When the news came that Ackbar Abbas was no more, I was shocked that someone who never seemed to grow old could have left us, just like that. I first met him in 2017 at his talk at the University of Hong Kong on fake news in the age of Trump. The talk was a brilliant but brief provocation on the false, the fake and the posthumous. All three terms would develop, as the years went by, his own unique spin. They would persist in his thinking as he used them to illuminate not just the contemporary world of late capitalism but also post-socialist societies, like the China in which he lived for part of the year. “Critique is always one revolution behind”, he pronounced in his customary gnomic fashion, as the audience full of PhDs struggled to grasp the arguments of the Laoshi (lo si in Cantonese), the master, who had never bothered to acquire a doctoral degree.
I had heard that the master, after years of living in the United States on retiring from HKU Comparative Literature, would not mind spending more time in Hong Kong, where he had family, and which was not too far from Beijing, where his wife Liu Sola (writer, composer, vocalist) lived. Hesitantly, I went up to speak to him and asked if he would consider visiting us at Lingnan University. My senior colleague Stephen Chan and I went to meet him at a café in Kennedy Town to discuss the details, and things moved quickly afterwards. Ackbar began to spend a few weeks every year as Adjunct Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies where Stephen and I worked. Each year, we planned a series of activities around his presence, starting with the Lingnan 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture he gave to a packed audience at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on October 23, 2017. Chatting with the attendees, I realised that a large number of them were his former Comp Lit students. They listened raptly to their Laoshi working his magic again, turning ordinary words into something that could shed light on major contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Here he re-introduced his concept of the posthumous, this time adding the term ‘socialism’ before it to describe present-day China, suggesting that China was neither capitalist or post-socialist in any simple way. Rather, the socialist past had a strong after-life, and might appear even more vibrant than before.
Here is the link to the lecture.
In my undergraduate core course at Lingnan on Culture and the Modern World, one of the first readings the students encountered was a chapter from Ackbar’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. In this prescient book, which came out in 1997 at the time of the Handover to China, Ackbar introduced the concept of ‘disappearance’, the one concept with which he is most associated, on which he is most extensively quoted. He initially used it to tackle the elusive and fugitive nature of culture in the former British colony. He argued that it was precisely at the intense moment caused by imminent disappearance that something like a ‘Hong Kong culture’ emerged.
He agreed very kindly to come and visit my class and talk to the students, who were struggling with the ideas of deja disparu and reverse hallucination. Perhaps it was not the right venue or the right audience for Ackbar, but at least I came away with a better understanding what this thinker, who always said he was born, brought up and corrupted in Hong Kong, was trying to articulate. And with a better understanding of Hong Kong too: how the rapidity of change in Hong Kong made one constantly battle with an anticipatory nostalgia, and with reverse hallucination, not seeing what is indeed there. Disappearance is connected to speed and the over-saturation of space with signs and images, leading to a kind of abstraction that is ‘ungraspable’. In this landmark book, Ackbar dwelt on cinema, architecture and literature, prefiguring his main preoccupations for the coming years. It was not that he set out to write about a film, an auteur, or an architect. These rich examples became for him a way of entering a thought-space and setting out concepts prompted by the material in front of him, concepts that could travel far beyond the film or the book. Although prompted by classic Western theorists like Kracauer, Benjamin, Virilio, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, et al, Ackbar’s agile thinking was constantly framing and reframing the world around him.
These moves were very much in evidence in a masterclass on ‘documenting Hong Kong’ at Lingnan, part of the Performing Archive series curated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, professor of practice that year. The series involved a docuthon, where three large screens showed Hong Kong documentaries in a loop for an entire day, followed by an engagement between Ackbar and Lingnan faculty and graduate students, in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive. Ackbar picked up the terms put forward by his interlocutors in addressing the Hong Kong situation and gave his own glosses. ‘Failure as resistance’, he said, was not a romanticization of failure; instead, it should be seen as referring to new political models coming out of specific contexts. “If I don’t try too hard”, he said, “I’ll succeed in everything I do”. So one needs to fail. Failure is when you work with new impediments and with the unpredictable present. ‘Disappearance’ in the Hong Kong context was not part of a series including appear, reappear, disappear – all these were taking place at the same time.
Ackbar emphasized that we could not take the term ‘local’ literally (referring to the mini-film ‘Local Egg’ which is part of the 2015 Hong Kong fiction anthology ‘Ten Years’). Local cannot refer to a real, empirical entity, since the local is always dis-located. Just as Hong Kong can never be a nation; it’s a hyphenation. Another key term, ‘dependency’, was often used in the Hong Kong context, referring to Britain and/or China. But, said Ackbar, this was not like dependency in South America. In Hong Kong, dependency is turned into a fine art. It refers to arbitrage, to turn a profit. Ackbar also took up the concept of ‘demonstration’, which could be (a) a political gesture, and (b) a reference to what was being shown in the act, what critiques of the present emerged there, what sort of working through the archives it would involve. Just as in his response to the 1990s situation, Ackbar cast a critical eye on political developments post-Umbrella Movement, not denouncing or celebrating but trying to think through the complexity. The one thing he emphatically denounced, however, was sentimentality, whether emotional, cultural, or political.
