3-1-11 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race

Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief

Summary: Cheng works through the intersections of seemingly oppositional concepts (theory/practice, power/powerlessness, self/other, among others), seeking to develop a vocabulary to speak about the ambiguity of where they meet in order to work through questions of racial melancholia.

“The gasp reveals the spectators’ complicity in the very disguise they are there to see dismantled.” (116)

The process of self-building, for Cheng, lies in the structure of the in between, of the gap, of the disjunction, of the oxymoron.  Her project is to begin to find the vocabulary to talk about this structure, and one way she does this is by talking about fantasy.  It’s not the content of the fantasy that is telling; it’s the way that the structure reveals itself that matters.

What is a gasp?  For Cheng, it’s the language of the process of self-building.  The gasp is the revelatory mechanism, the thing that enacts the reveal.  But a gasp is a catching of breath, it’s an inhale without speech.  Usually, one makes a sound when one gasps, but that is because the intake of breath is so abrupt and quick that it makes a sound that just breathing usually doesn’t.  What’s more, the gasp is a result of surprise; it’s convulsive.  A person can gasp consciously and on purpose, but Cheng concentrates on the gasp that the audience made on impulse.  Their reaction to what was happening on stage was not studied or purposeful. They didn’t mean to do it, and in fact, Cheng says that they really shouldn’t have because the knew the “reality” of the situation already.  For her, the gasp gets at something deeper than the surface or the reality.  The gasp reveals the unconscious.

But if Cheng wants to develop a vocabulary for talking about the gap, then why does she focus on a gasp as the revelatory mechanism?  A gasp isn’t really language.  A gasp is ambiguous in that way, just like the gap, and this connection is supported by each word’s etymology.  Both gasp and gap originate in Old Norse, where gap is the root word for gasp.  The OED’s entry for gasp: “The root *gap- (see gape v.), whence German dial. gapsen to gape for breath, belongs to a different vowel-series, but the sense of ‘opening’ is apparently common to both.”  In this way, the vocabulary for the gap is the gasp, an opening.  It’s not the content; it’s the structure.

The ga(s)p, then, reveals because it is structured that way, as an opening.  It’s an inroads to the unconscious.  I say unconscious here because the gasp is coming from the spectators, but they have no control over it, as it arises from surprise.  It’s more like an impulse than an utterance.  According to the structure of the sentence, the gasp is also an opening to the complicity of the people who are watching the reveal happen.  But this spectatorship is not distanced or neutral, because the thing that the gasp is revealing belongs to the spectators (“reveals the spectators’ complicity”).  Interestingly, complicity doesn’t just mean being an accomplice; it also indicates a state of complexity.  The presence of the ga(s)p is a complication, something to be worked through.  Cheng’s project is to tease out the threads of this complication, and the way she does that is not by defining or uncomplicating, but by outlining the structure of the threads themselves.  What they actually are is less clear. 

The thing they are complicit in is the cover up, the disguise.  The spectators are complicit in the cover up, but their gasp is the revealing mechanism.  Teasing out the complexity of this structure, I’m lead to the idea that the spectators are actively disguising (they are accomplices in the disguise) but that they are unconsciously revealing their complicity through the gasp.  Yet, the purpose of their being there is to see the disguise dismantled.  Here, even though the spectators know what is hidden, and even though they are there to see the structure dismantled, their surprise (the gasp) reveals that they were involved in its construction.

What is at stake here is the way that the structure of language and narrativizing reveal the process of self-building.  The gasp cannot be identified as anything other than a sound (it’s not an utterance), but it nonetheless is an opening which reveals the methodology of hiding.  By focusing on this non-utterance, Cheng opens up her argument to an alternative way of looking at narrative. Narrative isn’t an identity but a process of identification.

Writing this post was at once frustrating and fascinating, because I know that there is much more going on in this passage (and in the book as a whole) than I can clearly articulate at this point.  I wanted to examine Cheng's methodology here, as it is repeated over and over in the book in multilayered and complicated ways.  I think this could be a matter of not choosing the best sentence to examine, but Cheng's sentence structure is pretty straightforward most of the time.  She indicates throughout the book her intention and outlines her project, but as we can see from this passage, intention is a cover up for complicity in building the very structure one is trying to dismantle.  I think my next reading of Cheng would look at how her methodology interacts with the gap between performance and performativity--where does Cheng have agency in dismantling this structure (performance) and performativity (the gasp).  In doing that, I might get to a performance of Cheng's methodology rather than the gasping my reading seems to be doing right now.