Lin Xi: Otherness in the Looking-Glass
Otherness in the Looking-Glass
《镜中的他者》
Lin Xi
Zhou Ning周宁《Transcultural Studies: China Images as the Methodology跨文化研究：以中国形象为方法》
商务印书馆，2011年。Beijing: the Commercial Press.
To understand one’s self is no easy task, to which end the invention of mirror has undoubtedly assisted mankind in no insignificant way. What we see through mirrors is not just the self, but other(s). “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in The Brothers Grimm signifies the looking-cum-comparing experience that is deeply rooted in human nature, where the Evil Queen constantly pesters the magic mirror on the wall to tell her a representation that combines identity and comparison (“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the Fairest of them all?”). This is by no means to suggest, in following Kant’s footstep, that human nature is essentially made of crooked timbre; on the contrary, it is simply to point out that we look into mirror (or the “looking-glass” - a term no longer popular but coterminous with mirror) not just for self-admiring, but for comparing ourselves to others.
This otherness that helps either self-admiration or self-abashment is the centre of topic in Zhou Ning’s newly published book, which aims to offer no neutral transcultural account of examining otherness. For Zhou Ning, the actor who looks into the looking-glass is not confined to mankind, but expands to include the intellectual circle in general and state apparatus as a whole. This self thus created, at the supra-individual level, points to the images of other cultures, countries or nations that are used incessantly for comparison with a nation-state with which the intellectual circle identifies itself or to which state apparatus offers protection. Zhou identifies China as the big “other” that Western countries saw in history through the cultural looking-glass. This process of construction is self-feeding in the sense that such image(s) of China as the big “other” needs not to conform to reality, or even marginally approximate the real being of China. Truthful representation of China, in the light of this logic, has been no intention of the scholarly circle, which, as a whole, has participated consciously or otherwise in the building of such image(s). As Zhou puts it, “the image(s) of China, as the ‘other’ constructed by Western modernity, can either be idealistic, pointing to a utopia of desirability or cherishing for self-negation and self-transcendence; or demonised, referring to an ideology to show fear and exclusion and satisfy the needs of self-confirmation and self-consolidation” (p.4). Bearing this in mind, the questions that we can ask include: How has this image been used to help the West to construct its self? In which way has this image contributed to our understanding of the rise of modernity in the West? To which extent can we, as a popular saying goes in China, use the past as a mirror to guide us forward? Is this process purely cultural, or in a Foucauldian sense, mysteriously wedded to politics? It is to these issues that Zhou turns his attention; it will also be these issues that this review shall address.
I
The first set of issues with which Zhou is concerned directs our attention to the construction of the image(s) of China in the West, a construction to be dissected into a trichotomy, namely the generation such image(s) in the West, its continuance in the discourse, and its operational implication for the Western cultural system (p.19). Before entering the terrain of particularities in representing China, Zhou offers a meta-framework of what he means by “image”. Combining Althusser and Foucault, Zhou regards image as a cultural metaphor or symbol, an imaginary and even wilful representation of what is absent, mixed therein with such empirical substances as the cognitive and emotional, conscious and unconscious, objective and subjective, personal and social (p.23). The significance of the China Image(s) for the West is threefold: an imaginary of China, a self-perception of the relations with China and a metaphorical expression of cultural self-identification by the West. This definition opens the door for us to examine how the China Image(s) is used to construct self and other in the Western imaginary.
With the gate opened, the contours of the inner structure of this Western architecture of self and other are mapped out through a binary discourse built on Said. Drawing on Said, Zhou proposes a bifurcated perspective into examining this Western construct of self and other, namely positive and negative Orientalism, or in Zhou’s terms, utopian or ideological Orientalism, the former pointing to academic portrait of China as a utopia, an embodiment of paradise on earth in comparison to the undesirable West, while the latter pictures China as a negative “other” juxtaposed against the enlightened West, an “other” ready to be either vanquished, conquered or converted. Whether it be utopian or ideological Orientalism, positive or negative representation of China, the inner logic of such image remains the same in that knowledge is closely bound up with the socio-political, the former either confirming or negating the latter.
