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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
To think about humanism in this regard as a persona, as a kind of maybe system of masking, you're saying something very important today in an era when many disciplines are being shut down.
Joyce Cheng:You know, in a way, what I'm saying is the self is overrated. Right? Maybe the mass is a more important paradigm that we need to be able to recuperate.
Jonathan Eburne:Hello, my name is Jonathan Ebern, and I'm the series editor of the new University of Minnesota Press book series called Surrealisms, The International Society for the Study of Surrealism book series. And I'm delighted today to be speaking to you, Joyce, Joyce Chang, whose forthcoming book, The Persistence of Masks, is the inaugural book in the series.
Joyce Cheng:Thank you very much, Jonathan. I'm Joyce Chang, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject. It's an honor to speak to you, Jonathan, about this book to which you have so generously lent your interest and support.
Jonathan Eburne:That's very kind of you to say, Joyce, and it's been an absolute pleasure working with you on this. I'd just like to say a little bit about the series itself before launching into conversation with its first author. So as the series title suggests, the Surrealisms book series represents the mission of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, or ISSS, which is a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 to foster the exchange of ideas between and among practicing artists and writers and the scholarly community for whom surrealism, the movement, past and present, is a field of ongoing inquiry. Surrealism's a I think everybody who listens to this will probably know, but Surrealism's a movement in poetry, literature, art, political thought, and other forms of cultural expression that technically, I guess you could say, began in Paris in the early 1920s, but which quickly became transnational in scope, fostering movements and reactions on a global scale. I'm a University of Minnesota press, author myself.
Jonathan Eburne:And when the organizers of the ISSS group were looking for a publisher to feature inventive scholarship across disciplinary boundaries, UMP was our immediate first choice. And so now, just moving back to you, Joyce, for now. Your book, The Persistence of Masks, is in so many ways the perfect book for launching this series on account of the way it addresses both aesthetics and anthropology, experimental encounters with otherness, and emerging clinical understandings of selfhood. I'd So love to begin by asking you, Joyce, to say a little bit about the history of the project. So how did this project come about and what sparked it?
Joyce Cheng:Thanks, Jonathan. So I'm going to try to avoid those apologies of authors who feel embarrassed about how long the book took to write. But I can say that one reason for the long dura of its development and writing has to do with a kind of disciplinary shift. So I am still in my home discipline of art history. I've always been one of the art historians who had strong affinities with people in literature departments and also in philosophy.
Joyce Cheng:I was particularly interested in aesthetics. I will just briefly say I did grow up in East Asia. I think the interest in the ways in which modernism with its inception in the global North felt that it was impossible to not give space or engage with cultures and traditions and even languages outside of that cultural sphere. So I became very interested in the problem and phenomenon of primitivism as a kind of phenomenon that's very well documented in art and also in literature as well. But I felt some dissatisfaction with the predominant art historical accounts of what is called modernist primitivism, because most of those conversations had historically revolved around the questions of attribution and influences, and then also critique of collecting and exhibition practices.
Joyce Cheng:So ways in which non Western cultural objects were displayed in and collected in Western metropolitan museums. So all of that work is very important and informative to me. It was sort of a large amount of literature that I consumed as a graduate student, but I was just not fully satisfied with this account. I was seeking a more philosophical account of the phenomenon. Ultimately, I eventually accepted that I needed to shift to something that is beyond my discipline.
Joyce Cheng:Maybe intellectual problems are much larger than what had been undertaken And by art I shifted towards something like a theory of the subject my way of accounting for this phenomenon of primitivism. And eventually I didn't even need the word primitivism anymore. I became very interested in the, what I'm calling now, the ethnographic impulse in modernism and avant garde. And in this book, I deal specifically with surrealism and that particular impulse. And so in a way, you could say the book actually got me out of primitivism.
Jonathan Eburne:So many interesting things that you've just said there, and I'd love to pick out a couple of them. First, I love the idea that a book project comes out of a sense of dissatisfaction. It's not just like looking on towards some beautiful horizon of possibility, but really thinking about a kind of splinter in your toe. With that in mind, I'd like to move toward the way you approach these questions of a kind of surrealist ethnography, moving away from the kind of primitivism conversation that often, what goes around people like Picasso and that sense of just a kind of cultural appropriation, thinking about, you know, the mask, the African mask as both the kind of singular type and as kind of placeless and personless. So I trust that's what you mean by, you know, getting over primitivism.
Jonathan Eburne:So with that in mind and thinking about all these little elements that you've brought up that I think are really wonderful, the sort of kind of wrestling with material, could you say a little bit about surrealism, not just as the immediate topic of your book, let's say a group of artists, intellectuals, poets who are getting involved in cultural study, including reflexive cultural study of their own, you know, European, often European basis, but also as a kind of imperative, as a kind of, you know, way of approaching problems, a way of approaching the world. Is there something about surrealism as an experimental movement that animates your project and the way that you're working with the material that you work with? Again, I'm thinking about this idea of being like deeply dissatisfied and looking for some kind of way out of a vexed and old and let's say structurally reproductive project. So yeah, is there a way that surrealism speaks to the way you approach the project and not just forming its object of study alone?
