Elizabeth Brown

Arrest the Machine: Exposing the Meaning-Making Apparatus in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE

In this paper, I examine how Theresa Cha’s DICTEE arrests the unified, colonizing gaze of the audience and fractures desires for a Lacanian reflection of the self. Instead of experiencing a constructed illusion of reality, DICTEE‘s audience confronts a collage-like text that “Like ice. Metal. Glass. Mirror. Receives none admits none.” The breakdowns written into the text function to reveal the mechanics of meaning-making that the audience brings to the reading act. Turning the gaze back onto readers, DICTEE asks them to locate themselves within networks of power. Since Cha employs filmic elements within DICTEE‘s form, I begin by explaining how audiences attempt to make meaning when they approach reading/viewing in the cinema. Influenced by aesthetic traditions dating back to the Renaissance, the gaze of the Western subject functions to control objects by creating an illusion of reality constructed around the self. The positioning of subjects in a one-to-one relationship with objects allows a two-fold identification: subjects take on the pleasure-seeking gaze (scopophilia) of the hidden artist, which controls the framing and construction of the work-as-spectacle, and subjects identify egotistically with the depicted protagonist, who controls the linear sequence of events in the frame. By exposing the mechanics of the production process, Cha bars readers from accessing an illusion of reality through images or narrative in the text. Instead, the pleasure-seeking gaze of the audience is linked with acts of colonization and violence in the broader political world. DICTEE restores agency to subjects by repositioning them in way that allows for a critique of forgotten ideologies.

Elizabeth C. Brown is studying for an M.A. in English literature at the University of Washington. Her primary interests are in transnational literatures and poetry written in the United States. A few months ago, she returned from a year working in East Java with Volunteers in Asia (VIA), a non-governmental organization that creates opportunities for cultural exchange between students from the U.S., Southeast Asia, China, and Japan through volunteer work. Now, she is enjoying living back in Seattle.