In particular, the China Image(s) started in the West in 1250, moving along the line until 1750 when a big turn occurred. For Zhou, our study of the China Image(s) will necessarily fall within these two periods: one from 1250 to 1750 while the other from 1750 to the present. In the first period that lasted half a millennium, referred to as the “Pre-Enlightenment Period”, the China Image(s) was in general utopian in nature, of which the archetypes of such Image passed successively through three terms: the “Land of Ghengis Khan”, the “Great Chinese Empire”, and “Confucian China”. By the same token, the next two and a half centuries, as the “Post-Enlightenment Period”, was characterised by another three phases, namely the “Stagnant Empire”, the “Despotic Empire”, and the “Barbarian Empire”. In the image of the “Land of Ghengis Khan”, China was described as a land of wealth, abundance and luxury, signifying the nascent spirit of secular capitalism in late Medieval Europe, while the “Great Chinese Empire” glorified socio-political institutions in China, until it culminated in “Confucian China”, where China was discovered to be a land with the rule of the Philosopher King. For one time, China became the land where the Platonic ideal political regime manifested itself as a palpable reality, where the bureaucracy, with different levels of authority in its hierarchy, is run by philosophers – scholars well versed in wisdom and virtue. This image assumed a power of revolutionising, as scholars and intellectuals in Europe, disappointed by theocracy, turned to China for inspiration and a determination for social and political change.
An increase in the knowledge of China, coupled with a change in the idealisation of political regime(s), led to the downfall of such projection of China as a utopian other unto the self of the West. Enlightenment scholars led by Kant reformulated the ideal type of political regime, replacing monarchy with republicanism, in the midst of which Zeitgeist China as the symbol of open monarchy with the Philosopher King was debunked thoroughly. It gradually gave way to another set of imaginaries about China – this time as a ferocious retaliation upon the previous romanticisation of monarchy. China became the “Stagnant”, “Despotic” and “Barbarian” Empire, in contrast to which the West was depicted as a Progressive, Democratic and Civilised Land. To reconstruct its self as the paradise on earth apparently was a task that could not be completed on its own, parallel to which there had to exist a daemonisation of China. European scholars in the Post-Enlightenment Period were born skilful magicians, conjuring up a black rabbit out of the hat almost as immediately as a white one in the previous Period.
Nevertheless, this idealised image of “Confucian China” did not admit defeat so easily, in which stead it came back at different times as Western intellectual undercurrents. Although this image no longer acquired its political significance as an ideal model, its projection as an aesthetic ideal was retained, an aesthetical attachment that, when mixed with Chinoiserie, presented an escapist façade that masked intellectual disappointment with both the Enlightenment and machine-led modernisation. Where the Rousseausian depiction of the unspoiled savage life palpitated a lively tune, Goethe went as far as to seek in China a transcendental, spiritual “Land of Freedom”. Confucian China was a moral and natural paradise unpolluted by modern (Western) civilisation. Intellectual revolts against modernity essentially followed the same logic of argumentation as their opponents that sought to confirm Western superiority through a daemonised image of China. By way of contrast, against the aesthetical making of this idealised “Confucian China” in the 19th century, political radicalism in the 1960s re-invoked this idealisation of China, albeit substituting its adjective “Confucian” with “Red”. Maoist China was depicted as the heaven blessed with anti-modernity, in which idealisation China became the Mecca for both Left and New Left intellectuals around the world. As an updated version of “Confucian China”, “Red China” introduced into dissident voices in the West a romanticist haunting no less than their 18th-century romanticist predecessors.
II
Had Zhou stopped here with self-complacency, his account of the construct of the China Image(s) in the West might have been no more revealing than Said’s Orientalism. The only difference between Zhou and Said, then, would be their focus of attention, one on China while the other on the Arabic World, both grounded in the context of Western imaginaries of the other(s). Zhou, in the light of this hypothesis, would advance no further than Said not only theoretically but also conceptually, as he could claim no originality in presenting a picture, at a metaphysical level, that would be essentially different from the Saidian one. It is against this hypothetical background that we can identify Zhou’s contribution in this debate. For him, the introduction of globalisation into his analysis is more than a random choice of “something new”, “something different”, or “something non-Saidian”; on the contrary, globalisation is an essential element for us to understand our contemporary world, in the sense that culture and discourse are mapped out on a global scale, rather than being confined to nation-state boundaries. Bearing this in mind, Zhou invites his readers to travel with him to track the footage of such China Image(s) in its/their global tour. For Zhou, such image(s) has/have been reproduced throughout the world, the order of which is essentially dominated by the West. The world, through the depiction of glorifying and denigrating, is divided into two poles, one constituting the exemplary and the future of mankind while the other the declining and reactionary. Developing countries in examining themselves in this looking-glass that is made in the West see not only the otherness of civilisation, but also that of barbarity, enveloped conceptually in two regions. The geographical converges with the political and for the first time in history, such convergence acquires its global significance as the international standard to which every country has to compare itself.