Joyce Cheng:Yeah, I think that's a really good question. One of the ways I thought that I could get out of kind of a predominant way of thinking about primitivism in our history was actually surrealism. So I should say in my acknowledgements, I made reference to my first mentor, the philosopher art historian, Michael Stone Richards. And as an undergraduate, I was already introduced to Surrealism, simply as an art movement, but as, a matrix for aesthetics, for critical practice and what some European thinkers have called philosophical anthropology. So for me, I thought, okay, if you wanna get out of thinking about primitivism simply as a mode of attribution, a form of influence, and maybe museological practices that need to be critiqued, then actually surrealism in a way you could think it's the obvious way out.
Joyce Cheng:But I think for all the reasons that you have also given for the importance of surrealism, just when you were introducing the series, you talked about the basically full participation of poets, visual artists, critical thinkers, writers, and then filmmakers. So it is that kind of movement, isn't it? It necessitates all kinds of humanists because of the richness, the different ways in which it manifests. It actually necessitates all types of humanists to be on deck, right, for studying this in, this is not a project for one discipline. So in a way for me, this was ideal.
Joyce Cheng:It validated my own interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary impulse, And it really made clear that some intellectual problems just cannot be addressed by one discipline alone. I think you, as well as I, were both scholars of the 1930s, worked extensively in 1930s kind of Paris intelligentsia. And if I broaden your question to not just surrealism, but that whole period, like the intellectual life of Paris in the 1930s, I mean, excites us, I'm assuming both you and me, the fact that the multiple disciplines were absolutely in dialogue. They were in a very intense dialogue with one another, right? Philosophers were talking to anthropologists.
Joyce Cheng:And I think not just surrealism, but that whole period, how people operated is probably very satisfying for people with our kind of intellectual impulses.
Jonathan Eburne:That's lovely. I couldn't agree more. What does it mean to think through or to study even something as relatively specific as 1930s Paris? Well, suddenly you can't think about that without considering the history of colonialism, of French colonialism, right? So France is already, you know, the Caribbean, it's Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, it's Andochin, it's Vietnam, right?
Jonathan Eburne:So all of those other questions are imposing themselves. They're part of any particular topic. So not only do you have the example, the model, let's say, of certain kinds of intellectuals who are engaged in exchanges without worrying about who's, you know, where the lines are between disciplines. But also there's a very real exigent sense of what does it mean to even think of oneself as inside of any culture, Right? And the way in which cultures are being, you know, obliterated, the way they're being formed and territorialized, especially with the onset of national socialism in Germany.
Jonathan Eburne:I mean, right? So all of a sudden you have a kind of topic that is no longer a singularity but kind of blossoms into everything. And I think that's both lovely and important and mildly terrifying. One of the things I love about your book is the little preface where you deal with that interdisciplinary abyss in some ways, right? That sort of sense of looking into the vastness of the kinds of questions that begin to unravel when you really study these hot points.
Jonathan Eburne:To bring this back to the book and the question of the way in which, you know, we're trained to do things as scholars. I, for example, am a literary scholar by training, although I don't like to live in that one house only. For that reason, your book really speaks to me. I get the sense, obviously, from knowing you and knowing the project that it's very important to you that this book speak to other disciplines than art history or literature alone. Maybe a slightly off kilter way to ask a question about that would be, is there such a thing as an ideal reader of this book or is it more like an ideal readers in the plural?
Joyce Cheng:Yeah, well, I will assume that people who are interested in, let's say, a new somewhat original account of the formative period of surrealism on the level of content would be interested in this book. But I will say because of how long the book took to write, some moments in that process, I did say to myself, perhaps I would just write the book and then let the book find me, my real intellectual friends. And now I'm actually getting readership from literary scholars, and that is very encouraging, right? Because I am an art historian who is being read by colleagues in those fields. I would say probably the ideal reader beyond those interested in surrealism would be humanists who are interested in methods and particularly the ways in which no single discipline owns a method.
Joyce Cheng:I would say our history does a lot of iconography and stylistic analysis, but we would be fools to think that we're the only ones who do that. Others can do that as well. So ethnography would be one that is particularly done very frequently, commonly done by anthropologists, but in no way does anthropology as a discipline own ethnography as a method, right? So sociologists also do this, journalists also do this. So I'm showing in this book that to some extent artists, poets also have done ethnography.
Joyce Cheng:So I think humanists were interested and I guess not afraid of the non monopoly, their own non monopoly of particular methods would find this somewhat interesting. But going back to why people with our intellectual temperament are attracted to movements like surrealism and 1930s Paris or global intellectual life, I have this idea of the whole humanist, the multifaceted whole humanist who cares about intellectual philosophical problems that are beyond disciplinary boundary. And I know this can sound a little cliche because we talk a lot about inter interdisciplinary, but just to give a few examples of what that looks like, if you ask the question, what is or what counts as a subject? I don't think this kind of question can be answered by just philosophy or literary theory or psychoanalysis. Maybe they all have something to say about that, right?
Joyce Cheng:How can poetry, the arts and speculative thinking contribute to a theory of power? Like who can answer that? No single discipline can answer that. That's a big intellectual problem. Everyone needs to work together.
