Beyond Sinology

Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture

Andrea Bachner

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231536301
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Literature

New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West.

Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete "scripting" of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing.

Chinese writing—with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization—can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.

1

CORPOGRAPHIES

DEATH AND THE SINOGRAPH

In the display of “Chinese Characters” during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, not only the movement of the writing machine and its type emphasized the idea of a “living” script. The uncanny substitution of machines with human beings served the same aim. The letters on display were “living” letters in more than one sense: dynamic and in motion, they were also operated by human beings. When the type stopped and the boxes opened up, young male bodies emerged and waved to the audience, proffering blossoming peach twigs, thus releasing the tension created by the audience’s inability to distinguish between machines and human beings. And yet, underneath the admiration for the concerted effort of so many individual bodies lingers a feeling of unease: has the prison house of language been replaced here by cages of script? And what does this imply about the media politics that structure human behavior and identity? In an age in which digital codes seem to determine much of our perception of reality, what is the role of human beings—apart from that of encoded parts of integrated networks? Throughout much of his work, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler paints the digital age as an apocalyptic science fiction scenario in which machines rule human existence by way of code: “What runs in machines and steers how they run is a script at once before any script and after any script, a script that effortlessly short-circuits with the crystalline characteristics of specific chemical elements, such as silicone, and the genetic code of just any organism, such as the homo sapiens. Not man, as Aristotle taught, has logos or language, but unpronounceable codes—with or without the detour named language—have us humans.”¹ Kittler’s determinism elides the need for a human interface by treating human beings as little more than code. Even if the invention of digital code might become, at some point, the ghost in the machine from which we cannot escape once we have called it to our aid, even if genetic engineering might invest Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics with a whole new, even more frightening meaning, materiality is still an irreducible part of mediality. Even Kittler’s digital script in all its predatory might still needs chemical or corporeal “agents” for its existence. If code has us, we also have code; if code interfaces with us, we also interface with code. Kittler’s biased conflation of software and hardware, his elision of the human factor, represents an anxiety about materiality typical of moments of profound media shifts. Whenever our means of representing and interacting with reality undergo changes, with each new generation of technologies that mediate (differently) between us and the world, we also have to renegotiate the role we, as human beings, play, perched between representation and reality. Frequently, such renegotiations oscillate between anxiety about and fascinated frisson at the loss of human agency and worlded reality, leading to corporeal metaphors of incarnation and disembodiment.

Of course, one of the most basic, though by no means simple, media, language, maintains a necessary affinity with human bodies: language—as speech and writing—is produced by living bodies. Yet language also shapes bodies, both symbolically and physically, for instance, through the pedagogical apparatuses that form individuals capable of and attuned to proper speech and writing. Metaphorically, this mutual connection finds itself frequently eclipsed as language, represented in language, encroaches on the terrain of bodies, and becomes imbued with life, or obversely, with death.²

During the era of language reform under the aegis of Westernization and the idea of nationalism, the Chinese language acquired a body, a dead one. Reduced to a script supposedly deleterious to modernization, Chinese became both mortal and lethal. The reincarnation of the sinograph as corpse and disease-carrier owed much to the rampant critique of the script’s materiality in the West. In Haun Saussy’s words, for the West, “Chinese [became] an image of what can go wrong with language when it is not adequately released from its debt to materiality.”³ Saussy further describes the prejudiced view of the sinograph as of “the fashion of a rebus, a concept with a skeletal picture or combination of vestigial pictures,” thus echoing, within his critical reference to Western stereotypes, an imaginary rife with metaphors of death and corporeality at play in much of the modern discourse on the Chinese language in China.⁴ Almost inevitably, Chinese language reformers linked the impending demise of the Chinese nation body to the necrotic character of sinographic writing. In his famous essay in favor of script reform, “The Sinograph and Latinization” (“Hanzi he ladinghua” 漢字和拉丁化) of 1934, Lu Xun 魯迅 framed the sinograph as a carrier of disease that would lead to the martyrdom of the Chinese people, and ultimately of the entire Chinese nation. For Lu Xun, the necrotic character of sinographic writing, linked to an archaic, antiscientific mindset mired in superstition, spelled the demise of the nation as well as of the individual bodies of its citizens. The only viable solution was to sacrifice the sinograph before the nation itself became a sacrifice to its writing system.⁵

