Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

Abstract

Keeping with her broader interests in cultural studies, diaspora, and visual media, Rey Chow's latest book, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture, stands at the intersection of aesthetics and politics to confront the role of the mediated image in renewed modes of transnational communication. In each of the eight chapters, written as separate essays throughout 1999-2010, Chow consistently and convincingly weaves together a theory of what she calls "entanglements"-a critical terminology anchored within and against poststructural and postcolonial interests in global ruptures, displacements, and local specificities. "Entanglements" as a theoretical framework for transnational cultural studies indicates that physical proximity and historical continuity are no longer sufficient measures of the spaces of cultural contact; neither is rupture the only remaining line of difference. Hence, "entanglements" offers a wholly other and self-proliferating mode of address for rethinking ties to political visibility and representation, captivity and victimization, and retributive justice, and collective power. Two axial planes seem to organize the book: the first six chapters are interested in evoking an emancipatory field with respect to captivity, victimhood, agencial mimesis, and reflexivity as parts of a social structure, while the final two return to the Foucaultian maxim-visibility is a trap-in order to suggest entanglement as a political practice in place of resistance against hypermediated transnationalist governance. An interesting, yet necessary, place for theorizing entanglements is estrangement. A detailed exegesis of "estrangement" and its various conjectures as iterated by Viktor Shklovsky, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin allows Chow to begin laying the ground for "entanglements," rooted as a logical extension of twentieth century critical thought on subjective experience and material reality. By moving away from the formalist measures of proximity (distance) or affinity (identification), Chow tracks situations that have arisen since the wide-scale redistribution of the scattered and fragmented: "if art since modernism has been about a heightened sense of estrangement (or defamiliarization), estrangement itself is often a result of the intensification-one could www.interstitialjournal.com • September: 2014 • 1

Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art

“…Intended to shock, visual images of "third-world" suffering in Western media-of the dead, wounded, starving-constitute generic decontextualized horrors that elicit pity and sympathy, not discernment and assessment. As Rey Chow (2006) has argued, Americans have increasingly come to know the world as a target: when wars break out, foreign areas and peoples briefly enter American mainstream public discourses, often via deeply disturbing images of suffering, as embodiments of (naturalized) violence, crisis, and disasters (Fernandes 2013, 193). The hyperfocus on suffering, and the outpouring of outrage and concern over dead and injured refugees, has become a substitute for serious analysis of the geopolitical conditions that produced their displacement in the first instance.…”

The Challenges of New Biopsychosocialities: Hearing Voices, Trauma, Epigenetics and Mediated Perception

“…I include the important book, Changing the Subject: Psychology, Power and Social Regulation written by Henriques et al in 1984, as well as the field of critical and discursive psychology and more genealogical approaches to perception, attention, suggestion. 12 I use the term 'scenes of entanglement' to describe controversies where the past and future crisscross, intervene, intrude and open up the potential for something new to emerge (see Blackman, 2015); (also see the work of Rey Chow (2012). 13 http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=633956248921893;res=IELHEA 14 This includes the seminal work of Grace Cho (2008) and a variety of approaches which draw from the work of Abraham and Torok (1984) and Davoine and Gaudilliere (2004) as well as imaginative work on attachment theory (see Alford, 2015 for example).…”

Are We Digital Masters Or Captives? A Critical Evaluation Of Panoptic Versus Synoptic Effect Of Surveillance In Social Media

“…The Panopticon is a form of technology establishing systems of visibility (Haggerty, 2008). According to Chow (2012), Foucault's prison is concerned with whatever visible. It not only wants to show the crime and the criminal but in itself it forms a visibility.…”