The Pending Resurrection of Thaksin Shinawatra

This post is a commentary for November 10th…

[T]oday the text burdens the image, loads it with a culture, a morality, an imagination; there used to be a reduction from text to image; today there is an amplification from one to the other; (Roland Barthes 1991: 15)

[T]he image is re-presentation, i.e., ultimately ressurrection” (Roland Barthes 1991: 21)

The subject I need to note, so as not to forget implementing into my dissertation, is the relevance of ‘in between’ spaces that I’ve noted in a previous blog post on Jacques Ranciere. Specifically, my question aims toward Ranciere’s work to ask what happens, when even multi-billionaire politicians are read in light of a certain kind of equality presupposed, or, more generally, if an individual removes themselves from a set of policies that have set out to determine what or who they are? After some re-referencing theories on the image, I came back to Roland Barthes—summarized in the above two epigraphs—because of the issue I’ll discuss below, about the return and subsequent resurrection of one man’s image. And in this sense, today is somewhat of a heated day for Thai politics, fueled by numerous media outlets—the local (Thai and English language dailies) versus the global (fuel of sacrilegious media commentary).

Thaksin is back in Southeast Asia, for the first time in while. In a sentence, his image and recent history is pinned between the September 19 2006 coup that ousted him from his democratically-elected position as Prime Minister (in the name of credible corruption allegations), and his subsequent exile abroad dodging frequent extradition attempts by the current Thai government. The Times (UK) has just released an interview, filled to capacity (12 pages) with Thaksin the provocateur’s controversial comments on monarchical reform, a hypothetical military strategy of leading soldiers from the northeast region of Thailand after crossing the border from Cambodia or Laos, and his classification of Thailand as a ‘failed state’. A flurry of heated local reactions sprawled across English and Thai newspapers this morning: the Democrats request—and approval—of a ban on the Times interview, Thaksin’s arrival in Cambodia to serve as an economic adviser to PM Hun Sen [during a time when the two countries are fighting over an the ancient Preah Vear on the border], the Thai PM’s withdrawal of Thailand’s ambassador to Cambodia, and one more issue that catches my attention above the others.

At Matichon’s website Thai PM Abhisit Wechachiwat asks, in response to the Times interview, “did he [Thaksin] really say those things” by which he meant “could he really have said those things” by which he was really skimming the issue as to whether any Thai authority, who hopes to have any future in Thai politics, could make such bold statements about the monarchy? It is like suicide, in that one has entered a point of no return without care for one’s image after death. These years in exile would send anyone, even the billionaire that Thaksin is, into a state of contemplation on death. In this sense, Thaksin’s return (if only to the region) is a form of resurrection—a post mortem manifestation of return. In the Times interview, Thaksin stepped into the future, toward a moment that hasn’t yet been considered by those still bent on whether yellow or red shirts, Democrats or People’s Party, royalists or republicans, will reconcile the viewpoints (see this post to review what I’m talking about here). For Thaksin, and for the media flurry that snows across borders this morning, the lens shuttles forward in time.

But while the media will focus on this transitional point upon which future resolutions and possibilities hinge, I’m still thinking about PM Abhisit’s question: how could a Thai person say those things? Privy counselor, the member and former PM Prem Tinsulanond who Thaksin blamed by Thaksin for swaying a ‘royal circle’ of insiders, developed the question by reducing it to a comment. “Today Thai people feel bad. (from Matichon’s website)” Thaksin, through his own exile, and via the national exclusion of oppositional spokespeople, remains in an in-between space. Since he is not simply Thai, he can operate as an advisor to regional countries while he can still wage bets on the future of Thailand. He can remain an international businessman spending 10 days per month floating across borders. He can, and has, divorce his wife undermining the perception of morality that dominates Thai politics. I have to acknowledge, that this is the one fact that endears Thaksin to his longtime critics (that include me). The possibility of a Thaksin in-between spaces is the possibility of an exception: an off-kilter sense of citizenship, a literal geographic separation from his center, and yet the continual need for the center to acknowledge his presence and visibility even at the margins. In short, Thaksin has moved beyond the norms of the present. These actions have moved the conversation to an undetermined and contingent image of the future. The Times interview was one manifestation, and the government’s attempt to ban the article or website will always be outpaced by instantaneous technologies of distribution. Someone will have already turned the article to a PDF and emailed it—or some server’s satellite is directed from another host country that beams the content across borders. But even the ban speaks to the reality of another space, somewhere and sometime, where some question exists. Ranciere would call this question the development of a ‘wrong’. PM Abhisit and Privy Councilor Prem’s were outpaced and short changed, resorting to the issues of fixed national identity and morality. Thaksin’s turn to the future made them look like dinosaurs.

So I’m thinking of what Ranciere has said about the conventions of politics being nothing more than a set of policies designed to police their own borders. Borders include a vocabulary, rules, approaches, or the very regulation of the design: of how one understands the story, discourse, the domain of proper speech (as in the case of this interview), and so on. And the reason for this ‘policing’[from the Thai gov.] is because the futurity of an image is always escaping the terms of a policy. The ‘wrong’ is a disagreement, based on a presupposition of equality—and this is the fundamental catalyst for the political, as Ranciere notes, designed to “confront the established order of identification and classification (Rancière 2004: 89)” or at least “the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within (12)” some larger order. The literal parallels, especially to Thaksin’s critique of Thailand’s conventional power structure are obvious. And this is what allows Thaksin, based upon a presupposition of equality (saying in the interview that he is “touchable”) from the institution he criticizes, saying it is God-like.

