Cross-Cultural Desire

Cross-Cultural Desire Paul Bowman • • • •

Presented at GENCAS, Swansea University, 6th May 2015 The Prezi is at http://prezi.com/user/BowmanP/ Audio/video is at http://bambuser.com/channel/BowmanP Apologies for typos and lack of referencing. This is a first draft.

Keywords orientalism, desire, identity, taijiquan, Adam Frank, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, culture

Abstract Many issues coalesce and condense around the question of cross-cultural desire. This paper builds on Rey Chow’s speculative reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly, and approaches the topic not just in terms of sexuality, but also in terms of the question of interest in or fascination with ‘other cultures’. In her essay, ‘The Dream of a Butterfly’ (1998), Chow reads M. Butterfly as a study of cross-cultural desire, and argues that the film (if not David Henry Hwang’s play upon which it is based) is far from a simple demonstration of Western ‘orientalism’. Rather, Chow emphasises the ways in which the film explores the complexity of cross-cultural desire, and some of the ways in which gender, sexuality and cultural identity are entangled. Building on Chow’s work, this talk sets out the basic issues that cross-cultural desire raises as they have been explored in gender and postcolonial studies, in order to explore cross-cultural desire as it relates to international interest in East Asian martial arts. Those who wish to prepare for the talk should watch M. Butterfly (Cronenberg, 1993) and read Rey Chow’s essay ‘The Dream of a Butterfly’, which is both in her monograph, Ethics After Idealism (1998), and also The Rey Chow Reader (2010).

1. After Orientalism In ‘The Dream of a Butterfly’, Rey Chow challenges us to reconsider the way we use Edward Said’s theory of orientalism, at least in terms of the way we use orientalism to assess any Western interests in the East, especially those related to fascination, romanticisation and desire (Chow 1998; Said 1995). Chow does this less because she regards Said’s theory as somehow ‘wrong’ (although her argument may be taken to suggest that it is incomplete or unfinished), and more because of her sense that academics have been using Said’s arguments about orientalism in ways that are limited and limiting. Specifically, she suggests, since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, more and more academics have appropriated Said’s analytical paradigm and use it as both the start and end points of their analyses, in an approach that boils down to looking for orientalism, finding it, and judging it accordingly. What this means is that ‘orientalism’ has become something of a judgemental or moralistic stick to beat people with. (The use or abuse of supposedly egalitarian, politically correct or politically

 

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progressive ideas and arguments as tools to keep people in line is something that Chow elsewhere calls ‘the fascist longings in our midst’ (Chow 1998: 14-33) – in the same book containing ‘The Dream of a Butterfly’.) In the wake of orientalism, Chow suggests, too many East/West cross-cultural encounters, engagements, transfers and transactions are too easily deemed ‘merely’ orientalist, and accordingly denounced or summarily dismissed. Chow’s challenge comes because this happens too often and too easily in fields such as cultural studies and postcolonialism: cross-cultural interactions and transactions (particularly in film, media and popular culture), are often regarded as being ‘mere’ examples of orientalist fantasy or fetishism. This in itself is problematic. However, what is more problematic is tacit agreement that making such judgemental pronunciations and denunciations might somehow be the proper task of cultural criticism in the face of cross-cultural encounters – as if looking for orientalism, finding it, and denouncing it is (or has ever been) the proper or right or best thing for cultural studies to do. Certainly, Chow wants to challenge this, not because the paradigm of orientalism is ‘wrong’, but rather because it is not necessarily either the start or the end of any matter related to what I will refer to as cross-cultural desire.

2. The Dream of a Decision The example of cross-cultural desire that Chow reads is David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly. This film is based on a play by David Henry Hwang, which itself was, as they now say of Hollywood films, ‘inspired by a true story’. The ‘true story’, or the inspiration here, was the historical case of a French diplomat who had an affair with a Chinese woman who turned out not only to be a spy but also a man. Chow is more interested in Cronenberg’s film than either Hwang’s play or any other account of the historical events. This is because, whereas the actual affair may or may not have been straightforwardly homosexual, and whereas the play seems to want to treat the whole affair in terms of a white man’s self-blinding orientalism, Chow notices that the film, on the other hand, treats the theme rather differently. Specifically, the film juxtaposes, overlays and runs different kinds of desire concurrently and in different directions. First, we have the desire of a man for a woman. But, second, the desire is that of a white European man for a Chinese woman. And then, third, there is the question of the desire of the woman herself for the man. But, fourth, this is also the case of the desire of a Chinese woman for a white European man. One might add – were one to take the analysis in a slightly different direction – that there may also be the desire on the one hand not to see and on the other hand not to show the true sex of the Chinese woman. But Chow brackets this matter off and puts it to one side, largely because speculating about homosexuality in this text is arguably less fundamental to it than exploring the questions the text raises about desire per se.  