Joyce Cheng:They have something to say about this. How do the arts, right? Like the poetry and thinking, speculative thinking, right? Help us refuse the choice between anthropocentrism and dehumanization, right? These are concepts I actually came up with toward the end of writing my book.
Joyce Cheng:I realized this is like blackmail, right? The idea that on the one hand we have anthropocentrism, human as the measure of all things, this European Renaissance idea, that we have to choose between that and dehumanization, which is reification of human subjects as instruments that we can just use them as replaceable tools, are superfluous in some ways. How do the arts give us poetry, visual arts, creative practices? How do the music, how do they give us a way between those two? How does surrealism give us a way that we don't have to choose between anthropocentrism and dehumanization?
Joyce Cheng:These are huge problems. I'm hoping to reach out and speak to the people who care about those problems and in some ways who can say, I'm just interested in what other disciplines have to say about this as well, in addition to what I can contribute as a specialist of, you know, as an anthropologist, as an art historian, you know, as a literary scholar.
Jonathan Eburne:Oh, thanks so much. I love the image of a kind of a society of friends of the book, which is a kind of nonprofit like idea or a syndicalist idea that seems to really speak to the kind of associative nature of this interdisciplinary work. It actually emerges in a kind of conversation and set of mutual interests or mutual maybe frustrations as you started off.
Joyce Cheng:So originally I had those type of answers about who the ideal reader is in terms of crossing disciplinary boundary. And I forgot to say the most obvious thing. I guess the most obvious thing is the ideal reader for this kind of book is actually someone who understands that somehow we are not whole if we are just ourselves. So I don't know if that makes any sense. But in other words, you can't think wholly if you stick to one ethnic national identity, even if that is your own identity, right?
Joyce Cheng:So the surrealists themselves were people who actually, at some point, you can tell me if I'm wrong, they in a way refused Frenchness, right? They got in trouble for declaring their support for German romanticism. They were very interested in cultures that were not French, right? So I think I'm hoping that the impulse of that to go beyond oneself, that somehow being myself is actually not me being whole, right? I need to be whole by not being just myself.
Joyce Cheng:That impulse, I think, is really important. And I hope that my ideal reader is someone who's like this.
Jonathan Eburne:Oh, thank you for adding that. That's really wonderful. And it makes me think of so many ways in which countering the imperialism of the subject, like the whole subject, this is I am what I am and nothing else. I mean, thinking about dismantling that as a kind of surrealist, and not only surrealist, but largely a surrealist project over the decades, really just extends to thinking about all kinds of fluidities, right? Gender fluidity, sexual fluidity, in spite of the fact that that's often an imperfect evolution that not every, you know, member of the surrealist movement in Paris in the 20s is exactly, you know, against their own wholeness.
Jonathan Eburne:But certainly there are in fits and starts these developments of forms of disengagement from that sense of kind of imperial subject. Thank you, I love that. With that in mind, a book that really struck me when I was getting started in what, in the profession, I guess you could say, and which I think has been a really, as you know, been a really influential book, is James Clifford's nineteen eighty eight study, The Predicament of Culture, which has its famous chapter on ethnographic surrealism. This is a book that strikes me as turning around turning around ethnography and the history of ethnography and turning it away from a discourse that largely, what, rewards the imperialism of the subject in the sense that it's the scientific Europeanist codification of others, and really starts to rethink the practice of cultural study in the way that you're talking about, right? That, that, in a way that, that, that rethinks wholeness, that looks to combinations.
Jonathan Eburne:And, and that idea of ethnographic surrealism that comes out of that book as a kind of description of the figures in the 1930s who are coming out of or in the surrealist movement and then doing this ethnographic work is really a bridge to your project. And so I'm wondering if you could address, let's say, that kind of fluidity in terms of your book as a kind of response maybe to that much earlier book and the resonance that it's had within the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that you're talking about?
Joyce Cheng:Thank you. This is really the crux of the methods question in the book. So James Clifford's ethnographic surrealism was hugely important. And I actually am grateful to my manuscript readers for having actually identified how important that book is. So they invited me to have a much more direct engagement with it.
Joyce Cheng:So it's hugely important. It's hugely insightful. It is also correct. Yet I would say it's also a bit misleading. So I knew that book very well also as already starting in grad school, but I've always known as well because I, you know, I wrote the dissertation while I was living in Paris.
Joyce Cheng:I also knew that French anthropologists and historians have had trouble with that concept of ethnographic surrealism. And I couldn't exactly pinpoint where the malaise was coming from, why they were uncomfortable with this concept for a long time. So I say the more helpful book that helped me understand this was actually Vincent de Bein's kind of more recent book on the literary dimension of French anthropology. So this was very helpful for me because what he showed in this book was actually that historically anthropology, French anthropology came out of literature. So in that sense, the literary turn of French anthropology should not be a surprise, right?
