ASA 2024

Remarks for “Disengage! Toward an Ungrounded Asian/American Aesthetics”

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The conference theme of “grounded engagements” reflects a desire for being firmly rooted, as though critical inquiry has become unmoored and now stumbles through lofty airs and improper tones. It also carries a sense of stuckness, immobility, and confinement, as in one of our first lessons in performative utterances: the stern parental grunt, “You’re grounded!” But just as every child learns to refuse house arrest, steals out the window, flies into the night, and pursues more bad behavior, let us become ungrounded and pull Asian American studies along for a ride off the rails.

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We tell ourselves and others that Asian American studies emerged out of grounded struggles on university campuses. We are quick to remind people that “Asian American” was originally a political identity, and that it should stay that way. There has been little willingness to consider notions of Asian American being that are not historical situated, socially specified, and politically bent. The grounding mythology of Asian American studies is perhaps emphatically anti-ontological. Only a fool would try to develop something like an ontology of Asian America.

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I have been trying to develop an ontology of Asian America. Ontological thinking has rightly gotten a bad rap for setting forth first principles of being that are given and universal. Yet dismissals of ontology writ large might confine Asian American studies to binaries such as being/becoming, essence/relation, nature/culture, universality/particularity, philosophy/history. Might there be minor forms of ontological thinking, and how might they inflect Asian American studies?

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One problem with grounded critical inquiry is its tendency to mistake its descriptions for actual entities as though they were discrete wholes that can be comprehensively known. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls this the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” The misplaced concreteness is not a part of an actual entity that could be known if we looked harder. It is a field of potentiality that is immanent to actual entities but not reducible to any one. Potentiality is an incorporeal side of actual entities—their relational side, if you will. It cannot be known because it is indeterminate; it is not yet certain whether a potentiality will actualize, or what it might actualize as. Grasping potentiality requires abstract thought. As Brian Massumi writes, “The problem with the dominant models in cultural and literary theory is not that they are too abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete.”

To grasp the incorporeality of Asian America, I want to entertain the ungrounding thought of Asian America being everything everywhere all at once—at least for a while and up to a point. For such a position risks a view from nowhere, which is too often that of whiteness or a voracious imperial gaze. Yet temporarily beholding this perspective enables us to heed Whitehead’s point that entities are discontinuous in actuality but continuous in potentiality. It may help us grasp Asian America as a shapeshifting field of potentiality rather than as a series of actualities.

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I don’t care about Everything Everywhere All at Once as an emblem of Asian American representation or cinematic success. I encounter it as a provocation to think Asian America metaphysically and ontologically. This is compelled in the film by: the intersection of multiple scales of time, such as the biographical and the cosmic; loosening the hold of humanness over Asian America; and the multiverse, an infinite variety of worlds. Each world is produced at a fork in the road, where even the path not taken becomes a world of its own. I focus on the multiverse and its relation to nonsense in order to think Asian America ontologically. Let us treat the film’s genre not as an absurdist comedy-drama—as Wikipedia does—but as a nature documentary about Asian America as part of the “cosmic foam of existence,” as the character Alpha Waymond puts it.

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Nonsense plays an important role in the film. It enables characters to “verse-jump,” or to access the experience, knowledge, and skills of a different version of oneself—a version that exists in a world produced by a path not taken. Verse-jumping sways the course of events toward an unanticipated end. Importantly, verse-jumping is only possible when a character does something nonsensical to who they are. If we take verse-jumping not as plot device but as a philosophical concept, we might see that transgressions of common sense enable Asian America to become otherwise.

What is the relationship between Asian American studies and nonsense? Does Asian American studies accommodate nonsense? Or does it consolidate itself by getting rid of nonsense—in content, method, and institutionalization? What might Asian American studies be like if were not grounded in interdisciplinary common sense, but instead were ungrounded by nonsense?

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The multiverse concept only takes us so far. In the film, the multiverse is comprehensively mapped out. While the multiverse seems to be infinite, it is really a total set of permutations that can be known. No potentiality there. To retrieve potentiality, let us verse-jump out of the film and into the neighboring world of speculative philosophy.

Imagine a cosmos in which there are rifts not between worlds but within a world—rifts that mark an actualization of Asian America on the one hand and an excess of Asian American potentiality on the same hand. These potentialities are what did not happen but remain available to make a difference at a later moment. Political theorist William Connolly calls these potentialities the “powers of the false” while Lisa Lowe calls them “past conditional temporalities,” which treat the past “not as fixed or settled, not as inaugurating the temporality into which our present falls, but as a configuration of multiple contingent possibilities, all present, yet none inevitable.” Here, the rifts are not between worlds but rifts in time. The actualization of potentialities is nonsensical to the reigning order of sociopolitical common sense, and not only because it marks an onset of real novelty. It makes us ask: how can something that did not happen make a real difference in and to the course of time?

This notion of potentiality blurs historical thinking with ontological thinking. If Asian Americanists want to think through potentiality, it becomes important to ask, “What is being? What is time? What is reality? What are causality?” These kinds of questions are addressed by films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, writers like Ruth Ozeki and Franny Choi, and theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, William Connolly, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, and Erin Manning.

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I close in search of an ungrounded mode of critique that can engage Asian America as potentiality. We might heed the words of an anonymous philosopher, who said this in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in 1980: “I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence… Perhaps it would invent them sometimes... I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.” This kind of critique does not uncover truth or demystify power. It is not guided by the will to know. It is not judgmental. Many of us might be surprised to know that these words were from that paragon of critique, none other than Michel Foucault.

I dream of this kind of critique in Asian American studies. A critique that spends its best energy on cultivating what Asian America could be rather than on trying to know what Asian America is and has been. A critique that can suss out potentialities, multiply signs of Asian American existence, and trace a history of events that did not happen. A critique that makes bold leaps of imagination. A critique more inventive than interpretive. A critique that blurs with creation. In this kind of Asian American studies, nonsensical paths deserve special consideration, and even a falling rock is worthy of love. The question is not “How do we know the ground beneath us?” or “How can we stay grounded?” or “If we jump, where should we land?” The question is: “Will you fly with me—off a precipice, out of bounds, into the dark, to be together the lightning of possible storms, to carry Asian America to yet another power that cannot be known, cannot be judged, but that is sensible to toy with, and not so sensible too?”