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So these are some of the key coordinates. But there are more. As Chow’s reading moves us to see: for Gallimard, the white male protagonist, there is also something of a desire (however residual and wizened) to please his masters at the French Consulate. And the woman, Song Liling, was from the outset working as the agent of the Chinese government – and hence as an agent of its desire for information about foreign governments’ plans in Indo-China. So, each of the key characters manifests multiplyinflected formations of identity and desire. And these identities and desires have different origins and move in different directions. In the language of cultural theory, we can see desire not only as desire for the other (a self-arising desire for another) but desire as desire of the other (i.e., as not necessarily originating within us, but as coming to us from elsewhere, taking hold of us, carrying us along, and making us pawns in larger, more obscure games). Both Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Derridean deconstruction offer formulations for this: in Lacanian psychoanalysis, a strong component of our desires derives from an originary desire to work out what the other wants us to do and to be for them. If Freud ultimately connects this to sex, Lacan ultimately connects it to the impossibility of our own self-sufficiency and the constitutive character of our relations with external objects. If for Freud our ultimate repressions are scatological and incestuous, for Lacan, our ultimate repressions are (in the words of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) ultimately repressions of the consciousness of our own impossibility. Thus, in Freudian psychoanalysis, the desire to solve the riddle of identity (where did I come from, why did you have me, what do you want of me, what am I to do, etc.) is bound up with that of sexuality (I want you, I need you). In Lacan, these questions are displaced from the scenario of the nursery and into that of the abyss: the questions of desire are not ‘what do I want’, but ‘what do I want in wanting you’, ‘what do you want in wanting me’, ‘what do I want in wanting you to want me’, etc; and the answer from the abyss (or the abysmal answer) is something like: you want not to know your own impossibility. Deconstruction displaces these matters further, or in different directions. Derrida’s many ruminations on ‘decision’ are a case in point (Derrida 1996). What does it mean to make or take a decision? Indeed, do you take a decision or do you make it? Is it readymade for you? Can you, for example, decide what to desire? Is that really your desire, or your decision? Or: is your desire really your desire? Do either René Gallimard or Liling Song choose what to desire? Or does their desire derive from elsewhere? As Chow overlays different forms and questions of desire in her reading of the film, so we might juxtapose or overlay the supposedly psychoanalytic question of desire with the supposedly philosophical problematic of decision in Derrida. Perhaps you can decide what to desire – or perhaps that decision is made for you by external factors.1 The case of Song is interesting here: as a spy, Song was required to try to become intimate with foreign diplomats. Thus, her desire, like her performance of gender and  

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her identity, might reasonably be regarded as untrue. However, what becomes clear in the closing scene of M. Butterfly, when the man who played Song stands naked in the van that drives him and Gallimard from court to prison, is that Song’s desire – even when he was living as she – may always have been, and certainly became, in the end, real and true. Chow thinks this matter through in terms of both Baudrillard’s and Lacan’s reflections on seduction. In these terms it would be Gallimard’s very weakness that seduces Song, just as Gallimard may have been seduced by the idea of Song’s weakness. As Slavoj Žižek argues, it is never strength or perfection that seduces or humanizes; it is the soft spot, the weakness, the imperfection, the failure, that seduces, or that humanizes, personalises and allows us to love the other. And Gallimard is nothing if not a failure. At the start of the film, he is repeatedly shown to have constantly failed to live up to other people’s desires or expectations: he knows little of Western culture, he confesses, despite the expectation that he should; he fails to grasp the way that his work colleagues’ bonds of camaraderie work (for example via the small pleasures of fiddling expense accounts); so he fails socially. Moreover, even as he works scrupulously at his job, he fails to carry out his work roles adequately. Indeed, it seems only when his identity gains some kind of anchoring in his deluded belief that he is the strong white man in possession of his submissive Chinese mistress that things seem stable for him. However, Song’s weakness always belies her strength. Gallimard never prevails. By the end of the film, his own self-identity very publicly and performatively collapses, and evidently because it is no longer anchored by an external object. Gallimard kills himself in prison with a broken mirror as the climax of a theatrical performance. Each element of this scenario deserves to be emphasised for its symbolic or allegorical power: Gallimard kills himself, in prison, with a broken mirror, as the climax of a theatrical performance. At both ends of the film – the beginning and the end – Gallimard fails in relation to desire. First, he fails vis-à-vis the desire of the other. At the end, he fails vis-à-vis the desire for the other. It is only when he finds an anchorage via an external object – that he seems to ‘choose’ – the person he calls ‘Butterfly’, ‘my butterfly’ – that Gallimard’s failure is not in the foreground. In his suicide scene, Gallimard states plainly that he fell in love with an image – an image of a woman as invented by a man, and that nothing else will suffice (Chow 1998: 89). Gallimard’s desire for Butterfly first fosters and then destroys his identity. It becomes clear that in M. Butterfly, Gallimard is less interested in the actual real object than in his idealised idea of it. Would it have mattered if Song had actually been a woman? According to this reading of the film as an exploration of desire, probably not. The key point is that of what Chow calls the seductive lure. Gallimard’s realisation that his  