Joyce Cheng:It's always within reach. De Bein's book was about the literary book of many French anthropologists. So in a sense, this literary turn, while it is a kind of postmodern writing culture turn was also anthropology's return to its origins, right? So I just this morning, when preparing for this talk, I was thinking, could we think about that as anthropology's own primitivism in the way that they went back to their own intellectual origins? So the fact that had anthropologists who started to question that there is a kind of textual element, we are producing texts and all this, in a way it fits in with the history of anthropology itself.
Joyce Cheng:So I would say CLIFR's concept is both all of those things. It's very important, but I also understand there are other ways of thinking about this that don't require calling it ethnographic surrealism. The other part that I found not so much dissatisfying, but rather I was looking for to expand this a little bit more. I would say Clifford's ethnographic surrealism could potentially be misleading if it means, if it's taken to mean that one particular branch of surrealism was ethnographic, if that's how people interpret ethnographic surrealism to designate a particular section of surrealism. For instance, the Dokhyu Meng group that revolved around Georges Bataille and some of the professional ethnologists at the Institute of Ethnologie that he was friends with.
Joyce Cheng:So if it meant that ethnographic surrealism referred to that, then I said, you know, it could be a little bit too narrow because what if we think of ethnographic surrealism as actually all of the movement? I was actually happy to know that I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that. There are people who already other scholars that I think you're familiar, you and I both familiar with, are doing that. I find traces of this way of thinking in the work of Natalia Dusty. I find it in Efi Renzu.
Joyce Cheng:I found it in James Cahill's book on zoological surrealism, right? The Jean Panavers films of marine life as a kind of ethnographic film, right? So we actually have a lot of surrealism scholars who are inching toward this idea of what if all of surrealism was latently ethnographic in that way, right? Thinking about its analysis of dreams. So then I became more emboldened, right, with being informed by this kind of work.
Joyce Cheng:What if we think of all of surrealism as a kind of ethnography? And then we can think about what is the real subject of that ethnography? Is it particular cultures that kind of colonial mindset will consider exotic and needing to be reorganized and dominated? Or is the subject of this ethnography something much more universal? So I'm calling it the ethnography of the subject.
Joyce Cheng:It's a kind of double meaning of the subject, right? The ethnographic subject, but also the moral subject that has its positionality with subjectivity. That's how I would say I'm using or being supported by the concept of ethnographic surrealism.
Jonathan Eburne:The ethnography of the subject is a really important turn of phrase insofar as it accommodates, I would say, the other aspects of what you were just describing, which is life, like life itself, that a subject like a culture isn't just isn't a category or type. Right? The the point is not to kind of ascribe taxonomies, genres, categories to things, but rather to account for and transform, by the way, right, the ways in which subjects exist in the world and in life. And I think that's really a fundamental aspect of the work that you're doing in this book. With that in mind, I'd like to pivot to the other half of your title.
Jonathan Eburne:So from the ethnography of the subject to the first part, the persistence of masks. And something that really appeals to me about this title goes back to the one of the very first things you said today, which has to do with its the relationship to long standing discourses and practices of of so called primitivism, right? This sort of looking at and problematizing or appropriating a people that is far away. So when you talk about masks and their persistence, on one hand you're talking about very material, real, physical artifacts, ceremonial objects, made items that are trafficked and real and can be put on the face or put on the wall or whatever. On the other hand, at the same time, there's something else you're doing than simply identifying ceremonial objects used both in indigenous contexts and in European contexts, but rather like a practice of masking.
Jonathan Eburne:What does it mean to use a mask or to supplement the self in a way that masking suggests, both to hide and to supplement. Also, unmasking becomes part of that dynamic. So there's something performance based there. So not just a material artifact, but a kind of performance, even, as you say in the book, a kind of possession, you know, by the mask. Could you address that in terms of what you've been saying about these, you know, broad and kind of churning underlying questions?
Joyce Cheng:Yeah, thank you for that. So The Mask, if I were to stay in our history exclusively and to deal with the question of modernist primitivism, and still very interesting book is still coming out of that whole topic. I really don't want to be taken as dismissing the importance or the generative potential of that concept. It's just that I, as I said before, was interested in a philosophical account of this whole phenomenon. So I finally settled on masks because I realized they were important, but not only because the surrealism and other kinds of chic Parisians, right, in the kind of Beaumont actually collected African and Oceanic masks.
Joyce Cheng:It's not because of that. So the masks in surrealism are not simply those things. It's a much, much bigger iconography. Now I'm using our historical term. It's a much, much bigger iconography.
Joyce Cheng:And I include in that, and I think this might be something worth saying if I end up surprising my readers, the masks don't have to be even visible sometimes. Visible masks include things like veils, wonderful iconography in Surrealist art and poetry, heads very prominent in the document circle with Batai and Lerise when he was actually under Batai's influence, you know, the skulls and death masks, right? The leather mask that suffocates the women in a kind of sadomasochist practice. But masks are also gloves. There are also hats.
Joyce Cheng:There are also hands. And I think those are all interesting. Hats are more symbolic. We even use that in English as interchangeable with functions, right? I'm wearing my hat as a, I don't know, a teacher, I'm wearing my hat as so on and so forth.
Joyce Cheng:Hands also can be masked. Think that would be something quite surprising maybe to some, because we think of hands as actually belonging to our bodies. And so that how can they be mass? Well, actually it's a part of the body that actually can be in a way separated. So it's a very cookie idea, I know, but I tried to show that that's my chapter two, in the sense that it can be separated and repossessed, right?
