Trace Route: Questions for the Homeless
An E-terview with Lawrence Chua
by ricardo dominguez

Lawrence Chua is a novelist and editor who has been crossing the borders
between language, digital spaces, and social critique since the early
90s. His novel "Gold by the Inch" was recently published by Grove Press.
Chua is also the editor of MUAE 2: Collapsing New Buildings, a
collection of essays of critical dialogues between the most outspoken
intellectuals in Asia and the diaspora.

This e-terview re-maps his work on Buy One Get One
(http://red.ntticc.or.jp/HoME/), a two month homesteading online project
made with Shu Lea Cheang for the last years NTT/ICC Biennale in Tokyo.

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Q: Buy One Get One is the call of Late Capital–the possibility that an
object, a space, or some code will engender a bargain that beats the
price paid, or at least make it equal. The phrase seems to offer the
possibility that Capital will cancel Capital out and allow passage to
some other place. Did you find such a place? A space that beat the price
paid for digital (co)existence?

A: I'm not sure there is such a place in the sense of territory, but I
do believe that there is a space of sustenance and refuge where one can
let go of Capital and the sensual desires implicit in its construction.
I think that's the place of religion, and while it's not something I was
able to fully engage with while working on "Buy One Get One," it is
something that I believe is crucial to demystifying the euphoria that
surrounds "the call of Late Capital."

Q: Is refuge of the sprit the only hope against Late Capital? Is it
possible for religion not only to demystify Capital but to counter it
with the possibility of other forms of exchange? And do these
possibilities find space online?

A: I think "refuge of the spirit" is probably a good place to start, but
I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of a countering strategy. If
there's one thing I learned while working on "Buy One Get One," it was
about the unhealthy limitations of reactive, oppositional strategies.
And yes, the possibilities are everywhere. Even online.

Q: You both seem to have been caught between the sweat houses of code
and the cultural happy hour of trans-national exchange. Did find your
selves becoming more self aware of the history of your skins keeping you
out of the transborder flows of data? Or has this trace route enabled
you both to gather the logins and passwords necessary to answer the
riddles of this cultural Sphinx?

A: Those positions are constantly in flux. Skin is something transient
and always dying off, to be replaced by a new skin. It's important to
understand that double, or multi-consciousness in a way that isn't
reducible to either the jet-setting business executive with a laptop and
a cell phone, or the backpacking hippie with the lap top and cell phone
who wants to be down with the people and their struggles. I don't think
the project offered any moments of epiphany (as your question suggests
to me), but travelling with Shu Lea did remind me that a more useful way
of looking at identity is not so much asking "who am I?" as it is
querying, "what is this life?"

Q: So to be homeless, adrift, is to once more ask *what is existence?*
What does it mean to be skin under the signs of digital Dasein—where
*identity* is not bound by transient skin but by something more us than
we are?

A: I think that there are many things going on "under the signs of
digital dasein." One is the promise of no longer being burdened by skin,
of seeing the world as the container of the self, and maybe, even, of
jettisoning that baggage. But another is the re-inscription of that
self, that, as you say, may not be bound by skin but by "something more
us than we." It would be nice not to get too attached to some of the
categories of identity that "cyberspace" offers up.

These are mercantile categories, after all. While there is always the
risk of romanticizing a certain kind of homelessness, I would hope that
some of "Buy One Get One" suggested another way of thinking about the
home that is a teleological shelter against the remorselessness of
history: a home that is not defined solely by its walls and roof, but by
"our" relationship to the world around us, by the completely
interdependent nature of all things.

Q: I finally got a chance to read your new novel, a work that is filled
with the strange beauty and power at the edges of Late Capital. The
character is a ghost trying to become skin. To be both at home and
homeless at the same time. The novel shares deep connective tissues with
your online work with Shu Lea. Do you find your words crossover from
narrative forms into digital forms with the same tender energy? Or does
language go elsewhere online?

A: Thanks for the kind words. It's interesting that you see deep
connective tissues between it and the "Buy One Get One" project. I
hadn't really thought about it before, but I suppose you're right. I
started revising the proofs of "Gold by the Inch" on the floor of the
departure lounge in the airport at Abidjan, and carried them with me
through Beirut, and then picked them up again in Kuala Lumpur and worked
on them through Penang, Bangkok, and Seoul. It was eerie retracing some
of the ground the novel's narrator covered while revising the proofs.
When I started working on "Buy One Get One" I wanted to make a clear
break with the kind of writing I had done for "Gold by the Inch."