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desire was for an image, an image that was in large measure his own projection, is what causes his collapse into madness and suicide (Chow 1998: 89). However, in Chow’s reading, the death blow to Gallimard’s desire or relationship takes place in the scene in which the two estranged lovers share the police van taking them to prison. She writes: As the two men stare at each other, Song is the first to break the silence: ‘What do you want from me?’ he asks. In psychoanalytic terms, this question is an indication of the fundamental issue in our relationship with an other – demand. However, even though Song has brought up this fundamental issue, he has, nonetheless, posed his question imprecisely, because he still thinks in terms of Gallimard’s wanting something from him. Instead, as Lacan has taught us, the significance of demand is never simply what can be effectively enunciated by way of what the other can literally give us; rather, it is what remains resistant to articulation, what exceeds the satisfaction provided by the other. To pose the question of demand with precision, therefore, Song would have had to ask: ‘What do you want, by wanting me? What is your demand, which you express through me?’ Gallimard, on the other hand, responds to (the philosophical implications of) this question precisely: ‘You are my Butterfly’. (Chow 1998: 87) Song was, throughout, Gallimard’s enigmatic object of fantasy. What Gallimard had seen when he looked at Song was always something other than a mere physical person. Indeed, as Chow notes, when Song strips naked in the van, ‘challenging Gallimard to see for the first time what he has always wanted but somehow always failed to see’, in actual fact, the ‘naked body destroys the lure once and for all by demonstrating that what lies under the veil all these years is nothing, no thing for fantasy. With the veil lifted’, Chow continues, what is unavoidable is just ‘a pathetic body in all its banal vulnerability, which Gallimard rejects in abhorrence’ (Chow 1998: 88). If, until this tragic moment, the lure has been kept intact because it is upheld on both sides, Song, by the very gesture of undressing with which he tries to regain Gallimard’s love, has destroyed that lure forever. While Song intends by this brave and defiant gesture a new beginning for their relationship – a beginning in which they can face each other honestly as they really are, two men physically and emotionally entangled for years – what he actually accomplishes is the death of that relationship. Song fails to see that what Gallimard ‘wants’ is not him, Song, be he in the definitive form of a woman or a man, but, as Gallimard says, ‘Butterfly’. Because Gallimard’s desire hinges on neither a female nor a male body, but rather on the phallus, the veiled thing that is the ‘oriental woman’, Song’s candid disclosure of his physical body can only be lethal. Like Frau Baden, who, having dis-clothed herself, invites Gallimard frankly to ‘come and get it’, Song’s gesture of undressing serves not to arouse but extinguish desire. (Chow 1998: 88)

 