But in Thai politics, equality requires that you die and come back to life. I know this may appear as the standard in many countries, but this personal feature mirrors a reality at a larger dimension in countries experiencing the post-coup situation where the fall of one regime leads inevitably to mythologies of a new—and more purified—form. So when the “Opinion” headline of this morning’s Bangkok Post read “Thaksin may be digging his own grave” one realizes the author of this headline has, like Abhisit and Prem, arrived a bit late. Thaksin, the variable in between spaces, has already confronted and is well-aware of his death. What’s at stake are the terms of his resurrection.

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Barthes, Roland. 1991. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. [This book is actually an extension of the previously published Music-Image-Text, reprinting five of its essays to give a context for the newer ones]

Rancière, Jacques. 1992. Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization. October 61 (Summer): 58-64.

The Moviegoer Part II: Montage in Cinematic Writing

“Tell Mother that I’m fine and that I will be down later. I am not hungry.” Then I will indeed be fine, Kate as good as says. It is her sense of their waiting upon her and that alone that intrudes itself into her mezzanine. (176)

Round and round goes the ocean wave screeching out its Petrouchka music iii-oorrr iii-oorrr and now belling out so far that the inner bumper catches the pole and slings around in a spurt so outrageously past all outrage that the children embrace the iron struts for dear life. (230)

The two Moviegoer passages above come from two scenes that employ the cinematic technique of cross-cutting. In my opinion they are the most elegantly assembled of the novel, and it is evident why they author would’ve spent more time on these moments over others. Since Walker Percy leaves his chapters untitled, I’ll call the first scene, occurring in part 1 of Chapter 4, “The Mezzanine”. The second scene, which can be called “the ocean wave”, unfolds in part 2 of Chapter 5. The Mezzanine cross-cuts between two interior house levels juxtaposing a conversation between Binx and Kate in the house mezzanine and their ‘cut-up’ fragmented observation of a simultaneous conversation in the dining room [see footnote 1 at the bottom of this post for semiotic importance]. It is a scene mixed between a calculating logic of dialogue and gesture mediated by vision. The “ocean wave” scene, on the other hand, is an exterior cross-cut between Binx’s observations of kids playing on a playground—on a contraption called “the ocean wave”, his telephone conversation with a former love-interest’s roommate, and the extension of the landscape to reveal Kate entering and contradicting the existing landscape. These two scenes apply ‘cuts’ as a means of disagreeing with a series of surrounding circumstances throughout the novel: but through the dimension of an ‘in-between’ space which necessitates the cuts. In terms of social contexts, these circumstances include everydayness (or inauthenticity), the superficiality of early 20th century urban nobility (by cutting across dialogue), and other moral codes of the time. But as far as aesthetics is concerned, the cuts disagree with dialogue and the use of conversation as a means of developing plot, while these ‘lines of flight’ leave open a possibility and added dimension of reader ‘thinking’ where plot otherwise attempts to close stories through dénouement.

One of the primary characteristics of films, and television sitcoms more frequently, is the entrance into the frame. Several significant reasons for this entrance include underscoring the dominance of space and landscape, establishing the point of view, and isolating or highlighting ‘figures’ in that space. In the vocabulary of both film and cartography the ‘frame’ is called a ‘projection’ and its [overlooked] edges are called ‘cuts’ (See Black 2000: 29). In the mezzanine of their Kate’s upper class New Orleans residence, the scene maps Binx entering the frame by identifying the cuts.

It is a place one passes twenty times a day and no more thinks of entering a picture, a tableau in depth wherein space is untenanted and wherefrom the view of the house, the hall and dining room below, seems at once privileged and strange. Kate is there in the shadows. (175)

Several visual components of the mise-en-scene (set-up) have been established in the passage. Kate has been ‘figured’ in the noir sense, their view of space in the upcoming dining scene will be ‘cut’ from high angles, and from the first sentence Binx establishes himself as part of ‘a scene’ by “entering a picture”. He will further note the angle and the scene to be juxtaposed a few paragraphs later. “The angle is such that we can see the dining room and its company. (176)” Kate has, in the previous scene, attempted to take her life by overdosing on sleeping pills shortly after a 4 hour conversation with Sam Yerger, a [superficial and hyperbole-prone] writer and close family friend who has arrived in town to give a lecture.

In the mezzanine above, Kate talks to Binx talk about potential marriage and the possibility of a meaningful life. This meaningfulness is juxtaposed with the superficiality of the conversation unfolding below that, ultimately, will ensure the centrality of her dialectic and the eventuality of everydayness. A point-of-view shot begins to project this mounting dilemma. “Kate, who has been sitting back and peering down her cheek at Sam lie a theater-goer in the balcony, begins smoothing out the cellophane of her cigarette pack. (177)” She continues her verbal memory of the previous night’s conversation with Sam, cross-cut with Sam’s exaggerated “way of talking” in the following paragraph.