Joyce Cheng:It's often, it has been theorized not only by the surrealists as something that it can be automatic. So that's why you have this iconography of the severed hands in surrealist art, right? In the twenties, especially, this is very, very common. The severed hand, the hand that has its own life. If you look at Max Ends' collages, why?
Joyce Cheng:Because the hand is conceived as something that kind of is attached to itself, but it has its own life out there. So the last chapter talks about masquerade, where there are actually no physical masks involved. The women of Northern Ethiopia, who were practitioners of the czar cults that Lerise studied, actually had a very powerful access to a foreign masquerade that didn't require having possession of material objects, sculpted masks, which Lerise has very carefully with the whole team of Mision Dagaji Buti have very carefully documented to be virtually all in the hands of men, right? So all the West African mass societies were in the hands of men because they had possession of these objects. But you don't even need to have those objects in order to have access to a masquerade.
Joyce Cheng:So I really try to show that, you know, the mass is a figure. It's not simply an object. It can be. Ornaments can be masks too. So I talked about that in chapter three.
Joyce Cheng:So it's a figure and what I'm trying to reach for is something like the mask as a new, but also actually quite old paradigm for the subject. And I think that's what the surrealists were reaching for. So, you know, in the introduction, I gave a very brief kind of historical anthropology of how the figure of the mass had been basically vilified and basically marginalized by a Western humanist kind of It's actually Christianity first, Christianity and then a kind of more humanist West, right? So the mass became something that's vilified and the self became something much more authentic. That became the more important paradigm for the subject.
Joyce Cheng:But anthropologists like Marcel Mose, all speaking in the 30s, all said, well actually we had a much, much older concept with a person that is not person but persona, right? And then, you know, I think it's very, very interesting that Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, also repeatedly used this concept of mass, which I talk about in my epilogue, as something that maybe is a more constructive, less tyrannical figure that can be used to think about the subject. You know, in a way, what I'm saying is the self is overrated, right? Maybe the mass is a more important paradigm that we need to be able to recuperate. So it's also a subject.
Joyce Cheng:What's important is the subject. It's not the self.
Jonathan Eburne:That's lovely. And it makes me wonder earlier when you're talking about humanism and the kind of the ideal reader and the way in which your work strives toward and practices a kind of transdisciplinary form of inquiry. I mean, seems like one of your insistences here is this isn't just like the best kind of, you know, the best kind of thinker is this transdisciplinary one that has more to it than those tiny little disciplines that are all insufficient, but rather to think about humanism in this regard as a kind of persona, as a kind of maybe system of masking. And so I'm wondering if you could come back to some of the things that you were saying about the transdisciplinary work. And it strikes me that you're saying something very important today in an era when many disciplines are being shut down at the university level, at the state level.
Jonathan Eburne:The idea that knowledges are being, let's say, disarticulated rather than connected. There's so much being policed, shut down, categorized. Is there a way in which this insistence upon masking and persona as a kind of ethical challenge to the singularity of the imperial subject that really resonates today?
Joyce Cheng:Yeah, that's a really fascinating way of reframing the question of interdisciplinarity in terms of masks. Why are there masks, Right? And why are monotheistic religions afraid of masks? I'm thinking especially of Christianity and Islam. I talked about how in Christianity, the masks, like the medieval way of thinking about masks is like, you know, these are incarnations of the devil.
Joyce Cheng:And if you go to chapter four where I talk about the surviving practice of czar in multi confessional Ethiopia in the '30s, both the Christians and the Muslims sort of were skeptical. Now, themselves, and Muslims participated in tsar in Ethiopia, so I think that's very interesting, even though officially uncomfortable with it. Well, if I think in those terms, the masks are never one. Right? That's the problem.
Joyce Cheng:In fact, we came up with masks because we couldn't, in a way, organize certain features, characteristics into one character. That's why we came up with so many masks. That's why mass societies, it didn't matter if you found them in the South Pacific or in West Africa, they never just have one mask. They always have multiple mass. Right?
Joyce Cheng:And, you know, I'm I'm I'm playing with your idea of thinking about humanistic disciplines in those terms. Like, why do we come up with, you know, gender studies and, you know, new new types of ways of organizing knowledge, right? In a way, yeah. I think that's a very fun idea that you just put forth there. I think about them as new characters, right?
Joyce Cheng:New personas and new ways of organizing issues and problems and methods, right? Using these new studies, or we can find different departments or programs or something like that. I think that's a really interesting idea. But I would say, I think we talked about this when we were preparing for this conversation. I think it would be really dangerous, especially in the current climate that you're talking about, if we use the idea of trans disciplinarity as a kind of opportunistic way of justifying the superfluousness of certain departments and programs, right?
Joyce Cheng:So in other words, here's the dystopian scenario, we'll just consolidate anthropology and English because of writing cultures so that one faculty member can teach courses in both, right? So I think that would be a terrible dystopian way of using the notion of interdisciplinarity. Now, think to go back to the issue of otherness and difference, meaningful interdisciplinary dialogues actually depend on the difference and distinction of individual disciplines. Otherwise, what would we be talking about? It would be the same, right?
