Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

“Bottles of Beaujolais,” however, suggests that cannibalism might be the condition of, rather than an exception to, civilization.

If we can offer one criticism of popular science fiction works about the other-than-human, it is that they often withdraw from their own ambitions by retreating to the human sentimentality they claim to want to transcend. One of the hardest things for us to confront is our own thingness. This is why the desire “to boldly go where no man has gone before” and “to seek out new life and new civilizations” so often disappointingly returns us to life and civilization exactly as we know it.6

This chapter asks: could the archaeology of ornamentalism offer us a radical theory of science fiction, just as science fiction’s engagement with animated objecthood could articulate a radical theory of race?

Is artificial intelligence an enhancement or an erasure of the human?

We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. We can now extend our archaeology of ornamental Asiatic femininity from the introduction, as illustrated in plates 68–73. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.

But the history of Orientalism in the West is not just a history of objectification but also a history of personification: the making of personness out of things. This nonperson, normally seen as outside of modernity and counter to organic human individualism, actually embodies a forgotten genealogy about the coming together of life and what is not life, labor and leisure, that conditions the modern understanding of humanness.

The artificiality of Asiatic femininity is the ancient dream that feeds the machine in the heart of modernity.

American cyborgism is about what happens to personhood in the telos of Western technology. It’s the tale of ornamentalism, the animation of objects through the synthetic, full-body prosthesis of Asiatic femininity. This is a modern story of passing that does not pivot on binary tensions such as inside/outside, essence/performance, kernel/shell. The multiple phantoms of ornamentalism remind us that the master-slave relation in American history is far from black and white. Let’s address a question that is now hovering on the edges of our inquiry: Where is blackness in the fiction of the cyborg? Why is the telos of Asiatic objecthood the cyborg while the telos of black objecthood is the monster?

For the raced subject in America, the imperative to move on, in the face of painful racial encounters, comes from a place much deeper than regard for social niceties; it arises as a claustrophobic survival instinct. It is about carrying on despite the tear in the social fabric, an erupting phantom, a gaping void that you must sidestep—or be confronted by the utter rejection of your very being by the people smiling around you.

What the raced subject and the character Chris Washington demonstrate is that, for them, the necessary, life-affirming, survivalist process of introjection is always shadowed by and potentially indistinguishable from the devouring violence of assimilation and incorporation. In a deeply unfriendly world, introjection, “a constant process of acquisition and assimilation” vital to survival, is a horror, a no-win double bind.

While both the yellow woman and the black man are bodies subject to colonization, the discourse and terms of the theft are significantly different: one dehumanizing fate is to become a machine while the other is to become a monstrosity. It’s the difference between the persistent enfleshment of the black body and the insistent “syntheticness” attributed to the yellow body. The wearable black body is emphatically corporeal (extending the frail white body by making it more capable, more present, more real), while the wearable yellow female body is desirable for its aesthetic affinity and its material compatibility with the unreal.

If Peele’s contemporary American horror story peels back the layers of white psychic investment in black flesh, then Ghost in the Shell alerts us to what yellow female bodies promise their master: not the harnessing of durable organic flesh, or even the challenge of a psychic depth to plumb, but instead a pure escape into the dream of artificial ontology. The Major is always already surface, thing, robot, and shell. This is why the black body has to be “cut into” while the yellow body is “uploaded”; why the doll that is the black man requires violent manual manipulation (think, too, of Ralph Ellison’s image of the puppet and its visible threads), but the doll that is the yellow woman is automechanical; why Dr. Armitage’s operating room is a gory laboratory in the basement while Dr. Quelet’s operating room is a clean, hygienic high-tech lab. Both are nightmares, but one scene of brutality leaves visible, material residues, while the other leaves no traces of its violence.

(Is Kyoko’s nominal Asianness a perfect cover and alibi for her hidden artificiality, or is Kyoko’s flawless mechanical servitude the ideal cover and alibi for her Asianness?)

It is as if this black female body has been discarded not only because it did not cater to Nathan’s penchant for yellow women but also because black femininity entails a fleshness, a corporeal schema, that is finally indigestible to the machine aesthetics at work in Nathan’s and the film’s imagination.

The brutal final act of Hansel and Gretel, for example, in which the children push the “devouring mother” into a burning pit, is about “total happiness” and the right to “look upon the outcome of things as friendly.”31 In the modern fairy tale Ex Macshina, the outcome is not exactly friendly, but Ava may be offering us her own brand of radical theory: the proposition that existing, however isolated and provisional, may be the only mode of survival in the enchantment of objecthood.

Isn’t it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petrified pain? Doesn’t what we do in the realm of stone suggest this? To the extent we don’t let it roll, but erect it, and make of it something fixed, isn’t there in architecture itself a kind of actualization of pain?11

Yet this piece is doing more than articulating a nostalgia for the flesh. It insists that commodity is also art, body, thingness, memory and its evaporation. It is not only that bodies leave their residue in the things they produce (an insight often pointed out by scholars of object studies), but also that objectness reveals the complex and hybrid preconditions of personhood. The history of the conflation of persons and things has rendered flesh into something more aggregated and inorganic than we are comfortable allowing. More than memorializing bodies that might otherwise not be remembered, Drew’s sculptural ornament instantiates the thingness of human labor and life. These dense, striated, erupting bales of cotton are not simply metaphors but the material insistence of object life.