Away from Sam, a reverse-shot cuts back to Kate’s acknowledgement of being moved by Sam’s way of talking the previous night. Below (Binx, the narrator’s high angle view), a house servant passes a dinner tray around, and some whispers are witnessed but not narrated to remind the reader that their visual position does not assure their auditory one—we can see more than we can hear. In a flashback back to 1951, Kate narrates her time spent with a family friend in Memphis and the silence of her room there which motivated her back to New Orleans after a bout of depression—the silence meant anticipation, for conversation with her hosts and uncertain future which the reader knows to be associated with the abrupt death of her fiancé.

Cutting back to the present, Sam is telling stories with an excessive tone that seems to agitate the other dining room guests. Up above, Kate is in her own narrative world telling Binx climactically that her suicide attempts, where she only meant to “break out, or off”, could be diagnosed as “a matter of waiting. (181)” The camera quickly cuts back to Sam’s miscalculating joke, a punchline which offends rather than joins his listeners in agreement. In the scene both dialogue, two delineated spaces, and several characters are ‘cut’ through Percy’s cinematic style of juxtaposition and the overall arrangement of the elevated mezzanine. In any case, Kate is presented as sick, and the shot-reverse-shot between she and Sam cuts between symptoms and treatment in the larger metaphor of modernity [see Footnote 2]. At the end of the scene, the frame is exited, alongside their world as previously represented, with Kate and Binx planning to board train en route to Chicago. Through the cinematic montage written into literary staging of the scene, the conventions and lasting qualities of times and spaces for these two characters are shot through with cuts and contradictions. The images lead the reader to a new starting point, as the two make their way to Chicago.

Arriving there by train, Binx and Kate spend some time in Chicago, meet an old Korean War friend from ten years, and return on a bus back to New Orleans. On the bus Sam speaks with a ‘fashioned’ romantic (bespeaking the failure of authenticity in modernity) reading Stendhal, and then a farm machinery salesman who Binx calls “a better metaphysician than the romantic” because of his sincere belief in his product. Upon arrival in New Orleans, Binx is reprimanded by Kate’s mother-in-law (Binx’s aunt Emily) for taking Kate to another city without consideration for her ‘suicidal’ behavor and without telling anyone beforehand. After having confided in him over the years, she continues, he is now a stranger to her just as much as he is a stranger to civility. This civility in fact, is what the mezzanine scene has destroyed, a long line of aristocratic morality where everything is ‘open to view’. Binx and Kate have faded from the aristocratic fabric sending Aunt Emily into a final moral plea:

What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility? (226)

Binx reflects on his demoted status and heads to his car when Kate approaches. In all her sickness and anxiety, yet “dry eyed and abstracted” Kate reveals “I heard it all, your poor stupid bastard” (from the library, which reminds of Mathilde overhearing Julien Sorel’s conversation with the abbe Pirard, from the library, in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black). Kate asks Binx to meet her later that day, which brings the reader to the “ocean wave” scene.

Like the opening description of the mezzanine, Binx carefully crafts the cinematic landscape of a neighborhood schoolyard wherein resides the “ocean wave” contraption where he sits thinking. But instead of describing grass, trees, buildings, and weather conditions, Binx inserts images of modernity’s “dark pilgrimage”, “the great shithouse of scientific humanism”, the futility of a quest for knowledge, and the temporality of this his 30th birthday, all into the figure of the “ocean wave.” The cinematic landscape of the scene is the application of cuts to the horizon of the story: “what people fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my 30th birthday”; “My search has been abandoned”; “Men are dead, dead, dead.” Cuts close one frame as a means of moving abruptly toward another, and the story is leading into the uncertainty of new beginnings rather than closed and coherent worlds of dénouement. Amid the uncertain landscape, Binx reiterates his being disoriented, “I am beside myself. (228)” He seeks reassurance, but his anticipation in waiting for Kate leads to a growing anxiety. And this is where the narrative cross-cutting begins. The scene cuts away to children riding on the ocean wave, though they “ordinarily…ride only the merry-go-round which is set close to the ground and revolves in a fixed orbit. (229)” Everything in the scene, like an ocean wave, has been set adrift and outside it’s normal “rotation.”
The visual motif of the ocean wave is a reference to two earlier explanations of the narrator’s self-coined concept of “rotation” as applied toward a phenomenological mode of living.

A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. For example, taking one’s first trip to Taxco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would be. (144)

In another reference to the term, Binx had noted, in his departure from Chicago “[i]t is good to be leaving; Chicago is fit for no more than a short rotation. (213)” A rotation is a spout of being disoriented or, as Binx experiences by the ocean wave, to be “beside” oneself.

