherness, thereby justifying and reinforcing the thanato-political
suppressions of unvalorizable otherness. In other words, unless it attempts to arouse
any curiosity toward otherness, the depiction of unvalorizable otherness becomes
154
confined to what Lacan calls the vel of alienation, the situation of a forced choice
similar to the robber’s “Money or your life?”
21
Ultimately, those extreme depictions
of unvalorizable otherness can serve to obviate any attempt to challenge the
neoliberal control of affects, for any kind of such an attempt, according to these
extreme depictions, will only bring disasters to the population at large.
The Thanatos is within us all: Park Chan-wook’s Thirst
Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009) provides a different form of embodiment
unvalorizable otherness can take in that, unlike the diabolically evil form of
embodiment the standard extreme East Asian films show, this form of embodiment
appears affectively appealing rather than repellant. The priest, Sang-hyun (played by
Song Gang-ho), resurrected from his death, realizes that he has become a vampire.
But this vampire does not look so evil or extremely brutal as the “diabolically evil”
characters in films like Miike’s Audition or Ichi the Killer. Obviously, Sang-hyun has
become less morally innocent than before. He has committed adultery with a married
woman, and killed her husband out of misunderstanding. But insofar as he has ceased
to be a priest, his deeds do not appear more unusual than those of other human beings
living in the regime of neoliberal governmentality rather than the old juridical-legal
21
For Lacan’s notion of the vel of alienation, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), ch. 16. For how Lacan claims that this same
operation of alienation works in the Sadean fantasy, that is, the analyst’s discourse, see Lacan, “Kant,”
654.
155
regimes of sovereignty and disciplines. In the eyes of neoliberal governmentality, he
is now affectively appealing in the sense that he is not only physically strong and
virile, but also subtle and delicate in his gestures.
Sang-hyun’s only “abnormality” as compared with other “normal” human
beings is that, as a vampire he lives on blood. Yet, even this cannot be considered
absolutely abnormal because, as Sang-hyun himself claims, this simply indicates that
he has a “special” dietary style. Indeed, it is through this “special” style that the
unvalorizable otherness of Sang-hyun supremely embodies itself. In principle, this
could not be a problem from neoliberal governmentality’s perspective insofar as
stylistic differences are celebrated as main sources of affective value in neoliberal
societies.
Nevertheless, the narrative of the film Thirst shows how all the problems
come from this “special” feature. At first, Sang-hyun tries very hard not to kill other
people for his survival: he steals blood bags from hospitals or sucks blood from the
veins of comatose patients. But when his lover, Tae-ju (played by Kim Ok-bin), has
become resurrected as a vampire, Sang-hyun’s previous efforts are doomed to failure.
Tae-ju’s instinct for survival eventually sends the couple on killing spree. Feeling
guilty for this disaster, Sang-hyun eventually commits double suicide with Tae-ju
who has stubbornly refused to do so. The ending of the film vividly shows the
process whereby the couple are burning into ashes under the sun with leaving their
shoes behind.
156
Thirst does not treat the vampire couple as exceptionally evil or monstrous.
This allows the film to keep its distance from other more standard extreme East Asian
films. Unlike those films, which serve to justify the demand for the thanato-political
suppression of monstrous others, Thirst puts into question the neoliberal governance
of affects itself by blurring the boundary between the seemingly pacifying biopolitical
and the apparently destructive thanato-political demands. As the film’s English title
“Thirst”—which is quite different from its Korean title “bakjui” meaning “bat”—
implies, the vampire couple’s demand for blood, in itself far from excessive, but
rather is necessary for their survival. One might be tempted to say that it is simply an
issue of cultural difference. Insofar as its purpose consists in making the population
live, neoliberal governmentality never wants to suppress, but rather does its best to
reconcile different cultural demands. Yet, Thirst shows that this is impossible not
because of external threats but because of internal antagonisms. In other words, the
film discloses how neoliberal biopolitics is limited by its internal rather than external
obstacles. In this way, the film suggests that the thanato-political dimension does not
emerge in some exceptional cases, but rather persists at the heart of the biopolitical
regulatory mechanism.
22
22
In response to the question about the significance of violence in his films, Park Chan-wook says,
“Because of capitalism [. . .] relationships between people and communities—family, or clan, or
region—have largely broken down, especially in Asia.” Ian Buruma, “Mr. Vengeance,” New York
Times Magazine, Apr 9, 2006, New York Times, 39. This answer suggests how Park is already aware
that his films perform an internal critique of contemporary biopolitical capitalism.
157
It is, among others, excessive bodily gestures that allow Thirst to express
visually how thanato-political affective excess inheres in neoliberal biopolitics.
Unlike the standard extreme East Asian films, which tend to attribute excessive
gestures to exceptionally evil, Sadean figures, in this film, almost all of the characters,
not to mention the vampire couple, often go violent when they are confronted with
traumatic situations. Even before her metamorphosis into a vampire, for instance,
Tae-ju exhibits her violent character. While she claims to have been abused by her
husband and her mother-in-law, she is not simply seen as an innocent victim, but
seems to be ready to take strong retaliatory actions. In the scene, for instance, in
which Gang-woo, her husband, doing mischief to her, knocks her down, she nearly
slaps him on the cheek but does not put this into practice. Later she eventually coaxes
Sang-hyun to kill Gang-woo and his mother. In fact, nearly all the characters exhibit
ambiguity in terms of their gestures. Sometimes they seem very vulnerable, or
victimized, and sometimes they exhibit excessive brutality or aggressiveness. At first,
for instance, Gang-woo seems brutal, given his frequent abuse of his wife Tae-ju, but
later he turns out to be very weak and timid. Ms. Na, Gang-woo’s mother, although
paralyzed, manages to display her hostility toward the vampire couple by moving her
eyes and her right index finger. In this way, Thirst suggests how unvalorizable
affective otherness may arise from anyone, in any time, and in any space rather than
belonging to Sadean figures, fantastic times and spaces.