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Chow’s Lacanian reading insists on nonreciprocity and noncoincidence as part of the engine of desire, and of difference (whether gender, sexual, or cultural) as a lure wherever some kind of veil is believed to be concealing some kind of mystical and enigmatic secret. In M. Butterfly these themes are anchored to a cross-cultural sexual relationship, but Chow’s treatment of it consistently suggests that there is more going on here than sexuality, or that there is more going on in sexuality than sex. Her chosen epigraph from Lacan reinforces this. Chow edits down a passage from Lacan to this: ‘The mystical is by no means that which is not political…. What was tried at the end of the last century … by all kinds of worthy people … was an attempt to reduce the mystical to questions of fucking’ (Lacan, quoted in Chow 1998: 74). Her other two epigraphs, not coincidentally, are, in reverse order: Barthes’ words, ‘inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die’; and Heidegger’s line ‘love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves’. What is clear, therefore, is that Chow’s reading seeks to pull us away both from a simple focus on sex, even when sexual desire is under the spotlight, and also from a simple assertion of absolute separation between East and West when thinking about cross-cultural desire, even when there are indeed huge gulfs. 3. The Real Thing Slavoj Žižek once proffered a supposedly Lacanian perspective on sexual desire when he proposed that although we tend to think that the act of sex amounts to the ultimate in intimacy, because of the physical and emotional connection involved in two becoming one, this is not the case at all. This is because, suggests Žižek, even when two lovers are looking into each other’s eyes, they are not strictly speaking seeing each other. Rather, what they are seeing is a fantasy object. Žižek takes this to a hyperbolical conclusion: the true scenario of sexuality – or the truth of sexuality – is not that of two lovers having sex, but rather the situation of the solitary masturbator. According to Žižek’s formulation, both masturbation and copulation are essentially versions of masturbation. Or, as an old joke goes: sex is alright, but you can’t beat the real thing. Chow does not go as far as Žižek in this direction, although both readings of Lacan agree on at least two features of relationships involving desire: first, what Chow calls, following Lacan, the distance between eye and gaze; and second, therefore, the nonreciprocity and non-coincidence of relations in relationships. As such, both Chow and Žižek agree that what sustains such relations, in other words, is fantasy. However, in insisting on the matter of unequal, non-straightforward, and non-transparent relations, rather than taking Žižek’s step into insisting on an absolute separation between desirer and desired, Chow’s position is ultimately both more helpful and more suggestive than Žižek’s. This is because whereas Žižek’s position could be said to boil down to a doctrinaire or essentialist insistence on the fundamental character of sexual (and  

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cultural) difference as introducing a further void in the face of an already barred subject, Chow’s analysis, on the other hand, amplifies and multiplies the contexts in which the problematics of fantasy, desire and non-reciprocity are pertinent and played out. Chow’s reading links sexual fantasy to cultural fantasy in a way that maps it onto – or perhaps makes it subtend and subvert – many other well-warn problematics of ‘crosscultural communication’, whether political, economic, ideological, diplomatic, linguistic, or otherwise communicational. However, as Derrida once pointed out, despite its familiarity, we have to be alert to the fact that we don’t necessarily know what the word communication means, or rather, what ‘communication’ communicates. Many things can be communicated, Derrida observes: forces, vibrations, tremors, emotions, sentiments, things. Transport networks are often called communication networks. Indeed, the ways in which different sorts of transport networks are connected and interact can even be formulated or communicated as a matter of how well communication networks are communicated. So, communication might now become a central question – although now communication may not be reducible to the communication of words and meanings, but of many other things, including (along with words, sounds, meanings, values, products, commodities, forces and laws) senses and sensualities. Indeed, in terms of the field opened up by the question of cross-cultural desire, it seems that the communication of senses and sensualities may have a more significant or central place than the communication of linguistic signification, even if the question of linguistic signification and linguistic translation is by far the dominant paradigm for approaching cross-cultural communication. However, my argument for the rest of this paper will be that by foregrounding the matter of sense and sensuality we can move away from two entrenched and antithetical approaches. First, a kind of SaidianLacanian approach to orientalism, which fixates on two sides of the same coin: sex, on the one hand, and separation, on the other. Second, we might supplement and subvert frigid communication paradigms which abstract linguistic communication in all its forms (but mainly spoken, written, and body language) in order to try to work out how to make the world more capitalist. 4. Cultural Desire So my proposal is that we can engage the theme of ‘cross-cultural desire’ more thoroughly (or indeed intimately) by shifting the emphasis of our reading onto the word ‘cultural’, and remember that ‘cross-cultural desire’ can also refer to something other than either sex or language. Of course, neither sex nor language can ever be taken out of the picture. It has been widely known at least since the very early eighties, that  

