Anne Anlin Cheng, Tom Holert

Do You See It?Well, It DoesntSee You!

Tom Holert: A key point in both Second Skin:Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (2011)and its accompanying essay Shine: On Race,Glamour, and the Modern of the same year iswhat you have poignantly and paradoxicallycalled the disappearance into appearance,referencing the particular shimmering,excessively ornamentalized performance ofAnna May Wong in the 1929 movie Piccadilly. Thisact of disappearing, this loss of visibility inderealizing hypervisuality, runs against ourdefault notions of identity politics but seems tohave much in common with notions of opacity inpostcolonial literature and art. I am thinking inparticular of douard Glissants (the name aloneseems to invite inclusion in a discussion on shineand gloss!) work on crolisme that has beentaken up by artists such as The Otolith Group andfigured repeatedly in panel discussions onpostcolonial realities in contemporary Africa.Would you consider Bakerand Wongstranscending of the racialized body by means ofstagecraft and movie technology to be ananticipation of such postcolonial concepts?Anne Anlin Cheng: Much of my recent workhas been focused on shifting our attention awayfrom the visibility of race to its visuality. Can webe blind to what we think is clearly visible? And,alternately, can that which is ostentatiousdisrupt visibility? Ive found Glissants claim tothe right to opacity and his insistence on opacityas a condition for the constitution of the otherextremely effective in intervening against adepoliticized model of globalization andcosmopolitanism. But I also think the trope ofopacity is particularly rich for thinking about theforms of derealized hypervisibility that figureslike Baker and Wong demonstrate. In insistingthat we approach racial legibility dialecticallybetween the visible and the invisible, betweenappearance and disappearance, these early-century race beauties do anticipate orforeshadow postcolonial opacity. They alsoremind us that the euphoric, early-twentieth-century discourse around idealized transparencyin a wide range of fields from science totechnology to fashion to even law is in manyways a cover for a crisis in seeing.TH: Rather than someone prone to beothered and fetishized in the very attempt atassuming an authentic self, in trying to be aperson that demands recognition, Baker andWong opted on stage, in front of the camera for a depersonalized state of glittering, gleaming,shiny thingness. Moving betweencommodification and resistant objecthood theirperformances prove to be a method for women ofcolor not only to escape the traps of a sexist andracist gaze but also to deconstruct the collusionof celebritydom and subjecthood through an

e-flux journa

l #65 SUPERCOMMUNITY mayau

gust 2015 Ann

e Anlin Che

ng, Tom

Holert

Do Yo

u Se

e It? Well, It Doesnt See You

!01/08

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

The actress Anna May Wong photographed by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair (January 1931).

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

Alexander Calder animates a Josephine Baker puppet of his own construction. The puppet caricature is sexualized by theinclusion of extra wiggling metal pieces representing her breasts and torso.

insistence on subjecthoods fundamentalindeterminacy. Is this critical displacement ofagency to the very surface that is routinelyconsidered by cultural critics as the site ofdepoliticization bound to the modernist momentthat you focus on in your studies? Or is thishistorical focus a precondition for aninterpretation that resonates with contemporaryexperiences of thingified subjecthood?AAC: Yes, I do think objecthood can be botha symptom and an alternative form of escape forwomen of color negotiating the binds ofcommodification. (It could not be otherwise!)This dialectical relationship becomesparticularly pronounced in the twentieth centurywhen, as Bill Brown and others have put it,objects became things, when we are able toallow theories of thingness to disrupt thereassuring fantasy of our natural or organicpersonhood. At the same time, the twentieth-century object still bears the burdens andresidues of colonial and imperial history. Whilethe association between racialized femininityand superficial surface may be a very ancientone (consider, for example, the conflationbetween femininity and superfluousornamentation since antiquity), it is the interfacebetween racialized surface and the invention of

the modern surface (as material, philosophy, andaesthetics) that really interests me. I argue inSecond Skin that even as the dawn of thetwentieth century seems to be promising us thefantasy of a brand-new skin in the diversefields of medicine, psychology, technology, art,and architecture, that synthetic, shining newskin is in fact a rehearsal a resurfacing of thecorporeally laden skin of the racial other. Forexample, I show that Adolf Looss notion of asleek, unburdened, modern cladding is in fact aprofound nostalgia for the very primitive skinthat he denounces.Even more importantly, the early twentieth-century fascination with pure surface must beseen as itself a delicate and profound momentwhen the separation between a (shallow) surfaceand an (authentic) interiority collapses. Themodernists flirtations with the surface led themto confront the profound imbrication ofinteriority and exteriority, essence and covering,the organic and the inorganic. So the surface isunavoidably a political site of contestation overwhich human values are negotiated; themodernist surface of pure technologicalinvention was always already steeped in a(colonial) dream about impure others.TH: Baker and Wong, in your writing,