The first stop along our journey is Russia, a country torn as much culturally as geographically between Europe and Asia. It should be both a member of and an outsider to the West. Geographically spanning two continents, Russia is born with a duality that can be both blessing and curse. The self-identification of Russia, so to speak, is always caught up in this duality, on the one hand with the West while on the other with Asia. Scholars arguing for a we-are-part-of-the-West identity critique the inherent Oriental traits on the part of Russia, while those arguing for we-are-nobody-but-unique-Russia discover the sui generis elements in Russia’s own identity. Both attempts are channelled through the West (representing both “positive” civilisation and “negative” capitalism) and China as the comparators symbolising two opposing ends. For both camps, they are not so much concerned with China than with their own identity, of which the China Image(s) in Russia is simply a mere metaphor. The Westernisation camp borrows from the depiction of China as a stagnant, uncivilised and barbarian Oriental nation, against which to confirm that Russia is part of the advanced West, while their Slavophil opponents construct China, though in different light (either borrowing or rejecting the China Image(s) in the West), with projections of Russia in their mind. This Slavophil camp has a strongly Messiahstic aspiration of seeking an exclusive identity for Russia that cannot only transcend tradition and modernity, but East and East, South and North[1].
The second stop in row is India, which, though being China’s closest neighbour, is situated furthest away from China both mentally and culturally. Borrowing a poem by Zhang Xiaoxian, “The furthest distance in the world is not that from life to its end, but that when I sit by thy side, thou knowest not my heart”. For India, China is as remote as the North Pole. In Tagore’s classification, the Indian history has passed successively four stages: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism and modernity, which is interpreted as Christianity-Enlightenmentism by Zhou. In the former three periods, there was a conspicuous lack of attention to and interest in China, an observation testified by the meagre amount of information one could gather from historical records about China. When India stepped into modernity half a century ago, to seek its own identity necessitated the need to look at “other(s)” so as to mirror its self, a process in which India re-discovered both the West and China. This was a mental-cum-politicocultural exercise carried out by Tagore in the “commonality of Asian Spirit”, and by Nehru in the “commonality of Asian History”. For Tagore, India and China possess the same Asian Spirit that is different from the West, while Nehru sought commonality between the two nations in terms of historic colonialism. The honey-moon between China and India, nevertheless, ended with the break-up between the two countries due to territorial disputes in the post-1945 period. China, once a brother so dear to India in its effort to seek its self and to counter the hegemony of the West, now quickly faded into the background, waiting to be re-constructed, in a manner similar to the case of Russia, as a big “other” symbolising authoritarianism, despotism and autocracy. The Orientalist China Image(s) as constructed by the West was borrowed in wholesale by India. In his Development as Freedom, Amatya Sen portrayed India as a great member of the Global Democracy Club, against which apparently China is to be ridiculed and embarrassed. India’s identity, between these two poles, depends upon how far India approximates the Western other and moves away from the Chinese other.
