Captive Thinking, Thinking Capture

What if entanglement, attachment, and captivity were understood not as obstacles to freedom to be overcome but as categories of agency and critical thought? What would a mode of thinking that did not belong to itself, that dwelled in passivity rather than attempting to act, look like? “Critical masochism” best describes the unifying gesture of Rey Chow’s Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, a collection of essays that explore, across a wide spectrum of phenomena and media, the epistemological and erotic implications of being on the receiving end of historical structures that capture and dominate. Chow cautions against any kind of intellectual move that would attempt to give the critic the upper hand over his or her object, whether it be an artwork or a historical constellation. Rather, as Chow argues, one must take states of captivity, servitude, and entanglement as being constitutive of thinking.

“Entanglements,” as Chow writes in her introduction, imply “the linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart; the voidings and uncoverings that hold things together” (12). The essays in the volume assemble a multitude of cross-disciplinary motifs—figures culled from philosophy, literature, film, and visual art—that are held together by precisely this sense of a fragile and shared differentiation, by “meetings that are not necessarily defined by proximity or affinity” (1). The book offers a critique of what Chow sees as a tendency in contemporary theoretical thinking to equate reflexivity with critical distance that, according to her, effaces sensuous captivation in the name of “laying bare the device” (16). In the first chapter, “When Reflexivity Becomes Porn,” Chow argues that the Brechtian gesture of distanciation becomes in contemporary culture a normalized state of cool detachment. Critical distance, or the impulse to estrange the spectator from “embodied fellow feelings such as pity and fear” in order to reveal the workings of the medium as such is, in Chow’s view, comparable to pornography (30). Obsessed with unobstructed visibility, both porn and aesthetic reflexivity dwell in the “shocking disconnect between spectacle and spectatorship, between the extreme staging of trauma and the nonchalance of audience reaction” (ibid.). Chow’s point is that in its desire to visualize structures of mediation, Brechtian reflexivity attempts to occupy an active and scoptic position, to see rather than be seen, to act rather than to be acted upon. In chapters 2, 4, and 5, Chow identifies similar dynamics at work in key figures of contemporary thought: Jacques Rancière’s discourse on aesthetic democratization, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, and Jacques Derrida’s valorization of forgiveness. Chow demonstrates that in each instance the agency of the victim qua victim is effaced through an undue emphasis on, respectively, the unmarked beholder, the sovereign, and/or the one who forgives. Chow instead envisions a mode of thinking that would be enmeshed with the victim. While Rancière could only understand Emma Bovary’s death as an act of murder by Flaubert, her author, what would it mean, Chow asks, to see her suicide as self-authored?

To this end, Entanglements examines a series of literary, visual, and philosophical figures that, in Chow’s view, demand a different kind of thinking, one that resides on the passive side of uneven relationships. A most poignant example occurs in the second chapter, “On Captivation,” where Chow supplements Rancière’s conception of art as that which challenges the distinction between art and nonart with the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s example of the animal trap as both art and artifact. “The trap is, to all appearances, the opposite of freedom,” observes Chow, but its absolute closure is assumed only from the perspective of the hunter (42). The prey’s experience of being captured, on the other hand, disrupts the clear distinction between freedom and captivity. As the trap snaps shut, it comes into contact with something foreign. Caught in this “heteronomous affective assemblage,” the victim is ontologically inseparable from the trap yet at the same time is...