The following conversation emerges from the authors’ reading group’s discussion of Tsai Ming-Liang’s film, Walker (2012).
Tsai Ming-Liang is a Malaysian-Taiwanese director, part of Taiwanese New Cinema, whose films, like Rebels of the Neon God (1992), have often dwelt on urban alienation. The Walker series, which began as a theatrical production, consists of ten films made between 2012 and 2023, including No Form (2012), Walker (2012) and Abiding Nowhere (2023). The series follows a monk, played by the actor Lee Kang-Sheng, walking at a painstakingly slow pace, across the modern metropolis. The speed of the modern city, its constant change, the rapidity of life, makes for a stark contrast with the monk’s movements across its landscape. The metropolis in question is interchangeable—Hong Kong in Walker (2012), but Tokyo, Marseilles, and DC in other iterations. Tsai has noted that the monk is an homage to Chen Xuanzang, of the Tang Dynasty, who undertook a ten-thousand mile pilgrimage to India.
The following conversation emerges from our reading group’s discussion of Tsai’s film, Walker (2012). In the early pandemic, our small group of sometimes four, sometimes five, began to gather for an hour on Fridays. All early-career scholars, we longed for the conversations we had in graduate school. In our respective academic jobs, we found ourselves increasingly siloed in communities that lacked opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange. The group was born out of a desire to continue to engage in scholarly conversation and to create sociality in a moment that was structurally against it. We desired a kind of energetic scholarly exchange that could fuel us in our seminar discussions the following week—to have scholarship that nourished our teaching, and vice versa.
Of disciplinary knowledge formation, Bruno Latour writes in Laboratory Life that there are different stages of producing academic work. A stage that we rarely think about is the theorizing stage, where one makes ungrounded, seemingly wild speculations, suggesting possibilities that may seem far-fetched in order to form a hypothesis. All traces of this stage are typically excised from academic production. In our polyvocal conversation, we replicate the open-ness of the literature classroom as a site for close collective attention, while also encouraging one to “stray” in new, speculative, directions.
SUSHMITA SIRCAR: I came across Walker while putting together my class on “Global Cities,” which moves comparatively between the film and literature of cities including New York, London, Taipei, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Kolkata. In my syllabus, I had placed the film alongside other texts on “walking the city,” after Baudelaire’s sonnet, “To a Woman Passing By,” Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Woolf’s “Street Haunting” and Teju Cole’s Open City. The film obviously invites a reading within this long tradition of flânerie and walking the city, at least for the anglophone viewer of the film. I wonder then, is the monk of Tsai’s film a flâneur?
MOYA LI: The shutting of eyes separates the walker of the film from Woolf’s flâneur. Central to her writing about the city is a sense of liberation from the drawing room, this untethered eye floating here and then and grafting itself onto (imagined) scenes within houses on the street. Yet our Buddhist monk’s eyes are closed: he seems centered, solid, gathered as opposed to porous. While Woolf’s walkers seek to be modified—interpellated—by something other than the domestic scenes into which they were born, the monk appears impervious.
RAJ SAIKUMAR: The urban flâneur emerges at a time when the city acquires a scale, and the crowds become a demography to be governed. The flâneur is often isolated, alone, anonymous, tossed up, and dragged along. Walker, however, takes a different archetype of the walker – the monk – who is closer to the pilgrim, the mystic, or perhaps Nietzsche (an admirable walker), and throws him in the midst of a megapolis. What emerges is an insight about slowness and attention not as a mode of reclaiming one’s capacity for higher productivity without distraction, but as an aesthetic, political, and spiritual practice of rejecting modernity’s obsession with speed.
SNEHA KHAUND: There are several modes of watching at play in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker. The film presents its viewers with a range of instances of seeing and witnessing: pedestrians are juxtaposed against neon billboards and physical posters, and the models displayed on them are both the object and subject of a watching gaze. These are elements that build up through the short film to make up a crowd, one that gradually gathers to watch the monk in a busy city square as he trudges through the city. Within this vast range, the viewer of the film occupies a privileged position as the only consistent witness through these various stages. Of course, the passage of the monk through the city is not in real time: it is edited and presented through shifts across landscapes. Nevertheless, as viewers we experience a sense of primacy in that we first see the monk at (what we presume to be) the start of his journey through a camera lens positioned downwards onto the stairs he descends. And at the cinematic end of his journey, we are the lone spectator. Such heightened awareness of our own viewership stages performance at two levels: through the monk’s act of walking, as well as the framing of this activity through our own gaze.
