Captivation and the Work of Art

Emilio Sauri (bio)
University of Massachusetts Boston

A review of Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham: Duke UP, 2012.

In the introduction to Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, Rey Chow draws our attention to two senses of the word “entanglement.” While the “most obvious sense” is that of a “relativization” or blurring of conceptual boundaries and “stable categories of origination and causation such as author, owner, actor, mind, intention, and motive” (10), “entanglement,” Chow reminds us, also “carries the more familiar connotation of being emotionally tied to a person or an object, from whom or from which one cannot extricate oneself” (11). These two senses, then, speak to two distinct and, in many ways, contradictory tendencies: one toward a “democratization of society” and “elimination of elitist distinctions” and another toward an “affective or aesthetic form of capture and captivation” that “bear the persistent constitutive markings of hierarchical distinctions (such as domination and submission)” (11). Each of the essays gathered in Entanglements stages and attempts to think through this double-movement within and across an extraordinarily wide range of discourses, disciplines, and media to illustrate the extent to which each of these tendencies often entails its opposite. At the same time, it may not be too much to say that Chow’s book most often calls on the affective dimension of this same double-movement in order to question more conventional accounts of the “democratization, indistinction, and liberalization of social boundaries,” as well as of capture and captivation themselves (11). Ranging over a wide array of media (including film, literature, photography, and digital work) and theory from several traditions and periods, Entanglements also suggests that focusing attention on the subject’s experience of captivation—as prey, as audience, and even as object of representation—would play an important role in the transformation of concepts like art, freedom, sacrifice, and visibility.

Chow’s essays regularly return to a set of overlapping issues that create what she describes as a “topological looping” or “loops” woven into and between individual essays (1, 2). Thus, the operation of “enmeshing,” to which “entanglement” also refers, not only appears on the level of content but structures the relationship among the concepts, sections, and chapters that comprise the book on the whole (1).Recurrent questions concerning the relationship between mediality and reflexivity, capture and captivation, mimesis and its relation to violence, victimization and forgiveness, and the role of East Asian cultural production in the globalized Western academy today are brought to bear on each other in order to modify the reader’s engagement with concepts as they move between discourses and across medial forms. Importantly, however, “entanglement” does not refer to the effort to think sameness, but on the contrary, to “linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart” and “the voidings and uncoverings that hold things together” (12). Entanglement, in this sense, becomes a refusal to read these issues as expressions of the logic of a unifying whole.

The significance for Chow of transmedial thinking is already apparent in the opening essay, where Chow’s primary interest is reflexivity, or the “process in which thought becomes aware of its own activity,” and the manner in which thinking through (rather than simply about) medium has long been central to the staging of any reflexivity as such on the part of the artwork (18). Of course, as Clement Greenberg suggested long ago, modernism may just be another name for the moment when medium emerges both as the artwork’s central concern, and as a means to stage its reflexivity, though the point here will be to underscore the extent to which such staging “materializes as an intermedial event” (18).[1] Thus, in a perceptive discussion of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect [Verfremdungseffekt], Chow not only shows that, in his hands, reflexivity is a “conscious form of staging” that “far exceed[s] the genre of drama,” but that the aims of such reflexivity—what Walter Benjamin described as the “uncovering (making strange, or alienating) of conditions”—are no less at the heart of the enterprise known as “theory” (18, 13). Accordingly, if Brecht’s theater asks how reflexivity is “possible when a particular form is involved,” then “Staging, understood as phenomenological rather than simply empirical process, is … one way in which these questions have been answered” in the work of theorists like Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Laura Mulvey (23). And if, in Brecht’s method, a “leaning toward science and experimentation” comes into view with a “suspension, if not evacuation, of empathetic identification,” this distancing—which Chow describes as a “move to de-sensationalize”—finds any number of equivalents in the “analyses of drama, painting, literature, and film as undertaken by theorists such as Althusser, Macherey, and Mulvey” (23, my emphasis). The few examples provided here are illuminating, and although Chow herself admits these are “schematic,” we might nonetheless ask whether the claim that theory constitutes a “systematic response to, and a continued enactment of, the key Brechtian legacy” overstates the case (22). For what follows from this interest in the “phenomenological” aspects of staging is, in many instances, an emphasis on the subject that, ultimately, renders its truth primary. In other words, what is at stake in a good deal of theory since the 1970s is not so much what Benjamin in “What Is Epic Theater?” calls “conditions”—which are, from the perspective of poststructuralism, fragmentary, unknowable, and untotalizable—but rather an elucidation of the subject’s position vis-à-vis the unknowable structure (a point Chow herself appears to concede in a brief critique of Baudrillard footnoted in the following chapter).[2]