158
Although it performs an internal critique of neoliberal valorization, by
embodying unvalorizable otherness in the guise of explicitly violent gestures, Thirst
still precludes other forms or possibilities that this otherness may assume. Just as
Freud claims, the film makes it clear that the Thanatos does not reside elsewhere and
in evil characters, but rather it persists everywhere and in everyone. Nevertheless, just
as Freud also warns, the film suggests that the appearance of the Thanatos is always
so much dangerous, or disastrous that it should be prevented from appearing or that if
it appears it has to be removed if the rest of us are to survive. In so doing, Thirst
seems to attribute no other potentialities than negative values to unvalorizable affects.
Beyond the Thanato-political Regulation of Affects
In the previous discussion of Lacan’s notion of the analyst’s discourse, I
drew attention to how this notion theorizes the way in which unvalorizable affects are
thanto-politically valorized. However, this is only one aspect of the analyst’s
discourse, for, as can be seen in the lower-right place in the formula of this discourse,
even the negative, thanato-political valorization process leaves some remainder
(marked by S1) behind. What is this remainder? All we can infer about the status of
this remainder is that it is the unvalorizable residue of the unvalorizable affect.
a $ S1: master signifier; S2: knowledge
------- ------ $ : subject; a: surplus jouissance
S2 S1
(Analyst’s Discourse)
159
As we have seen, regarding the question of how the psyche can cope with
the traumatic experience, Freud’s final response was that all it can do is to make this
experience reproducible and predictable, and that in this process the unpredictable
and thus unvalorizable affect is transformed into the predictable and thus valorizable
one. This affective transformation, though tormenting enough, Freud claims, provides
the psyche a minimal reassurance insofar as it allows the psyche to predetermine and
thus to prepare for the traumatic to come. But as we have seen from Freud’s examples
of this predicted trauma, this transformation generifies the singular, traumatic
experience. In this way, unvalorizable otherness is regularized as variations of the
mythic Sadean fantasies.
However, Lacan claims that a form of remainder also falls off from this
thanato-political valorization. This remainder corresponds to the production of an
isolated, pure sign and the affect of shame as Lacan writes:
It does have to be said that it is unusual to die of shame.
Yet it is the one sign—I have been talking about this for
a while, how a signifier becomes a sign—the one sign whose
genealogy one can be certain of, namely that it is descended
from a signifier. After all, any sign can fall under the
suspicion of being a pure sign, that is to say, obscene. [. . .]
Dying of shame, then. Here, the degeneration of the signifier
is certain—certain to be produced by the signifier’s failure,
namely, being toward death, insofar as it concerns the
subject
23
23
Lacan, The Other Side, 180.
160
Although Lacan does not explicitly mention it here, he virtually underscores the
importance of shame in contrast to guilt. For Freud, when one imagines unvalorizable
jouissance through the Sadean fantasy, one feels a sense of guilt, for the Sadean
jouissance is what the superego prohibits for moral reasons. As we have seen, insofar
as it comes from the reproduction of the traumatic experience, this affect, the sense of
guilt, is what the original traumatic affect is transformed into. But when the traumatic
experience is repeated, is the original affect always transformed into the sense of guilt?
Lacan claims that the traumatic affect can be transformed into a different affect, that
of shame.
What is the difference between guilt and shame? How can the traumatic
affect turn into shame? What is the significance of this change? Copjec addresses this
issue of affect in detail. As Freud claims in “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” the
primary affect arising from one’s unpredictable, helpless encounter with otherness is
anxiety. To the extent that it is only dissociative, this primary affect makes any social
link impossible. In order to make any social link possible, Copjec argues, it has to be
transformed into other kinds of affects. If the first one is the feeling of guilt Freud
focused on, the second is that of shame. As we have seen, guilt comes from the
valorization or determination of the traumatic otherness. In Copjec’s words, “guilt
takes flight from the enigma of our jouissance-being.”
24
Regarding shame Copjec
claims that “Unlike guilt, shame does not seek to penetrate surfaces or tear away veils;
24
Copjec, “May ’68,” 109.
161
rather, it seeks comfort in them, hides itself in them as in a safe haven. Our
relationships to the surface change in shame, as compared to guilt; we become
fascinated with its maze-like intricacies and profundity.”
25
From her account, what is
crucial about the distinction between guilt and shame is that, if guilt comes from
determined jouissance with its opacity removed, shame from opaque jouissance.
If the transformation of anxiety into guilt or shame is, as Copjec claims,
crucial for making social relationships possible, then, what different social
relationships do guilt and shame allow? As we have seen, insofar as it is concerned
with the thanato-political imagination, the feeling of guilt can only make possible
social relationships based on biopolitical immunity.
26
In this type of social
relationship, none can escape from the feeling of guilt. Insofar as one can only
survive by removing unvalorizable otherness, one gets to feel a sense of guilt because
of the loss of this otherness. Or if one is stigmatized as a repellant Sadean figure, one
has to feel a sense of guilt because one is considered harmful to one’s society.
However, the feeling of shame can make possible different kinds of social
relationship. Insofar as it arises from indeterminable opacity of otherness, the feeling
of shame “gives us that distance from ourselves and our world that allows us
25
Ibid., 111.
26
For more detailed, biopolitical implications of the notion of immunity, see Roberto Esposito,
Immunitas, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011). Interestingly, not only does
Esposito highlight how this notion serves to justify all kinds of conservative political positions that aim
to destroy otherness, but he also points out its paradoxical function of enabling otherness to survive as
can be seen in the processes of pregnancy and childbirth.
162
creatively to alter both.”
27
In other words, the indeterminacy inherent in shame opens
up the possibility of thinking about our yet indeterminate relationships with otherness.
Ultimately, this leads to the possibility of our imagining different forms of social
communities or networks.