I was pretty much bored with the kind of lyrical, ornate writing I'd
done for a lot of the novel and was interested in exploring more pop
ugliness. The kind of writing I associate with a lot of Shu Lea's
earlier projects was also imbued with a kind of lyricism, and a kind of
vagueness. I wanted to go in almost the opposite direction: something
very direct that wasn't afraid to be ugly. Shu Lea and I batted around a
lot of different approaches. The final result, I think, is a dialogue
between the two. I am still doubtful about a lot of it. It did make me
think about the uses of narrative. The call to digital literacy was a
seduction to abandon the forms of the linear narrative, with all the
implications that has on our understanding of past, present, future,
history, memory, language, blah blah blah. But I think that's turned out
to be a largely empty seduction. Without the capacity to play with
different forms of narrative or language, it seems mostly masturbatory.
That is, unless you're engaging with it at NTT's ICC gallery, you're not
really engaging with it at all: it just becomes another narrative that
can only be understood in a linear context. On the other hand, writing
for a project like that certainly frees me to employ more fragmentary
forms of address without having to worry about how I'm going to put them
together in the end.

I guess what I'm thinking is that the novel and the more digital forms
of literature that we see on the Web and CD-ROMs have both emerged in
tandem with different episodes of imperial expansion. Think of the place
of the imperialist narrative in the work of Joseph Conrad, Herman
Melville, Jane Austen, etc. etc. etc. and the ways their novels ("Heart
of Darkness," "Moby Dick," Mansfield Park") called that adventure into
question while at the same time participating in it. They helped their
readers understand and rationalize or critique the kinds of monstrous
events that were happening at the time (colonialism, slavery, industrial
exploitation). In much the same way, so much of what we see in digital
art is informed by the language of "globalization" of the IMF and the
World Bank. That language, of both comfort and dis-ease with progress
and development, has its roots in novels like "Moby Dick." Whether it
goes other places is something that remains to be seen.

Q: You are also working with Shu Lea on part of the Brandon project.
What is the nature of queer desire online, or can it even be
represented? Can it be at home in this space?

A: Well, actually, I contributed very little to Shu Lea's new project. I
wrote two sketches for a character named Monster, but after "Buy One Get
One," I wanted to work on a very different narrative about crime and
evidence that I'm hoping will become a book. I don't know what queer
desire is, but I imagine it is very much like any kind of desire. I try
to understand desire in the context of the Buddhist philosophy of
"dependent co-origination."

Desire arises out of the six senses: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and
mind. These senses give rise to six kinds of contact. Those six kinds of
contact, give rise to feeling, again six kinds, by way of the eyes, ear,
nose, tongue, body and mind. Those six kinds of feeling give rise to six
kinds of desire: for forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations,
and mental objects. That desire conditions the arising of four kinds of
attachment: sensuous attachment, attachment to views, attachment to
rules and rituals, and attachment to the idea that there is a self, an
I. Attachment, in turns, conditions the arising of becoming and starts
the whole cycle over again.

I'm not going all New Age on you, but I think it's important to
understand desire and technology in this context since they are
basically born out of one another. What interests me about communication
on the Internet is the way in which it can teach us to abandon
attachments we have to identity formations. I'm not so much interested
in celebrating the ease with which technology allows us to switch one
form of identity for another ("straight" for "queer," "masculine" for
"feminine") as I am in understanding how those forms will always
continue to engender the same power relations and how the function of
representation historically has been to co-opt radical cultures to
industrial discipline.

I think understanding the importance of morality is probably more
important to me these days than representing desire. By morality, I'm
referring to those relationships and activities that do not oppress or
take advantage of anyone, even oneself, and that are for the mutual
benefit of ourselves, others, and the world. The task of morality,
religion and what Ajaan Buddhadhassa Bhikkhu called Dhammic Socialism is
to eliminate selfishness.

I'm not talking about the fake morality of the Christian Right in this
country, which really has selfishness at its core, but about a deeper
morality and religious practice that eliminates selfishness and gives
people the ability to control and transform their behavior for the sake
of a just society. A vision that shows how true happiness lies somewhere
other than selfishness, consumerism, materialism and hedonism. Perhaps
through morality, we can start to think of the world as a home for the
self and start to see the ways the circuits of "dependent
co-origination" function.