In tracing a line of development that extends from modernist aesthetics of estrangement, through poststructuralism, and to the films of Michael Haneke, Chow’s essay is not interested in highlighting theory’s debt to Brechtian reflexivity, but rather in assessing the ethical and political limits of those aims. For Chow, this becomes increasingly important today, when the “nonfusion and nonintegration between audience and actor, between actor and fictional character, and between spectacle and emotion” Brecht sought in his own method have become well-known moves in the culture industry’s game (16).[3] Chow subsequently maintains that Brechtian alienation aims for a “laying bare” or “version of purification that seeks to revive a certain before—before the onset of corruption, before the loss of innocence”—that now bears a “close affinity between pornography’s denuding conventions and the logic of mediatized reflexivity” (27, 28). Having failed to produce the spectator who, as Althusser put it, “would complete the unfinished play, but in real life” (21), this de-sensationalizing reflexivity has instead borne witness to a neutralization of its utopian possibilities in the form of “spectorial apathy” (29-30). Perhaps no director, according to Chow, is more aware of these limits than Haneke, and in a compelling reading of Benny’s Video and Funny Games, she argues that even the “extreme revelations” at the heart of both “may be pointless, the films seem to say, for they may well mean nothing to those who are watching” (29). Not unlike pornography, Haneke’s films also involve a kind of distancing between spectacle and spectatorship, which, as Chow reminds us, is “precisely the point of the Brechtian project of estrangement, designed as it was to make us suspend the embodied fellow feeling such as pity and fear, and unlearn the identificatory habits that typically accompany catharsis” (30, emphasis in original). Unlike the Brechtian project, however, Haneke’s films ostensibly signal the ethical limits of this refusal of such “embodied fellow feeling” and “identificatory habits” (30). But even if this “nonaffect (or affect of nonresponse) is symptomatic of one dominant direction in which reflexivity as a modernist theoretical practice has mutated in postmodernity,” Chow’s conclusion nonetheless begs the question: how would redirecting the aims of art and criticism toward such feelings and habits—that is, toward the subject’s affective response—allow us to read the material conditions—Brecht’s object of inquiry—that underlie something like this very mutation (30)? That an emphasis on embodied feeling and identification may very well tell us something about the relationship between audience and artwork, between emotions and artworks, or even between subjects themselves, is obvious enough; yet, insofar as the horizon of this reversal is an empathy or compassion between subjects, it isn’t entirely clear how it might clarify—let alone transform—the conditions that structure those relationships in the present. That is, if what counts as ethics here is ultimately affective, then how might ethics speak to the transformation of that system of exploitation Brecht believed the proscription against identification would help reveal?[4]

Chow shows how an attention to the subject’s experience vis-à-vis the artwork radically alters the conceptualization of art, its ontology, and function, as her discussion of captivation indicates. At the center of this discussion is the trap, or more specifically, the question of how the trap might complicate and transform standard notions about capture. The trap emerges as a powerful figure in Chow’s analysis of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), as well as, later, in her consideration of Ang Lee’s Se, jie (Lust, Caution), where Foucault’s well-known claim, “visibility is a trap,” takes on an entirely new significance in relation to China’s new visibility within the Western academy. But Chow takes up this question first in her consideration of Jacques Rancière’s work and his commitment to the indistinction between art and nonart in order to determine whether the democratizing impulse that underlies this commitment is any different from current valorizations of fashionable concepts like dispersion, circulation, and migration that “have together produced a facile form of progressive thinking, capitalist and otherwise” (35). Here, as elsewhere, Chow refuses the easy identification of a leveling of hierarchies with more freedom, and asks us to consider whether Rancière’s effort to liberalize art—or even his notion of “emancipation”—leads to the opposite: a restriction or capturing of such freedom in the service of a system that demands inequality. Entanglements subsequently turns to the trap as conceptualized by the cultural anthropologist Alfred Gell. For Gell, Chow explains, the trap is a kind of conceptual art or avant-garde project openly at variance with the “institutional notion of art” and the Western insistence on the distinction between artworks and artifacts (41). No doubt Gell’s account resonates with Rancière’s commitment to a democratization of the arts, so that, “Notwithstanding their different cultural frames of reference, the two authors share an ethicopolitical interest in the liberalizing of boundaries of sensibility, identity, and agency” (42). At the same time, the trap also entails another hierarchy, one between the hunter and the prey that transforms this “zone of contact,” as Chow puts it, into a “site of cruelty, domination, subordination, and asymmetrical power dynamics,” and as such, reveals how the “philosophical and social scientific attempts to realign freedom … tend to run into a paradox, one that revolves around the (knotty figure of the) trap” (43).

