EL TEXTO URILIA
EL TESTIMONIO DEL ARABE LOCO (SEGUNDA PARTE)
describe in more detail within Chapter 6, I immersed myself in Fifth Night following each screen, taking notes, feeling, imagining, and experiencing as I walked around and sat in the dark room for over an hour. It was an incredibly immersive experience for me, which is why I offer it within my analysis.
Importantly, my experience of Yang Fudong’s work led me to seek out more of his works, which, in turn, directed me to Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves. In Chapter 6, I discuss how Yang and Julien offer diasporic visions of multiple-‐mediated forms of memory within one, isolated experience that would not usually be possible if one were to isolate a traditional media form (e.g. a traditional drama film). Thus, in Chapter 6, my analysis discusses these issues in more detail, and in the context of some other archives I develop throughout this thesis. I approach these
installations with the full range of methodologies I have developed throughout the thesis, and discuss their potential to offering urgent and important means of diasporic vision for one’s montage of histories. The key question concerns what remembrances and forgettings may be perpetuated through these mediated
fragments and how to what extent diasporic visions of mediated perceptions might be considered problematic in the collective and individual identification/identity of diasporas.
2.8 Analyzing Ghosts and Montage
I search for a way of seeing, that ‘conjures up the appearances of something that [is] absent’ (Berger 1972: 10) Montage
My thesis research is specifically designed to perform a diasporic montage
this installation (e.g. I must be in the ‘right place’ at the ‘right time’, be somewhat ‘lucky’ in finding out where/when it is being exhibited, and also able to financially afford travel there if it is out-‐of-‐ town) reminds me of the problem of ‘access’ that continues to confront the postgeneration Chinese-‐ Canadian searching for lost histories. While an installation like Ten Thousands Waves is in English, it relies on being ‘accessible’, which is nonetheless a reality of temporary exhibitions. In this regard, I am thankful at the very least for the online availability of it to some degree, even if it is unofficial and imperfect.
through a critical autoethnographic method and reflexively ‘staging’ through my writing and analysis of data. It does so by offering a key way of seeing haunted histories that distribute through mediated forms of memory. While my approach certainly draws from a method of ‘crystallizing’ data (which is not new), a diasporic montage, I argue, extends this to a more urgent project than merely data gathering from different sources. Specifically, the important contribution of performing a diasporic montage through an autoethnographic mode is in its active, critical engagement of affective memories of trauma, and reflexively interrogating what is both seen (in fragments) and unseen (in the spaces, gaps and silences) between fragments. Its conceptualization as a ‘montage’ is, in its way, also a juxtaposition of concepts and methods (see Chapter 7.2).
Gordon’s (2008) perspective of montage is drawn from her interest in Benjamin’s (1999) ‘modernist montage techniques (Gordon 2008: 65; see also Benjamin’s (1999) The Arcades Project). Benjamin’s concept of ‘montage’ is demonstrative of literary modes, photomontage, or the collage of everyday
materials (see Dillon 2004: par.2). While montage can be a contested term within film studies, I am epistemologically assuming a more interdisciplinary
interpretation that juxtaposes various media forms, including literature,
photographs, moving images and oral stories (see Chapter 7.2).81 Thus, there is a process of collision, defamiliarization, reconnection, and reconfiguration that is at work in efforts to perform a montage of hauntings. This approach also recalls Warburg’s seminal ‘montage-‐collision’ work with his Mnemosyne project (see Chapter 1.6) and an Eisensteinian view of montage (see Chapter 7.2).
In Gordon’s (2008) interpretations of Benjamin’s work (within the context of her own research into questions of hauntings), montage-‐based constructionism involves the notion of ‘blasting’. This is a method that ‘blasts through the rational, linearly temporal, discrete spatiality of our conventional notions of cause and effect, past and present, conscious and unconscious’ (Gordon 2008: 66). She argues that blasting ‘depends fundamentally on animation, on being able to demonstrate to others the moment in which an open door comes alive and stops us in our
81 According to Dillon (2004), Benjamin’s montage allowed the ‘rags, the refuse…to come into their own: by making use of them’ (Benjamin 1999: 8. Benjamin was likely thinking about ‘collage and photomontage of ticket stubs, pieces of newspaper, and magazine illustrations’ (Dillon 2004: par. 2).
tracks, provoking a different kind of encounter and recognition’ (ibid: 66). In other words, an (oppressed) past that is seemingly dead and faintly visible is re-‐
animated into the present, shocking us into seeing it (ibid.: 65).
