some notes on HistoriCITY from Yeung Yang (part2)

Interestingly, during the Roundtable, the discursive framework of multiplicity, plurality, interdisciplinarity, diversity, etc. was energetically produced, circulated, and advocated, as if the exclusion (however vaguely) identified by the organizers, specific to the Hong Kong art history writing “context”, another much welcomed catchword in the Roundtable, ought to be dismissed and talked past (in order to move on). I am suspicious of this discursive framework not because I am against multiplicity per se; in fact I do not intend to take a stand here. Rather, I would like to ask what this discursive framework has become in the Roudtable? How was it allowed to determine the approach of Hong Kong art history writing, and at the expense of what other ways of understanding? Within this discursive framework were questions like “Whose histories?”, “Whose voice?” repeatedly posed by several speakers, which gave even greater force to the “imperative of giving everyone a voice.”[Rey Chow, “Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized, A Different Type of Question about Revolution” in Writing Diasporas, Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993: 145.] Rey Chow has critically revealed how posing these questions that is already a form of privilege “mostly affordable for those who can stand apart and view the world with altruistic concern.” These questions also fail to put their own condition of possibility into question:“The question that this question cannot ask, since it is the condition of its own possibility, is the morefundamental inequality between theory—the most sophisticated speaking instance, one might say—and the oppressed.”

I am thinking of those situations, places, interests, for which such a “public demonstration” of and on Hong Kong art history writing as a Roundtable would be “unthinkable, undesirable, and impracticable.”[Derrida, ibid., p.56.] Had the solidarity expressed with these concepts adequately understood its own contexts - the Roundtable itself and its concern, namely Hong Kong art history writing, or was it driven by the rule of “compulsory discursivity”[Wendy Brown, Edgework, Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press, 2005:85.] that repeated the inequality of power in Hong Kong art history writing, if one intends to argue this inequality exists?

This relates to the term “local”. More than once, in public talks and including this Roundtable, I have noticed that the term “local” created a demand on some to announce he/she is “qualified” as “local” in order for his/her voice to be heard in a different, as if more legitimate, way. A term made present by the organizers (as an adjective that refers more to tendencies) to compensate for its absence in the past became coercive for some, for it created the demand of having to pass as a “local” (a noun to refer to the identity of a person). During this Roundtable, some speakers proposed that the meaning of “local” could be so unstable and caught in the binary produced by the ideological “global”, that it couldn’t usefully inform the project of writing Hong Kong art history. It is always easier to dismiss binarism in theory than to practice thinking without it through and through. At the same time, there is a case to argue for duality without falling into the trap of dualism. I personally do not find critical currency with the term “local”. But the very fact that it was used within particular situated moments and had been conferred some form of currency is itself interesting. Recently in a gender studies class on public space, I posed the question “What makes a ‘local’ local, if there is such a person?” Students came up with such ideas as the sense of (belonging to) places and time (as everyday, continuous) that highlight the quality of the relation of themselves to what takes place and takes shape in our immediate environment (however changing and contingent). These ideas were able to articulate the concept of the “local” so much so that this term became redundant. My point is, it is only when the Roundtable understands itself as taking place in a specific space-time as a specific, though tentative, public that it would begin to understand its responsibility, and this public and those to come would benefit from this understanding being exposed, discussed, and negotiated.