As Lacan suggests in the previous quotation, the feeling of shame is
coterminous with the appearance of a pure sign.
28
The pure sign, as Lacan argues, is
a degenerate, obscene signifier. In other words, it is a residual signifier left behind by
valorization processes. The formula of the analyst’s discourse seems to say that this
signifier is the master signifier insofar as it is marked by S1. However, as Dominiek
Hoens points out, this in no way means a return to the master’s discourse whose agent
is the master signifier, but a sign isolated from a signifying network, something
uncontrollable like a tic.
29
If we can still call this sign a signifier, it is a newly created
signifier with no signifying value, isolated from the existing signifying network.
30
27
Ibid.
28
Lacan clarifies this coextensiveness of the feeling of shame with a pure sign: “Today I have brought
you the dimension of shame. It is not a comfortable thing to put forward. It is not one of the easiest
things to speak about. This is perhaps what it really is, the hole from which the master signifier arises.
If it were, it might perhaps not be useless for measuring how close one has to get to it if one wants to
have anything to do with subversion, or even just the rotation, of the master’s discourse.” Lacan, The
Other Side, 189.
29
Dominiek Hoens, “Toward a New Perversion: Psychoanalysis,” in Jacques Lacan, eds. Russell
Grigg et al., 96-97. This notion of the pure sign is in no way invented by Lacan, but can be traced back
to what Freud calls “drive-stimulus.” By the term drive-stimulus, Freud designates a stimulus arising
from drive processes whose cause is unknown. As some examples, Freud lists the cases “when a
dryness of mucous membrane of the pharynx or an irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach
makes itself felt.” Obviously, some of the causes of these stimuli may be discovered through scientific
examinations or psychoanalytic interpretations. But for Freud, what is crucial about this kind of stimuli
is the urgency they impose on the psyche for its dissolution whatever their causes may be. Sigmund
163
Interweaving Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics and Benjamin’s
discussion of the relationships between violence and law, Agamben interrogates the
political and ethical significance of the appearance of this pure sign. Unlike Foucault,
who rarely considers any potentiality of those who are deemed as harmful,
threatening, or dangerous in the regime of neoliberal governmentality, Agamben
focuses on the potentiality of those beings, that of “bare life” in his term. This
perspective on bare life is made possible by, among others, his reading of Walter
Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence.”
While Foucault seems to claim that bare life did not become an issue until
governmentality emerged as a new political power, Agamben traces the notion of bare
life back to the figure of homo sacer in ancient Roman law. In the latter, the life of
homo sacer, he claims, appears, in a paradoxical form, as the life which “may be
killed and yet not sacrificed.”
31
This definition indicates that bare life is doubly
Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Freud, Vol. XXI, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), 118.
30
In the last stages of his teaching, Lacan calls this sign a“sinthome,” an artificial symptom that
remains even after one’s traversing the fundamental fantasy. In Seminar XXIII on sinthome (not yet
translated into English), Lacan discusses in depth James Joyce’s work as illustrating the production of
sinthomes. For a succinct account of this notion and his seminar on sinthome, see Paul Verhaeghe and
Frederic Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal: Le sinthome or the Feminine Way,” in Re-inventing the
Symptom, ed. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), 59-82. For a detailed introduction, see
Robert Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston
(New York: Other Press, 1995).
31
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 8.
164
excluded, “both from the sphere of the profane and from that of the religious.”
32
The
central question of Agamben’s Homo Sacer, however, is how bare life, excluded from
the realm of politics, began to be treated as politically in modernity. Bare life, he
argues, appears as a political being in what he calls “the state of exception,” following
Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin.
Agamben’s conception of the state of exception is much more
sophisticated and complicated than Schmitt’s original understanding of the term
because his deployment of the term is much more influenced by Benjamin’s critique
of Schmitt’s idea. For Schmitt, the state of exception, though it refers to the state in
which law is suspended, is the space and time where sovereign power appear in its
purest, for in this state the sovereign makes his or her pure decision regardless of
existing laws and rules.
33
As Agamben points out, however, Benjamin critically
responds to Schmitt’s thought on the state of exception by claiming that “[t]he
sovereign, who is responsible for making the decision on the state of decision, reveals,
at the first opportunity, that it is almost impossible for him to make a decision.”
34
In
other words, Benjamin criticizes Schmitt for replacing the space-time for sovereign
indecision and impotence with that for pure sovereign decision and potency.
32
Ibid., 82.
33
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1985).
34
Qtd. in Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 56.
165
Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” according to Agamben, is crucial to his
critique of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty to the extent that Benjamin sheds light on
how new potentialities of bare life can emerge in the state of exception against
Schmitt’s idea of that state. Benjamin starts this essay by asserting that “the task of a
critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and
justice.”
35
This claim targets Schmitt who thinks that violence can only be justified
either by law to maintain law in the state of normalcy or by the sovereign to establish
law and order in the state of exception. For Benjamin, the problem with Schmitt’s
idea is that it supports the necessity of tying violence to law, thereby excluding any
possibility for thinking of violence without relation to law. Consequently, in addition
to “law-making violence” (or what he calls “mythic violence”) and “law-maintaining
violence,” Benjamin proposes a different kind of violence—“divine violence,” “not
related to [laws as ends] as means at all but in some different way.”
36
Near the end of the essay, Benjamin summarizes the contrast between
mythic and divine violence:
Just as in all sphere God opposes myth, mythic violence is
confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its
antithesis in all respects. If mythic violence is lawmaking,
divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets
boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic
violence bring at once guilt and retribution, divine power
35
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1,1913-1926,
eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236.
36
Ibid., 247.
166
only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the
former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.
[. . .] For blood is the symbol of mere life. The dissolution of
legal violence stems (as cannot be shown in detail here) from
the guilt of more natural life, which consigns the living,
innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that “expiates” the
guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not
of guilt, however, but of law. For with mere life, the rule of
law over the living ceases. Mythic violence is bloody power
over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure
power over all life for the sake of the living. The first
demands sacrifice; the second accepts it.
