Expressly oriented: The Lyric Opera of Chicago recently opened its doors to a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, directed by its very own Chief Artistic Administration officer, Matthew Ozawa. In stark contrast to previous renditions since its 1904 premiere, the creative vision behind this adaptation was informed by a design team composed entirely of Japanese women, including Yuki Nakase Link, Kimie Nishikawa, and Maiko Matsushima. Central to their intervention and critique was staging the narrative within a virtual reality game, transitioning between B.F. Pinkerton’s modern home and Cio-Cio-San’s 20th-century Nagasaki. Cognizant of the piece’s orientalism, Ozawa’s production wrestles with capturing Madama Butterfly’s essence while excavating the pejorative views promoted by its Western fetishism.
Indeed, this production positions the phantasm of exoticization at the forefront, holds it in unwavering interrogation, and underscores its list of unethical claims for otherwise unreceptive audiences. Rather than performing the intuitive move that comes with adapting a piece riddled with Western sophisms, namely by tucking away its orientalist themes, Ozawa emphasizes these so as to more adequately critique them. In staging the opera as a site of fetishistic excess, this adaptation makes Madama Butterfly’s latent objectification explicit by encoding the viewer’s experience as Pinkerton’s virtual reality. The audience embodies orientalism’s objectifying logics through the lens of his VR goggles, noticing how this is not merely a choice-and-consequences game, but also an all-too-real representation. It is this decision that makes Ozawa’s direction productive—it maintains, if not amplifies, aesthetic value via critical commentary.
Maximiliano Mendoza, contributing editor
Twilight of the gods: The princes of public intellectualism have long been dying out, one by one, leaving conspicuous black holes in the silent vacuum of academia. With the passing last Saturday of Jürgen Habermas, the continental European tradition has mostly seen itself out, replaced by fuming phantasms of identitarian ontology on one end and empirical TESCREAL shills on the other, leaving the practice of Western philosophy more doleful than ever before. It is now a funereal pursuit, mired in imitative remembrance of the liberal world order’s golden days and besuited cigarette-smoking champions and foes. A glorious era where higher education was cutting edge and not a killing floor for intellectual diversity, when conviction was watery and persecution ennoblingly beautiful—as viewed through the rose-colored glasses of the Free World and its half-thinking refugee elite. The world inhabited by Habermas seems quite different from our own, a world of discursive, “communicative” action and rationality, with the world as polis and the ever-mighty “public sphere” as its agora of rational discourse and decision-making.
Born in the ascendant years of the Nazi Party and dying in the ascendant years of global neo-fascism, Habermas’s life spanned an optimistic period in human history, the epoch of the open society, with the fall of colonial empires, the Communist axis, and identity-based discriminatory laws worldwide, where reason prevailed and shushed the underclasses with ethoses of patriotic solidarity and secular, principled living. And yet, the year of his death saw a familiar resurgence of reactionary identitarianism and fearmongering, whether in America, Iran, Venezuela, or Israel. Global society is contracting, but the intellectual is no longer public or a member of its public, no longer its moral barometer or its vanguard of conscience. As Leo Greenberg writes in Compact, the West has entered its age of “fortress liberalism” of “firewalls, militancy, restrictions, defense, and pragmatism” and not of moral virtue or ethical motivation. The philosophers of yore roll in their graves.
As Habermas once noted, “freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual” and the public thinker must, for betterment of all, think toward the liberation of all, to achieve and merit a free society. May we merit such thinking again.
Brady Santoro, managing editor
Image: Alfred Stevens, La Parisienne japonaise, oil on canvas, ca. 1871-75 (La Boverie, Liège).