03/08

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

Lena Horne reflected in the dressing room mirror at Stanley Theatre, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, c. 1944. Photo: Teenie HarrisArchive/Carnegie Museum of Art

Virginia Woolf poses for Voguemagazine, 1924.

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

become agents of a certain pedagogy of vision or counter-vision. In this perspective theirperformances as visual events elicit,embody, and illustrate a multiple crisis: ofvisuality, of subjectivity, of value. Theydemonstrate the workings of a deconstruction, amethodology of undoing, particularly undoing thevery aesthetics associated with colonialmodernism. Its very interesting that the effectsof lighting and shininess they deployed to theiradvantage seem to have successfully avoidedany primitivist, ritualist, ethnologicalinterpretation.AAC: One could say that Baker and Wongsparticular deployments of light and shine do notavoid primitivist, ethnographic interpretations;indeed, for most viewers then and now, thesewomen are seen in the service of thoseinterpretations. This is partially due to the factthat existing, dominant discourses on shine andshininess (i.e., Marxism and psychoanalysis)reinforce such interpretation; as Marx and Freudwould tell us, shine is the lure of commodity orsexual fetishism. But my point is that thesetheoretical frameworks have also blinded us tothe alternative workings and effects of shine.When we trace alternative genealogies ofshine, we find ways of theorizing the effects oflight and shininess that resistprecisely theconcept of commodification. For artists likeBrancusi and Moore during the interwar years,the notion of shine symbolized a host of ideasabout auratic potential and originary radiance.More specifically, they relied on shine to releasesculpture from its material condition and open itup to new meanings. For them shine has become,more than a description or a quality of light, thevery medium or agent through which the visualand the sensorial merge. And in the realm ofliterature, we might turn to someone like Proust,for whom glimmers of light often signal momentsof intense, ineffable aesthetic encounters thatresist translation or redemption, and dislocatethe subject.Finally, I would suggest that the staging ofthe colonial fetish is always more complicatedand fraught than what ideology would allow. Intransit, in performance, in acting, the imperialsouvenir is never simply pure cargo. Yes, it (orshe) has been commoditized, but it (or she) has awayward life of its own. And, on the other side,the master/voyeur/fetishist, in relishing andidentifying with the colonial object, often risksbeing penetrated by that object. I argued inSecond Skin that this is what happened toPicasso in his supposed appropriation ofprimitivist fetish, and this porousness of themaster subject offers another way to understandLe Corbusier dressed up as Josephine Baker at aballwhich they both attended.

TH: Have you found evidence of a feminist,decolonial, critical thinking-doing, in the past orpresent, that takes immediate, literal inspirationfrom these models of mimetic resistance andself-empowerment by emphasizing surfaceeffects? In other words, has Bakerand Wongspedagogy of counter-imagination formed anyschool?AAC: I think my work is very much about away of reading. So we might revisit many texts(filmic, literary, theatrical) in order to reconsiderwomens relationships to the question of surface.Its not a coincidence that female performers ofcolor from Baker to Wong to Lena Horne in theearly twentieth century should be constantlyplaying with the tension between the fantasy ofpersonality and the promise of authenticity, fortheir commodity and their agency both reside onthe surface of their skins. Shane Vogel haswritten beautifully about Lena Hornesimpersonal voice in a way that is aligned withhow I think of surface effects. We can also turnto a canonical figure like Virginia Woolf and tracea feminist reworking of surface-agency. AlthoughWoolfs work is known for its celebrated turninwards, she was fascinated by surfaces: theenvelope of life, or her other famousformulation, dress consciousness. If womenhave been long sutured into their appearance,then appearance is the site on which they mightcontest their assigned corporeality.I should underscore that the forms ofagency Im interested in tracking are notself-empowerment in the traditional sense. AsJudith Butler has taught us, the ideals ofsubversion and self-empowerment have theirlimits and can reproduce sinecures of their own.Im not interested in locating redemptive,subversive agency as an act of self-will orintention because the women whose workhaunts me are those for whom will and intentionhave been severely compromised. (We can neverforget that these women are subjects of colormaking their way in a colonial and imperialworld, nor can we forget that they worked asperformers, with all the complications aroundwhat it means for them to act.) Nor do I think theanswer is to offer up the real or the authentic asantidotes to misrepresentations. (This is why Idid not write a biography about Baker or Wong.)On the contrary, I want to take seriously thequestion: What does agency look like in a crisisof consent? Can we think about agency when thehuman subject is in question? The counter-imagination that you elegantly identify is not aset of proscriptive strategies on the part of thewomen in question, but a complex interactionproduced at the intersections of performer,performance, medium, and the practice ofreading.