Reading some of his unpublished essays now, and watching the recorded videos of his Lingnan lectures, we are struck by how certain ideas and tropes kept haunting the master. One of these is the ‘real’. “We are no longer in the real”, said Ackbar in his response to the Lingnan docuthon. “We are, to quote Baudrillard, in the desert of the real”. He began his commentary by invoking one of his favourite figures, Dziga Vertov, the Soviet film-maker who invented the ‘kino-eye’. Vertov’s ‘man with a movie camera’ overcomes, says Ackbar, the prejudice of the humanistic eye as it interrogates the ‘real’. While watching the Hong Kong documentaries for several hours at a stretch, Ackbar said he began to feel a certain boredom. Through the dream-work enabled by boredom he sought to analyse what documentary does. It’s no longer the lie that lies, he now thought. It’s the truth that lies. In a world where facts have become factoids and ‘reality’ is actually reality-TV, we see that the real exists as simulation. And when the real is simulation, what do you document? One can only indulge in nostalgia for the real. Akbar ended his masterclass remarks by claiming that documentary, like translation, is always impossible, “hence always a betrayal”. He proffered a different starting point, a challenge to the filmmaker: “Start with the fact of betrayal, and with the betrayal of fact”. This could become the new basis for documentary.
We did not see Ackbar again after 2020 and the breaking out of COVID, except for his gracious presence online at co-organised events between his home institution, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the Centre for Cultural Research and Development (CCRD) at Lingnan Cultural Studies. Here is a link to his comments during our virtual research workshop on digital humanities during the pandemic, The Ghost in the (Twittering) Machine, Oct 24, 2020.
Starting with The Twittering Machine, a painting by Paul Klee, and a reference to the social media platform Twitter, Ackbar suggests that digital media is a ‘super-spreader’ of information and disinformation, or media-as-virus, and that the notion of the digital humanities might, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, actually produce monsters.
The last time we listened to Ackbar in a formal setting was during the 2021 research workshop, organised by UCHRI, CCRD and a newly-established Centre for Inter-Asia Research at Ahmedabad University, where I had just moved from Lingnan. After a discussion with Ackbar, and with the UCHRI Director, David Theo Goldberg, who had been a key presence in our collaboration, we decided the theme would be Racism by other Means. As we said in the workshop announcement: ‘Which are the novel (sociotechnical) ways through which racism(s) replicate, spread, infect, mutate, and travel? As forms of domination have changed, so do forms of resistance and compliance. This research training workshop aims to generate a multi-vocal conversation to understand how algorithmic racism may define new kinds of bio-politics, and how experiences and analyses of race/racism in one place can inform similar experiences and analyses in another place.’ You can view Ackbar’s short but sharp presentation at this link:
Ackbar spoke about the doxic as toxic, referring to the beliefs or doxa about race and races. He drew on three films, or as he put it, a single detail in each film, to point to the parodic doubling (another recurring theme in Ackbar’s work) in the production of commonsense. He began by saying that racism persists in posthumous form, not referring to its afterlife but its persistence in the form of hysteria (the symptoms of racism becoming arbitrary). Ackbar pointed to the larger social ecology in which racism existed, since it could not be enforced in isolation. His first example was from the Bruce Lee film Fists of Fury (1972), made in Hong Kong but set in the Shanghai of 1910 that faced various forms of foreign domination. The hero sees a signboard saying ‘No dogs or Chinese allowed’, and kicks the sign to pieces. The audience is meant to read this as an anti-racist moment. However, in the park where the sign is displayed is an Indian gatekeeper dressed in an exotic costume. Here the film’s protest against racism is occurring through the racist act of portraying the Indian, hence the parodic doubling of racism and anti-racism. Ackbar pointed to similar moves in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), where toleration could end up becoming the double of bigotry, and in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), where a fugitive woman fleeing gangsters is protected by a small town which subsequently turns against her. Three grim reminders of the doxic as toxic, and of racism by other means.
***
Among my cherished memories of Ackbar is a chance meeting with him on the Mid-Levels escalator one afternoon in Hong Kong, the same escalator that features so prominently in Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express. This was in 2019, in the semester Ackbar, Stephen Chan and Ashish Rajadhyaksha taught a course at Lingnan on Wong Kar-Wai. He often came over to Ashish’s and my flat in Yuen Long for dinner, and enjoyed chatting with the postgrad students and other faculty who sometimes were there too. Although Ackbar was fond of taking taxis, he came with us on the MTR many times, always insisting that he would not sit down, chatting in the same measured tones in which he gave a lecture as we clung to the overhead straps.
Having been grounded in the US by the pandemic, Ackbar was trying all kinds of strategies to be able to travel to China to be with his wife Liu Sola. We last spoke on Zoom some time before he headed back to Beijing. You will be greatly missed, Ackbar.
Writing this short piece gave me the opportunity to recollect the many wonderful occasions on which we interacted with Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. For making those occasions richer, and for their company during the Lingnan years, my warmest thanks to Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Kin Chi Lau, Lisa Leung, Anjeline de Dios, Soo Ryon Yoon, Roberto Castillo, Toto Eunsoo Lee and Kelvin Wu.
Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Director, Cente for Asian Studies, GITAM University, India. She is the author, most recently, of Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconsciousand the co-editor, with Ritty Lukose, of Digital Intimacy: Young Women, Gendered Modernities, and Aspirations in Inter-Asia.