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desire and language are constitutive of identity: as Kaja Silverman put it in her 1982 book The Subject of Semiotics, identity and desire are so intimately imbricated that it is not possible to theorise the one without theorising the other (Silverman 1983). The one is bound up in the other. However, as Adam Frank repeats many times in his 2006 ethnographic study of martial arts culture in Shanghai, ‘identity moves’ (Frank 2006). In our present terms, then, this suggests that if ‘identity moves’, then desire also moves, and that there is some kind of relationship between these two movements – or communications. Adam Frank’s book is called Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity through Martial Arts. It is the culmination of his formal fieldwork research, which took the form of learning taiji in Shanghai; but unlike many participant ethnographies, Frank’s work does not limit itself to a myopic focus on the events that took place during his periods of formal fieldwork. Rather, he does not shy away from the questions of his own desires and fantasies, as they moved him and worked him before, during and after his formal study. As he observes towards the end of the book, many – perhaps all – practitioners of taiji have, at least at one time or another ‘shared a fantasy of finding the little old Chinese man who would fulfill our respective conceptions of the ultimate Chinese person’ (Frank 2006: 240). Any mention of this fantasy of a little old Chinese man who is also a profound martial arts master is likely to set off the alarm bells of an ‘orientalism alert’ in many people’s heads – ‘Orientalist stereotype! Orientalist stereotype!’ But it is crucial to note that, throughout his study, Frank points out that it is not only Western martial arts pilgrims and tourists to China who are in search of this little old fantasy. It is also, at least to the same extent, Chinese martial artists who are in search of precisely the same orientalist fantasy. As he continues: whilst it is obvious that this image is ‘a romanticization’, it is nevertheless ‘one to which long-time practitioners [of taiji in Shanghai] were inextricably beholden’. The long-time practitioners of whom Frank speaks here are actually predominantly Chinese practitioners of taiji. This multi-national and multiethnic sharing of a fantasy about the little old Chinese martial arts master arises, argues Frank, for often different but ultimately equivalent reasons. For, of course, Westerners have their orientalist imagery, drawn both from a long history of travellers’ tales, myths, legends, colonialism and imperialism, intensified and distilled into range of media. But on the other hand, he proposes, there is ‘a deep-rooted process of internal colonization that has occurred within China for many centuries and an accompanying romanticization of the past that intensifies with each generation’ (Frank 2006: 35). This is why, in Frank’s account it is not a Westerner but in fact ‘a renowned and relatively young teacher of Chen style taijiquan from a Beijing sports university [who] once put it to [him] in a tone of definite exasperation, “Where are the people like in the books? I don’t think they exist”’. In other words, both American martial arts  

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pilgrims in China and native Chinese taijiquan masters have been orientated and organised by a desire to find the same thing. As Frank puts it: ‘In very different ways, the search determined our sense of self. For each of us, it also got in the way of fully understanding the art of taijiquan’ (Frank 2006: 240). The connection between the lure of the other caused by the sense of a veiled secret and the stoking of desire to such an extent that it moves an identity comes to the fore here. It is not simply a matter of pure orientalism, complete non-reciprocity or absolute separation. Passages like the following illustrate its complexity: One common thread that ran throughout both the fieldwork and archival research for this book was the desire among both Chinese and non-Chinese practitioners to find a teacher who embodied the taijiquan they had read about in books or seen in movies or about whom they had heard stories as a child. While such tales of power did not dominate my interactions with fellow practitioners, they often found their way into our conversations. It was certainly at the heart of my own initial impulse to travel to Shanghai to meet then eightyseven-year-old Ma Yueliang for the first time in 1988. (Frank 2006: 26) In other words, the object cause of Frank’s cross-cultural desire is not fundamentally cross-cultural, in any conventional sense. Chinese pilgrims come in search of their fantasy of the ultimate authentic ideal of Chinese martial arts too, and fantasise around the same categories and images. Of course, this may still be regarded as ‘cross-cultural’ to the extent that the past is a foreign country, and that desire for putatively ancient martial arts is routed in their very sense of ancientness – in other words, insofar as they are symptomatic of a kind of ‘primitive passion’ or postmodern nostalgia and desire of and for a fantasised premodern authenticity supposedly lost to the modern world (Chow 1995). This is certainly ‘cross-cultural’ in the sense of relating to different temporal rather than spatial cultures. A desire for the absolute fantasy other and a desire for the forever vanished fantasy past are surely two versions of the same thing. But the point to be emphasised here is the effect of the lure of the veiled secret on identity and desire. For instance, Frank notes early on in his book the problem of ‘the preconceptions and stereotypical associations about Chineseness and martial arts that I brought with me to the research’. His desire, his stimulation, his interest, turned out to have involved lashings of stereotypes and orientalism – and his belated realization of this effectively consigned him to a potentially interminable course of auto-analysis. He knows he had those preconceptions, and he knows that these were what prompted him to go to Shanghai in the first place, but now he remains interminably involved in what he calls the ongoing ‘excavation of those preconceptions’ (Frank 2006: 26). 5. The end of the affair  