For Chow, however, the trap does not deceive, disable, or disempower alone, and this becomes all the more apparent, she suggests, when we think of it not simply as a “clever device” that captures prey but as an “archetypal epistemic or representational device” that bears a “semiotic kinship” to literature, and art more generally (45). Of course, this conception of the artwork as trap is, as she points out, already implicit in the idea of being “captivated” by something or someone that fascinates us or compels our attention. And yet, the point here will be that, like literature and art, the trap is an “index of a type of social interaction” and unequal “division of labor” that, at the same time, “sets into motion a new process that becomes, strictly speaking, indeterminate,” thereby escaping the “intent and intelligence of the trap’s design” (46). Thus, while the artwork as trap insists on a kind of hierarchy between (an active) artistic intent and (a passive) captive audience indicative of the relationship between hunter and prey, it also makes a leveling of this same hierarchy possible by means of the captive’s experience of “being captured,” a form of captivation that suggests a particular type of “affective state” (46, 48). And it is this experience of capture and captivation or entanglement that makes the trap something other than a trap in its most conventional sense—makes it, in other words, what Chow, following Derrida, describes as a “hinge or pivot” “around which multiple planes rotate in perpetual slippage from one another, in such ways as to conjoin mobility with enclosure, and alterity with capture” (46). Giving rise to a “discursive excess” in the form of the subject’s experience as prey, reader, or beholder that both completes the trap’s design and escapes it, the artwork as trap can be said to facilitate freedom even as it restricts (47). But seeing the artwork as trap also allows the critic to prioritize the reader’s or viewer’s relation to it. Absent that subject’s experience, the trap not only fails to level the hierarchies of art and nonart, artwork and artifact, hunter and prey, artistic intent and affective response, but also remains incomplete.[5]

As Chow makes clear, this shift in emphasis will also require us to ask certain kinds of questions that have less to do with what the artwork might say about itself (as with medial reflexivity) than with the captivated subject, including “Whose captivation counts in the end, and whose captivation counts as art?” (57). Art here no doubt refers to the conjunction of artistic intent, artwork, and audience, though the emphasis is clearly on the reader or viewer and his or her own experience. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is also the perspective from which the artwork’s claim to autonomy will look more or less unintelligible. As Chow puts it, “medial reflexivity” is that “process by which an artistic medium becomes self-conscious, in the sense of having a heightened awareness of its own activity, capability, and limits” (38), as in Rancière’s example, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She continues, “Once art takes on a specificity of its own, boundaries are no longer simply the demarcations externally imposed but must involve as well differentiations internal to the work itself” (37-8), recalling what Pierre Bourdieu called the “field of restricted production” which, in contrast to the “field of large-scale cultural production,” “tends to develop its own criteria for the evaluation of its products” and to “obey its own logic.” Thus, to the extent that the development of the field of restricted production is decidedly “towards autonomy” (Bourdieu 113), what transmedial thinking and its attention to the subject’s experience amounts to is, in this sense, an attack on the any assertion of autonomy as such; and indeed, Chow suggests as much when she describes capture and captivation as a “type of discourse, one that derives from the imposition of power, and that contains the makings of what may be called a heteronomy or heteropoiesis” (6).

