Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 18:02:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: shuang chiang/Jizu/the weight of the veil


'The city recorded through photographic images became 
a mask, and the feminine presence in the city is
recorded by its absence[Nesbit, In the Absence of the
Parisienne, Colomina, Sexuality and Space].'

'Mixing metonomy illiberally with synecdoche in
incestuous configurations jostling the room in the
space of the text and belying the author's claim to
'dispassionate...intellectual honesty'...The normative
assumption underlying Scott's vision of 'good' city
form are filtered indirectly through the successes of
early reformers and later reflected in the models of
the City Beautiful movement.'
[Sandercock, Making the Invisible Visible: A
Multicultural Planning History, Berkeley: U. of Ca.
Press, 1998]

In The Veil is Burning, furious over the paltry dowry
she brought to her marriage, in-laws gag and kill the
wife-to-be.

In Chinese cosmology, shuang chiang 'Descent of the
Hoar Frost', Oct. 24 - Nov.8, is reminiscent of
Fenillon quoted in A Thousand Plateaus: 'Lines of the
universe are feminine, lines of the state,
prostitutional.'

Il faut aller maintenant jusqu'au bout, consentir a
echange Roberte contre d'autres femmes, accepter a
vouloir qu'elle le soit a vous-meme. Theodore reste
surd, il sait que la vraie repetition est dans le don,
dans une economie du don qui s'oppose a l'economie
mercantile de l'echange (hommage a Georges Bataille).
Que l'hote, et sa reflexion dans les deux sens du mot,
s'opposent a l'hotel. Et que, dans l'hote et dans le
don, la repetition surgit comme la plus haute
puissance de l'inechangeable: l'epouse, prostituee par
l'epoux, n'en reste pas moins l'epouse, le bien
inechangeable de l'epoux.'
[Deleuze, Logique du Sens, p.334]

Taixuanjing (by Yang Hsiung)says that yang now goes
deep to hide and to conserve itself as yin expands
towards its solstitial zenith.

'..were to be observed in order to establish the
approach of the solstices and equinoxes, universally
observed junctures of great practical and religious
significance....When the constellation Ssu [Greek 'pi'
Scorpio] appears, frost falls. When the rivers dry up,
complete the bridges.'
[Guoyu(Sibu beiyao ed.)trans. James Hart]

It is interesting to note the security activity
currently in play on bridges in the U.S. such as the
Golden Gate. The Guoyu also contains the earliest use
of the word shaman(xi) and shamaness(wu). See
Pankenier's in-depth article 'The Cosmo-political
Background of Heaven's mandate,' Early China (1995)
20:121.

'She may claim in interviews and write in Islamic
journals that women should restrict themselves to the
home, but in her life, and significantly, in writing
her life, she marginalizes domesticity and glorifies
political action. She asserts her independence by
establishing a disjunctive between her words and her
actions. She speaks in piously normative terms and
then proceeds to act expediently and sometimes even in
contravention of what she has just said.

She explains that such exceptionality becomes
mandatory when Islamic norms and values are completely
understood and they are redirected towards building
the Islamic state. Are we to believe the prescriptive
articles for domestic others or the descriptive
self-authoring by a Muslim woman soldier? Perhaps we
should believe both at the same time. 

...Women in Islamic groups everywhere are now using
her language of accommodation and resistance with no
sense of contradiction...since 1500 years ago...were
equally addressed, and were equal partners in matters
of state...Whereas the feminists consistently stressed
the superiority of the West in their feminist goals
and actions, Al-Ghazali was commited to feminism
within Islam...That is the mosque...women also acquire
an identity there that is very difficult to contest
because it is gendered with an unparalleled power: the
force of the sacred.'
[Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism
Through Literature, Routledge, 2001, p.103]

'The collection of A Thousand and One Nights contains
the didactic story ot Tawaddud, a slave girl that
astonishes the 'ulama' by her extensive knowledge of
Islam. With regard to jihad we read: 'He said: 'What
is the jihad and what are its essential
elements(arkan)?' She answered; 'An attack on us by
the unbelievers, the presence of an Imam, preparedness
and constance when one meets the enemy.'
[Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, Markus
Wiener:Princeton, 1996, p.187]