Joyce Cheng:Anthropology and literature can talk to each other in a productive way precisely because they are different. They have different histories, right? And they have different strengths. And so one of the things that we didn't talk about, but I do like to at least mention is in 1930s surrealism for historical reasons, the surrealist actually conceived of what I'm calling masks very much along the terms of the feminine, right? I would say the psychoanalytic feminine, not the femininity as kind of exterior signs of femininity or not an anatomical issue.
Joyce Cheng:It's not today what we call assigned females. Le femininence cycle analytically is a type of subjectivity that includes otherness, right? So to put it very simply. And so like that kind of, you know, the ethics of difference, I guess, would be impossible if all the disciplines become the same. So we can do interdisciplinary work, strong, intensely productive interdisciplinary work precisely if the disciplines are distinct and very aware of their own strengths and also shortcomings, right?
Joyce Cheng:So I just give one short example. Anthropology and history has historically been meeting for very productive reasons because history, historians, conscious historians want to in a way repair or alleviate its own local centrism, right? So always relying on written records, assuming that cultures that have no written records are basically not worthy of study or basically inaccessible, right? That's the kind of local centrism that conscious historians are very interested in trying to mitigate. So they then engage with anthropology.
Joyce Cheng:That's the reason for it, because they're aware of their own shortness. Same time, anthropology is very aware of its own allochronism, right? This is Johannes Fabian here who says, What can we do? We need to take more into account historical time. The question of temporality that we assume it's a non problem anthropology, cultures are fixed in time, they're almost like frozen.
Joyce Cheng:That's not okay, right? So then they engage with history. But in order for that kind of healthy, strong, interesting interdisciplinary dialogue to happen, the two disciplines have to remain different, right? And so I would say, I would hate to see you know, interdisciplinarity as a way like, we don't need departments. We don't need disciplines.
Joyce Cheng:I think that would be horrible for all of us.
Jonathan Eburne:It makes me think of the real extreme, as you say, even religious or ecclesiastical difference between an idea about masking as dissimulation. So there is but one woman with a thousand faces, or the hero with a thousand faces, right? We can talk about every mask, you take off the mask to reveal the truth that's beneath it. All truths are fundamentally the same. The masks are what create this illusion, illusory difference, as opposed to, let's say, the ethics of masquerade, where what manifests itself is the specificity.
Jonathan Eburne:I mean, I'm thinking about even Nigerian masquerade. Like it's the god shows up, right? The spirit is present in the masquerade. It's not like if you rip off the disguise, you see it's, you know, it's the same old thing. Like, and there's, there isn't, there is a specificity to each spirit, each God that manifests through masquerade.
Joyce Cheng:Absolutely. And that's such a, I mean, I'm so happy that you came to that because I had completely underestimated myself. I came from a non monotheistic culture, right? I grew up in East Asia. I had completely underestimated how deep seated is the vilification of the mask, even in the kind of secular West, right?
Joyce Cheng:And in some ways, what I realized is it got even worse in the secular West with a kind of secular modernity. So this simulation is absolutely how mask is conceived of in the kind of post enlightenment world. So it's inauthentic, right? But the moment when you start to think every mask, this simulates and also makes appear something, don't It also, you know, it also shows something. Then we're now in the interesting dynamic.
Joyce Cheng:And I think this is the thing that Hannah Arendt actually tried to, in her critique of enlightenment, is trying to say. We lost this concept the persona. It's actually very, very important for everybody's safety. And that's also a realization that virtually every anthropological study of masks in, because we've lost this tradition in the West, in the secular West, a lot of the work that's being done elsewhere all show that. Like, they don't think of the mask as simply dissimulation, right?
Joyce Cheng:It's actually about making manifest other things that without the mass would not have a mode of appearance. I would say, going back to your lovely idea of thinking about humanistic disciplines or branches of studies in terms of masquerade, we form these new disciplines or programs or fields because we think we can make manifest something. It's not like we're trying to hide something, right? To simulate something. We're trying to reorganize our knowledge so that something new can appear, right?
Joyce Cheng:And so going back to your idea of what happens to that in an age of financial austerity where every university is prioritizing cutting costs, I would say I'm hoping that there are going to be conscientious people up there who understand that we need to maintain a healthy number of different disciplines in order for any important humanistic work to be done. You can't just consolidate everything. I'm not saying no cutting. I'm saying, please let disciplines also maintain their integrity so that we can actually enable better, more productive dialogues. So Jonathan, this is a point where we talked about we would pivot the conversation toward the series.
Joyce Cheng:I'm very honored to inaugurate the ISSS series. And I would love to hear about your vision of how my book fits into your conception of the future of this series of books. And I wanted to hear especially about some persistent issues that you think maybe future Surrealism scholars would benefit from paying more attention to. One persistent issue I have kind of wrestled with while writing my book, and I also see it in the work of my colleagues, Surrealism scholars of our generation, is the tension between a history of Surrealism and a theory of Surrealism. This has been kind of stressful, actually, as a scholar to kind of navigate.