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At several moments in the work, Frank engages with the crises of identity and desire that can occur when a fantasy bubble is burst. What happens when the preconceptions, the object of the quest, the holy grail or Mecca or promised land is unveiled, and shown to be, like Liling Song, human, all too human? In M. Butterfly, Gallimard’s identity becomes unanchored, or in a close to literal sense ‘unhinged’, in being disarticulated from an external stabilizing object. Adam Frank touches on the crises of identity and orientation – of practitioners losing interest and stopping training when the banal unromantic reality of teachers teaching and learners learning took hold and rattled preconceptions. Frank does not mention anyone having a breakdown as a result of penetrating the fantasy, although he does evoke the breakdown and demise of relationships with the practice of taiji. It is with the theme of crisis, challenge to, waning or changing of desire that I would like to close. This is not because I have grown tired of this or don’t love you. It is rather because of the importance of thinking about moving, or continuing, after the party, so to speak. To stick with the texts we have been focusing on: there are clues in Chow’s reading of M. Butterfly, as well as in some of Frank’s already quoted observations. For instance, Chow proposes that when Song strips naked in the police van it is in order to bare himself to Gallimard so that they may start again, this time without any veils or lures or secrets, but in the full consciousness of themselves as real living, breathing adults. Frank proposes something related in his reflections on the practice of push-hands in taiji training. He proposes that it is in this very sensuous, two-partner, two-way, collaborative-combative exercise that one most frequently comes close to losing all identity. For those of you who have never practiced push-hands, one way to describe the object and the feeling of the exercise is in terms of the interplay of hard and soft, empty and solid, tense and relaxed, weighted and unweighted. Pushes and pulls, tension and relaxedness, balance and imbalance flow between two bodies as if those bodies were one interconnected interacting system. Ego, effort, excessive force, thinking or planning, and so on, are all pitfalls that, in the hands of an experienced taijiquan practitioner, will lead to the ever greater failure and frustration of the egotistical, trying, forcing, thinking inferior. Identity falls away. Race and ethnicity certainly recede from relevance – although I am not sure whether sex or gender always recedes or is sometimes amplified. Nonetheless, the key point is this: as we have already heard Frank observe, conversations about media, myth and fantasy ‘did not dominate [his] interactions with fellow practitioners, [even though] they often found their way into our conversations’ (Frank 2006: 26). To me, this observation emphasizes two different relations – in a sense, two different identities – vis-à-vis taiji. What dominates taiji interactions in taiji practice is the practice of taiji: its practicalities, the doing of it, its embodied performance. Interactions are pedagogical: an adjustment here, a touch there, a single  