Several years later, in 1937, the Esperantist Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之 proposed even more starkly corporealized metaphors of language in support of a script reform. The very title of his essay, “On Poisonous Discourse” (“You du wen tan” 有毒文談), already sets the stage for an imaginary of disease, death, and medical treatment. In response to detractors who fustigated his radical position with respect to Chinese language reform, Hu Yuzhi espoused the negative epithet of the supposedly poisonous, corrupting influence of his writing and turned it into a positive value: administered in small doses, poison can actually have healing powers. From this perspective Hu Yuzhi spins an elaborate web of metaphors of corporeal decay:

Written signs (wenzi 文字) have skin, flesh, and bones. The skin is the written form of the signs (wenzi de shuxie xingshi 文字的書寫形式). The flesh is the composition of their vocabulary and grammar. And the bones are their conceptual economy. …

The form of Chinese writing is not pictographic (xiangxing 象形), but not phonetic (xingsheng 形聲) either. Its pronunciation has been totally disconnected from normal speech (koutou yu 口頭語). If we compare this with modern alphabetic writing (pinyin wenzi 拼音文字), it simply does not constitute language (bu cheng hua 不成話). Of course, except for necrophiliacs (milian haigu de yi lao yi shao men 迷戀骸骨的遺老遺少們), nobody can be satisfied with this kind of script.⁶

Hu Yuzhi envisions writing as a body here, with skin, flesh, and bones. However, so the passage suggests, unless animated by voice, in the form of a phonetic script, writing remains dead, not the living instrument of communication, but the fetishized object of the worshippers of tradition, of those who live eternally in the past. Chinese writing disconnected from everyday speech becomes spectral.⁷

The logic of Hu Yuzhi’s reflection on the Chinese script is deeply phonocentric, since it equates speech with life, and writing, whenever it does not map speech, with death.⁸ This stance imbues one medium with life (speech), whereas it relegates another to the realm of death (writing). We might read this as an echo of prevalent perspectives in Western metaphysics, as critiqued by Jacques Derrida. For its relation to life, speech draws on the symbolic force of corporeal presence, as well as on the imaginary that links breath (or pneuma) and spirit. In Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie) Derrida counters this position with a scenario of signification in the guise of writing. Whereas speech falsely claims an allegiance with presence and life, all signification, imagined as writing, is really predicated upon absence and death: between she who speaks or writes and the words produced, between the objects and their placeholders in the system of signification, insurmountable gaps open up. What animates signification is not a living spirit, but, as Derrida elaborates in subsequent works, for instance, in Specters of Marx (Spectres de Marx), a spectral presence. All language dwells in the realm of death.

For a good Marxist such as Hu Yuzhi, however, neither the spirit of Western metaphysics nor Derrida’s specters can have a part in the linguistic economy. Instead, signification is entirely material: both the sign and its meanings belong to the sphere of the real, tangible, and corporeal. Writing as such, the skin on the linguistic body, constitutes an integral part of language, and not, as phonocentric descriptions viewed through a Derridean lens would have it, a dangerous supplement that corrupts the spiritual connection between meaning and spoken signifier. For Hu Yuzhi, a phonetic script with its (supposedly) direct link between written and spoken language has more use value than the Chinese character relegated to the commodity fetish of Chinese tradition for a cultural elite. Language, as circulating currency, not as useless ghost money, has the most use value whenever reality and language are closely connected. The sinograph fails in this respect because it is a hybrid: out of touch with the reality of everyday speech, since not entirely phonetic, but also out of touch with the reality of the objects it designates, since not entirely pictographic. The Chinese writing system becomes a fetish in the Marxian sense, since it accrues a spectral form of value through misrepresentation: the illusion of its cultural value obscures the real (and material) connections in the system of linguistic exchange, between referent and signifier, as well as between everyday speech and writing.