Cutting away from the children on the ocean wave, Binx continues to wait for Kate, with a growing doubt surrounding their future. He makes a phone call to a previous love interest named Sharon Kincaid and, upon hearing about her engagement to another man, converses casually with her roommate Joyce. A reverse-shot returns to the scene of the children on the ocean wave who are finding ways to speed up its “rotation” to “watch the whirling world.” From an anxious anticipation for Kate’s arrival at the playground, the world has shifted into a superficial conversation in which Binx sets up a time to meet with Joyce. But alas, the landscape of the scene is extended, the spatial cuts adjoined into a broader horizon, and, out of the corner of his eye, Binx sees Kate approaching. She has entered an image established as an “other worldly space” in the previous sentence . “[T]he playground looks as if it alone had survived the end of the world. (231)” And then “she could be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere. (231)” Binx reiterates his belief in the end of the world, and a promising salvation for the few who survive it. He means to say that ‘everydayness’ and inauthenticity can only be off-set by disaster. The scene returns to the rotations of the ocean wave, its sounds (“Iii-oorrr”), and its resemblance to the figure of “a young dancing girl.” Cutting back to Binx’s conversation with Joyce, Kate nearby, he reassures the latter by saying “may I bring along my own fiancée, Kate Cutrer?” Kate attends the scene, sitting nearby.

The scene ends in a jump-cut to an empty playground, a car parked alongside, with Binx and Kate inside discussing their marriage plans across the dashboard of her 1951 Plymouth (quick note: 1951 is also when Kate first considered suicide, and likely when Binx first encountered the possibility of his own death during the Korean war—times are referential and cinematic as figurative motives ‘jump’ and ‘shuttle’ between these events).

To sum up, both the mezzanine and the ocean wave scene are points of departure for a narrative otherwise ruled by conventions of nobility, everydayness, location, and inevitabilities. By cutting through these conventions, by juxtaposing the vertical position of the mezzanine with the superficiality of the dining area, or by cutting between the “rotations” of the ocean wave and the anxious anticipation of an uncertain future for Binx and Kate, The Moviegoer is able to assemble a series of disagreements. The characters, and the readers for that matter, are not partitioned or routed within a series of fixed avenues and conclusions. Instead, like a movie and like moviegoers, they must assemble the fragments within their own rotations. While most existing analyses of this novel (and in some ways the author followed this line for promotional purposes) the moviegoer is scene as ‘escapist’ and ‘selfish’. I am not sure why this misreading, and peculiar kind of ignorance, exists given the catastrophic ending of Binx’s most prized moviegoer in the novel’s epilogue. Lonnie, Binx’s half-brother, was fifteen when he died had become a moviegoer based on a certain ‘affect’ developed in response to his frequent illnesses. From Kierkegaard, to Nietzsche, and especially to Percy’s near-contemporaries in Albert Camus and Andre Gide, the possibility of any kind of search can only be partnered with a confrontation with illness—the sickness of modernity, or, more literally in the case of Camus, Gide, and Percy, recurring and disabling illnesses. Before Binx defines the concept of rotation (144), he is at the Moonlight Drive-In watching Fort Dobbs with Lonnie and Sharon Kincaid. “Lonnie is happy” he says, while alerting the reader to a ‘moviegoer’ secret the two share, “that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in seeing, know that the other sees. (143)” The secret of the novel as a whole, especially the role of the moviegoer, requires reading the novel as though one is being led through cuts and moving images—or rotations, as Binx calls them. In this sense, Lonnie’s tragic early death is the final cut.

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Black, Jeremy. 2000. Maps & Politics. London: Reaktion Books.
Chambers, Ross. 1994. Meditation and the Escalator Principle (on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine). Modern Fiction Studies 40/4: 765-806.

[Footnote 1] The very definition of Mezzanine has to do with a vertical level “in between” the main floors of a building. This is why Nicholas Baker’s novel The Mezzanine (1988) figures his place of employment (located on the building’s mezzanine) as the figure of the entire story about in-between times: the action takes place during lunch break, he reads Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (meditating being a mode between thought and action), and so on. Developing an entire conceptual vocabulary from this novel, and using Ranciere like me, Ross Chambers (1994), has coined this cinematic movement between spaces as “the escalator principle”.

[Footnote 2]Kate is compared to the young Natasha Rostov, a character in War & Peace who’s suicide is averted by a doctor who arrives in time (171). Sam Yerger, a writer and not a doctor seems verbalize his self-awareness in the dining room as one who attends—like a physician—to the emptiness of others through the excess of his globe-trotting stories.

The Moviegoer part I: cutting apart landscapes

I stumbled upon this novel due to its title and, after a brief search, found that it had beat out Heller’s Catch-22 and Salinger’s Franny & Zooey to win the 1962 National Book Award in the United States after two previous printings in 1960 and 1961. For me, it seems the surrounding international climate of literature at the time would’ve welcomed the decision. This is a novel about a self-described ‘moviegoer’ at a time (between 1958 and 1962) when people are writing under the influence of a film culture, to the extent that cinematic references are thoroughly weaved into the literary text. This movement reached its peak in France with the cinematic styles of New Novel writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, but also movie theater settings as in the final autobiographical novel of Albert Camus (The First Man) written during the same period. By the mid-1960s, literary critic Roland Barthes’ move toward theory and semiotics was heavily based upon this literary current whereby, he noted in an introduction to Robbe-Grillet, novels presented “all the experimental conditions of cinematographic vision.” (see Barthes 1965: 19) Walker Percy, heavily influenced by French literature and continental philosophy, aimed to Americanize some of its currents in this novel. And as for National Book Award(s), it is no surprise that the transatlantic alliance between French and American literature would’ve likely welcomed and awarded Percy’s efforts.