37
Through this distinction between mythic and divine violence, Benjamin elucidates
how the state of exception is not simply the space-time for the sovereign violent
decision on bare life, as can be seen in the rule of martial law over bare life in the
state of exception, but also for the emergence of new potentialities of bare life that
can nullify the sovereign decision.
Agamben expands on Benjamin’s somewhat obscure idea of bare life in
the state of exception by focusing on the distinction between the fictive and the real
state of exception Benjamin suggests in “On the Concept of History.” In this essay,
Benjamin opposes the two kinds of state of exception:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of
emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the
rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords
with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task
to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will
improve our position in the struggle against fascism. One
37
Ibid., 250.
167
reason fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress,
its opponents treat it as a historical norm.
38
If we read this quotation in relation to the previous one, we can see how the main
purpose of this distinction is to expose how fascism is in no way a realization of
utopian possibilities the state of exception opens up; rather it prevents other
possibilities from unfolding by making a sovereign decision on bare life. Agamben
attempts to clarify this distinction by proposing that the distinction between form-of-
law and form-of-life is crucial to understanding the distinction between the fictive
and the real state of exception. Agamben claims that the state of exception Schmitt
conceives is not simply characterized by the absence or lack of law, but rather by the
persistence of law as its pure form, that is, as “being in force without significance.”
39
In other words, against Schmitt’s idea that everything can possibly happen in the state
of exception insofar as the sovereign decision is purified of law, Agamben claims that
“everything” can happen in that state only insofar as it serves to establish a new law,
that is, only insofar as it still serves as a means of realizing the pure form of law as
the end. “The” everything that can appear in Schmittian state of exception, thus, is
already restricted by the form-of-law. In this sense, Agamben qualifies this form of
the state of exception as fictive.
38
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4,
1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 392.
39
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 51.
168
Consequently, from Agamben’s point of view, sovereign power and its
rule over bare life have persisted at least virtually even after this power was
suspended in the guise of the state of siege, as can be seen in the rise of fascism, for
alternative forms of power that displaced sovereign power have still established new
laws or rules that substitute for existing law. Following Benjamin, Agamben
underscores how this fictive state of exception has never existed temporally or
exceptionally but rather persisted in different guises throughout the modern history.
For him, not only fascism but also liberal democracy, totalitarian socialism, and even
welfare policies and other humanitarian supports are examples of the fictive state of
exception insofar as they serve to manage and control bare life in a calculative
manner. In this way, Agamben expands on Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics to
include not only liberal and neoliberal governmentality but also other forms of power
that Foucault does not focus on.
In addition to what Agamben has considered, I would argue, what I have
called as the thanato-political, fanatic or Sadean valorization can also be seen as an
extreme example of the fictive state of exception. As we have discussed, this
valorization of jouissance not only contradicts the neoliberal biopolitical one, but is
elevated to the status of moral law. This indicates that it also serves as a means of
fulfilling what Agamben calls form-of-law. It should also be noted that, insofar as it
tends to justify a neoliberal governmental power’s mobilization of thanato-political
suppressive tactics, it ironically serves as a means for recovering neoliberal
169
biopolitical power. Sadean, fanatic violence is, thus, an example of mythic violence
or law-making violence. That it is predictable also allows us to see how it fulfills the
pure form of law. Insofar as, no matter how dreadful, it fulfills our expectation of the
worst or the evil, it is no other than a means to a pre-established end.
Yet, following Benjamin, Agamben claims that form-of-law does not
exhaust the possibilities the state of exception can open up, but there is always a
possibility that what Agamben calls form-of-life can bring about the real state of
exception:
[I]nsofar as law is maintained as pure form in a state of
virtual exception, it lets bare life (K.’s life [in Kafka’s The
Trial], or the life lived in the village at the foot of the castle
[in Kafka’s The Castle]) subsist before it. [Yet, law] that
becomes indistinguishable from life in as real state of
exception is confronted by life that, in a symmetrical but
inverse gesture, is entirely transformed into law. The
absolute intelligibility of a life wholly resolved into writing
corresponds to the impenetrability of a writing that, having
become indecipherable, now appears as life. Only at this
point do the two terms [that is, law and life] distinguished
and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and the form
of law) abolish each other and enter into a new dimension.
40
If form-of-law is a different name for Benjaminian law-making violence, form-of-life
corresponds to Benjamin’s notion of divine or pure violence. As this quotation
indicates, form-of-life as pure violence is characterized by its separation from law,
including existing one, alternative ones, and even the pure form of law as such. By
40
Ibid., 55.
170
this separation, Agamben means that violence no longer serves as a means to an end,
but rather remains as pure means or medium, “mediality without ends.” He claims
that the latter corresponds to what Benjamin calls pure language. What is pure
language? It is “that which is not an instrument for the purpose of communication,
but communicates itself immediately, that is, a pure and simple communicability.”
Likewise, pure violence as form-of-life is that which only “holds itself in relation to
its own mediality.”
41
This is the way in which bare life in the “real” state of
exception expresses its new potentialities irreducible to laws and rules.
Notably enough, Agamben finds examples of pure violence as form-of-life
among inmates of concentration camps. According to Agamben, the concentration
camp is one of the best examples of the state of exception that has persisted in
modernity. For, there is no such thing as law but only temporary and contingent rules
designed for managing and controlling bare life in the camp. Nevertheless, insofar as
they realize the pure form of law whatever their contents are, these rules only
maintain the state of exception as fictive. Moreover, insofar as they endeavor to adapt
themselves to these whimsical rules, camp inmates also serve as a means for
maintaining this form-of-law. Yet, as Agamben is surprised to know, some
descriptions of the inmates in Auschwitz that Primo Levi left show some corporeal
excess that cannot be reduced to this logic of form-of-law.
