In “The Parallax View” (2006), Slavoj Žižek identifies a class of social antagonisms as a “traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism” that escapes symbolization (24). These antagonisms can be glimpsed only through internal contradictions. They serve to hold the society in a state of tension, neither completely disrupted, nor allowed to stabilize.
We use Žižek’s framework to investigate the tensions underling Beijing’s physical and psychical remapping, and, in particular, we use the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics as evidence for the emergence in Beijing of a third cartography of the city, one that has overwritten the Imperial and Maoist organizations of city space. This third mapping corresponds to Soja’s definition of “thirdspace” in that it represents a space where the city’s history is thoroughly subsumed into a system of global image making. The ceremony completes a process where the city becomes identified with its filmic image.
The apparent success of the modernization of Beijing, a success which animates the ceremony, might seem to promise a continuous flow linking the old to the new. But that continuity is better understood as the continuity created by a nostalgia film. It is the triumphant conversion of history into easily consumable imagery fit for consumption in what Rey Chow calls the “global regime of value making.”
|Keywords:||Beijing, Film, Olympics, Ideology, Parallax|
Assistant Professor, Department of English, City University of New York, New York, New York, USA
Student, Department of Liberal Arts, International Christian University, Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan