Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief conceptualizes the grief, mourning, melancholy, introjection, incorporation, transgenerational haunting, and fantasy of Asian-Americans to show how these subjects, raced between Black and White, deconstruct rigid racial, sexual, ethnic, and legal binaries through the assimilative process of identity formation.
“In short, why discipline the other when the other can be made to discipline her/himself?”
Beginning a sentence with “in short” signals that what’s to come will once again perform a piece of the past which, like an unruly bit of theatricality, must be “made to discipline” itself. Repetition is, after all, a disciplined performance. The word “why” initiates a question that will need to be answered, pondered, or closely reread; it initiates the sentence’s petition for a performance by a reader who is only quasi-present in the sentence as the implied you—the root question being “why would you discipline”—a you who is to perform alongside the text in answering a question, a you who is absolutely crucial to the sentence but is nowhere to be found.
The question that follows positions you (now both the reader and the implied you of the sentence) with no other way out of the paragraph than through this “why [that] when [this]” question structure. The syntax and cadence of the phrase “why discipline the other when the other can be made to discipline” leads the first-time reader to expect the next word to be you; after all, the implied you at the beginning of the sentence would appear again at the end of the balanced, chiasmatic sentence, and the familiar ring of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” not only demands a you in the middle and at the end of the sentence but also likens this sentence’s structure to that of a famous Biblical edict, allowing for the demands of the scripture to covertly infiltrate the ethical or moral import of the sentence. With both of these forces driving the sentence toward a resolution in you, when the sentence actually ends with “her/himself”, it’s as though the reader’s desire inserts the you she expected to read there, so that the reader “can be made to” read a you that is nowhere to be found precisely where “her/himself”—the other—actually is. A spectral you comes back to haunt the end of the sentence, an effect of which is the split female subject, as I will argue below. The sentence incorporates you by swallowing it down to the level of implication and association, the only way out, through the performance of the choice you make in answering the question, which, as the sentence points out, is a choice always already made for you; it’s a performance: “The accomplishment or carrying out of something commanded or undertaken” by someone or something else (OED). Self-discipline is, by the end of the sentence, always a performance controlled by another you, indicated here even at the syntactical level by the “discipline her/himself”’s position as a passive object. The performer is really the performed you, illustrated several times over in the content and form of the sentence through the ways it interpellates you.
Both options in this sentence mean work for the incorporated you, rhetorically (dis)positioned by the sentence to either do the disciplining or make the other discipline her/himself; but you aren’t left to your own devices because the sentence shows signs of favoritism. In the “why [that] when [this]” sentence structure, “that” is the option that the question offers as easy, simple, and uncomplicated: “discipline the other” is the thing that is most often done, the more expected or naturalized thing to do—it’s the “buy the cow” of the “why buy the cow…” scenario. The second option in the sentence—making the other discipline her/himself—is the perhaps-out-of-the-way possibility, but because of its “…when you can have the milk for free” position, you are to assume that there’s a bigger payoff, something to recommend this option over the syntactic and obvious first choice. Making the other discipline her/himself is in the position of privilege in this sentence; it will provide you more pleasure and fewer headaches than being the constant disciplinarian, always on the scene. This way, you can all but vanish—as you has in this sentence—yet the other still performs in the way it’s been disciplined to (by you, also subsumed here by the use of the passive).
By seeming to privilege “her” in putting “her” first in the feminist-friendly construction “her/himself”, the “/him” which separates her from “her” “self” splits the her from her self while it privileges the monolithic “himself”; at the same time, the relationship “her” has to “himself” is slashed through—a literal bar bisects her from her self—and what stands in between is “/him”, the bar a reminder of the binary which would hope to prefer the woman by placing her before or over him but is in fact the very thing splitting her in two. And what’s between “her” and “self”? It’s “/him”; His phallus and him. It is the phallus that divides the self-disciplining female subject, yet because the writer of this sentence is herself a female subject, Cheng is being made to do the work of the phallus herself. The construction “her/himself” is perhaps the perfect microcosm within this sentence to see its meaning enacted: “In short, why discipline the other when the other can be made to discipline her/himself?” The overwrought attempt to undo the gender hierarchy has in fact made of itself its own stereotype.