Joyce Cheng:Historians of Surrealism are often not very happy with the theoretical use of Surrealism. And then sometimes I do have trouble placing myself either side of that fence.
Jonathan Eburne:It's almost a consequence of the success of surrealism as a museological topic, especially as we've now reached the centenary of the '19 twenty four manifesto of Surrealism, that there have been so many exhibitions around the world, just, I mean, almost hundreds of countries, hundreds of exhibitions. And the idea that the highlighting of the visual component of surrealism might be said also to highlight a kind of divide in art history, perhaps, between art history, the historiography of art, and art criticism and other kind of factors of a kind of analytic component of art history, which is not named in the title, but which also participates in that discourse. The very fact that surrealism as a cultural phenomenon, as you've already said throughout, does not obey a single place or medium, but rather exists in kind of poetic registers, but also in, you know, active political speech forms and tracts and publishing and so forth, means that it is always crossing registers and looking to implicitly or explicitly translate what it's doing into different, you know, any, at any one moment, whether a group or a person wrestling with certain kinds of practices and ideas that are linked to surrealism in some fashion, there's always a kind of phase change or, you know, translation effect at work, I would say.
Jonathan Eburne:And what that means is that for me at least, and in the vision of the series, I think that it's very possible to study all of the kinds of things that are happening under the large umbrella of surrealism in specific times, spaces, and circumstances with, you know, named people who are doing the work, named texts, and to be very rigorously historiographic about documenting that, doing archival work, you know, whatever is involved in that kind of history side. And in doing so, to attend to the concepts and, let's say, broader tensions that are at work in that period and in producing that work at that time and space. I would say that surrealism as a movement is always heavily conceptually loaded. There is great intentionality behind it. Whether people are breaking from the group at a certain given time, or whether, let's say in the sense of the Cairo Surrealist group, Ari Liberte, they're debating how much does one import of an experimental avant garde movement and how much does one nationalize or toctonize a movement.
Jonathan Eburne:What does it mean to think in a revolutionary form? What does it mean to collectivize? These are really big and fundamental and difficult questions, but they're very conceptual ones, philosophical ones, but also practical ones. And so I myself don't think there needs to be some kind of rift between certain, you know, tenors of work, although I think that that has, that happens, I think in a lot of scholarship, maybe just in the way storytelling happens or in the way that people assemble their object of study, their archive of material. But one of the things that excites me most about the study of surrealism, and which the ISSS's mission and the University of Minnesota Press's mission really speak to, is the value of paying deep attention to a kind of empirical specificity and precisely through that thinking about the conceptual work, the conceptual resonance of that specificity, and especially in turn of how that speaks to us in the present.
Joyce Cheng:Yeah, I think when we talked before, we talked about my preface where I talked about how I struggle with this, the multiple disciplines that are possible as ways of studying approaching Surrealism, and then the realization that history and philosophy, we more commonly call it theory, are actually the main two disciplines from which all of our humanistic disciplines kind of descend. And I think to go back to this question of difference and otherness, one of the things that actually helped me, and I think it was so exciting about the series, right? Can we do a kind of work in surrealism that makes productive use of the difference between history and theory? And that actually requires us to say, at least I finally made this realization myself, history and theory are different practices. So the moment I accepted that they're not gonna be the same, when I theorize I will be at risk of losing some particularities, right?
Joyce Cheng:Because I have to generalize. When I historicize, I am at risk of losing certain concepts because the facts may not fit those concepts. So once I accept that these two are actually fundamentally different, then I can actually do both, then I can actually play with this.
Jonathan Eburne:Absolutely. And I would add to that also with your point about a kind of ethics of difference in mind, if you're studying how a historical person, a historical artist or poet or thinker may have been theorizing in a certain times and place. To study that historically means one has to be mindful that it's not, you know, my theory, it's that person's theory, Right? Studied, you know, studied through the lens of distance and difference from it. I can't just aggregate it to my own schemata, right, schematic for how I think about it.
Jonathan Eburne:Rather, I have to recognize it as not mine. And I find that's another kind of differentiation that I consider to be both, let's say, empirical in some ways, but also very beautiful. And, you know, something that I think your work really attends to. It's also a quality that the forthcoming, I believe, second book in the series, Katherine Hansen's book on the Bucharest surrealist movement, the Infant Noir Group. It's called The Powers of Know, and looking at the historical specificity of a kind of dialectical thinking emerging in this particular space and time by these particular people under these particular deep political pressures, and yet how that also evolves and has continuities with contemporary dialectical thinking.
Jonathan Eburne:I think all of these things are possible in the way that you've described. And being mindful, let's say being methodologically attentive to the way those differences between history and philosophy, between different linguistic and site specific traditions and knowledges are manifesting themselves in one's own scholarship, I think is both very important and I think what this series is really allowing and hoping for.
Joyce Cheng:Speaking of dialectical thinking, if we have time for one more kind of generative question that I would pose here. So the dialectics between myth and truth, think is a very interesting one. I don't know if you think this is something that in a way the future of Surrealism studies might engage with more. You are the author yourself of a book called Outsider Theory that has some Surrealism in it, at least is adjacent to surrealism.