41
Agamben, State of Exception, 62.
171
Agamben especially focuses on what Levi describes about the figures
called “the Muslim,” der Muselmann in the camp, “a being from whom humiliation,
horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make
him absolutely apathetic:”
42
What is the life of the Muselmann? Can one say that it is
pure zoe? Nothing “natural” or “common,” however, is left
in him; nothing animal or instinctual remains in his life. All
his instincts are canceled along with his reason. [. . .] [W]e
can say that he moves in an absolute indistinction of fact and
law, of life and juridical rule, and of nature and politics.
Because of this, the guard suddenly seems powerless before
him, as if struck by the thought that the Muselmann’s
behavior [. . .] might perhaps be a silent form of resistance.
Here a law that seeks to transform itself entirely into life
finds itself confronted with a life that is absolutely
indistinguishable from law, and it is precisely this
indiscernibility that threatens the lex animata of the camp.
43
In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben provides some concrete examples of the
Muselmann’s behavior also drawn from Levi’s testimony. These include “an
inarticulable babble or the gasps of a dying man.”
44
Clearly, these corporeal residues
are beyond biopolitical valorizability. But it should also be noted that they are
irrelevant to the Sadean fantasy, the greatest crimes or transgressions. In this sense,
these unvalorizable corporeal remainders illustrate what Lacan marks as S1 in the
42
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 185.
43
Ibid.
44
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books,
2002), 37.
172
analyst’s discourse, for the latter represents such a remainder left behind by any kind
of valorization, including signifying, bio-political, and even negative, thanato-
political ones. As Agamben astutely notices, when one encounters corporeal
remainders, one can feel shame instead of guilt, for they are in no way determined
affective remainders, the kinds of horrible things such as organ extraction that can be
expected from the Sadean fantasy, but rather those which have taken one by surprise
beyond prediction and which remain opaque after they occurred.
45
This kind of pure corporeal signs would not appear only in the seemingly
abnormal or exceptional life in the concentration camps. As Agamben claims
following Benjamin, the state of exception is no longer exceptional but has become a
rule today. Neoliberal governmentality we tend to think as normal is in fact an
example of the “fictive” state of exception insofar as its biopolitical rules, however
flexible, serves as a means of establishing or maintaining a common measure for
living a life, thereby trying to preclude any other forms-of-life from emerging.
Nevertheless, as Lacan and Agamben show, it is not entirely possible to prevent these
pure corporeal remainders from interrupting neoliberal valorization processes, for, by
definition, they subsist beyond all kinds of corporeal management or control.
45
For Agamben’s discussion of the relationship between the unvalorizable remainder and shame, see
Agamben, Remnants, 103-104.
173
Potentialities of Worthless Gestures in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll and Jia
Zhang-ke’s Useless
Air Doll
While recent extreme East Asian films have coped with unvalorizable
corporeal otherness through the thanato-political valorization processes, there have
been other kinds of recent East Asian films that address it very differently. Kore-eda
Hirokazu’s film Air Doll (2009) is one of them. The film centers on Nozomi (played
by Bae Doona), a sex doll who comes to life one day. While Nozomi continues
working as a sex service worker for her owner Hideo (played by Itao Itsuji), she often
secretly goes out of his house and begins to learn how to live her new “life” beyond
her duty as a sex doll. But because she is new to the human world like an infant, she
has to learn from scratch all kinds of things, including how to walk, speak, and
behave naturally. She even gets a job in a video rental shop and learns how to work.
But soon it turns out that the human world is not so different from that
world where she works as a sex doll. Nearly all signifying as well as affective labors,
behaviors, and gestures she needs to learn are valorized to such an extent that they are
exchangeable and substitutable with those of the same kind, and forsaken if they are
deemed superfluous or old. The film illustrates this problem in a variety of ways. Sex
dolls, among other things, are made for men who want substitutes for their female sex
partners. For Hideo, Nozomi is only a substitute for his ex-lover. Later in the film, he
174
brings in a new sex doll to replace Nozomi, which has now become old. He even
names this new doll Nozomi. Hideo is also disposable in his workplace insofar as he
can be replaced by any number of people who need his job position. Indeed, most of
the people the film portrays seem to be in the same situation and thus feel lonely and
“empty,” as a lonely old man in the film stresses. For those who are used to living in
this neoliberal condition, this landscape may not be very surprising. Yet, since the
film shows this condition from the perspective of the nonhuman character, this world
administered by neoliberal governmentality seems very alien.
Nevertheless, Air Doll is not content with showing critically how every
corporeal affect is biopolitically valorized. It also traces unvalorizable corporeal
remainders especially through Nozomi’s body and its gestures. Dissatisfied with her
role as a substitute for a female sex partner, Nozomi attempts to become something
more. She tries to play with children at the playground, she tries to provide a better
service in the video rental shop, etc., but her awkward and weird gestures are mostly
rejected by them as worthless. However, there are at least two decisive moments
when her unvalorizable corporeality sparks people’s curiosity and desire
unexpectedly. First, when she visits the lonely old man’s house to take care of him,
he asks her to touch him. In response, she tries to touch his penis, as she is usually
asked to do so. But the old man points to his forehead with his finger, saying “Here.”
When she places her “cold” hand on his forehead, he expresses sincere gratitude,
citing the proverb, “Cold hands, warm heart.” The other moment is the one when
175
Junichi (played by Arata), her co-worker and boyfriend, asks her if she will allow him
to deflate her, saying that this is what she can do for him. She lets him do that, and
the film shows how he deflates and reflates her with his breath over and over again.
The sexual connotation of this act is unmistakable, especially since they are both
naked in this scene.
