Think of a child playing the animal. It is certainly easy to sentimentalize the scene. But what if we take it seriously— that is, look to the aspects of it that are truly ludic in the most creative sense. Simondon writes that the child’s consciousness of the animal involves far more than the simple recognition of its substantial form. One look at a tiger, however fleeting and incomplete, whether it be in the zoo or in a book or in a film or video, and presto! the child is tigerized. Transformation-in-place. The perception itself is a vital gesture. The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life— giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw. The child immediately launches itself into a movement of surpassing the given, remaining remarkably faithful to the theme of the tiger, not in its conventionality but from the angle of its processual potentiality.Remaining processually faithful to a vital theme has nothing to do with reproducing it. On the contrary, it involves giving it a new interpretation, in the musical sense of performing a new variation on it. The child does not imitate the visible corporeal form of the tiger. It prolongs the tiger’s style of activity, transposed into the movements of the child’s own corporeality. What the child caught a glimpse of was the dynamism of the tiger, as a form of life. The child saw the tiger’s vitality affect: the potentially creative powers of life enveloped in the visible corporeal form. The tiger’s vitality affect passes through what a formal analysis might isolate as its corporeal form. But it never coincides with that visible form. The life’s powers that come to expression through the form’s deformations sweep the form up within their own supernormal dynamism, which moves through the given situation, toward others further down the line. This transsituational movement is in excess over the form. It is the very movement of the visually given form’s processual self-surpassing. This is what the child saw— all of it, in a glimpse; all in a flash. Not just a generic animal shape: a singular vital movement sweepingly immanent to the visible form. What children see: the immanence of a life. Not “the” tiger: tigritude. Children do not just catch sight of a tiger form. They have an intuitively aesthetic vision of the tigeresque as a dynamic form of life. It is this they transpose when they play animal. Not onto their own form but into their own vital movements.[...]Across the serial variations, tigritude begins to escape. It begins to surpass given situations in which we might reasonably expect a tiger to find itself, and the modes of importance those situations present. The tensions of tigeresque corporeality in- forms the childlike corporeality in play. It immanently animates it— and is animated by it in return. The replay series stretches out the tigeresque tensions, prolonging them into a transindividual tensor. The situational tensions put into play undergo an inventively deforming pressure that vectorizes them in the direction of the supernor-mal. Tigritude takes flight. The givens of the tigeresque situation, as conventionally known, are surpassed, following exploratory tensors extrapolating from the child’s enthusiasm of the body (Massumi 2014: 86).
From the introduction to Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics:
If we are to learn to adapt in this world, we will need to do so with all the other creatures; seeing from their perspective is central to re-organizing our knowledge and perceptions. The ability to think the human species implied by the terminology of the Anthropocene within a particular Umwelt (a concept proposed by Jakob von Uexküll) affords us the possibility of opening up and onto the life worlds of other species. To think of ourselves as biological organisms first, as one type among the worlds of other critters, allows for more open and curious relations to the other beings with whom we co-compose the world.59 This kind of meta-species thinking—exposing the interconnections, while allowing other animals to come to the fore—unfolds in Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson’s “A History According to Cattle” and Ho Tzu Nyen’s “We’re Tigers”. The latter portrays the importance of tigers in Malay culture, blurring the distinction between the human and the tiger, and thereby displaying on a visceral level how the human is completely entangled with the (unseen) other. Indeed, this is why “the Javanese do not, after sundown, utter the word macan (tiger) for fear of invoking its presence.” To acknowledge this predatory dimension of nature, to recognize both danger and fear, is no less critical to a multispecies perspective than is welcoming among our human worlds the multitude of worlds composed by our companions. (61-62)
Speech is spell, and words once ejected into the air, warp the very weave of worlds. This is why, as Robert Wessing tells us, the Javanese do not, after sun down, utter the word macan (tiger) for fear of invoking its presence. Instead, they refer to him as guda, from the Sanskrit word gudha, which means hidden, or secret.
The dispersal of tigers across the Malay world was completed more than a million years ago, long before the coming of Homo sapiens. Tigers have always been here, at the origin of our histories.