Accordingly, such reflections on captivation or the experience of “being captivated” need not be restricted to the scope of the artwork’s influence alone, and this is nowhere clearer than in Chow’s account of the short story “Lian” (“Attachment”) by the Chinese author Lao She.  Chow considers what an “intimacy with inanimate objects [does] to one’s sense of belonging, of being part of, say, a national community”—or how, in other words, the individual’s relationship with such objects provides a line of flight, so to speak, from a specific kind of identity (59). Chow’s essay is interested in suspending the Marxist tradition’s “stern criticism of commodity fetishism” and its “suspicion and distrust of objects” in favor of an “empathetic reading of the inorganic” that gives rise to a “historical-materialist practice,” which she discovers in the love of things that Benjamin expresses in his essay on book collecting (61, 62, 63). Taking up the art collector’s “devotion to his objects” embodied by the protagonist Zhuang Yiya—who ultimately betrays the nation to save his collection—and particularly the story’s juxtaposition of two kinds of collectors, Chow observes that, in “Lian,” whereas for collectors from “the new middle-class in early twentieth-century urban China” culture is “something to be enjoyed for itself,” the “second kind of collector is merely opportunistic” and collects “to make money” (65). Later described as playing out the “familiar binary opposition” that “recalls none other than the classical Marxist analysis of commodities in terms of use and exchange values,” we might say that this difference in attitude can also be understood in terms of the difference between the exchange formulas, C-M-C (the collector who collects for the pleasure—or use-value—the art object offers) and M-C-M (whereby the art object serves as mere commodity in the valorization of capital (71). And yet, what “Lian” demonstrates is, according to Chow, that “the intrinsic use-value of an object … comes inevitably to be validated by what is foreign or extrinsic to it” (73). “By implication, the collector who only collects for the sake of the object (for the love of art) is at best a fantasy; in actual practice he is not entirely distinguishable from the peddling and hoarding kind” (73). Which is to say that rather than dealing in art and nonart, both kinds of collector traffic in commodities. For this reason, Lao She’s short story can be said to produce something akin to collapsing of the Bourdieusian distinction between “symbolic capital” (or what Chow describes as the “social recognition, or the professional approval of the connoisseur”) and “economic capital” (or “money”) (73). But this also complicates the claim that what “makes Zhuang’s decision provocative or scandalous … is not simply that he surrenders … to the enemy [the Japanese] for the sake of art, but that he is faithfully (that is, positively) attached to something other than the national community” (73). For if his “devotion to objects” is not to be distinguished from a devotion to commodities, then we might ask, with Chow, whether this “idiotic and narcissistic dedication to a set of objects” could also be understood as a devotion to the market (73). Whether or not this was a more radical position than nationalism in China on the eve of WWII, recent history suggests that the same devotion to the market—which insists on the indistinction between commodities and everything else—has come to define the position of the radical right.

Nevertheless, it is worth stressing that Chow’s subject of captivation is not defined by typical markers of identity like nation, race, gender, or sexual orientation, and so the “state of being captivated,” she explains, “has no such collective name recognition based in identity politics, even though it is a situation in which an undeniable relation to alterity unfolds” (51). But Entanglements also shows how this attention to the subject’s experience will have similarly far-reaching consequences beyond the discourses of literature and art that extend to ethical concerns, including the theorizing of victimhood and forgiveness. Thus, for example, Chow’s reflections on sacrifice, mimesis, and victimhood begin with a fascinating discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s work that alerts us to what she identifies as the “antimimetic aesthetics and ethics” underlying his refusal to read the Holocaust as sacrifice (88). The essay’s primary concern is to  understand the manner in which narratives of sacrifice and victimhood might afford a kind of agency that Agamben’s “antimimetic resistance to sacrifice (and with it, representation)” otherwise denies—a concern which is taken up again in an essay on forgiveness in the Korean film Miryang (Secret Sunshine) by Lee Chang-dong and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, as well as in her analysis of Akira Kurosawa’s Hachigatsu no rapusodī (Rhapsody in August) in relation to American studies and theories of translation (91). Chow’s account subsequently opens onto a critique of the feminist and postcolonial appropriation of mimesis as mimicry or imitation, which, she contends, “still by and large leaves in place the inequalities of the situation” that “remains governed by white man or the white man as original” (96).  Even as it becomes “equally deserving of critical attention,” such mimesis as mimicry is relegated to a “secondary phenomenon” that “continues to be accorded a subaltern or instrumentalist status” (96).