Since they do not belong to the inventory of prohibited, Sadean
jouissances, these unvalorizable corporeal gestures and traits do not provoke the
sense of guilt but rather those of shame and curiosity. They do so even if they have
sexual connotations as in the case of the inflation-deflation play. Indeed, unlike most
of the corporeal sexual practices, those unvalorizable corporeal residues purify
sexuality of guilt and color it with shame and curiosity. In Agamben’s terms, these
corporeal remainders illustrate pure means without end insofar as they are not
produced for achieving any predetermined goals, but remain as a pure mediality
which communicates its communicability as such. Lacan qualifies this non-Sadean
unvalorizable jouissance as feminine in distinction to phallic jouissance that refers to
valorizable affects. In a similar way to Agamben, Lacan writes about this mode of
jouissance, “jouissance serves no purpose.”
46
The unexpected occurrence of
jouissance, thus, exposes one’s tendency to restrict the potential of one’s life to that
46
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973: Encore, the
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton,
1998), 3.
176
which one’s needs or purpose permits. More significantly, if one decides to embrace a
certain kind of jouissance rather than reject it, one has to speculate about or reinvent a
new purpose for one’s life such a jouissance might serve. This is how several
instances of jouissance that unexpectedly come from Nozomi might awaken her
neighbors to other possibilities of leading their lives that are inconceivable from the
perspective of neoliberal governmentality. Indeed, jouissance becomes the medium or
the interface that might unexpectedly link each being with another unexpectedly. It is
in this unexpected link that allows one to imagine a community of being-in-common
in Nancy’s terms.
However, as a tragic incident implies, the film does not seem entirely
optimistic about a utopian community mediated by jouissance. Nozomi tries to do the
same thing as Junichi did to her, to deflate him by making a hole in him, but this
unfortunately kills him. In other words, she fails to elicit the same jouissance from
Junichi. To be more precise, even if her attempt had been successful it could not have
produced any “feminine” jouissance for her because she deliberately attempts to
obtain it through a means to an end rather than by being open to something
unexpected. The jouissance she would have obtained is, rather, a Sadean one. In fact,
when Nozomi cuts Junichi’s body, the film seems to assume a Sadean tonality as if to
treat her as a femme fatale.
Nevertheless, the ending of the film optimistically suggests how even this
seeming catastrophe might be transformed by chance into a germ of enjoyment for
177
someone.
47
After Junichi dies, Nozomi commits suicide by deflating herself. The air
from her body and her last breath become a part of wind, which carries pollen along
all around her lonely neighbors and finally, as the final scene suggests, affects a
reclusive girl, who has withdrawn into a cramped room throughout the film. When
she gets up and opens the window, she breathes in deeply and exclaims, “Beautiful!”
And the final shot shows Nozomi’s dead body surrounded by empty bottles and
apples from the girl’s point of view. This final scene is hopeful because the girl, who
has been impassive throughout the film, is now affected by the seemingly useless
kinds of enjoyment like air, a wasted plastic body and the same empty bottles and
apples that she has thrown away.
Useless
The media coverage of the Beijing 2008 Olympics is reminiscent of Leni
Riefenstahl’s Olympia, a controversial documentary of the Berlin 1936 Olympics, in
terms of the way in which bodies are aestheticized through media. It should be noted
that despite its remarkable aesthetic achievement Riefenstahl’s Olympia legitimized
the notorious Nazi biopolitics that graded and regulated bodies. If this biopolitics is
disciplinary by its nature, the form of biopolitics the spectacularly mediated Beijing
event illustrates is neoliberal insofar as the event is much more devoted to flaunting
affective rather than simply healthy qualities of bodies. The biggest problem of this
47
Kore-eda similarly remarks about the ending: “The death of the air doll has a special meaning. The
last breath that comes out of her body is a symbol of hope and rebirth.” Hermia Lin “The Length and
Breadth of an Air Doll,” Taiwan News. 15 January 2010: n. pag. Web. Accessed 30 March 2010.
178
neoliberal biopolitics, however, is that it leaves behind a great proportion of
population as wasted. Here it should be noted that, just as neighboring East Asian
nations including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with its affiliation with the WTO
in 2001, China solidified its participation in global neoliberal govermentality.
From his debut film, Jia Zhang-ke’s films have focused on the wasted
portion of population living in rural areas, such as Jia’s hometown Fenyang, Xianxi
Province. But, arguably, his earlier films including Xiao Wu (1998), Platform (2000),
Unknown Pleasures (2002) and The World (2004) tend to portray such wasted bodies
as still affectively appealing rather than as simply wasted. This portrayal of wasted
bodies is possible primarily because the films’ actors play the roles of affectively
attractive characters. This fictional characterization makes these bodies appear
spiritually full rather than empty or wasted. However, starting from the film Still Life
(2006) and a documentary Dong (2006), Jia’s films began to deprive bodies of any
spiritual qualities by employing non-actors’ bodies without characterizing and
spiritualizing them. In this way, his later films allow spectators to encounter wasted
bodies as such. His documentary Useless (2007) is even more notable in that not only
does it bring light to a contrast between valorizable and unvalorizable corporeality,
but it allows audiences to encounter new forms of unvalorizable corporeal remainders.
The film Useless addresses the facets of the lives of those who engage in
the clothing production in today’s China. It consists of three segments. The first one
focuses on a mass-produced garment factory and its workers; the second Ma Ke, a
179
haute couture designer and her work and daily life; the third the works and daily lives
of independent tailors engaging in small businesses in a Chinese rural area, and the
life of a coal miner who quit tailoring business in the face of proliferating sweatshops.
This brief synopsis should be sufficient to perceive a certain hierarchy at work
between different types of affective bodies. In terms of affective qualities, Ma Ke’s
body is deemed most appealing; the tailors’ bodies less appealing and always
threatened; the factory workers’ and the coal miner’s the least appealing, nearly
wasted. The film also shows a tramp’s body deemed disposable in terms of its
affective qualities.