Jonathan Eburne:Surrealish?
Joyce Cheng:Surrealish ish. The Bataille group is quite present. And I thought about the rhetorical use of ethnography as well in the surrealist movement. Obviously they're saying ethnographic documentary, which is documentary is a word that often is used by many, many of our colleagues to talk about this aspect of surrealism. I mean, is a claim at least, right, to a certain kind of veracity of truth, which is why we document this is not just art.
Joyce Cheng:Walter Benjamin said this about surrealism. He already recognized it in the 20s. Surrealism is not about art. It's about other things, right? At the same time, let's say the afterlife of this, you know, latent ethnography of Surrealism, which we might say is James Clifford's ethnographic Surrealism or Surrealist ethnography, The point of departure of this kind of postmodern anthropology is actually about questioning the scientific objectivity of traditional anthropology.
Joyce Cheng:I am wondering, what do you think surrealism has something to say about that objectivity that questions itself? People engage in creative speculative practices suddenly laying claim to the veracity of what they are attending to, right? These are actual crimes. You are the author of one of my favorite books in surrealism studies on art of crime. That's a very good example too, right?
Joyce Cheng:This is real. We're looking at murder cases and we're analyzing the psychic drama that produced them. You know, it seems to me that in surrealism, we actually have these two movements going on, both in surrealism and the afterlife of surrealism. It's about myths that try to become truths and truths that are suddenly not so confident about their own veracity.
Jonathan Eburne:Yeah, that's one little last question, and it's a doozy. Tupa, thank you. There's something on the one hand tricky about these terms because myth can mean anything from traditional stories, traditional knowledges, right, the basis of a kind of traditional cultures, to all of the kinds of discrepancies and dishonesties ascribed to tradition, which is to say commonly held beliefs, folk beliefs, mere folk beliefs, and the dismissal. Superstitions. Right, superstitions.
Jonathan Eburne:Right, so it really runs the gamut between things that are beyond truth, that are truer than true, that are deeper than true, to like absolute falsehood. Right? So that's a terminology that's troublesome. And likewise, truth is a word that on one hand is the transcendental basis of all knowledge and we only know. But also it's a kind of imperial concept as well under which all kinds of terrible things have been done, in the name of truth.
Jonathan Eburne:Know, genocides, let's say, can happen. So rather than thinking of these as stable entities, the idea that to really consider what is at stake in calling something, naming something a myth, like what are we talking about, what's being dealt with, and when we call something truth, what
Joyce Cheng:is
Jonathan Eburne:being ascribed to it, that sense of gaining a broader nuanced picture, so to speak, of the stakes and authorities according to which these terms are being generated. That's, in my mind, the kind of work we were just describing, in thinking about a kind of interdisciplinary work that puts together theory, philosophy, and history. The history part is, you know, who's saying it, what authority is behind it, is there a military power backing it, who's being erased, whose voices are being taken away. Right? And if the word myth is being used to demonize, then, you know, that's important to know.
Jonathan Eburne:And that's part of that becomes part of the equation. So really rendering those two terms something other than absolute, I think is a fundamental work.
Joyce Cheng:This is a really great response because in a way, I think maybe it's not about myth and truth, it's about myth and myth, right? So in the 1930s, one could actually say, who wasn't interested in myth, right? So the Nazis were very interested in myths, mythologies, and recuperating elements of Germanic folklore for political goals. And on the other hand, you have the Left intelligentsia that was also very interested in myth. And then we have Minotaur, the surrealist review that uses myth, a mythic creature, a pagan chimera as its figurehead.
Joyce Cheng:And that was all about myth, right? So I think you're absolutely right. It's actually about what kind of myth and what is myth? Is myth or mythology? Are we looking at a kind of epistemological system from which we can generate that is actually capable of generating new ideas that meet the urgencies of the time?
Joyce Cheng:Or are we talking about recuperation of supposedly timeless narratives that then can be refabricated to suit ideologies as opposed to help us come to terms with crisis, right? I think that's the difference between myth and myth.
Jonathan Eburne:No, that's really well put. And another way I'd just add to layer onto that is these aren't quantifiable distinctions, like about measuring the absolute value of something in some kind of absolutist terms. Rather, the kind of distinctions and evaluations you're talking about are qualitative and have to do with the narratives set in motion by upholding, right, a certain order of myth, whether that's the order of truth, justice, and the American way or whatever else, right? So, yeah, what narratives are set in play by this epistemological investment? So I know we've now had a goodly amount of time to talk to one another, and I really appreciate, you know, you having given your time to have this conversation.
Jonathan Eburne:Do you have any final words for your readers out there that are listening to this?
Joyce Cheng:Final words. I'm hoping to not have to ever have final words so that it would be generative of further dialogues. You know, I think I thought that the book might help me find my friends. And now it's that moment where I am interested in the reviews and what people find productive and less productive? Did I get anything wrong?
Joyce Cheng:Those type of things. And I hope there are no final words so we can keep talking.
Jonathan Eburne:Fantastic. That's great. Thank you so much.
Joyce Cheng:Thank you, Jonathan.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, The Persistence of Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Chang is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.