We should note here that although Entanglements has little interest in the autonomy of artworks, such critiques will suggest it is deeply invested in the autonomy—cultural and otherwise—of collective and individual subjects found within wide-ranging networks of racial, ethnic, and gendered social relations. No doubt this is simply another way of addressing the question of agency, though Chow offers a unique answer by turning to the work of René Girard and his conception of mimetic desire as an “absolute and universal condition—an assertion that is accompanied by a refusal to explain violence by confining it to domains of cultural difference or particularism” (100). Understood according to the logic of mimesis and sacrifice, victimhood, for Girard, is “more a matter of structural and social necessity”; for this reason, Girard “challenges us to think of victims not simply as victims but rather as bearers of a systemic function” (101, 102). This is because violence itself is the product of a “mimetic desire” that emerges “both as a fundamental antagonism that defines every confrontation among human individuals and as what constitutes cultural processes of reenactment that are aimed at warding off the original violence” (102). From this perspective, violence is less the unwelcome moral byproduct of social relations than that which makes such social relations possible in the first place. But this also raises the question of whether this “generalized state of competition” can be historicized as the universality to which the social mediation of the commodity gives rise under capitalism.[6] That is, if mimetic desire is to be truly grasped as “an absolute and universal condition,” might this have something to do with that system of violent exploitation and expropriation capitalism names? But this, in turn, raises another, perhaps more crucial question: is the “fundamental antagonism” that Chow, following Girard, claims underlies society none other than the antagonism between labor and capital? Indeed, this is an antagonism whose violent displacements have taken various forms—both materially as “spatial fixes” and ideologically as nationalisms of all stripes—which, at the same time, make society itself possible (“the purpose of which,” as Chow puts it, “is to forestall a worse form of disaster”) (103). Would this suggest that the contemporary concern with victimization is not only the mimetic remainder of that which has been “lost, given up, or surrendered—in other words, sacrificed” but the mark of the displacement of a specifically economic antagonism whose resolution would render society as we know it unrecognizable, if not altogether obsolete (90)?

The questions raised here attest to the power of Chow’s analysis and approach, which more often than not avoids conclusive answers in order to invite speculation. The strength of Chow’s interventions lies in her refusal to think about these disciplines and discourses in terms of equivalence, as well as in her ability to engage each of these on its own terms.  To keep things apart and, at one and the same time, hold them together in the same thought: this is the impossible task that Entanglements invites us to consider. In being captivated by this impossible task, Chow suggests, we might discover a point of departure for new lines of flight.

Footnotes

[1] See, for example, Greenberg’s claim that, in modernist painting, the “task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art” in “Modernist Painting” (Greenberg 86). Chow mentions Greenberg in her essay on captivation.

[2] See, for example, Michaels.

[3] For a somewhat different perspective on the fortunes of Brecht’s legacy in the present, see Roberto Schwarz, “Brecht’s Relevance: Highs and Lows,” trans. John Gledson, in Two Girls (London: Verso, 2012), 235-259.

[4] For a set of incisive perspectives on Brecht and affect, see the essays collected in Affect, Effect, Bertolt Brecht.

[5] In this way, the artwork as trap calls to mind what Michael Fried called “literalism” in 1967 (and what is more commonly identified as “minimalism”), suggesting a commitment not simply to the indistinction of art and nonart, but also to what Fried saw as the “objecthood” and “theatricality” of literalist art. See Fried.
[6] For an excellent account of the relationship between society’s self-reproduction, mimesis, and commodity production see Larsen.

Works Cited

• Affect, Effect, Bertolt Brecht. nonsite.org 10 (2013). Web. 28 Sep. 2015.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Market of Symbolic Goods.” The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1998: 112-141. Print.
• Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998: 148–172. Print.
• Greenberg, Clement. Modernisms with a Vengeance, 1957-1969: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print.
• Larsen, Neil. “Literature, Immanent Critique, and the Problem of Standpoint.” Literary Materialisms. Eds. Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013: 63-77. Print.
• Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Print.