[html note: since this is a blog which uses html to process style and format, i want to point out that /him would be a command in html language that means, literally, to stop or to end the script called him. it’s a command to terminate him. thus even in html language it would be a disciplined performance, only this time, whatever came between the two hims would be entirely his, so that there’s only a her outside of him, yet this does not prevent
In the end, the rhetorical question pretends to offer both the writer and the reader choices, but by omitting the very subject who is supposed to be doing this disciplining or making the other discipline, and by Cheng herself performing the hypochondriacal feminist, the sentence implies that we’re all others, that we are all always already made to discipline ourselves and that we likewise play the part of making others discipline themselves. The sentence performs both the allowance of agency and its refusal by relying on the implied you for its structure and meaning; through implication is the only way you exist, and by its very erasure of the word you, the only subjects left are the others. In short, we’re all others here. The question doubly disciplines and doubly others—disciplining the reader to respond to a question even while she’s rendered invisible in the process, disciplining the other to discipline her/himself; othering the other by mode of discipline and othering you by placing you outside of its explicit boundaries. (We could play this out a bit more by considering the ways that we as academic readers are further assimilated and disciplined by disciplinary reading training and courses like this.) The systems of assimilation and control Cheng elucidates in her book are not confined to situations of race only; we can extrapolate from these circumstances that similar rules of assimilation and discipline operate in all imagined communities. Cheng’s task and ours is to map the way communities choose to acknowledge, use, and respond to these tactics.
[As a postscript to these ideas, I want to connect something else this passage doesn’t explicitly say to the S/M pedagogy I presented on in the Sade class. The passive construction “can be made to discipline” veils the pedagogical processes that undergird this “making” someone else do something. It implies an entire teaching philosophy which converts students who must be disciplined outright to students who have internalized this discipline so as to perform it as self-discipline. Both options in the sentence, as I’ve said, require some work from you. The first option might be said to be discipline incorporated, swallowed and lodged in the ego; this second option requires the positive, “healthy” introjection of a pedagogical structure, a discipline that keeps on disciplining.]
[The original title for this post: "Why buy the cow when the cow can be made to buy its own milk?"]
There is a lot of insightful, promising play in this reading, but a few hitches that trouble me.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why your summary talks about subjects being "raced between Black and White" when Cheng's point--as you also indicate in the summary--is to go beyond binary racial categories? Perhaps it's the ambiguous word "subjects" which could mean either people or topics here.
For the close reading, please cite the page for the quote.
How is repetition a disciplined performance? I'm unclear what that means; the terms seem compacted and telegraphic, whereas a little more careful laying out of the stakes might give you even more leverage for your reading. Is the implied "you" really the second person, or could it be the third impersonal (that is, "one" and not "you")? What settles the question on the second person? It's a crucial point, since the next paragraph--and in fact much of the reading-- hinges on the second person. (great associations by the way, but while I see how you connect it in, I'm not yet convinced the "you" comes from anywhere but outside the sentence. Still, the idea of a "swallowed you" is especially intriguing.)
I like your readings of the her/himself, but can you develop the payoff more fully? what are the consequences of reading this split as you do--what might this say about discipline, self-discipline, the specifics of this sentence or this argument? You gesture towards this by including Cheng, but can one really say that Cheng is a female subject self-disciplining here, without veering into essentialism that all female-named people occupy the feminine position in the symbolic order?
Finally, I'm concerned that your interpretation of the passage takes us to the claim of "we're all others here," when Cheng's point is precisely that some others are more other than others. It's not an even playing field here, but the claim "we're all others" seems to minimize those differences.
What does it mean to discipline? to self-discipline?