Employing an empathic vision within my performance of a diasporic montage privileges a key reflexive element, as this approach, ‘[requires] not only attention to the thing thought, but also attention to the thinker's mode of
engagement (the flow and arrest of thoughts)’ (Gordon 2008: 64. italics original). Such ‘thought’, however, does not mean reducing such a methodology to
cognitivism. Deleuze suggests, ‘[more] important than thought there is “what leads to thought”...impressions which force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions which force us to think’ (Deleuze 1972: 95). Intersecting Bennett’s (2005) focus on empathy alongside critical ‘thought’ within methods of seeing data thus avoids the problematics of emotional overidentification and cognitive intellectualism. In fact, Bennett’s (2005) concept of empathic vision offers an important means of reflexivity as a process that facilitates ‘seeing oneself feeling’ (see also Section 2.7). Seeing reflexively from the framing of a montage, therefore, offers an active process that composes mediated perceptions through an ‘animation’ of invisible, unknowable and silenced histories. 82 Complementing Gordon’s (2008) perspective with Wang (2004), the act of performing a montage permits the composer to:
‘[blast] out the continuum of hegemonic historiographical paradigms. By splicing, by wrenching objects out of their reified context…[it] assaults the smooth, linear narrative that perpetuates existing social relations. (p. 87)
Thus, for Wang (2004), a montage seeks to ‘animate’ the ghost to life, and is therefore concerned with my/our act of ‘seeing’, analyzing, and critiquing the very data and visions of history, power, and memory that we have gathered and juxtaposed together. Significantly, as Chapter 7.2 discusses in more detail, my concept of the diasporic montage did not shape the research design. Instead, my research design shaped the development of what I have termed a diasporic montage. As an active,
82 Gordon (2008: 67) discusses her understanding of montage through Luisa Valenzuela’s magical realist fiction. Gordon describes the novel as ‘allegorical, fragmented, narratively, incoherent, and difficult to comprehend in any straightforward way that would easily answer the questions all readers ask’. Thus, the very juxtaposition of elements that do not conform to conventional reason, structure, or understanding is what animates the ghost.
critically reflexive method of engaging affective hauntings, it is also flexible enough to further evolve in new directions.
2.9 Conclusion
The methodological approaches and decisions that informed my research design throughout this thesis are directly linked to how I searched for a vision of affective hauntings and histories through the very performance of researching this thesis. I utilize a performative writing approach through critical autoethnography to demonstrate this throughout my thesis. Significantly, the diasporic visions
through my exploration and analysis of mediated memories I have discussed so far has been central within the umbrella of my methodological approach that I call this diasporic montage. In other words, this ‘diasporic montage’ has been an ongoing bricolage of mediated visions that performs my search for histories (see Chapter 7). The concept of diasporic montage intersects a methodology of diasporic vision, critical autoethnography, critical historical consciousness, performative writing and the reflexivity of empathic vision as the basis for my research design and methodology. It offers a way of ‘seeing ghosts’ or ‘haunted histories’ by attempting to compose a ‘montage’ of diverse forms of mediated memory. 83
Specifically, in the context of my research design and my discussions
throughout this chapter, the juxtapositions take place in several ways within how I am composing my montage within this thesis: a) each mediation of memory, whether memoir, video, photograph, artwork, conversation, or installation is a fragment of diasporic vision within my montage of data b) the ‘design’ of the diasporic montage itself can be considered its own methodological ‘montage’, in the sense that it juxtaposes multiple methods together (e.g. diasporic vision, empathic vision, critical historical consciousness, critical autoethnography, performative writing) c) the very thesis itself is my composition of a diasporic
83 I also want to mention that photographs as archives do form an important part of my diasporic montage, even though they are left largely undiscussed within Chapters 4, 5, and 6. The absence was mainly due to an issue of space and focus for me, as including more photographs would have meant leaving out written memoirs. I decided to keep the memoirs for this thesis’ purposes. However, in my proposal for future research in Chapter 7.3, I have managed to offer an intriguing, urgent and important way of incorporating archival photographs in how one can further develop and compose a diasporic montage.
montage. In the next chapter, I begin my empirical analysis through a diasporic vision of affective hauntings in the mediated memory form of verbal
conversational interview data.