(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
understood as complex, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of
existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and
peripheries” (Appadurai Disjuncture and Difference, internet source). The non-fixity of
boundaries mentioned in his work gives to the fluidity of five arenas: “(a) ethnoscapes; (b)
mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes” (ibid). The affix “scape” is
Appadurai’s qualification that these spaces are perspectival constructs “inflected very much by
the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states,
multinationals, disaporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements
(whether religious, political or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as
villages, neighbourhoods and families” (ibid). Appadurai’s elaboration of the global celebrates
migratory movements and boundary shifts but it does not eradicate the need for some sort of
identification, a search for one’s roots, albeit his citation from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined
Community (1983): “One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison” that aids
the argument that underlying the ideal of a global village is an ideology of cultural assimilation.
Attributing this search for commonality to some higher source, in this case the Rivera source,
Saussy’s reworks the analogy of “the living tree” of “cultural China”, premised upon
archeological finding, to expose its weakness. Using it as the spine of his argument, the “trunk”
ironically informs us of the discursive susceptibility of privileging the source, which can also be
found in his use of the mountainous source of rivers. Rather than the trunk, this thesis, inspired
by Saussy’s figure, prefers to think of the tributaries, figured again as roots, but roots always
already dispersed – an inversion and displacement that does not only have the living tree
uprooted and turned upside down; it is also “imag(in)ed” through a metaphor that does not have
a unifying spine – the figure of allium propagation: significations invigorated with a
dissemination likened to that of onion seeds whose spaces are like the liminary sites between
letters and whose inflections are comparable to the small bulbs which are transplanted so that the
propagation proliferates and expands such that one has spheres superimposed giving to a
symbolic of rings upon rings intertwined, arguably metaphorized by the Ring series. Not only has
Nakata’s Ringu (1998) spawned the Hollywood versions, the 2005 American version is also
directed by him; the multiple remakes in Japan itself in the form of sequels, television series and
anime are instances of the above-mentioned dissemination. In addition, it has a Korean
adaptation called The Ring Virus (1999) where the leitmotif of the thesis can be found, the
apparition biogenetically producing twin terrors.
The Korean titular remake is a significant analogy to ideological dissemination. Thus Callahan’s
celebration of the socio-ethical interactions prioritized in Asia, “best described in terms of the
social ethics of people-to-people relations that aim to encourage different ways of being” (2007,
232), is laudable. But we may still have to be vigilant to the ideological underpinnings of
persuasive maneuverings. “Soft” power does not mean that it is not coercion especially if a
weaker party is verbally forced into doing something that may not be in its interest. Nakata’s
Ringu is of particular import because it deals with a matter specifically Levinasian, the ethical
relation to an unanticipated other and an alterity that horrifies only because of its recognizable
and, yet, distorted features. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics as Callahan has in his essay,
then Nakata’s alienated being, Sadako, is an instance of the existential misfits with which we
may have to come face-to-face in Callahan’s idealistic postulation. In cultural terms, the answer
lies with the politics of recognition, the willingness to accept the other as s/he is. What Callahan
has not foreseen is this: Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of ethics means an unreserved openness to
an immeasurable Other; a welcome that potentially overwhelms and erases selfhood.
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