e-flux journa

l #65 SUPERCOMMUNITY mayau

gust 2015 Ann

e Anlin Che

ng, Tom

Holert

Do Yo

u Se

e It? Well, It Doesnt See You

!05

/08

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

The philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan sports a fur coat for extra surface effect.

A school of pacific sardines, unlike their canned counterparts, return the onlookers' gaze.

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

TH: I am interested in the hermeneutics ofyour reading of surfaces and the inevitability ofembodiment in the context of a racialized cultureindustry. The phenomena of light and shine, ofglitter and gloss, are ontologically ambiguous ormultivalent. They are at once indexical facts thatcan be explained (away?) by referring to certainlaws of physics and optics, and productive interms of iconic values, of semiotic meaning andvisual-economic value. How does the sign-valueof a radiating body on stage and/or in the filmstudio correlate with the alienating, objecthood-reclaiming, and therefore liberating function thatyou identify in these performances? I couldnthelp thinking of the blinking sardine can inLacans famous tale. The uncanny agency of theblinking can pushes the subject of the gaze tothe brink of nothingness, the ultimate horror. Dothe sparkling bodies of Wong and Baker frightenthe colonial, male gaze in a similar way?AAC: Its interesting that you mentionLacans sardine can because Ive always thoughtof that passage as a critical analog for how Ithink about what youre calling the brink ofnothingness and its relation to the question of(human and nonhuman) agency. Theconfrontation with that brink provoked byWong and Bakers shininess for the male,colonial gaze and by the can for Lacan produces not so much horror (because thatimplies some measure of consciousconfrontation) as I think an ineffable andprofound dislocation. I think of the sardine canand the notion of the gaze that it dramatizes asnot a corrective or redemptive moment, per se,but as a provocation, a call to an ethicalencounter.Let me explain. In a series of essay groupedunder the title Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a inThe Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan theorizes theintimate relationship between subjectivity andobjecthood. In meditating on the political andethical relationship between bodies in a sociallandscape, Lacan turns to an extended metaphorabout vision and suggests that there are three,rather than two, agents in the visual field: notonly the seer (the subject) and the seen (theobject) but also a third term, which he names thegaze, which is of course a crucial key in Lacansextended critique of the cogito.Significantly different from the notions ofthe Freudian scopic drive or the gaze ascurrently deployed in film theory (both implying alooking based on a subject position, be it maleor voyeur), the Lacanian gaze is designedprecisely to expose the illusion that founds sucha position in the first place. By distinguishing theeyes look from the gaze, Lacan designates thelatter to refer to the undoing of our scopophilic