A similar vein of intellectual thought can be found in the case of Japan, the final stop in Zhou’s book. As a country that in history has borrowed en masse from China, Japan is in a situation potentially more embarrassing than Russia and India. Where it is possible to delineate culturally one’s own difference from other(s), it is almost entirely unlikely for a nation to castrate its own history. “To Discard Asia and Join Europe” (tuoya ru’ou), in this sense, would have to involve with greater care both cultural and intellectual manoeuvrings. As an earnest disciple of China in the past, Japan invented its own language on the basis of Chinese characters. If we bear in mind the assertion that language is the bearer of culture, then a conclusion that will naturally follow is the similarity between Japanese and Chinese languages is entailed by a close resemblance in terms of culture, which is attested by both fact and value. For Japan, the meaning of Asia thus implies a shadowy presence of China in the background, or in its expanded sense, a towering circle of Confucian cultures. To “Discard Asia” is not only to castrate such Asian traits of Confucianism, but to disinherit itself from China. This would have been a mission impossible without the assistance of the West as another big “other” that came into Japan’s sight. Thus, Japan walked its way to a modern identity on two legs: one to denigrate China, while the other to glorify the West. This Chineseness-polluted history, as well as culture, was the original sin Japan carried on its back to modernity. It created a tension in identity-building, in that Japan relied upon Westernisation and stigmatisation of China to castrate itself from its Orientalist past, while in a reversed order, took its past to construct a modern identity different from the West. To travel on dual rails is an art, albeit a delicate one that is difficult to complete without being derailed at times. Japan has been plagued more often than not by such derailing(s).
By and large, in delineating the China Images in these regions and nations, what Zhou has in mind concerns four issues in logical order with increasing depth: the first layer being the particularity of the national or regional contexts in which these China Images are formulated with various characteristics and have evolved in different pathways, a layer to be succeeded by a second one that connects such local contexts with a process of “transcultural flow” of China Image(s) effected by modernisation and globalisation. In this process, no country or region can monopolise the representation of China single-handedly, but constantly export to and import from other areas representation(s) of China. The third layer is to flesh out the cultural hegemony of the West in this global ideational system of China Image(s), in which the Western representation of China dominates, directly or otherwise, the construction of China Image(s) around the world. The last layer sits on the top of all the above three ones as an overarching umbrella that exercises a synthesising force, this being a triangular relationship between China, the West and a local region or nation. The representation of China in a local region or nation not only means how it looks at itself in a way related to China, but also symbolises their perception of self with the West in the looking-glass (p.7, 157, 219).
III
Apparently Zhou did not satisfy himself by a mere description of such “transcultural flow” of China Image(s) around the world, the theoretical implication of which, though palpable by far, is not yet readily discernible. We need to go back to Said and Foucault for a full appreciation of how these cultural findings feed back into our theorising of such phenomena (Erscheinung). Without such theorising, Eischeinungremain perplexingly manifold, of which a combination (Verbindung) is required, so as to present a unified picture of manifestations (Vorstellung). What Zhou discovers unity (Einheit) in all these Vorstellung is a binary working of Orientalism. Following Arif Dirlik’s critique on Said, Zhou converts Orientalism from a noun to a verb. With self and other in the background, this verb of “orientalising” points to two directions: self-orientalising and mutual orientalising. For Dirlik, Orientalism cannot be constructed as single-handedly by the West as assumed by Said; rather, it is a cooperative venture between the West and non-West. In Asia, there is a process of self-orientalisation on the part of Asians, where Western images of Asia are accepted uncritically or unconsciously as a given, taken for granted and deeply embedded within Asian self-perception (pp.172-3). In pushing Dirlik’s critique one step further, Zhou argues that it is not just a matter of relating the West and non-West, but also of mutual orientalisation among members of the non-West. Who is more Westernised or closer to its own Oriental tradition becomes an issue that defines the competition and comparison among non-Western nations. A country is praised or criticised for being close to either the West or its own Oriental past (pp.207-8, 298).
This process of dual orientalising is shocking, to the degree that it lays bare the collective unconsciousness on the part of non-Western countries when they embark upon their respective journeys to modernity. Where self-orientalising bespeaks the hegemonic relations between the West and non-West, mutual orientalising points to the aftermath of such hegemony. Colonialism, in the light of this analysis, is not limited to the direct domination of the West over non-West, or terminates, as historians might have hailed the independent movements sweeping the Third World in the mid-20th century, where the West withdraws from their direct rule over colonies. Instead, only when it comes to this process of mutual orientalising can we feel the polluting effect of colonialism in a more subtle and nuanced way. Zhou is relentless in pointing out that Orientalism is not something that can be changed so easily as altering the West or its attitude, but what must be continually resisted and battled against. Orientalising, when it was born in the West and from the unequal relations between the West and non-West, has almost assumed a life of its own when we trace its footage around the world, until it culminates in becoming the looking-glass in which non-Western countries not only see their “self” and the otherness of the West, but also perceive the “self” among and between themselves. Through this binary concept of orientalising, Zhou unites Said and Dirlik in a more skilful way, where the self, the Western “other” and the non-Western “other” are united in trinity. As is argued by Laozi in Tao-te Ch’ing, “one gives birth to two, two to three and three to everything”. Three, especially a trinity three, presents us with a greater possibility of grasping the manifold in our world, especially in a colonialism-trotted world.