But beside book awards and aesthetic trends of the time, there are other several unlikely reasons to work through this otherwise uniquely American novel. The first is the symptomatic flatness of an American modernity that buries absurdity with what our first person narrator calls ‘everydayness’. The second is the ‘moviegoer’ tendency that shifts between selfishness and selflessness, or an alienated sense of being continuously uprooted; a refusal of anyone image to, instead, live between many. This will carry the moviegoer motif into the cinematic experiments in form of the latter half of the novel.

The protagonist “a stock and bond broker” named John Bolling (“Binx”), navigating between the urban core of a modernist New Orleans and the modernity of its Gentilly suburbs, wherein lies the central motif of a movie theater, is engaged in a search. “The search” Binx says is “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…[t]o become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. (13)” The post-war New Orleans that provides the cinematic landscape of this novel is fraught with tourists and a threatening ‘everydayness’ underpinned by certainties that stifle “the search”: nationwide polls, religion, and the mundane casual conversation of a fading class nobility surrounding Binx’s somewhat comfortable life. But chance and uncertainty contradict this everydayness: recent memories of being wounded in the Korean War, a suicidal cousin-in-law named Kate Cutrer suffering the after affect of her diseased fiancé, the slower background mobility of the African American underclass, and of course movies. “Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives…What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man. (7)” The age of moving images not only displaces reality, but cuts across it as a form of disagreement. And so Binx summarizes his existence as such: “My exile in Gentilly has been the worst kind of self-deception. (18)”

This form of disagreement forces Binx, like many in modernity, into an in-between space of self-awareness based on images. Kate, on the other hand the character who suffers most from the despair of being, is caught in a ‘dialectic’ (46) swinging from spirituality, youthful socialism, to the embodiment of intimate associations. To be caught within a dialectic, Binx muses, is to be socially bipolar, shifting between opposing and contradictory selves. In the same way, Binx encounters a young man imitating a the anachronistic romantic reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma on a bus from Chicago to New Orleans. Critically analyzing his acquaintance, Binx casts the young busrider as one “sticking himself into the world in a certain fashion, of slumping in an acceptable slump, of reading an acceptable book on an acceptable bus” (215). In both the case of Kate and the imitative young romantic, self-awareness of the unfortunate dialectic will drive them both into despair. For the latter, “[h]e is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies. (216)” In other words, there is a possibility in his search but it his closed by his preference of one particular image. There is one other moviegoer of note in the novel, a central arresting image. His name is Lonnie, the fifteen year old half-brother of the protagonist who suffers from routine sicknesses (pneumonia, the “five day virus”, and some undiagnosed) and the recent death of his older brother. Binx confirms, “[l]ike me, he is a moviegoer. He will go to see anything…[h]is life is serene business. (137)” There is an inverse relationship between the moviegoer and ‘everydayness’.

Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it—but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch. (145)

Particular attention, in this novel, should be paid to the role of disaster. At one point Binx admits to have secretly “hoped for the end of the world” to spawn a collective discovery of a self amid ruins (231). At another point, he admits in a Mike Davis-like proposition, that everyone hopes for an end to American everydayness: “what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall (228)”. Binx longs for a “cut” across time, a fragmentation of the image standing at the center of the world (as Wittgenstein says), to open up the possibility of conducting new and different searches.

In cinematic terms, the cut (like cross-cutting) calls for a form of juxtaposition rather than a dialectic that requires either an arrival or synthesis at some point. It is neither pure experiment or mere background, as ‘cutting’ is a dominant form of modern vision entering the novel by measure of its verisimilitude. In the observation car of a train to Chicago, Binx therefore narrates its path as “cutting off backyards in odd trapezoids” where “the cemeteries look at first like cities” or, further down, “[l]ike a city seen from far away. Now in the suburbs we ride at a witch’s level above the gravelly roofs. (185)” Cutting transforms suburbs to cities through a view particular to modern technologies that set images in motion as they cut across them. Here, the moviegoer is also a passenger. Further observations weave ‘cutting’ into the ride: “[a]s the train rocks along on its unique voyage through space time, thousands of tiny thing-events bombard us like cosmic particles. (190)” In one of these “thing-events” a fellow passenger orderly clips an article from the newspaper. Binx sees only the words “the gradual convergence of physical science and social science.” The scene resembles the very mode of assembling our reality that consists in making cuts. In a following chapter, an old friend reacts with violent gesticulation when Binx brings up a war memory that connects the two. The reemergence is abrupt and unwelcomed because it has been “cut adrift like a great ship in the flood of years. (210)” Again, it’s not that movies have firmly enveloped life—though that may be the present case, but that its form of juxtaposition through ‘cutting’ share a stark resemblance with how The Moviegoer cuts across the time and space of modernity.

Barthes, Roland. 1965. Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet. In Two Novels By Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. New York: Grove Press.
Percy, Walker. 1998 (1960). The Moviegoer. New York: Vintage International.

Rancière and the politics of destruction

Rancière, Jacques. 1992. Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization. October 61 (Summer): 58-64.