>From the Huliguchen(Hu li chu tan) Fire Calendar of
the farmer-nomads(3,000 B.C.)and Mul Apin clay
tablets, one can begin to reconstruct the
astronomer-priests'(shaman's) intentions and
inventions, variations on a theme. Clement's
'creativity' passages in The Feminine and the Sacred
should perhaps not be forgotten here. One of the
earliest Chinese star catalogs contains reference to
these instances of what Edward Schafer, in his Pacing
the Void, shows what was expressed as something like
'disastrous geography.'

Xiaochun and Kistemaker's The Chinese Sky During the
Han: Constellating Stars and Society, Brill, 1997,
p.154 has 'Jizu _____(Chinese character); (Lupus), 12
stars; many soldiers ready for battle in groups of
three. During the Qin and Han, continuous military
actions took place against the invading Xiongnu. This
culminated during the reign of Han Wu Di.

P.180 Cheqi _____(Lupus) three stars south of Qiguan;
special chariot cavalry units which were called
'garrisons' in the militia system. This part of the
Han sky has been projected on the solar calendar. It
corresponds to the end of summer, when enough food had
been produced for the soldiers to go on expedition.
Then the mounted army of Han Wu Di went on war against
the Xiongnu, between 130-119 B.C. There were annual
strikes of Chinese cavalry led by the famous general
Huo Qubing. This military picture was in the sky
already by the Shi Shi, and Gan Shi described the
scenery in more detail by creating some extra
constellations.'

Huo is also the Fire Star, Alpha Scorpio. At this
point in history and in this regard, see also the
capture of a wooden idol, the 'Golden Man' from the
Xiongnu. This resonance with jihad, then, seems to be
very old indeed.

'It is a radically sex-segregated society that insists
on the importance of appearance. It is already
tribalized in a world that Castells has described as
moving ever more in the direction of general
tribalization as communes of resistance and localized
identities are mobilizing to hold onto diversity as
empowering but also as generating globalized value. It
is also a country that is increasingly networking with
the rest of the world and which is now anticipating
and preparing for revolutionary change.

...Escobar describes women, environmentalists, and
'movements in the Third World' as being most likely to
succeed in these kinds of oppositinal practices
because of their historical attachment to [places
(italics)]. ...It mimics what was happening in the
seventh century when Muhammad brought his socialist
and feminist revolution to the feuding, patriarchal
tribes of Arabia.'
[Peters, p.117-120]

'Underneath the overt lies a covert message: U.S.
citizens can resove racial conflicts without
structurally altering society and without
self-transformation. Once during a Prague Spring,
Alexander Dubcek promised the very real option for
socialism with a human face. Now neoliberal forces
dangle the hyper-real carrot of capitalism with a
smiley face.'
[Huntington, Ecstatic Subjects, Asymmetrical
Reciprocity, p.282]

Rapture is not a new word, and is at least as old as
Chu Hsi's Confucianism. Yet Lucretius' 'austerity of
rapture' is here akin to Huntington's opposition to
Levinas' ethics on the point of her 'idealized
collapse into a concrete person...reified, exoticized
Other...Hypostatization of difference, reinstates
absolute identity.'

In another post, I hope to show Chu Hsi's Confucian
jen as lending credence to Kristeva's  idea of love,
and show the point at which Zizek's 'Love Thy
Neighbor? I Don't Think So' can be grasped in
Confucian terms while not having to sacrifice
Kristevan jen(humanity). In addition, the etymology of
jen will be shown to have interesting resonance with
the socius, food, and political boundaries, as it goes
back to Neolithic Beringia and Alaskan place names.

Finally, because ancient peoples used plants much more
than has been believed, I introduce a more militant
stance on their study and relevance to the general
socius, starting with my Ainu page at
http://chaosmosis_1.tripod.com/tashagabtarayoro 
and my next post on B. anthracis and militant
ethnobotany of the Middle Ages in a forthcoming post.






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