IV
After a critical account of how the representation of China signifies power relations not only between China and the West, but also local regions/nations and the West, and among local regions/nations themselves, a further question that we can ask Zhou is, “Then what? How will it be possible for us to end this vicious circle of cultural mutual feeding fuelled by a Hegemonic West?” The pill prescribed by Zhou, although he does not directly point it out in his text, nevertheless takes certain assumptions worthwhile of our analysis here. For Zhou, “this transcultural study of China Image(s) has as its research object ‘thoughts’ or ‘imaginaries’, as its research methodology that of tracing the pathway of theorising and the history of ideational development, and as its research issue a concern with international cultural or geopolitical strategy, namely how to combine social scientific theoretical research with the study of national strategies” (p.339). It is right here that we see the intention of Zhou, or at least a potential direction in which his research can be used. It is not a mere cultural study, but has as its greater ambition to be “combined with the study of national strategies”. In a more concrete manner, how could it be nationally strategised then? This is a question to which Zhou offers no answer. In paragraphs preceding this conclusion, he is discussing the necessity for a nation-state to project itself as a “just” nation, lest it fall prey to be pictured as a “threat” to international order and peace. This national strategy, so we can infer, might in all probability prescribe an assertive role to be played by the state in establishing itself as a “just” nation all over the world. It seems, alas, that Zhou has linked justice with national might, in a way that is distinctively Pascalian. As Pascal argues in Pensées, “It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might and, for this end, make what is just strong, or what is strong just. …Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognised and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus, being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just” (§298).
What Pascal critiques in Pensées is justice easily being hijacked by might, to which the solution, as Zhou would suggest, is to introduce a counter-might. Before our discussion of the feasibility of this hidden suggestion, it will be useful to remind ourselves of the televised debate between Chomsky and Foucault in 1971. Foucault, although agreeing that intellectuals have a role to play in critiquing existing social and political authority, nevertheless refused to provide an alternative, futuristic and “better” vision in replacement of current regime, lest such programme be polluted by contemporary false consciousness. In this sense, Foucault is a negativist, as he chooses to deconstruct reality and refuses to construct any alternative programme. He warns that any such intellectual endeavouring, even if with a minimum amount of utopianism, might be polluted by existing mentality. The imminent, gravest danger to such alternative plan, in a post-Foucauldian sense, could in all probability come from state-sanctioned programmes, especially when it is guided by a strong ideology of “propping up a ‘just’ image”.
It is with Foucault’s precaution in mind that we come to appreciate the potential undoing of Zhou’s thesis. It is true, as Zhou maintains, the predicament for us to imagine modernity is the towering West that exercises a dominating influence. We either imagine a modernity that approximates the West, or imagine no modernity at all. So is the case with the construction of a modern self-identity, a task to be carried out not on a blank sheet of paper, but rather with the West as the big dominator in the background. Nevertheless, a critique of current hegemonic power by no means suggests that the solution is to replace it with another, or to insert into the status quo one or more hegemonic powers, making it a situation of multi-hegemony. Foucault had resisted within his intellectual power all the attempts to suggest something positive, an undertaking he did well and not without any good reason. And yet, to be fair, the temptation of constructing, no matter how blurred the vision of a possible alternative to current being might seem, sings the forever Siren song for intellectuals travelling across the sea of knowledge.
[1] As Berlin defines this group, “[t]he Slavophil doctrine derived principally from German Idealism, in particular from Schelling’s view…that true knowledge could not be obtained by the use of reason, but only a kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the universe – the soul of the world – such as artists and thinkers have in moments of divine inspiration. Some of the Slavophils identified this with the revealed truths of the Orthodox religious and the mystical tradition of the Russian Church and bequeathed it to the Russian symbolist poets and philosophers of a later generatio”. See Isaiah Berlin, The Property Study of Mankind, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998: p.470.