I thought a rejoinder was required to my earlier posting on Thailand ("The Transformation of Thailand into a Post-Oedipal Playground of Transsexaul Kitsch"), which foregrounded the protaganist of Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform with respect to Orientalism, rather than to the more often cited H.P. Lovecraft, where humanity is perpetually victimised by primordial forces they can neither control nor understand (I figure Louis Ferdinand Celine must be awaiting comparison in this context). What I failed to do was cite any work by Thai academics that could contextualise how representative of their country were the informal economies of sex tourism etc, that are fetishsized in Platform, and indeed, in Internet culture more generally. According to the study I've cited, they are apparently very important, with decisive ramifications for the viability of Thai democracy, given the extensive corruption involved in the industry.
I also thought it incumbent on me to reproduce Lingis' reply to Peter Jackson's critical review of his work. Lingis offers one of the most unscholarly, ineffectual responses to a critic that I've ever read. Clearly he, like any academic, is obligated to answer the specific charges, but he merely evades this responsibility, choosing instead to engage in wordplay, and vaguely alluding to a literary character. Everyone knows that Lingis is a showman to some extent, lecturing from within a coffin, or turning off the lights in the lecture theatre, adorning himself in glowing bodypaints and what not, holding to the maxim, "the unlived life is not worth examining". But his response reads as a surprisingly timid, and perhaps even dishonest, missed opportunity to foreground his own investment in the topic at hand.
This is a pity, because I would have liked to have seen more from him about liminal experience in relation to other theoretical work, such as Foucault's heterotopias, or perhaps more fittingly Agamben's "states of exception" or "zones of indistinction", where the borderline between economics and politics, reproduction and production is dissolving. What else are the biopolitics of sex tourism if not this? And what about the question of how fitting it may be that such zones are inhabited by liminal figures such as kathoey? On these grounds, some qualification of Bakhtin's carnival is also required, as it is not the social order of the host society that temporarily reverses its power relations, it is rather, in the case of the western sex tourist, a reversal they can experience by travelling to such refuges from feminism and identity politics more generally, "king for a day, fool for a lifetime". Guilt is assuaged by travelling as far away as possible from familiar ties, and Houellebecq adds the interesting, and disturbing twist, complementary to the "desiring machine" reference of my earlier posting: this desire assumes a serial form, inasmuch as it views Asia as a gigantic factory producing an overabundance of life, an interchangeability of bodies and faces, where "they all [sic] look the same". It is indistinction on this level, which is [spuriously] contrasted with notions of western individualism, that Houellebecq draws upon to rationalise the actions of his protagonist: after innumerable encounters he is unable to distinguish anything other than the fact that he was there, thus freeing him from any haunting by the faces of the sexual partners left behind.
In these terms, the point of arrival is also a paradoxical point of departure; re-enchantment is tied to a terminal identity. As Platform makes clear, few settle in such zones to begin a new life, but simply to concede the end of their lives. So perhaps biopolitics does eventually reconnect with the pessimistic, organic entropy tropes found in Lovecraft's work afterall....
I have chosen a couple of youtube clips that may (in)directly speak to some of the concerns raised in this posting.
Alphonso Lingis' Response to Peter Jackson's 'Spurning Alphonso Lingis' Thai "Lust": The Perils of a Philosopher at Large'
Alphonso Lingis
I really reveled in the wicked pleasure of reading, as much, I think, as Peter Jackson of writing, the portrait of Alphonso Lingis - this individual neither of us has met. Any academic like us gets off on letting out all the stops sometimes. This Alphonso Lingis is 'ignoran[t] of the power relations in East-West erotic contact.' He 'rule[s] out the possibility of loving erotic relationships between Caucasians and Thais.' He is unable 'to tell the difference between a kathoey and a Thai woman.' He takes Thailand to be a 'matriarchal Garden of Eden.' He takes 'transvestites [as] representative of Thai males,' and 'assume[s] that all Thai men are potentially kathoey.' He is afflicted with 'blindness to non-Western cultural patterns.' He 'imperiously' 'fail[s] to see or acknowledge the local different rules of the erotic.' He embodies 'an uncritiqued Orientialism,' and 'an uncritiqued imperialist view of Asian masculinities as inferior forms beside Western expressions of manhood.' Makes one think of Fritz Shrobenius, in Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence. But in the end Alphonso Lingis is 'just another angst-ridden coloniser feeling guilty about his power rather than a liberator.' Peter Jackson lets us down there. Ouologuem's portrait of Shrobenius is both more malicious and more liberatingly side-splitting.
I do sincerely apologize to Peter Jackson for having somehow dropped the appropriate footnote for the two sentences he indeed is the origin of.
Al Lingis
Professor Alphonso Lingis,
Department of Philosophy
The Pennsylvania State University
Editorial Reviews
Card catalog description
Card catalog description
Gambling, prostitution, drugs, arms trading, oil smuggling, and trafficking in people - these six illegal businesses are large and getting larger. They distort the economy and victimize people. They are increasingly linked together through networks of protection and organized crime. They help to fund Thailand's corrosive 'money politics' and to sustain corruption in the police. In this sequel to Corruption and Democracy in Thailand, the authors argue that control of the illegal economy, especially through reform of the police, is vital for the development of a modern economy and functioning democracy.
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