In an early article in his now well-translated theoretical corpus, French thinker Jacques Rancière (philosopher, theoretician of film, literature, and politics, and aesthete), speeds up the slow murder of political science by turning its approach in the direction of aesthetics. At the same time, he transforms the field of aesthetics into the very blueprint around which all disciplines are designed, by keeping the core conceptual vocabulary of politics. In the end, this allows him to arrive at the more relevant concerns of today’s new media coordinates wherein most disciplines operate. In many ways, Rancière’s 1992 article treated here presages many of the concerns of visual culture to come. But it also helps to validate my own response to this recent New York Times article on the relevance of political science. For those who want to eliminate the field, how can I help?

The terminology Rancière begins with, already figured in opposing motifs since the inception of political theory as a vocation, includes policy, emancipation, equality, politics, the political, universality, and subjectivization. For Rancière, most of these terms are simply linkages based upon the presupposition of equality he calls “the only universal in politics. (60)” Between equality, and the process of emancipation that turns back to illuminate this foundation, an individual removes themselves from a set of policies that have set out to determine what or who they are. The obvious examples range from statistical groups like race, gender, nationality, or other categorical imperatives of citizenship, to communities that require a conforming individual to undertake their ideological positions. In both cases, these ‘policies’ and perceived origins conceal a more significant ‘in-between’ space (which is what he defines as “the political”) while refusing the possibility of the “one-more” or “any one”. In this way, conventional policies restrict visibility of an excess: singularities, alternatives, possibilities, and so on. In such cases, ambiguity most be molded into an intelligible category, or the subject must remain invisible.

The reality according to a presumed equality among people to act or assume a variety of non-recognized roles, however, is one Rancière finds in “the formation of one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other. (60)” He calls this subjectivization. And Rancière’s ingenuity here, as we see in the work that follows this essay, lies in the natural link forged between politics and the spaces of literature and film. The modern novel, as distinct from traditional story form for example, is based on a sequence of often-disjoint events that determine fragmented characters in-transition. Flaubert, and a host of 19th century authors Rancière categorizes as belonging to the aesthetic age, used this fragmentation through new visual-temporal modes. These modes are cinematic rather than ‘figural’ (a la Erich Auerbach), and this is the central theme of his literary argument in The Flesh of Words (2004), his reflections on contemporary art in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), his meditations on film in Film Fables (2006), and the cinematic visual mode of all forms in the inter-textual essays collected in The Future of the Image (2007). These dominant cinematic motifs, carried by a redefinition of ‘the political’, breathes new life into the field of visual culture, film studies, new media studies, comparative literature and literary studies, and political theory. It basically eliminates political science as conventionally studied, as well as the Aristotelian pretentions of narratology precisely because it seeks de-categorization. This October essay is arranged someone as a precursor to his work in literature:

…the concept of narrative itself, like the concept of culture, is highly questionable. It entails the identification of an argumentative plot with a voice, and of a voice with a body. But the life of political subjectivization is made out of the difference between the voice and the body, the interval between identities. (62)

Though Rancière’s first English-language works The Ignorant School Master [1991] and The Names of History [1994] are both designed to make a break from the Marxist frameworks of his teacher Louis Althusser, they form the beginning of this disciplinary break (from knowledge and history, respectively) that culminates in aesthetics. This is because the visible domain of what constitutes legitimate attention is poetic, an arrangement or design of parts and coordinates, rather than a set of logical premises. Or, to be more specific, Rancière is speaking of a logic that is ‘paratactic’.

Simplified, there are a variety of contemporary illustrations of this sort of subjectivization. But the one which springs most easily to mind is Kenji and Noi, two characters from Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe (2003). Kenji is a lonely Japanese national in-between the space of a Japanese library in Bangkok and the world of Japanese yakuza outlaws back home. Noi, an adventurous yet fragmented wanderer between jobs, is a Thai national soon to pursue work in Osaka. According to common national stereotypes, one is extremely introverted, orderly and suicidal, while the other is chaotic, loquacious, cluttered. All of these subjective characteristics are likewise projected onto living spaces and the landscape. Stuck in traffic on the Phut Bridge, Noi’s sister Nid is killed hit by on-coming traffic when she jumps from the car after a heated argument. At this very moment, Kenji contemplating his own suicide on the edge of the bridge, witnesses the accident, and begins to involve himself in Noi’s life. The two engage in a variety of intercultural moments which, though touching, are an aside to the film’s more significant themes of global subjectivization. Kenji has no desire to return to Japan and, after the death of her sister, Noi becomes involuntarily removed from Thai space—in the sense that the objects and people that surround her are ‘traumatic’, with Kenji being the exception. For both characters, their ‘own’ countries are violent cartographies: Noi with regard to her Thai boyfriend, and the fact that Kenji is being hunted by a Japanese crime family.

