Indira Neill Hoch

Chen utilizes Xu Bing’s “Cultural Animal” and his prior artwork “A Case Study in Transference” for writing about translation, transnationalism, and queer possibilities that arise from trans- crossings. The typically less linguistically active animal (live pig) is painted with gibberish Roman alphabet characters while the linguistically more active human (male mannequin) is painted with false Chinese characters. The live pig eventually sexually mounts the mannequin after female pig sex hormones have been applied to it. Chen argues that “[Bing] inverted industrialized society’s normative animate control relations of (human) subject over (animal) object by rendering the human static and passive and the pig active and alive.” Important to “Cultural Animal” is that neither text can be translated, or even read.

However, arguing that neither text can be translated assumes that a viewer has experience with either Roman alphabet character languages (you could even argue, that really they would have to know all Roman alphabet languages to know for sure that the text was unreadable, to verify its status as gibberish) or Chinese writing. The false characters “frustrates any process of reading.” But this also assumes a desire to read like one reads a book. The ink on the pig’s body is smeared, and this itself invokes the possibility of reading, that maybe the viewer is missing part of what makes the text legible because it has already been wiped away.

OTL

uwu

These are two sets of Roman characters that for weeks remained illegible to me, or rather, I read them wrong. I’ve got to admit now, I’m not as hip as I used to be. When I read internet research and think about how different the perspective of researchers in their 30s and 40s is compared to me, I’ve always had a touch of “well, they didn’t grow up with it like I grew up with it…” OTL and uwu were sick reminders of how quickly text on the internet becomes illegible. My pride kept me from asking what they meant, or even looking them up, having already convinced myself that I knew what they were. I read both as abbreviations (saying oh-tee-el and you-wee-you in my head as I moved past them). OTL? On the level? People seemed to use it when apologizing for why they hadn’t posted lately. I had no explanation for “uwu” figuring eventually it would just click.

How wrong I was. They weren’t abbreviations, they were emoticons. OTL, it’s a little guy, his head (O) is on the floor, his body is bent over with his arms reaching down (T) and he’s bent at the knees, his feet behind him (L). It conveys exasperation. I’d been foiled in falling into the linguistic conventions of “lol” and “gtg, brb” rather than that of “^_^;” or “:)” And “uwu?” It’s a face, just its eyes are closed, those u’s are eyelids, the w is a mouth. I still don’t really see it.

Chen writes that Xu Bing sees art as being aligned with market development, rather than being at odds with governments, resisting readings of his work as pointed critiques of Chinese or U.S. politics. Where art reviewers may want to read Xu Bing’s work as participating in a government vs. art system of meaning, he sees them as collaborating in a different way, operating in a different symbolic system. The inability to translate has little to do with the illegibility of characters and more to do with the inability to merge one thought system into another. If your mentality looking at “Cultural Animal” is to read, reading is frustrated. If your mentality is trying to get the pig to mount the mannequin, you stop worrying about the characters and just smear hormones on it. If your goal is to talk about animancies, there is material for that too.

What Chen’s book does so well is shift between systems of meaning, even ones that seem somewhat off at first. Linguistic systems act on visual systems that reinforce behavioral systems. They’re not perfect mappings on to one another, there’s no translation of 19th century advertisements (even as she reads them for their symbolic underpinnings), because they can’t be meaningfully translated. They sit inside multiple systems that can’t be detangled.

Coming back to OTL, part of its function is that I misread it. As part of the vernacular of the internet, with new bodies entering online spaces faster than others exit (all of those kids coming in….while I’m not leaving) mildly coded slang differentiates groups in spaces that otherwise might not have strong differentiation. Youth don’t join facebook, or have minimal facebook presence, because their parents are already there; they’re already under constant surveillance.

Something written down in familiar characters, something I think I can read, may actually be more opaque than false Chinese characters to a Chinese reader. At least in their frustration, they know eventually that it can’t be read. In ethnography, one goal is often to understand the meanings that group members construct for their own practices and behaviors. But what about misreadings or mistranslations? In an intensely connected word, meanings crash up against one another all the time, and those misreadings may be taken up as practices in themselves.