Hardt and Negri argue that affective labor has become the dominant form
of labor in the post-Fordist stage of capitalism. By the term affective labor, they mean
“human contact and interaction”
48
whose products are “a feeling of ease, well-being,
satisfaction, excitement, or passion.”
49
What is notable about their discussion of
affective labor is that “what [it] produces are social networks, forms of community,
biopower.”
50
Although Hardt and Negri presume that every human being has the
power to create the same amount of affect, this turns out to be false given the role of
neoliberal biopolitical media in grading bodies in terms of their capacities to create
affect.
48
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 292.
49
Ibid., 293.
50
Ibid.
180
At a cursory glance, Useless seems to endorse the role of mainstream
media in evaluating the affective capacities of bodies. From the ecological type of
clothing she creates, and the way she works professionally in the fashion show in
Paris, audiences might seem to perceive clearly how the fashion designer, Ma ke,
cares much about the affective communication between the producer and the
consumer. Moreover, she seems to maintain her calm and natural attitudes in front of
the camera. In fact, given that the original Chinese title Wu yong (“useless”) is the
name of her new brand of clothing , Ma ke seems to be the central figure for this film.
By contrast, it appears that the bodies of the rural tailors, the assembly-line factory
workers and the coal miners have less power to produce affects given their less
affectively attractive attitudes and their boringly mechanical manner of working. As
for the tramp, his body appears entirely wasted, useless. Against Hardt and Negri’s
expectation, then, endorsing the inequality between affective labors, the film might
seem to lead the audience to imagine an exclusionary community insofar as this
affective inequality may block one’s desire for connecting to affectively less
appealing bodies like those of the factory workers, the coal miners, and the tramp.
However, not only does Useless call attention to these differently
valorized kinds of affective labor, but also it allows the audience to encounter
unvalorizable, affective non-labor. Although Hardt and Negri do not call attention to
it, the distinction between affective labor and affective non-labor is crucial to thinking
of corporeal affectivity beyond the limited possibilities neoliberal capitalism opens up.
181
For clarifying this distinction, let us examine what Marx writes about the process of
labor. Regarding the significance of the process of labor, he writes:
Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of
nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials.
And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the
mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must
subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere
momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the working
organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration
of the work.
51
As this quotation makes clear, the labor process is basically an activity in which man
subordinates a means to a given end. In other words, labor is a purposeful act. Even
though Marx focuses on physical labor, this characteristic of labor will be the same
even with affective labor unless one proposes a different definition of labor. In this
sense, labor shares the same quality as law-making violence and law-maintaining
violence in Benjamin’s terms or form-of-law in Agamben’s terms since the latter is
characterized by the subordination of a means to an end. By contrast, what I call
affective non-labor corresponds to the Benjaminian pure violence or means without
end in Agamben’s terms. Affective non-labor, then, can be understood as a corporeal
pure violence or corporeal affective means without end.
52
51
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 284.
52
In his excellent work on the affective politics of postcinematic media, Steven Shaviro proposes the
relation between affect and emotion as analogous to that between labor and labor-power: “In a certain
sense, emotion is to affect as, in Marxist theory, labor-power is to labor. For labor itself is an
unqualifiable capacity, while labor-power is a quantifiable commodity that is possessed, and that can
182
Notably enough, in his essay, “Notes on Gesture,” Agamben claims that
cinema is, among others, a medium of gestures. What is a gesture? According to
Agamben, the gesture is neither “a means as addressing a goal” nor “a finality
without means,” but a means without end, in other words, “the exhibition of a
mediality,” the “process of making a means visible as such.”
53
In short, what
Agamben calls gesture precisely refers to the Benjaminian pure violence as pure
means. This gestural capacity of cinema Agamben discusses is crucial because it tells
us how cinema could counter its tendency to engage in the biopolitical management
of bodies.
Useless attempts to realize this possibility through the cinematic
production of gestures in several ways. The notable gestures mainly come from
affectively less profitable or wasted bodies. Unlike Ma ke, who naturally performs as
herself in front of the camera, many affectively unprofitable people, especially the
rural people or the assembly-line factory workers, occasionally catch a glimpse of the
camera. This is probably because they feel uneasy about how they should act in front
of the camera or possible audiences. Moreover, every time they catch a glimpse of it,
they make awkward gestures or their face slightly contort. These distortions arouse
be sold by the worker.” Steven Shaviro, Postcinematic Affect (Washington: Zero-books, 2010): 152-
153. However, for me, this analogy is not quite compelling for two reasons. First, as I demonstrated,
the Marxian notion of labor is a purposeful and thus subjective or personal act whereas affect is
impersonal or singular. Second, according to Marx, labor is also quantifiable although its value is more
than the value of labor-power due to its production of surplus value.
53
Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti et al.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 58.
183
complex affective effects impossible to evaluate from the neoliberal governmental
perspective. These moments of the audience’s affective encounter with unglamorous
or even wasted bodies, however, open up the possibility that the audience could begin
to imagine a different relationship with other bodies than the kind of relationship the
mainstream biopolitical media reproduce. The film also creates similar gestures at the
moments when coal miners pose themselves smoking in front of the camera, but in
affectively awkward rather than attractive ways. They are standing somewhat stiffly,
looking directly into the camera. These unvalorizable gestures will in no way provoke
the sense of guilt, but rather that of shame from the audience as well as those
affective non-workers if they see themselves in this film. This shame, however, does
not serve to preclude the audience from imagining a community with them, but rather
arouses curiosity about them and desire to feel more about them from the audience.
These unvalorizable gestures, thus, open up the possibility that we can
imagine a new postnational community against the dominant biopolitical media’s
attempt to form a neoliberal form of global community. Regarding this new
community to come, Agamben writes:
Among beings who would always already be enacted, who
would always already be this or that thing, this or that
identity, and who would have entirely exhausted their power
in these things and identities—among such beings there
could not be any community but only coincidences and
factual partitions. We can communicate with others only
through what in us—as much as in others—has remained
potential, and any communication (as Benjamin perceives
184
for language) is first of all communication not of something
in common but of communicability itself.