SUSHMITA: These different kinds of watching makes me reflect on Tsai’s comparisons to other mediums in describing his cinematic project. He talks of the film as a museum, the film as a painting, the film as a photograph. In an interview, he suggests that the film “offers a distinct viewing experience akin to contemplating a painting,” like “entering an art gallery.” The film’s earliest versions were staged as theatrical productions, and the film has been exhibited in museums like MoMA PS1. Despite these comparisons (or despite the fact that Tsai wants a certain kind of attention from his viewer), the fact that the object circulates as cinema is interesting to me. The medium of narrative cinema, or a “cinema of slowness” as a particular kind of technology seems in this instance to work against Tsai’s aims. At least for a viewer like me, watching the film on my laptop, I was unable to turn my mind off enough to enter into the deliberately sluggish rhythm of the film. I found myself jumping forward in the video, piecing together its narrative by moving through it much more rapidly than the pace Tsai and the monk set for us.
This restlessness that Walker generates, for me, complicates the category of flânerie. I could not enter into the monk’s meditative state of mind, his center of stillness amidst the frenetic pace of the city. Instead, I was more aligned with the people around the monk, rushing past, with things to do and no time to spare. Is flânerie even possible in the contemporary city?
MOYA: The walker takes the place of the metropolis as Barthes describes it—as a silent center from which time and the world emanate. Maupassant writes in the Eiffel Tower because it is the only place he can’t see it, but the tower is (in Barthes’ reading) the center of Paris and the world for all others. The closer one is to it, the less one looks at it, but the tourist travels to it to see it and thinks “I’ve arrived”—at the center.
But the walker’s engagement with the city is neither the tourist’s nor the inhabitants’. Rather, he is more like the city itself. He is the steady, silent center (in the sense of the center of the frame—almost the entire way through), the impervious core around which the city evolves, shifts. What emanates from him is not so much time as the forestalling of it, as it congeals and thickens. When Tsai first saw Lee Kang-sheng walk, he noticed not that Kang-sheng walked slowly, but that “time seemed to stand still”—to thicken and congeal around him. In attaching ourselves to the normative pace of a gait, we allow our own sense of time to be modified.
RAJ: A characteristic of modernity is speed (dromology), and with it, mobility and logistics. The disparity between action and location in The Walker triggers incommensurabilities that propel the narrative forward. Several temporalities co-exist. Consider translation as a material and embodied technology of worlding in the longue durée – the slow but incremental travels of Theravada Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BCE, through Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and China via the Silk Road, and Korea and Japan by the 5th century CE. Even more miraculous is the story of its endurance through the centuries, adapting itself to late capitalist restlessness and malaise, sometimes as residue, a trace, a fossil, and at other times, yet another object of consumption; the opium that makes our reality, its dukkha, bearable.
After metaphysics, the monk becomes the aesthete; the empty space left behind by the death of God is filled up by art, literature, and, of course, Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema. Is the monk paying attention to the traffic on the road, or is he walking like a horse with blinders? After all, he does have a feedbag of snacks to avoid lurking in the ultra-processed foods aisle at the supermarket.
SNEHA: An investment in performance subtends the realism of the film and refracts our cognition of the city as a whole into a series of vignettes presenting likeness and juxtaposition. This extended performance therefore prompts us to inquire about the nature of community that emerges through opposition: a monk with attendant values of asceticism alongside participants in a society defined by material consumption. The monk’s performance elicits spectatorship, reaching its peak in the sequence from 8:59-13:10. Here, a long shot juxtaposes the angular figure of the monk against the fluorescent billboard displaying a man dressed in seemingly royal garb on a horse. The absurdity of the billboard and its saturation in values of consumption is brought into relief through the concentration of the viewer’s gaze on this juxtaposed duad (monk/billboard) which in turn is facilitated by the other people in the scene also watching the monk. This builds a community amongst the viewers through a shared quizzical interest in the monk’s performance. Ultimately the film does not merely stage individual alienation through the monk’s solitary and painfully slow walking act, but points towards collective experiences that expose the absurdity of late-capitalist consumerism, connections that persist despite the political economy.
We share the flash of anxiety a man in a suit on the platform seems to exhibit when he perceives the slowness of the monk: will he make it on to the tram to Happy Valley? The suspense lifts as the tram departs and this viewer feels a sense of sadness as the monk is still on the platform. Will no man wait for him and help him onto a train? Thankfully another train arrives soon after; perhaps the man in the suit knew it would, and he looked.