Against these event-driven contingencies, there is no moral logic but, instead, an ethical ‘response’—what Marco Abel (2007) calls the “ability to respond (response-ability)” based on abrupt nature of the affect. In this sense, there is no ‘reason’ why Noi and Kenji involve themselves in each other’s lives, except for the wedge that drives their natural spaces apart. Turning back to Rancière, this is about the poetic forms of disagreement that allow for a new possibility to unfold, not an ordered world set in replay. The film requires the viewer to think outside the parameters of citizenship at the same time it requires film studies to question the boundaries of national film narratives in an industry that is increasingly transnational. Because, as Rancière suggests, ‘policies’ do not dictate the actions of the ‘one more’ or ‘any one’ subject, politics unfolds in this space of ambiguity and ambivalence: can they communicate in English (the in-between space of language), when Japanese and Thai fails to register conversational understanding between the two? If law fails to attend to the safety of these characters, what are the necessary forms of contingent negotiation? Have has the assembly of all these parts of Last Life in the Universe, cuts, spaces, and so on, illuminated an emancipated subject (or spectator) through the aesthetics it employs? This is politics.

The noted works:
Abel, Marco. 2007. Violent Affect: Literature, cinema, and critique after representation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Cohen, Patricia. 2009. “Field Study: Just How Relevant is Political Science?” New York Times (Online) 19 October. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html?_r=1.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004a. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004b. The Politics of Aesthetics. New York: continuum.

Ranciere, Jacques. 2006. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. New York: Berg Publishers.

Ranciere, Jacques. 2007. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliot. New York: Verso.

Bangkok Cuts: Blacking Out Black May

I’ve explained above that this is “a running commentary” on both writing my dissertation and “listening to music.” It’s inescapable that so much music gets funneled into my eardrums given the amount of time at the computer writing, and yet the drama of research becomes a passionate and invigorated politics when, at key junctures, my random ‘shuffled’ Itunes plays a track that seems to merge naturally with the theme being written about. In those cases, I write make a note of the song in a running playlist below the dissertation chapter heading (See M. Bull’s Sound Moves: Ipod Culture and Urban Experience [2008] for more on this). For the violent yet ironic tone of the section I’m writing on 1992, a “Black” period in Thai street politics, these songs stood out: “Cut” by The Cure; “Killing Game” by Skinny Puppy; “I didn’t mean to hurt you” by Spiritualized; “Max Ernst” by Mission of Burma; “Shelf Life” by Love & Rockets; “What did your last servant die of” by The Wedding Present; and “Outside My Window”, a song by a defunct early 1990s band from South Carolina called Blue Heaven, who would’ve called it quits around the same time as the aforementioned event detonated a new Thai era.

As the title of this entry suggests, these past few weeks I’ve been focusing on a three unique approaches to the field of Thai Studies and three underlying themes of their work: Duncan McCargo’s (1997) ‘cutting’ across the surfaces of Thai media, Marc Askew’s (2002) reflections on the participatory acts of ordinary subjects who ‘cut’ into the administrative policies of urban governance in Bangkok, and Alan Klima’s (2002) political meditations on the dead which make ‘incisions’ into the corpse as a means of making ‘cuts’ in the larger visual culture of the Thai nation-state. In all three masterfully-written accounts, the role of the city and the Black May events of May 1992 converge in a unique interplay of montage and ‘black’ screens that underpin the cinematic space of Thai politics. And furthermore, as Kim Dovey (2001) has noted, the ‘cut’ occupies a unique place in Thai politics: “Later in class, when a pencil line was drawn across the image of Sanam Luang to signify the possible cutting of a canal, one of the Thai students recoiled in horror as if a surgeon was at work on her body. (265)” Sanam Luang is a central urban green space that conjures images of protest and violence in the Thai imagination. But it is well understood that only legitimate figures are authorized to ‘cut’ into its soil.

Most accounts, like David Murray’s (2002) less lyrically-written scrapbook of the events, narrate the violent May 1992 events known as Black May as a strange precursor to a new visual culture. More recently, some journalists are calling this year’s protests between the ‘red’ (UDD) and ‘yellow’ (PAD) shirts as its culmination. In 1991, a government headed by Prime Minister Chatchai Choonavan was ousted in a military coup led by Thailand’s Class 5 generals known as the National Peace Keeping Council (NPKC). Declaring Choonavan’s ousted Chart Thai party, the bastions of ‘unclean’ politics ridden by corruption and illegal deal brokering, the broadly supported coup-makers began to project an imagined campaign of cuts. The first cut: to black out the “unusually rich” and undisciplined business practices of Chart Thai with the yet untarnished image of ‘cleaner’ politicians. But in the following year, with mounting public protests in Bangkok, it became apparent that the junta had forged alliances with the same Chart Thai millionaires it had earlier deemed corrupt. And to further complicate matters, NPKC leader Suchinda Kraprayoon (AKA, ‘Big Su’) reneged on a public promise not to assume the position of PM. At the pinnacle of the public’s growing distaste was the military junta’s institutionalization of their longevity by successfully passing a new constitution.