In spite of Hu’s clearly phonocentric thrust, speech inhabits a strange place in his essay. Unlike writing, speech is not explicitly given a body or voice in “On Poisonous Discourse.” It forms part of the argument only in the written form of a phonetic script as a positive foil for the sinograph. What is at stake here is not merely, not even primarily, the elevation of speech over writing. Without writing, so Hu’s extended metaphor suggests, language remains skinless. Voice alone is not body enough to materialize language. Rather, Hu Yuzhi concerns himself with language as a holistic system, an organism in which none of the parts can be treated in isolation. If one part fails, all others will be compromised as well:

I consider our fixed script to be rotten in skin, bone, and flesh. And this rotten skin, and flesh, and bone has actually influenced our spoken language and has even influenced our brains. It is like a rotten corpse (fulan de sishi 腐爛的死屍) that spreads its germs to living people (ba bingdu chuanran gei huo ren 把病毒傳染給活人). Because of this, finding flesh and bone for the living script of the future (weilai de huo wenzi 未來的活文字) is quite difficult.⁹

The dangers that Hu Yuzhi ascribes to the Chinese language are much more than a linguistic surface effect. Instead of a simple change of skin (or script), the Chinese language urgently needs a complete makeover. When Hu Yuzhi materializes signification in the shape of a body, he relies on the symbolic contiguity between language and individual bodies as the basis for a discourse of contamination. Because language, as organism, is prone to decay, it can exert its nefarious influence on the bodies of those who use it, as well as on the nation body. The Chinese language has become a corpse that infects the living, which warrants, ultimately, a total replacement of the language body, for example, with Esperanto.

By ascribing a dead body to the Chinese script, however, Chinese language reformers themselves indulge in a strange strain of necrophilia. Instead of being enamored with a dead script—an accusation leveled at their opponents—they are enthralled by the imaginary of a dying and deadly writing system. In their eyes, the Chinese writing system has become a necroscript: both mortal and lethal. Much as a virus consumes a body from the inside, the inanimated sinograph actively spreads decay and death to each Chinese individual and thus to the nation body. This logic connects materiality and mediality in suggestive and profoundly morbid ways. Materiality is transferred from the concrete media of writing—such as paper and ink or chisel and stone—to the graphic shapes of writing itself. Metaphorically speaking, Chinese writing is lethal through infection precisely because, lacking the phonetic lifeline between writing and speech, it can never have a “natural” relation to the speaking bodies that constitute the nation body. Speech as such is materialized doubly: in the letters that “spell” it (and thus give it a graphic body), and in the living, breathing, and speaking bodies of the Chinese people. Through this organic metaphor, writing also partakes of life—as its other, death, and in the form of the uncannily vitalistic image of a deadly disease-carrier. However, attributing life to language, even negatively, means implicitly diminishing the agency and vitality of its human users. By framing a language and its script as agents of death, even with the avowed aim of rescuing human lives and the nation body, these bodies have already been sucked dry of life—metaphorically speaking. The bodies that speak and write have already been scripted as passive beneficiaries or sufferers of language.

The other side of the same coin, the transfer of material force to language itself, prevalent in French theory of the 1960s and 1970s, ushered in the era of what is now widely known to the “initiated” as poststructuralism—and Chinese writing served as privileged “raw” material for its conceptual work. In the aftermath of 1968, French theory harbored two types of cultural desires: that for a new political order, hence theory’s flirtation with communism, and that for an alternative to the confines and constraints of Western culture. In many examples, China emerged as the placeholder of choice onto which such desires could be projected.¹⁰ As a trope, China allowed for a welcome combination of the modern (such as Maoism) and the ancient (such as China’s millenarian culture).¹¹ Thus, French theory found a modern alternative to Western culture in the Chinese past, frequently constructed outright as timeless. Often, the difference between Chinese and alphabetic writing, for instance, was argued by way of examples drawn mainly from classical Chinese.¹² Unlike earlier Western reflections on Chinese writing, such as Hegel’s, the sinograph appears throughout as a positive example. For instance, in the essay “Remarks on the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’” (“Remarques sur le ‘mode de production asiatique’”) of 1975, the French theorist Julia Kristeva singles out the Chinese language as an alternative to the Western logic of signification:

Let’s say, in order to simplify, that in Chinese writing as well as in anything enunciated in Chinese (classical probably...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• A Note on Characters, Romanization, Translations, and Images
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Script Politics
• 1. Corpographies
• 2. Iconographies
• 3. Sonographies
• 4. Allographies
• 5. Technographies
• Conclusion: Beyond Sinology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index