SUSHMITA: There is for me a disjuncture between the pace set by Tsai’s static camera and the long shots of the monk, and my inability to adhere to it. This gap between the meditation of the monk and my desire to rush through my viewing of the film suggests to me that it is the viewer of Tsai’s film who comes to occupy the position of the flâneur of the modern city. Although I am persuaded that the monk belongs to a tradition of meditation and retreat rather than flânerie, I think Walker itself is grappling with the literature of the flâneur while also in continuity with it. The film fits in both the archetypal flâneur’s haunting of commercial spaces (arcades, shoe stores), and the time-out-of-joint aspect characteristic of his existence in the first place. We can think of the disappearance of a medieval Paris under Haussman’s modernization, which the flâneur simultaneously documents and mourns. The monk’s being contrasted with the “modernity” and speed of the contemporary city harkens to this disjuncture. However, while the monk maintains his equanimity, the frenetic viewer is the one made to forcibly inhabit the roving, lingering gaze of the flâneur. The space for actual flâneurs might disappear as the crowds in the city rush about. Yet the film does seek to make the viewer into the flâneur—despite my resistance to being corralled into this role.
MOYA: If the walker is a deictic entity (in Sushmita’s unfolding—a being that says “look here, then here, then here,” drawing the viewer into the position of the flâneur), what he makes visible is the power of narrative to naturalize its own balance of the seen and unseen. That which changes and the silent, steady center that gives shape to discourse—as Maupassant writing from Paris gives shape to the reality of his world.
This naturalization takes place in the body. Like Sneha, I too felt anxious at first about the walker’s movements—there is peril in entering incoming traffic with one’s head bowed. Yet it is surprising how easily other city-dwellers adjust to the walker, and correspondingly how little suspense I felt as the film progressed. Suspense, narratologists tell us, is produced by the contemplation of two vastly different outcomes, and the inability to know which one will come to pass. It is a timebound affect, created by our inability to see the future but also by our past experiences which gave rise to the terrain of possible outcomes: the modern city is unexpected. Yet in the uneventful portrayal of the walker’s movements, the film habituates us to something new—a new norm, an accepting into the unthinking parts of one’s being a feeling of what is ordinary and what is remarkable. The city and our learned experience of it gives way to something else, attached to the walker’s way of walking.
Insofar as a global metropolis gives order to reality (Maupassant’s naturalism), the monk is not under its spell, he is not arranged in relation to it but rather presents himself as an alternate center—posing the question: what orders/norms/ways of being can unfold?
RAJ: As one possible answer, after our conversation, in teaching a course called “On Disobedience,” I paired Walker with a discussion of Gandhi, the exemplar of civil disobedience as a secular theology. The pairing allowed me to politicize the film’s aesthetic, while giving Gandhian Satyagraha a more contemporary artistic form. Gandhian iconography often takes the form of the Mahatma walking with determination and tenacity. In the slowness of the Gandhian march and in its embodiment of human/animal fragility, the self is imperceptibly drawn into its surroundings, absorbing the landscape of tastes, smells, air, and colors. Frederic Gros suggests that walking awakens in us an archaic and anarchic rebelliousness, “our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired.” The course enabled me to read Walker under the sign of an aesthetic principle of passivity (etymology: endurance) as resistance.
SUSHMITA: What does it mean that we are able so easily to place the monk within these disparate traditions? On the one hand, he is a stable, rooted center (as Moya has argued), on the other, he is easily supplanted onto different metropolises in Tsai’s other iterations of this project, and by us, onto the figure of Gandhi’s political iconography, and alongside Baudelaire, Prufrock, Woolf, and Maupassant. Perhaps this interchangeability too works against Tsai’s objective to collapse the onrush of the future into the interminable present, to slow down modernity, to prevent the viewer’s being swept up in it. For passivity and meditation here are already exchangeable commodities—as seen in the poster advertising yoga behind the monk.
MOYA AND SUSHMITA: Jordan Taliha McDonald writes that the stray has a strange relation to domestic space—it is defined by it since a stray animal is one without a home and yet, contained within the concept of a stray is its potential to become otherwise, to be adopted. The kind of wandering suggested by the “stray” subject—in whose ambit we might include Tsai’s out-of-place walker—makes it possible to glimpse how we might expand the borders of our reading and extend them to objects further afield. In replicating this collaborative, conversational form in our writing about this film, we hope to have adopted the politics of wandering, documenting, enduring, resisting, and absorbing the world that Tsai’s monk constellates into our academic forms.
Moya (Moyang) Li is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where she thinks at the intersection of aesthetics, math, and computing. Currently, her favorite pastime is people-watching at operas and cafes.
Sushmita Sircar is an Assistant Professor of English at Gettysburg College, with a book, Imagining Community Against the Nation, forthcoming with Liverpool UP. She’s glad to have survived exploring the technically off-limits parts of the Paris catacombs.
Sneha Khaund is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. She enjoys listening to pop culture podcasts.
Rajgopal Saikumar is an Assistant Professor of World Literature at Bard Early College (Brooklyn, NY). He works in law and humanities, but more importantly, he fosters cats in Bushwick.