54
Mobilizing a number of gestures that have other potentials to affect the global
audience Useless allows for an alternative imagination of community predicated on
unvalorizable affective bodies in the era of lingering global neoliberalism.
54
Ibid., 10.
185
Afterword
From the 1990s onward, we have seen a salient turn to the emphasis on
senses and affects in theorizing and historicizing film spectatorship. Tom Gunning,
for instance, has proposed the notion of “the cinema of attractions,” calling attention
to the spectacular and exhibitionist tendencies of early cinema, which have been
neglected in structuralist and poststructuralist film theories.
1
Miriam Hansen and
Linda Williams have revealed how classical Hollywood or popular genre films have
bombarded audiences with subversive sensorial-affective pleasures, thus redeeming
the overlooked potential of mainstream films, as well as questioning the legitimacy of
the elitist didacticism characteristic of Marxian and poststructuralist critiques of
ideology.
2
Critics such as Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks have developed even
more sophisticated theories of embodied spectatorship grappling with the issues of
the tactile, the haptic, or the synesthetic qualities of film experience.
3
Clearly, my dissertation was born, and has significantly benefited, from
this context of the sensorial-affective turn in studying film spectatorship. Yet, as I
have glimpsed nuanced changes in recent East Asian and other regional films,
1
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early
Cinema, eds. Thomas Elsaesser et al. (London: BFI Publishing).
2
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine
Gledhill et al. (London: Arnold); Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film
Theory and Criticism 6
th
edition, eds. Leo Braudy et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
3
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Laura Marks,
The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)
186
especially those of the past decade, I have increasingly doubted the potential of the
apolitical atmosphere surrounding those theories of embodied spectatorship. Indeed,
this atmosphere prompts us to reread Walter Benjamin’s controversial distinction
between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art.
The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the
increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same
process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly
proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property
relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in
granting expression to the masses—but on no account
granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed
property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in
keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of
fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.
4
It is important not to read this distinction simply as that between the
copyright and copyleft of a film. For throughout this essay Benjamin is concerned
with the new potential of the new form of art to undermine the economic base rather
than the way that economic relations determine the superstructure. What Benjamin
would have really had in mind with this passage is rather to invent the form of art
whose potential makes it impossible to think spectatorship in terms of the property
relation.
5
Obviously, the emphasis on sensorial-affective qualities of film experience
4
Walter Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility (Third Version)” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Vol. 4,1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 269.
5
Jacques Rancière complicates Benjamin’s distinction between the aestheticization of politics and the
politicization of art by proposing “an aesthetics at the core of politics.” He emphasizes how this notion
187
has destabilized the property relation inextricably linked with geometrico-signifying
aspects of film viewing. Yet, as I have argued throughout this dissertation, with the
rise of global neoliberal governmentality, these undisciplinable qualities have
increasingly been subjected to the new mode of power that aims to regularize and
valorize affects. In other words, global neoliberal governmentality has enabled even
affective features to be possessed and accumulated. In this respect, regardless of
whether they intended or not, the exuberantly proposed theories of embodied
spectatorship run the risk of aetheticizing the politics of affective film experience by
neglecting this role of global neoliberal governmentality. This is why there is an
urgent need to consider politics not only by opposing geometric-signifying to
embodied-affective film experience, but also by thinking about different potentialities
of sensorial-affective film experience. My dissertation is written as a response to this
need for politicizing global East Asian cinema even in terms of affectivity.
I began my dissertation by proposing the somewhat ambiguous, indefinite
term postnational condition rather than more definite, descriptive terms such as
transnationalism to theorize the transition from sovereign and disciplinary powers to
global neoliberal governmentality. This is primarily because this term allows the task
of aesthetics “has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific
to the ‘age of the masses.’” But for me, as long as Rancière understands aesthetics in terms of the
distribution of the sensible, aesthetics is hardly free from the property relation, which, according to
Benjamin, determines the aetheticization of politics. This should be one of the reasons why his notion
of the aesthetic regime of the arts hardly problematizes neoliberal governmentality, only opposing
itself to sovereign and disciplinary powers, to which the ethical regime of images and the poetic—or
representational—regime of the arts correspond respectively. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.
188
of politicizing global East Asian films to illuminate indeterminate affective
potentialities over and beyond those valorizable under the regime of global neoliberal
governmentality. In this respect, this term would hardly be one that neutrally
describes this transition in the mode of power and thus implies its inevitability. Rather,
the meaning of the term is indeterminate enough to include what remain unnoticed,
unregularized, and unpredictable by the operations of any of the three regimes of
power.
To the extent that it writes about some of the global East Asian films of the
past decade or so, my dissertation can be read as a historical writing, albeit written in
theoretical parlance. Yet, it was written less with hindsight than as a “contemporary”
account of the past. What this means is not that it was not very objectively written
because of the difficulty of keeping distance from the period too close to the present;
rather, that writing from a “contemporary” perspective paradoxically offers a
disjunctive viewpoint with respect to one’s own time, as Agamben writes:
Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s
own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a
distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with
time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an
anachronism.
6
6
Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary,” in What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans.
David Kishik et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41; emphasis in the original.
189
Today when writing about contemporary films is usually thought of as “adherently”
paying attention to the conditions of their dazzling successes, I hope that my
dissertation can open up “disjunctive” perspectives on contemporary global East
Asian films so as to distract us from such conditions of the successes of (some of)
these films to their remaining potentialities.
190
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Creator
Park, Jecheol
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Core Title
The vicissitudes of postnational affects: visuality, temporality, and corporeality in global east Asian films
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)
Publication Date
11/30/2012
Defense Date
07/17/2012
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Tags
affect
corporeality
east Asian cinema
postnational condition
temporality
visuality