Tales of Happy Life -Narratives, Subjectivities and Politics of Resistance in the Protest against Demolishing Lo-Sheng Sanatorium
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Wong, Wing-Kwong
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
During the protest against demolishing Losheng (Happy Life) sanatorium, the role and position of the Losheng inhabitants, who are mostly aged leprosy patients, is the point at issue in the full light of public notice. In this paper, I take a multi-narrative strategy to explore the highly debated issue of subjectivity and politics of resistance of these residents, and thus I juxtapose three versions of narratives which were mediated by different cultural forms.
The first narrative is to represent inhabitants of Losheng from my own perspective and horizon, based on my first-hand experience as a young activist during the up to now three-years protest, and it is mediated by the cultural form of the taken notes and inter/intra-group communication. It take the so-called ‘political process’ as the main writing framework. In which, the way to understand inhabitants of Losheng are confined by the conventional sense of ‘social movement’, pre-existing analytical categories, and the time/space frame of this genre of narrative.
In the second version of the narrative, I review great volume of press report and strategically re-read and re-inscribe the antagonistic/coordinating relations between inhabitants, administrators and other local elites. It considers residents as the historical agent who made their own ‘History’ with spontaneity and consciousness, and thus I reconstruct a historical figuration about the inhabitants as intending subject of resistance. However, it is just through the very strategic reading/inscribing that the productive mechanism of such narrative tenaciously and in complicity reproduces the desires for a single, linear, and objective reality which can be totally represented.
The third narrative is based on the in-depth interviews of three leading members of the Losheng inhabitants, mediated by the word-by-word record of the interviewees’ oral histories, which endeavors to provide an opportunity for individual resident to ‘speak for himself/herself’. Nevertheless, the ideological issue is still difficult to escape, unfolding in how they understand and represent the forms of oppression, the possibility of action, and the relationship with others.
In the above-mentioned analysis, the three genre of narratives , either based on representing ‘others’ from my empirical experience, constructing objective reality (about ‘others’) by compiling historical document, or inviting them to make their own voices, imply three facets of the same structure of subjectivity. Eventually the ‘others’ are still “absolute others” extrinsic to their own existence. How to establish a stage for those “disadvantaged” to voice their views? In fact, ‘to let them speak themselves’ and ‘to speak for them’ is the two sides of the same coin.
Furthermore, attempts to probe the Subjectivity/subjectivities of Losheng inhabitants are destined for failure. It is a secret blank wrapped by heterogeneous narratives. At the end, we have to problematize and sensitize the desire for a single reality, and probe into how it produces multiple and contradictory subjectivities through mediation of cultural forms. What is feasible is to construct/deconstruct/reconstruct the writing subjects, either linguistically or bodily, in praxis of the politics of writing.
Subjects
多重敘事策略
主體性
抵抗政治
他者
絕對他者
真實的慾望
multi-narrative strategy
cultural form
represent
subjectivities
politics of resistance
others
absolute others
desire for reality
Type
thesis
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