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word, occasionally: ‘relax, yield, sink’, etc. The mind-body that is engrossed in listening, sticking, yielding, neutralising, is not the mind-body living a fantasy relation to media texts and cultural discourses. In fact, the intrusion of this constitutive outside would ruin the practice. However, as soon as practice ends and conversation begins, all of the outside and all of the orientalism can easily return. Hence my claim of two different relations and two different identities in the same body. As Lau Tzu put it, those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know. This can apply to the same body at different times. Another way of saying this is that even if the initial attraction is based on a fantasy stereotype, the unveiling and erasure of that stereotype through contact need not simply signal the death of desire and the end of the affair. As I am intimating here, new pleasures and new relations to the object emerge and grow. Until you have experienced something, you cannot know what pleasures, challenges and rewards it offers. Identity moves, Adam Frank reiterates. This movement is not disembodied. It is connected to the movements of fantasies and desires, which are themselves complexly connected to experiences and encounters. If the reality never lives up to the fantasy, it is just as true to say that the fantasy itself does not live up to the reality. Which suggests that Žižek’s exclusive focus on the place and power of fantasy is only half of the story; just as Chow’s focus on the stark physicality of the naked body cannot capture the dynamic productivity of the interactive encounter. 6. Cross Culture? After a while, the question might emerge of whether the person, the practice, the thing or the desire is truly of or from or essentially that of another culture.2 This is the question – or rather, the kind of formulation that we need to unpack. For when we evoke ‘another culture’, this conjures up and sets to work lots of ontological assumptions. If there can be ‘another culture’, then this must mean that there is a ‘present culture’ – ‘this culture’ – a culture here and now and present and singular. So it implies that both of these cultures are unitary, unified, univocal and discrete. And this is a problem that the language of ‘multiculturalism’ and even ‘hybridity’ does little to nothing to improve. The problem is essentially that diagnosed by Jacques Derrida: it is the problem of what he called the metaphysics of presence – the idea that there is ever a present, unitary, indivisible, non-partial/non-multiple, complete identity. In other words, in this case, the idea that culture is a thing – a noun-object as opposed to a verb-process. If we can translate our conceptualisation of ‘culture’ from the noun-object terms of what Derrida called metaphysics to the verb-process terms championed not only by the likes of Deleuze but also by the general trajectory of deconstruction and poststructuralism in general – not to mention the Western countercultural appropriation of  

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Daoist thought since the 1950s – then we can regard the big binaries of orientalism and the clearest cases of cross-cultural desire as merely the starkest examples that help to illustrate the general logics involved in the formation of identity and desire. From this point there is a great deal more to be thought and explored, but given the amount of time and space I have already taken up, I will select only one final observation to make as a conclusion: In the light of this, it seems possible to read Gallimard’s highly poetic, highly symbolic, highly allegorical suicide as suggestive of many things: that loving changes us into thing we love (Heidegger); that from the outside this – like any decision or commitment – can often look like a kind of illogic or madness (Kierkegaard, Derrida); that Gallimard inevitably ‘fails’ because (throughout, in every way) he is a kind of idealist who will not let one realm or register of pleasure and fantasy merge with another, but forever projects an ideality onto an elsewhere and an otherwise. This is what Derrida called a danger to be avoided: the collapsing of difference into opposition. For Derrida, there are no necessary oppositions, just productive and subversive supplements, of the one always supplementing the other, whether in the forms of antipathies and oppositions or in the forms of attractions and desires.

References Chow, R. (1995), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Film and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1998), Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading, Theories of Contemporary Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (1996), "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism." In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by C. Mouffe. London: Routledge. Frank, A. (2006), Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity through Martial Arts, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, E. W. (1995), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin. Silverman, K. (1983), The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.                                                                                                                 1

 Sociological research such as Pierre Bourdieu’s work on taste seems to offer some clues here, although critics such as Rancière have challenged Bourdieuian and other such sociological methods.   2  Adam Frank insists throughout his study that taiji is essentially Chinese, for example. He does not insist on this for naïve reasons, however. Rather, he regards taiji has having become, in many nationalist discourses in and of and around and about China as the very symbol of Chineseness. Within the PRC, taiji has been recruited and deployed for all kinds of internally- and externally-facing nationalist PR exercises. And, outside the PRC, it has also functioned as the very pinnacle of alterity, of otherness and of difference. In Frank’s words:

Taijiquan did not function purely in terms of national identity. In the United States, taijiquan became even more ‘Chinese’ than it was in China, and this change held true for Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, as well as practitioners who did not consider themselves of

 

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Chinese descent but who nevertheless enjoyed what they took to be the sensual experience of Chineseness. Likewise, especially among some teachers in the PRC who trained foreign students, there was certainly a pleasure (and sometimes financial benefit) in assuming the role of the ‘little old Chinese man’. (Frank 2006: 240) In other words, the practice is not limited to its physical location in bodies. Rather, it traverses multiple realms and registers in different ways: national, ideological, ethnic, pedagogical, institutional, media, orientalist, and so on. It is both bodily sensual and semiotically significant in ways that are organised by different kinds of interest and discourse. In my reading of Adam Frank’s account, therefore, what subtends and invisibly organises taiji as an object of cross-cultural desire are different positions vis-à-vis nationalist discourses – not just Chinese, but also residually counter-cultural Western orientalism. And this may be a reasonable position. But given his own insistence that ‘identity moves’, and its connection with the modifications of desire in response to experience, one has to ask whether this is necessary or inevitable.

 

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