In fact, much of the Black May literature reads like a film, since visual culture undergoes a new face life when engaged toward contesting and representing the legitimate space of politics or, as Ranciere states in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), the reconfiguration of the boundaries of the visible. Into 1992, several ‘arresting’ and lasting images lead up to injurious moments of death and ultimatum as Chalard Vorachart’s hunger strike in front of the Government House was met with the delivery of two coffins—possibly gifts of the military regime. When this hunger strike ended, when he was rushed to the hospital for IVs and insulin treatment after fainting, former Bangkok Mayor Chamlong Srimuang began his own. But, as McCargo (1997) notes, Chamlong opted for a faster route to death by allowing himself a mere glass of water per day. His 7-day covenant entailed a vow of silence, a 7-day ultimatum for Big Su’s resignation since he’d die on the 7th of starvation, and a refusal to seek future political gain. More people arrived into the Old City area of all protests past, present, and future, to observe the death symbols and a possible end to years of dictatorship in its garden variety of forms (a military dictatorship of the 70s with a three year interruption, the parliamentary dictatorship of the 80s, and the subsequent return of the military in 1991). At around 5 in the morning on May 19th the military fired on protestors. Further consolidating the space of the disrupted streets, they occupied and wielded a campaign of brutality at a hotel used as a make-shift infirmary used either for the protestors or street vendors caught in the cross-fire. Television captured none of this, but instead broadcasted a relatively serene narrative of the days events, while the BBC documented the violence. This censored video footage was later circulated in both black market vendors and university auditoriums throughout the area in the following weeks. Video culture, in this way diametrically opposed to what Ranciere would call ‘policy’ culture (the space of legislated activity), became the most solid ground of truth. What had been ‘cut’ from domestic screens had been re-assembled for public view in the aftermath of Black May. As a practicing artist (Bancha Suvannanonda) in the area noted, the juxtaposition of two scenes, between witnessing the event and watching the news coverage is one of two simultaneous worlds. “I was living two streets away from the action and witnessed most of it with my own eyes, but saw something totally different on TV!“” A cut is exactly this, a juxtaposition.

Part of the ‘cut’ is between street, where an event unfolds, and a screen where it can be en-framed. McCargo, Klima, and Askew each make use of this visual cut in ways that hinge upon Black May. McCargo, for instance mentions how democracy activists compared Big Su’s dictatorship to a “knot, the meeting point of a complex network of political connections. (244)” Instead of untying the complex knot, it needed to be cut. This cut was necessary especially in the climate of media censorship whereby public awareness was ‘blacked out’. On the other side, central protest figure Chamlong Srimuang ‘cut’ speech from his platform through his vow of silence (a juxtaposition to the silence of censored broadcasts). Instead, he placarded his key positions on posterboard and surrounded himself by these silent cinematic inter-titles. I won’t say much about this now, but what McCargo is illustrates is the realm of the visual that Burgin calls the sequence-image (and in fact, it could be read through a concept Ranciere calls the sentence-image). The paratactic assembly of ‘messages’ is a protest (silent in Chamlong’s case) against the mediation of other media screens.

To my emphasis on the event, and visual imagery in particular, is owed to a particular politics of writing engaged by Klima in The Funeral Casino (2002). In particular, Klima juxtaposes a cut between two worlds of the visual, between the “off-camera place” of a dictatorship and a camera-like subjective lens influenced by Walter Benjamin, where “history cut through the core of truth without providing a totalizing frame. (8)” The associations with death that Klima pins down render part of symbolic references to the “Blackness” of May, but also an alternative history to violence in Thailand that pins neoliberalism between dead bodies and death imagery—as an emancipatory clause in the stake of legitimate politics, the relatives of the dead are likely the most well-equipped to realize the cost of this morbid global modernity. It is quite morbid, as are the videos now available on Youtube. The illustration of a violent cartography, the “off-camera place”, is connected to a “blacked out” economic history where murdered protestors have disappeared (rumored to be hidden in containers off shore as recent newspaper articles report as of 2009) for the sake of modern business practices. It is an irony that the after-images of Black May would be, as Klima so eloquently narrates, the campaign to cleanse politics in Thailand.

If we flash-back to the black screens in the slums of Bangkok eight months earlier, we get a sense of what was at stake in the visual management of a new global modernity. According to Marc Askew’s account of the September 1991 World Bank/International Monetary conference in Bangkok (Big Su’s military regime being firmly rooted after their coup several months previous), the attempt to hide bodies was an attempt to clean the image for the eyes of the meeting attendees. This required blacking out the slums. Askew mentions past infrastructural methods that had already ‘cut’ through the middle of communities six years earlier but now the cuts were more obvious: “new walls were constructed to obscure these unsightly habitats of the poor. (139)” But then the slum residents painted murals upon the walls to remain visible. The conference organizers then parked busses in front of the walls, Askew notes, to black out their presence.

Now I live in the center of political cuts, in an area of town where streets are perpetually closed for either political processions or abrupt protests. All of the books mentioned above read more like everyday films, and with more soul than Youtube. Today I witnessed a police officer cleaning a begging woman and her child from the sidewalk. The cuts continue.

Works Cited
Askew, Marc. 2002. Bangkok: Place, Practice and Representation. London and New York: Routledge.
Dovey, Kim. 2001. Memory, Democracy and Urban Space: Bangkok’s ‘Path to Democracy’. Journal of Urban Design 6/3: 265-282.
Klima, Alan. The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
McCargo, Duncan. 1997. Chamlong Srimuang and the New Thai Politics. London: Hurst & Company.
Murray, David. 1996. Angels and Devils: Thai Politics from February 1991 to September 1992—A Struggle for Democracy? Bangkok: Orchid Press.