power by the materiality of existence (the real)that always exceeds and undercuts thestructures of the symbolic order. The gaze as athird agent is therefore unlike any agent wewould normally conceive, for it is crucially anagent without agency. It is the thing that ripsopen our illusion of subjectivity, our certitude asseeing and seen subjects. Lacan gives us anexample through the visual experience of lookingat a painting by Hans Holbein called TheAmbassadors (1533) in which the viewerimagines he or she is in control of the looking,until he orshe notices a blot at the bottom of thecanvas which only by looking at it from the sidecan one see that it is a skull looking back at theviewer. We, the viewers, are displaced from themastery of our looking and are looked back upon,but not by another person rather, by animpersonal object. To Lacan, this disconcertingexperience is the closest a subject can come toconfronting the gaze and the real that it invokes.Thus the gaze is an agent in the visual field,though it has no agency; in fact, its presenceserves precisely as a critique of our agency, ourillusion of subjective and visual mastery.In the oft-cited autobiographical anecdoteabout the sardine can, Lacan relates how as ayoung intellectual he worked one summer in asmall fishing village as an apprentice. He verymuch wanted to be like the other fishermen, butone day, out on the sea, a fisherman called PetitJean pointed out a floating sardine can in thewater and said to young Jacques: You see thatcan? Do you see it? Well, it doesnt see you!Lacan did not find the joke funny. He was in factrather offended by it. In puzzling out his ownreaction, Lacan tells us that this joke becameemblematic of his coming to his own invisibilityin the field of the visual. He realizes thatthepicture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in thepicture.1 Jacques Lacan,The Four FundamentalConcepts of Psychoanalysis,trans. Alan Sheridan(Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1978), 96.The sardinestands as a symptom of the gaze, which unravelsthe illusion of the subject by exposing how theseer is seen not seen as in recognized but asin being placed as an object in the field of vision that is, seen as the unseen. As Lacan tells us,And if I am anything in the picture, it is always inthe form of the screen, which I earlier called thestain, the spot.2Lacan, 97.This moment holds profound ethicalimplications for human sociality and itsimplications about power. As Lacan continues:This is something that introduces what waselided in the geometrical relation [that is, theillusion of understandingI and you as twomutually seeing points in a given field of vision] the depth of the field, with all its ambiguities andvariability, which is in no way mastered by

e-flux journa

l #65 SUPERCOMMUNITY mayau

gust 2015 Ann

e Anlin Che

ng, Tom

Holert

Do Yo

u Se

e It? Well, It Doesnt See You

!07/08

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT

me.3Lacan, 96. Emphasis and commentary inbrackets added.It is not a coincidence that thisparable about the loss of visual and subjectivemastery is also a fable about assimilation.Lacan, after all, was slumming it that summer.There are masculinist, economic, and classcompetitions in this story about his relationshipto these fishermen in a dying industrial town. Thetriangulated encounter with Petit Jean, therealization of the sardine cans inhuman eye, andhis own subsequent marginalization areinextricably bound up with his desires to belongand be recognized. Lacan confesses, In short, Iwas rather out of place in the picture. And it wasbecause I felt this that I was not terribly amusedat hearing myself addressed in this humorous,ironical way.4 Lacan, 97.Lacans failure to passas one of the guys propels this insight into theobjectness of human experience that subjectivityis designed to disguise. Crudely put, Lacanssudden insight into his own objectness is itselfcolored by a very subjective response to beingsocially excluded.Given that we cannot live in the reality, so tospeak, of the gaze (nor can a human subjectwield the gaze like a weapon) except perhapsas elusive moments of radical subjectivedislocation, as demonstrated by the sardine canstory the answer is obviously not to claimaccess to either full subjective agency orcomplete subjective relinquishment, but toacknowledge that human relations arestructured along that difference. What isrevealed by the sardine cans not-seeing eye isLacans own (barred) desire to be inscribed in the(subjective) picture. Lacan discovers that he isnot in the picture in the most significant andphilosophical sense of the phrase, but thisdiscovery can only be facilitated by his verydesire and need to be so. This complicity, forLacan, encapsulates the ethical dimension in therealm of desire. And it is precisely thisvertiginous encounter with ones own objectnessthat I propose the fetishistic encounter labors todeny but nonetheless provokes. Baker andWongs shine then is not a weapon that theywield, but neither is it a mere symptom ofcommodity fetishism. Instead, its light gesturesus toward the possibility of this fluctuationbetween being a subject and being an object.

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and AfricanAmerican Literature at Princeton University. Shespecializesin twentieth-century literature and visualculture.Tom Holert is an art historian, cultural critic, andartist.

e-flux journa

l #65 SUPERCOMMUNITY mayau

gust 2015 Ann

e Anlin Che

ng, Tom

Holert

Do Yo

u Se

e It? Well, It Doesnt See You

!08/08

07.06.15 / 16:57:15 EDT