What one cannot know, or does not wish to know, one passes in silence. This is why certain tribal groups in Malaya refer to the tiger only by stretching out their right hands in the shape of a claw. The Gayo of Sumatra call him mpu uton (grandfather of the forest) or mpu tempat (grandfather of the place), while the Acehnese refer to him as datok (grandfather or ancestor), or gop (other person, someone; used also for people from another village or place). Yet these aliases tell us something of the tiger’s secret: it is a creature of the forest, it is a being of nature and it is other to man – yet not completely and radically so. For it is also kin, bound by blood to man in the distant horizon of an ancestral time. To speak of this zoophilia is not to think of the tiger, but with the tiger, as a medium in which thought can be propelled into a realm anterior to the formation of the human mind.
When the early human settlers arrived in the region, they favored as their habitat the transitory zones between the forest and the waters, an ecotone already occupied by other large, ground-dwelling mammals like the deer, the boar, and the tiger that preyed on them. Man had not yet the capacity to dominate this savanna-like landscape, for which the tiger was so perfectly adapted to. With its feet perfectly designed for stealth, and its eyes attuned to darkness, the tiger, with its striped coat of yellow and black, melted into the golden brown fields of tall Lallang grasses, silently stalking its prey from behind, awaiting the perfect moment in which it would bound up at the throat. To live in such a terrain, man had to be plugged into an animalism, characterized by a heightening of the senses and an intense connectivity to the tiger which is to be consummated in form of interspecies interchangeability. This is why in the Malay world, the tiger was believed to live in villages, where the houses have walls of human skin, and the roofs are thatched with human hair. And in the midst of crossing lakes and rivers, the tiger can dissolve into the shape of man.
The first written record of the Malayan ‘weretiger’ comes from an early-fifteenth-century Chinese source, The Triumphant Visions of the Shores of the Ocean, by Ma Huan, who served as an interpreter to Admiral Zheng He, the great navigator-eunuch of Ming dynasty China. Of his visit to Malacca, he wrote, “In the town there are tigers which can assume human form; they enter the markets, and walk about, mixing with populace. If anyone recognized one of these creatures, he would seize it and kill it.” There were ways by which one could discern a weretiger. In his human form, he is believed to lack the philtrum (the cleft on the upper lip). He is usually a being without a fixed abode – a vagrant, a beggar, or a shaman who traverses the liminal space between nature and civilization.
The British colonial rule of Malaya brought about an unprecedented disruption that was at once ecological and cosmological. Tigers were massacred, and weretigers exiled to the realm of folklore. But like a Leibnizian divine machine, the tiger keeps returning to haunt the region in reconfigured forms. In 1942, the Japanese 25th Army led by Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita – known also as the “Tiger of Malaya”, exacted revenge upon the British forces in Malaya. Moving swiftly through the forest – savage, amphibious and full of guile in a battle – the Japanese forces seem to embody the very qualities that had made the tiger such a feared adversary of the early British settlers.
The principal resistance in Malaya against the Japanese occupation was the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army, a guerilla organization under the leadership of the Malayan Communist Party. When the Japanese forces surrendered in 1945, the epithet of ‘tiger’ gradually transferred to the Communists, who now constituted a very real threat to the returning British forces which were deflated and weakened by the war. The British eventually responded by intensifying their regulation of forested zones, offering cash bounties, organizing hunts and ambushes – similar strategies previously employed to annihilate the Malayan tigers. And in the shadows of the dense tropical forest, the British hunters of Communist guerillas sometimes found themselves coming face to face with tigers instead.
To embark upon the trail of the weretiger is to follow through with its line of perpetual metamorphosis – an anthropomorphic, yet non-anthropocentric line that is at once materialist and metaphorical. And in the myriad entanglements of this metamorphic line, one senses the shape of a Malayan world that has yet to be articulated.
Painting by Buddhist Ito Jakuchu, who slightly anthropomorphisized his animals, but in a way that remains alien and inscrutable, with that distinctly more-than-human vibe:
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